The Factor That Impacts Behavior More Than Personality Type, According To A Brain Scientist
This is what happens when you combine brain scans with personality type.
Ollyy via Shutterstock When it comes to understanding differing human behaviors about those around us, we often turn to popular indicators like Myers-Briggs Type, the Big 5, or Enneagrams as frameworks. These personality type tests can be helpful for categorizing ourselves and others. However, Dr. Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA's School of Medicine and best-selling author, insists there's a factor that impacts behavior more than personality type: personality pattern.
Why is it better? Personality patterns can be mapped on scans that measure brain activity. Personality types, on the other hand, cannot.
Personality patterns impact our behavior more than simple 'types'
In a fascinating conversation with Andrea Miller on the Getting Open podcast, Siegel discussed his new book, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy: Integrating 9 Patterns of Developmental Pathways in Clinical Practice. In the episode, Dr. Siegel shares why "interpersonal neurobiology", a field in which he is a pioneer, is so helpful.
By combining interpersonal neurobiology with the Enneagram personality system — a structure that describes nine distinct strategies for understanding and navigating human behavior — we are offered insights into how we interact with the world. Because of the brain science involved, personality patterns go deeper than personality types.
Interpersonal neurobiology is the connection between our brains, minds, and our relationships. By overlaying interpersonal neurobiology with Enneagram personalities, people can unlock something much deeper than a simple set of "rules". This system helps identify their difficult patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Once we understand these patterns, we can transform our brains "from prison to playgrounds", as Dr. Siegel shared.
Identifying patterns offers people opportunities for growth and change
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In the podcast, Dr. Siegel explains that a pattern is more of a collection of personality traits. These variables tend to cluster together in what we call patterns. There's a wide range within patterns — humans are varied and complicated, after all! — whereas a type infers that there are strict boundaries and borders around a person's behavior, almost as if you are aberrant or broken if you don't fit well into one type.
Unlike a type, a pattern can make our personalities appear more fluid. Siegel explained that one of the most common sets of patterns is the Big 5, which refers to the five major personality traits in psychology, including Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These classic five variables are considered to be quite flexible and can be arranged in all sorts of patterns.
How these personality patterns were discovered
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Siegel and his team of researchers took an estimated 50,000 cases that Stanford professor of psychiatry David Daniels had accumulated over his career, and studied them to ask the question: "What do these stories people tell, with the bias of the Enneagrams, tell us about the nature of who they are?"
These stories included people's explanations of their beliefs, their way of thinking, what mattered to them, their emotional way of being, how they regulate their emotions, and how they interact with people in the world.
"'Personality' is a word we use for patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior that are persistent across time and context," Siegel said, adding that context, here, means situations. "Thought means 'what do you believe, what matters to you, what's your story?' Behavior is how you interact with other people, and emotion means what you tend to feel, especially when you're reactive. How do you handle those feelings?"
Why the Enneagram works better when used as a starting point
While the Enneagram can provide a helpful framework for our behavioral patterns, Siegel affirmed that it's not fixed or set in stone. You can change and adapt and grow. You can set goals and achieve them — even when it comes to your personality!
Learning from your behavior patterns offers an opportunity to dip your toes into a deeper exploration of your sense of self. We're all obsessed with trying to understand not only our behaviors but the behaviors of those around us, and Siegel encouraged individuals to approach this exploration with an openness to discovering even more about ourselves.
Nia Tipton is a staff writer with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and journalism who covers news and lifestyle topics that focus on psychology, relationships, and the human experience.