Andrew Kennedy

Essential Personalities -
and why humans found love, adapted to
monogamy and became better parents
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1

Essential Personalities,
and why humans found love, adapted to
monogamy and became better parents

By Andrew Kennedy

ISBN-13 978-0-9544831-4-2
copyright©2009Andrew Kennedy
All rights reserved

Andrew Kennedy has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author
of this work.
Published by:
Gravity Publishing, 2b Findon Road, London W12 9PP, England
www.gravitypublishing.co.uk/

This book is sold under license and on the condition that it shall not by
way of trade or otherwise be sold resold hired out lent copied stored re-
produced transmitted or transferred in any other format form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
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may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permis-
sion and acquiring a part or the whole in whatever form does not give any
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Disclaimer: All internet site addresses and all document links to external
content not under the control of the publisher and placed in this docu-
ment are provided in good faith but neither the author nor publisher is
responsible for any of the web site or document contents indicated by
them.

Cover design: Thomas Eagle

Illustrations by the author
Cover photo by the author depicts a 4:5, an 8:1, and an 8:6
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 2

Table of Contents
About the Author.......................................................................................................................5
About this book.........................................................................................6
Preamble about personality.......................................................................11
Imitating Steve McQueen.........................................................................16
Part 1.......................................................................................................28
How it all began........................................................................................28
Empathy.....................................................................................................................................31
Déjà vécu....................................................................................................................................35
Individuals..................................................................................................................................37
Doubles......................................................................................................................................41
The primacy of the individual.................................................................................................43
The TO8 - The Basics...............................................................................44
Sun movements and the daily rhythms of life.......................................................................47
Seasonal and daily rhythms.....................................................................................................49
The eight parameters and the four axes.................................................................................51
Merging the human and natural continuums........................................................................54
The Four Drives.......................................................................................................................................55
The drive for water: ................................................................................................................................55
The axis 4 - 8 (metaphorically The Taxonomist)..............................................................................56
The people of motion 4 --> 8.............................................................................................................57
The drive for or food:..............................................................................................................................58
The axis of 2 - 6 (metaphorically The Collector)..............................................................................59
The people of form 2 --> 6................................................................................................................60
The drive for shelter:..............................................................................................................................62
The axis of the landscape (metaphorically The Surveyor).............................................................63
The people of the landscape 1 <--> 5.................................................................................................65
The drive for expression .......................................................................................................................66
The axis of expression (metaphorically The Actor).........................................................................68
The people of expression 7 --> 3........................................................................................................69
The figure of eight..................................................................................................................................70
The TO8 Year............................................................................................................................71
Being born into the TO8 Year.................................................................................................73
The Major and Minor Cycles ................................................................................................................74
The Major............................................................................................................................................74
The Minor...........................................................................................................................................75
The interior and exterior minds............................................................................................................76
The Major and Minor 'currents'............................................................................................................78
Using the TO8..........................................................................................................................79
Why does the TO8 work?..........................................................................83
Imitation and narrative............................................................................................................83
The uniqueness of personality................................................................................................84
Defining personality.................................................................................................................86
Turning brains into personalities............................................................................................88
Language versus personality....................................................................................................89
Altruism ....................................................................................................................................92
Partner Attractiveness..............................................................................................................95
Survival and similarity..............................................................................................................96
Personality and the seasons.....................................................................................................98
The end of the beginning.........................................................................103
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Seeing the world in eights......................................................................................................103

