Read me in seconds, if you can

“Know thyself.” This ancient Greek aphorism, inscribed at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi and central to the Socratic philosophical tradition, continues to pose one of the most difficult challenges in human knowledge. For centuries, philosophers, psychologists and researchers have tried to understand how people form an image of themselves, how they perceive others and to what extent their judgements correspond to reality. Today, however, it seems that we have found a remarkably practical solution to this old problem. We no longer need years of observation, research and reflection. A few behavioural categories, a suitable colour scheme and the promise that we can read the person opposite us in seconds will do. Socrates would probably have asked for an explanation. Modern marketing would have offered him a course.

As someone who works with language, knowledge and technology, I watch with particular interest the growing popularity of approaches that promise to explain personality through a limited set of behavioural characteristics. Psychology has long studied individual differences, personality traits, social perception and the influence of circumstances on behaviour. This research shows how difficult it is to draw categorical conclusions about personality from isolated observations. In everyday communication, people interpret words, gestures and reactions, build assumptions about other people's motives and often treat their own impressions as objective knowledge. This tendency is precisely what makes quick psychological classifications so attractive. They create a feeling of understanding before we have established whether the conclusions correspond to reality.

It becomes especially interesting when such promises enter business. The ability to understand clients, colleagues and partners undoubtedly has practical value. But there is a huge difference between recognising a behavioural tendency and claiming that we have decoded a person. The first is a hypothesis we can test. The second often sounds like a conclusion whose evidence has yet to be found. The more confidently someone promises to predict human reactions in seconds, the more I am interested not in the speed of the analysis but in its accuracy. If understanding people were that easy, philosophy would have finished its questions long ago, psychology its research and human relationships would probably need only a short user manual.

A behavioural model is not a psychological diagnosis

Psychology makes a fundamental distinction between describing behavioural characteristics, psychological assessment and clinical diagnosis. These concepts are not interchangeable, although popular training often leaves their boundaries unclear. A behavioural model is a conceptual simplification that organises certain expressions of behaviour into categories or dimensions. Psychological assessment is a much more complex process, which may include standardised instruments, interviews, observation, contextual analysis and the testing of different hypotheses. Clinical diagnosis has an even more specific purpose. It concerns the identification of particular mental states or disorders according to professional diagnostic criteria. Not every psychological assessment leads to a diagnosis, and not every personality characteristic is a clinical problem. Mixing these concepts creates a false picture of both the possibilities of psychological tools and the limits of professional competence.

From my position as a teacher with many years of experience working with different age groups, from children in their first year of school to teenagers and adult learners, I have observed a huge variety of human reactions, behaviours and ways of communicating. This experience has taught me to be particularly cautious about quick conclusions concerning personality. The same person can show confidence in a familiar setting and uncertainty in an unfamiliar one, initiative in one situation and restraint in another. Behaviour changes under the influence of age, social environment, language skills, motivation, previous experience and the relationship between the people communicating. As a linguist, I also know that even the meaning of an utterance cannot always be established outside its context. Why, then, would I accept that personality can be decoded in seconds through a few predefined categories? If years of observation, conversation and professional experience have not convinced me that people can be reduced to four types, a colourful diagram is unlikely to do so.

This is where I would return to DISC, which describes certain behavioural tendencies through four main dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness. The existence of such a classification does not concern me by itself. Models are useful when they help us organise observations, formulate hypotheses and investigate patterns. The problem begins when we forget that a model is a simplified representation of reality, not reality itself. Contemporary DISC instruments exist in different versions, developed by different organisations, with different scoring methods and different degrees of scientific support. It is therefore not enough to refer to four letters and assume that we have a reliable instrument for judging a particular person. Which version are we using? How has its reliability been tested? What conclusions do its results actually support? And when did describing a behavioural tendency become evidence that we know the motives, character and future decisions of the person in front of us?

For me, the central question is how we move from an instrument's results to the conclusions we make about a specific person. Psychometrics requires us to distinguish measurement reliability, the validity of an interpretation and the practical usefulness of the results. A questionnaire may produce relatively consistent results without necessarily allowing accurate predictions of behaviour in real situations. Even less can we assume that every popular interpretation of the results is scientifically grounded. When an instrument designed to describe behavioural preferences is used to make categorical claims about a person's character, professional abilities or motives, its original purpose has already been exceeded. When decisions about recruitment, management or sales are based on those claims, the consequences are no longer merely theoretical.

That is why I would like to see more attention to professional responsibility in the presentation of such tools. A person does not need to be a clinical psychologist to use suitable models in communication or organisational practice. But they do need to understand what those models can and cannot do, and when interpretation moves beyond the available evidence. Psychological terminology is not a certificate of competence, and a convincing presentation cannot replace professional qualification. The most significant problem is not the existence of simplified behavioural models, but the authority sometimes assigned to them without sufficient grounds. Putting a person into a category is relatively easy. Explaining why that category matters for the concrete decision ahead requires an entirely different level of knowledge and responsibility.

It is particularly curious how easily a conditional classification can acquire the authority of objective knowledge when it is presented with enough confidence. Human thinking has a remarkable ability to discover patterns even where information is incomplete, and then to look for confirmation of an impression already formed. If we have decided that someone belongs to a particular behavioural type, we are likely to notice mostly the reactions that support that judgement and find explanations for those that contradict it. The model gradually stops being a tool for observation and becomes a filter through which we perceive reality. But what happens when the person in front of us does not behave as expected? Do we reconsider our conclusion, or do we look for reasons why they do not fit the profile assigned to them? And if every behaviour can later be explained as confirmation of the model, under what circumstances would we admit that the model was wrong? For me, the willingness to question our own assumptions is what separates critical thinking from confident interpretation. Otherwise, we risk learning more about our own expectations than about the person we claim to have decoded.

Irena Popova

KALEIDOSCOPE | ASTERI Compass Media