Cultural archetypes, stereotypes and modal types

[edcoaching]

Thought I'd start a new thread on how "experts" look at type and culture--the people who are writing articles on it and getting paid to use type with teams to work with cultural and other diversity.

First, cultures have "archetypal" images of the best way to be. Heroes, values taught in school, traits that are rewarded at work, etc., are the kinds of things that are looked at to determine archetypes.

• The president of the French type association points out how Decartes is held up as the greatest French Philosopher (I think therefore I am...) and the goddess of the Revolution is Reason
• He pointed to many other characteristics of French schooling and business practices that point to Thinking being valued

Then there are the "stereotypes" other cultures hold. Most Americans, for example, when thinking of France are more likely to think "passion, amore" and come up with Feeling as the stereotype of that country.

Finally, there is the modal type--the one most frequent in the population. Solid research has only been done in a few countries--the statistically sound studies where a valid type sorter is used with random samplings of people. There isn't one yet for France, but the type association there reported at the 2005 International Conference on Psychological Type that they estimated about 65% of the population prefers Feeling. He said only half-jokingly that he believed that the archetypes developed in his country were an attempt to temper their natural temperaments...

Sometimes archetype, stereotype and modal type match up--The United States and Extraversion, for example. Sometimes they don't.

[Haight]

Although your post seems more like a statement then anything else, I'd like to debate this a bit. However, I need two questions answered first:

a/ When one says, "The amount of INTJs in the population is 1%," for instance, is that a world population total, or could, or has, that been broken down into country statistics?

b/ How do these samples work, exactly? In other words, would one type be more likely to respond to the sample/survey relative to another type?

[entropie]

I think for germany, from observation, the things count as following by approximation:

E: 20%
I: 80%

T: 60%
F: 40%

S: 70%
N: 30%

P: 60%
J: 40%

The most intresting thing is, while I have come to know the stereotype that germany is S-land, it really is I-land. The most types, you will meet are ISTJ, ISTP and INTJ, from my opinion.

In the past years, everything is getting more "open-" and "-hearted" but it really still developes much around Introverted Sensing, which holds things in life for benevolent good gods or devilish bad things.

I wonder how easy it would be for an ENTP to become president here xD. Well forget this thought, I bet it is pretty impossible. Will do that in France

[Haight]

See . . . it's that type of sample and analysis that I fear.

"80%" introverts!? Never mind, don't answer that.

Anyway, I'll wait for your answer, ec. Thanks.

[entropie]

Explain ? I dont understand

[nolla]

USA is an extrovert feeler who got bullied at school, ran away from home when teenager and now suppresses all that shit but can't help exploding from time to time. That's how it seems from here.

[edcoaching]

Originally Posted by Haight

Although your post seems more like a statement then anything else, I'd like to debate this a bit. However, I need two questions answered first:

a/ When one says, "The amount of INTJs in the population is 1%," for instance, is that a world population total, or could, or has, that been broken down into country statistics?

b/ How do these samples work, exactly? In other words, would one type be more likely to respond to the sample/survey relative to another type?

Thanks--I s'pose it was a statement, kind of a report on "how it's done" in some circles. I find it useful when working with groups of educators because a) when your school district has students who speak over a hundred languages you need something for convenience! b) it helps point out how students can differ from their cultural backgrounds as far as learning styles and c) it often prevents negative stereotyping. But to answer...

The samples are done country by country and there are two kinds

• Samples of convenience, which means people who use type professionally turned in results of verified (hopefully) type from workshops. These can be really skewed, though, because often they're all corporate managers or something. The samples do show similarities around the world on who goes into management!
• National representative samples. With these, the statisticians use their methods to figure out how many people they need to poll to get an adequate representation of the population--it was 3,009 in the United States, from across different demographic groups.

They do their best to correct for things like, will E's or I's be more likely to answer the phone, etc. There are a lot of details in the MBTI manual about how they chose the sampling. I do know they had trouble finding enough people from minority populations as, with good reason, they tend to be suspicious of tests and experiments...for the National Representative Sample, they multiplied these responses to equal their % in the general population--not perfect but a statistically acceptable method and better than nothing???

[Jeffster]

Originally Posted by nolla

USA is an extrovert feeler who got bullied at school, ran away from home when teenager and now suppresses all that shit but can't help exploding from time to time. That's how it seems from here.

USA is a country, with like 300 million different people in it. Trying to "type" a country as a whole is just silly.

[nolla]

Originally Posted by Jeffster

USA is a country, with like 300 million different people in it. Trying to "type" a country as a whole is just silly.

Yeah.

So can I type their foreign policy?

[booyalab]

Originally Posted by nolla

USA is an extrovert feeler who got bullied at school, ran away from home when teenager and now suppresses all that shit but can't help exploding from time to time. That's how it seems from here.

sorry....when did we get bullied, what's school, what's home, when were we a teenager, what are we suppressing, and what do you consider exploding?