What has astrology go to do with it all?..............................................................................107
Hemispheres and tropics.......................................................................................................110
Chronobiology and the circadian rhythms...........................................................................113
The Moon...............................................................................................................................................122
Part 2......................................................................................................131
The astronaut in the Landscape................................................................131
The best fisherman..................................................................................................................131
Heroes and heroines of the landscape..................................................................................137
The astronauts........................................................................................................................142
The sunset hero (type 5 in the TO8)....................................................................................................146
The dawn hero (type 1 in the TO8).....................................................................................................149
Tribe or gang?...........................................................................................................................151
The orthodoxy.........................................................................................................................155
The maverick...........................................................................................................................156
The right stuff..........................................................................................................................161
Monarch, dictator and president..............................................................165
A Monarch...............................................................................................................................165
The Dictator...........................................................................................................................169
Presidents................................................................................................................................170
The 42 US Presidents............................................................................................................................171
The Anatomy of Love..............................................................................176
Mating......................................................................................................................................177
Dating......................................................................................................................................184
Making children......................................................................................................................186
Love and monogamy...............................................................................................................193
Long life and grandparents...................................................................................................200
The grandparent syndrome...................................................................................................202
About the attraction of opposites........................................................................................206
Lovers, friends, rivals and allies...............................................................208
Friends.....................................................................................................................................209
Allies.........................................................................................................................................211
Lovers.......................................................................................................................................212
Rivals.........................................................................................................................................213
Community life.......................................................................................................................214
Who is a human anyway?..........................................................................221
Julia.......................................................................................................236
TO8 best partners table.........................................................................................................241
Part 3.....................................................................................................247
The personalities ...................................................................................247
To the reader,..........................................................................................................................247
Southern hemisphere.......................................................................................................................248
Changeovers and cusps.....................................................................................................................248
Births inside the tropics ..................................................................................................................249
Disclaimer:............................................................................................................................................249
Ones......................................................................................................250
The Minor One......................................................................................................................................253
Day 63 Major 1:Minor 7....................................................................................................................254
Day 64 Major 1:Minor 8 ..................................................................................................................255
Day 1 Major 1:Minor 1.......................................................................................................................257
Day 2 Major 1:Minor 2......................................................................................................................258
Day 3 Major 1:Minor 3 ....................................................................................................................259
Day 4 Major 1:Minor 4 ...................................................................................................................261
Day 5 Major 1:Minor 5......................................................................................................................262
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Day 6 Major 1:Minor 6.....................................................................................................................263

Twos......................................................................................................265
The Minor Two.....................................................................................................................................269
Day 7 Major 2:Minor 7......................................................................................................................271
Day 8 Major 2 Minor 8......................................................................................................................272
Day 9 Major 2:Minor 1 .....................................................................................................................274
Day 10 Major 2:Minor 2 ...................................................................................................................275
Day 11 Major 2:Minor 3 ...................................................................................................................276
Day 12 Major 2:Minor 4 ..................................................................................................................277
Day 13 Major 2:Minor 5 ..................................................................................................................279
Day 14 Major 2:Minor 6 .................................................................................................................280
Threes....................................................................................................282
The Minor Three...................................................................................................................................285
Day 15 Major 3:Minor 7....................................................................................................................286
Day 16 Major 3:Minor 8....................................................................................................................287
Day 17 Major 3:Minor 1.....................................................................................................................288
Day 18 Major 3:Minor 2....................................................................................................................290
Day 19 Major 3:Minor 3....................................................................................................................291
Day 20 Major 3:Minor 4...................................................................................................................292
Day 21 Major 3:Minor 5....................................................................................................................294
Day 22 Major 3:Minor 6....................................................................................................................295
Fours.....................................................................................................297
The Minor Four....................................................................................................................................300
Day 23 Major 4:Minor 7....................................................................................................................302
Day 24 Major 4:Minor 8...................................................................................................................303
Day 25 Major 4:Minor 1...................................................................................................................304
Day 26 Major 4:Minor 2...................................................................................................................306
Day 27 Major 4:Minor 3....................................................................................................................307
Day 28 Major 4:Minor 4...................................................................................................................308
Day 29 Major 4:Minor 5...................................................................................................................309
Day 30 Major 4:Minor 6....................................................................................................................311
Fives.......................................................................................................313
The Minor Five......................................................................................................................................316
Day 31 Major 5:Minor 7.....................................................................................................................317
Day 32 Major 5:Minor 8....................................................................................................................319
Day 33 Major 5:Minor 1 ..................................................................................................................320
Day 34 Major 5:Minor 2 .................................................................................................................322
Day 35 Major 5:Minor 3 ....................................................................................................................323
Day 36 Major 5:Minor 4....................................................................................................................324
Day 37 Major 5:Minor 5....................................................................................................................326
Day 38 Major 5:Minor 6 .......................................................................................................327
Sixes .....................................................................................................329
The Minor Six........................................................................................................................................333
Day 39 Major 6:Minor 7....................................................................................................................334
Day 40 Major 6:Minor 8...................................................................................................................336
Day 41 Major 6:Minor 1 .................................................................................................................337
Day 42 Major 6:Minor 2....................................................................................................................338
Day 43 Major 6:Minor 3....................................................................................................................339
Day 44 Major 6:Minor 4...................................................................................................................341
Day 45 Major 6:Minor 5 ...................................................................................................................342
Day 46 Major 6:Minor 6 ..................................................................................................................343
Sevens....................................................................................................345
The Minor Seven...................................................................................................................................348
Day 47 Major 7:Minor 7...................................................................................................................349
Day 48 Major 7:Minor 8...................................................................................................................350
Day 49 Major 7:Minor 1 ...................................................................................................................352
Day 50 Major 7:Minor 2 ...................................................................................................................353
Day 51 Major 7:Minor 3.....................................................................................................................354
Day 52 Major 7:Minor 4....................................................................................................................356
Day 53 Major 7:Minor 5.....................................................................................................................357
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Day 54 Major 7:Minor 6....................................................................................................................358

