Work In Progress! Proceed with caution.
Question:
How can I bridge NERIS Type Explorer (16 Personalities) and Yaqeen’s Souls Assorted spiritual personalities into a holistic framework for assessing personalities?
Sources
- NERIS Type Explorer: https://16personalities.com
- Souls Assorted: https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/souls-assorted-an-islamic-theory-of-spiritual-personality
summary
I want to explore NERIS’ 16 Personalities to see how I could inform a framework, a clear conception—for myself and others maybe—that takes the spiritual/religious component into consideration.
Backstory
I first crossed paths with NERIS 16 personalities in 2020 and found it to be an invaluable resource to understand human complexity. I then came across Yaqeen’s paper on Souls Assorted in 2022 and it ignited my desire to explore this field taking the spiritual component into consideration.
My question was: “Is there a way to relate these 2 frameworks such that we can base personality assessment on an Islamic foundation leveraging the research from NERIS 16 personalities which looks at how certain factors influence our behaviors and shape our worldviews?”
I’ve read lots of articles from 16personalities since then, and in trying to improve my overall religiosity and spirituality as a Muslim, I’ve caught glimpses of what could be inferred as personality types from an Islamic viewpoint. While I had left research on this topic in the backseat, It has always been a part of how I view the world and how I interact with people as a Muslim.
The major problem has been navigating such a topic from an Islamic viewpoint while (re)learning Islam myself. I lacked (still do) significant knowledge from the Islamic paradigm, and while the original question was confined to just these two frameworks, I felt I didn’t have enough knowledge to take on such a task. (Plus, I wasn’t as interested in research/academia at the time.)
Start Here
Fast-forward to 2023/24, I’m now a member of ISIP (International Student of Islamic Psychology), and while I feel I have found some balance and acquired a level of understanding of my personality type (INFJ-A) in relation with my Muslim identity, I observe how others could benefit from the resources provided by 16personalities. I genuinely think people could be better if they simply understood the fundamental fact that everyone is different. I observe how Muslims could better understand themselves and make sense of their experiences due to certain factors. I see how parents could become their children best friends if they could make an effort to understand themselves first, and more importantly their kids. I see how communities and communal organizations (?) like masaajid could better help and connect with their members—especially the youth. I see how organizations and workplaces could perform better by harnessing the uniqueness and strengths of each employee. I see how students could stop strangling each others’ necks trying to be like the other, trying to fit in, trying to prove some foolish point over a decimal number.
In short, I see how every individual could gain clarity into their own behaviors and mannerisms and the effects caused by them. Especially Muslims! It hurts when I see how Muslims behave simply because they could not, or didn’t take the time to, find other ways to approach an occurrence or situation.
Due to the nature of the topic, I think it’s hard to effectively carry out research on it. The apparent research question is to find the relationships between these 2 frameworks. The underlying task is building a framework for a psycho-spiritual personality assessment that incorporates these (and possibly more) frameworks.
I don’t know how to structure this either. But hey, we start somewhere eh!
Highlights
“Secondly, as mentioned previously, these different categories of spiritual personality describe dominant tendencies; they do not confine a person’s spiritual expression. Thus, it would be wrong to presume that someone who exhibits the Hand of Power orientation is unconcerned with justice, or that the Heart of Inspiration does not see negative consequences. These spiritual personalities only describe what is the foremost tendency or greatest focus of one’s passions. They may translate into a proclivity for different concrete actions, but righteousness includes all these actions and there is no reason why a person of one category can’t excel in virtues typically dominant in other categories.”
“one may ask whether it is not possible for there to be more spiritual personality types; why limit it to four? Of course, each of these four could have many subcategories and further differentiation and variation, however given that it is constructed upon two psychologically evident and Islamically manifest conceptual spectrums (experience vs. judgment and action vs. restraint), which are both subsumed within the basic spiritual instincts in Islamic thought (knowledge and deeds), this categorization is conceptually fundamental. Moreover, its conceptual correlation with the psychological traits of the Big Five lends this classification an empirical basis for being considered fundamental as well”