Eights....................................................................................................360
The Minor Eight...................................................................................................................................363
Day 55 Major 8:Minor 7 ..................................................................................................................365
Day 56 Major 8:Minor 8 ..................................................................................................................366
Day 57 Major 8:Minor 1 .................................................................................................................368
Day 58 Major 8:Minor 2 ..................................................................................................................370
Day 59 Major 8:Minor 3 ...................................................................................................................371
Day 60 Major 8:Minor 4 ..................................................................................................................372
Day 61 Major 8:Minor 5 ...................................................................................................................374
Day 62 Major 8:Minor 6 ..................................................................................................................375
Notes......................................................................................................377

About the Author

Andrew Kennedy was born and educated in England, graduating from
Edinburgh University with a B.Sc. He is married with a daughter and shares
his time between a farm in the Pyrenees and Andalusia. He has worked in a
variety of occupations and has travelled widely. He devised the personality
theory he calls the TO8 in the 1980s. He holds a patent in a switching
device, created the Taoism-inspired 3-D board game, The Game of Rat and
Dragon and has published two books about Taoism, The Jade Suit, an epic
poem about Chinese history, and Briefing Leaders, which contained new
translations of two Chinese classics, I Ching, in which he analyses how the
probabilities of the oracle affect its meanings, and Tao Tê Ching in which he
incorporates the philosophy into a fictional account of Lao Tze's last days.
He studied Traditional Chinese Medicine and graduated from the European
School of Shiatsu as a practitioner. He maintains a shiatsu practice in Spain
while he continues to consult on relationships problems. He writes regu-
larly about science, complementary medicine and the human psyche.
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About this book

This book establishes a method for looking at the human personality and
presents a proof of the argument in the form of sixty four personality types.
There are three parts to the book. The first part describes why I began the
search for the human personality and how the method, the TO8, came
about. The second part describes where my discoveries led, and in the
third part, the reader will find a complete list of the personality types of the
TO8 and a brief description of them. The method is a brand new way of
looking at the human personality and how the monogamous mating that it
implies has evolved, and with it, the reader will not only learn about himself
or herself from the method, but also learn a new basis on which to judge
one's likely friends, lovers, rivals and allies in life.
Twenty-five years of experience using the method to examine problems
in relationships have thrown new light on the mating partnership. So, I
dedicate the book to a particular and rather maligned—in this day and age
—social group namely, parents.
While I was still puzzling over the mystery of why my system should
work so well, an off-hand remark of the anthropologist, Igor de Garine,
crystallised my thoughts. I had asked him, tactlessly, why he seemed happy
at the thought of his brilliant young daughter wanting a child before an aca-
demic career. He shrugged and said, 'Having children is what we do'. In the
hurly burly of economical, psychological, evolutionary psychological, neuro-
logical and genetic research into what makes human beings tick, we seem to
have forgotten the fundamental fact about individuals: we have evolved to
be parents.
I didn't start out thinking about parents or even about monogamy. Ori-
ginally, I invented a way of looking at personality to criticise the individual
personality typing of traditional astrology. I could not easily explain why
personalities described by both astrology and psychology systems and those
that we find and enjoy in literature seemed so different and irreconcilable.
Although my system, the TO8, was originally designed to ridicule astro-
logical methods of looking at personality, it appeared to be successful in
predicting human thoughts and attitudes. If the behaviour of people could
be predicted reliably by the seasons, the question was clearly, how might
that have come about? How can my method's sensible but arbitrary set of
axioms about evolution and the seasons have such analytical and predictive
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 7

power when it comes to human personality? When I pondered this ques-

tion, I found myself inexorably drawn to the evolution of the parental
bond.
The TO8 is not an abstraction or even just a thought experiment. It
produces empirical results that the reader can judge whether or not consti-
tute evidence for the arguments. Many have thought so. Throughout the
years of the 1990s, I used the system sporadically and privately, finding a
relevance to human relations that was surprising. In the year 2000 I put up
a perfunctory web site (theoryofeight.com) and signed on as an expert on a
popular advice site and began to comment on relationships to anyone who
asked using the TO8. In the years of using it successfully to help analyse
people's personal problems, I have not needed to alter or reverse a single
one of my original axioms. There is something true about the TO8, but
how could that be?
When we try to understand the puzzle of how our circumstances and
self-image fit together we often fall into the arms of systems like astrology.
This is curious since astrology is publicly derided at least as much as it is ac-
cepted around the world. Those who deride it generally criticise its 'success'
as being due to self-selection: those who find it meaningful are already be-
lievers—the facts don't interest them. Studies have been done comparing
astrologers' success in predicting an astrological type with rolling the dice.
Astrologers have not done better than chance, yet people still believe astro-
logy to work.
One of the simplest experiments to explain why was made along the fol-
lowing lines. A lecture on astrology and its types was advertised to students.
Afterwards, an astrology profile was sent to all those who attended as if it
were their profile and asking them to say how like them it was. All the re-
spondents thought the profile accurate. Only trouble was; it was the same
profile for all of them.
The experiment purports to show that astrology is whatever you believe
it to be and is therefore false. It is difficult to explain the extraordinary con-
nections between human behaviour and the solar year that I get with my
system in quite the same way. I have never published any detailed descrip-
tions of how I arrive at the TO8 types and no one knew how the system
worked. I do not see my subjects face-to-face and I stress to them that I am
not an astrologer and do not use traditional astrological techniques. So,
what a subject considers valuable about what I tell them is not determined
by preconceived notions or persuasion; they do not know what to expect
and this makes them less ready to accept what I say and more judgemental.
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When I mistake a birth date or when a subject has given me incorrect in-
formation, the reaction is criticism. But when I have corrected the errors,
their response changes: Ah, that's more like me, or Now I see what you mean.
Something different and new is going on with the TO8, but what might
that be?
In what follows, I explain what I think is going on as well as giving read-
ers a practical handbook on how to gain an insight into their own and other
people's personalities from a birth date. I tell the story of my method from
its beginnings in a series of dramatic dialogues following, informally, the
classical method of introducing a new theory. By the end I hope the reader
will not only be entertained by the puzzle of the TO8 personality type but
also be informed about the repercussions for the parenting relationship.
The system is a precise construction, built on a few axioms, easy to un-
derstand, completely transparent and accessible. With it, I have related the
origins of these mysteries of personality to our home, the Earth, rather
than to the heavens, and have explained them using ideas about evolution,
rather than using the mysterious actions of planets and other heavenly bod-
ies. I wanted to include the idea that some form of analysis based on natur-
al cycles might be pertinent to who we are, and to provide a useful up-to-
date language for talking about ourselves and how we behave. In doing so, I
found myself contemplating ideas about the purpose of human culture, the
nature of love and parenthood, and speculating on the future style and ten-
or of the human personality that scientific progress is going to bring:
changes that may be more radical than any evolutionary change up to now.
I have tried to make the TO8 simple, direct and the very opposite of an
impenetrable nest of metaphors and special pleadings that often character-
ises similar systems. What I suggest is quite testable, and the reader has in
hands the very means to test it: the set of types I have discovered. Clumsy
and infelicitous these brief descriptions may be but if they don't ring true
then my arguments fail. A range of observations from our personal experi-
ences might also test the basic thesis: observations like:

• Marriages made from similar people (in TO8 terms) are more success-
ful and productive than others.
• People who live in the tropics may be experiencing twice as many
yearly points of tension in their personalities than others.
• People from the Northern hemisphere who move to the Southern
hemisphere will have a greater sense of dislocation than those from
the Southern who move to the north.
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• Social upheavals contribute to significantly rising birth rates.

• Birth rates in the developed world should be rising after the recent
period of liberalisation, whereas liberalisation periods in the develop-
ing world will cause a fall.
• Fans are more likely to be in long standing relationships than not.

Billions people around the world read behavioural predictions and char-
acter determinants about themselves described by some sort of astrology
daily, and divination and horoscopes are big business in many countries, yet
most 'educated' people—certainly in the western world—would never ad-
mit to believing that astrologers are right even though recent studies show
that more than half Americans, Britons and French believe in the influence
of the stars on human affairs, and that global corporations use astrology in
their business and marketing policies (nor should we forget that at the end
of the twentieth century the US President Ronald Reagan consulted an as-
trologer regularly for guidance1). The popularisation of astrology has led it
to be 'secularised' to some extent and has even led some astrologers to
stand back from a strong causal element in their work by invoking ideas of
synchronicity and underlying patterns of similarity. By following on from
my first thoughts, however, my position has come to be stronger than most.
Underlying the system I call the TO8 is the recognition that the seasons
not only determine features of our temperament but coordinate our per-
ceptions of personality, and thus our relationships and success in life.
Biological researchers, though, are beginning to take an interest in the
influence of the seasons and can show some daily and seasonal effects in the
behaviour of immune and brain systems, though proving the influence of
these cycles in human social behaviour has been more difficult. Even so, it
has been shown that, for example, people born in the summer months ap-
pear to consider themselves luckier than average, while people born in the
winter months appear to show increased schizophrenic tendencies. Light
treatments help SAD sufferers, and other research appears to show that
certain wavelengths of sunlight assist learning. Insomniacs suffer more in
spring than in other seasons. There are definite statistical variations in
mental and mood disorders due to the seasons. The results are vague and
are poorly understood but point in the same direction that all readers of
divination systems are looking: the seasons show us the limits to human in-
dividuality.
By finding the limits, however, we can now begin to see why we have
them. It is my view that the human personality is an evolved system, gener-
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al to all human beings, that blends qualities and characteristics, over and
above the actions of specific traits, to a particular end—the making of the
parental relationship. The expression of personality can be thought of as a
relatively newly acquired 'language' of behaviour, and the TO8 is an at-
tempt at explaining its syntax.
The ancient Chinese analysed the mysteries of consciousness with simil-
ar tools, and dividing both the energies of Nature and our psychic 'spaces'
into eight has a long history in Chinese thought. Even Chinese philosophy,
however, has not been able to describe why this number works so well.
Their reverence for a pre-determined balance in creation has led them away
from finding evolution a crucial element to the making of the human mind.
So I believe the themes behind the TO8 that I investigate in this book are
both novel and provide us with the background to notions found in both
the East and the West.
To a western world raised on the notion that each one of us is not just a
distinct individual but a unique one, the idea that the minds of both sexes
are shaped by a federation of properties that we all share, and which is
readily accessed, seems hard to accept. The TO8 looks not at what distin-
guishes individuals but at the foundations of the individual. It tries to ex-
plore the personality system common to us all, to see how it evolved, and to
find where, for each person, the cultural and cognitive space in which we
are embedded ends and the particular individual begins. It has nothing to
say about luck, or upbringing, or the unpredictable events and forces that
influence lives. It only examines the federation of properties that dwells
more or less harmoniously in our consciousness and which influences the
trends of our lives. The real function of the TO8 is to help you evaluate the
personality cards you were dealt and to size up your fellow players. It can-
not, in the end, tell you how to play those cards.
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Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn !om the experience of others,
are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

Imitating Steve McQueen

I am always thrilled when I see a good mimicry of someone. I think to
myself, 'Just how can they do that?' A person who looks nothing like someone
else can still accurately convey another personality with a few deft gestures
and expressions.
I remember watching Sammy Davis Jr, who was short, moustachioed, of
afro-American and Puerto Rican parents, and about as far from looking like
anybody else as you can imagine, sit in a chair during a talk show and imit-
ate the actor Steve McQueen. Sammy Davis became, for a second or two,
the very man. A facial tick, a lift of the shoulders and for the briefest of mo-
ments Steve McQueen had replaced Sammy Davis Jr. How did he do it? By
what means was he able to present an entirely different personality with
just an expression, a look? And it wasn't simply that he looked liked Steve
McQueen for me by appealing to just my personal set of perceptions. The
whole audience was as amazed and amused as I. Sammy Davis Jr portrayed
to the people around him the (presumably) complex personality of an en-
tirely different person with some tiny gestures and movements. How?
Theatre and (now) television are the arenas in which the mysteries of
personality are played out endlessly before us. Imitation and deception are
themes threading through all performance art. Actors say things and do
things that have nothing, or very little, to do with the reality of who they
are, while plots of both comedy and tragedy hinge on mistaken identity,
mistaken and misjudged intentions. It seems curious that much of our
artistic efforts are devoted to the difficulties of knowing people when one
might expect that our evolutionary development would have kept us in
close contact with and with the full knowledge of how we, as individuals of
the human species, might behave. We should be able to read and under-
stand each other naturally, yet we don't seem to.
While our preoccupations with finding out who people are make the art
of theatre and the skills of acting so absorbing and mysterious, they are
found at all levels of culture. Not only do literature and art seek to under-
stand why people behave the way they do, we are compelled to find human-
like reasons for everything we see. It lies behind our anthropomorphic de-
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 3

sire to make gods of natural phenomena, to interpret curious events in

terms of ghosts or beings from other planets. It is why we turn animals into
pets. It defines our beliefs about life after death, whether in Heaven or as a
re-incarnated soul on earth. Personality is central to advertising and public
relations, and without it, politics and sport would be dry, dull affairs. We
bestow personalities on inanimate objects and industrial conglomerates. We
are enthusiastic fans of and are sometimes deeply committed to the inten-
tions of star personalities we have never met, while we are open to the de-
ceptions of confidence tricksters and salespeople that we meet face to face
but whose intentions we cannot divine. Our desire to impose human char-
acteristics on events tends to restrict the conclusions we draw about the
world. We are, all of us, to some degree or other, affected by our continual
need to understand events as if they are the product of or are related to
something that human beings possess and cannot escape from—a personal-
ity.
So what is this thing we call personality? We think of it as something
that just happens because we have minds and brains. And the minds and
brains of humans express themselves in this way2. As some psychologists
tell the story, it is the consequences of deep mental activity that cause per-
sonality, making our personality something secondary, an after effect, of
what is going on beneath our notice. It is, as Stephen Rose believes, an
'emergent property', unique to each brain3. But while psychologists talk
about people having personality types, and like to group people by the ways
in which they are statistically—and this is an important word4—likely to
behave, there is little attempt to uncover why the idea of a personality type
is even appealing to us beyond the suggestion that types merely represent
category limitations in the brain.
In spite of the various systems of personality typing currently in play,
there are five dimensions to the human personality on which most psycho-
logists seem to agree. They have been collectively given the acronym
OCEAN: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion/intro-
version, antagonism/agreeableness, and neuroticism. An individual is rated
according to his apparent score on each of these dimensions. These ratings
are generally considered a reliable predictor of behaviour, which is to say;
they are reliable predictors of how a person subsequently reacts to ques-
tionnaires. Does OCEAN, however, really help us understand real life situ-
ations? How, in fact, would OCEAN predict the self-centredness of a par-
ent locking his or her toddlers in a room while he or she went out on the
town? How would OCEAN answer this kind of question that I receive all
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 4

the time from worried individuals: Hi, I need any help to find out why I am
here on earth? Or this question: Hi, How do I find the right partner and live a
normal life? These kinds of concerns are central to our conduct and yet to
where on the five dimensions of OCEAN could these concerns be mapped?
A number of questions spring to mind that help us try and grasp what
this problem of personality is all about. In everyday life, we don't use
OCEAN, so how do we read someone's personality? Do we just guess what
someone is going to be like based on clues that person gives us? If so, what
determines the range of our guesses—past experience? How much experi-
ence of different types of people would we have to have to be able to guess
with reasonable accuracy what a new person might be like? Does success in
reading people depend upon the number of people that we have already
met? Would people who had lived all their lives within small families or
groups of people be able to understand a new person for whom they had
not seen a model? What could the result of a guess actually be? Do we com-
pare someone with ourselves and see how far he or she departs from what
we are like? But what are we like and what meaningful form of knowledge
do these 'departures' take? Do we estimate what someone is going to do in
a situation only when we need to, and not bother to make any kind of beha-
vioural prediction in advance? And what about the often-disturbing fact
that different members of someone's peer group can have radically different
opinions about him or her, or that someone's behaviour can depend upon
whom he or she is with. Personality typing should consider this, but it does-
n't.
These questions highlight the main problem for theories about our
awareness of others and what that implies for our behaviour—the 'empathy
problem'. Getting to know someone is a complex process. How can merely
observing individuals lead us to understand them? How do we come to an
understanding of what is going on not just in our own heads but also in oth-
er people's heads? Commentators have assumed that the 'mind-reading'
ability arose in human development and gave Man the impetus to develop
his complex social structures. As brain mass increased, we got to under-
stand more people, hence allowing social complexity to increase. Others
suggest something more complicated: that we became aware of ourselves
precisely because we had to be aware of others in an already complex soci-
ety.
The difficulty with these ideas is the computing power required. If one
does not accept that individuals fall into sets and believe that they are truly
different from one another then the computing power needed to model
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 5

each one's mind, cross-referring to the others, rises fantastically quickly. We

simply cannot create fresh theories about people we meet; there are not
enough molecules in the Universe to make a brain big enough. So the limit-
ations of brain power might be responsible for our perceptions of the
'types' of individuals we see. Here's Steven Johnson in his book Emergence,
'The brain didn't need to invent any complicated new routines once it figured out
how to read a single mind – it just needed to devote more processing power. The power
came in the form of brain mass: more neurons to model the behavior of other brains,
which themselves contained more neurons, for the same reason. It's a classic case of
positive feedback; only it seems to have run into a ceiling of 150 people (author's italics),
according to latest anthropological studies. We have a natural gift for building theories
of mind as long as there aren't too many of them.' 5
Johnson suggests that we can't distinguish between more than 150 'types'
and that 150 people represent an ideal community size (unless those 150 are
the same type). In fact it can be better argued that boundaries are necessary
for our cognitive awareness and that far from being the result of a failure of
capacity, our limited range of types is designed purposefully to extract the
maximum amount of usefulness from them. (We will see later how this idea
makes better sense.)
If individuality really exists, however, then variations in individuals are
not limited, and we should always be surprised by new varieties that we
hadn't experienced. The computing problem has not been solved even
though the modelling of others' behaviour may explain how understanding
people can be a relatively quick business; for there's no doubt we do make
superficial estimates of what people are like at first meeting and sometimes
within a few seconds6. But how do we account for non-superficial reactions
like the intense experience of love at first sight? Even if we haven't experi-
enced that particular feeling, most of us have experienced the sensation of
meeting someone who becomes an immediate friend. Writers have referred
to this sensation as a meeting of 'old souls'—friends from a past life. Does
this confirm our ability to read minds? If we do have a number of personal-
ity models already programmed into our minds against which we measure
people, could it be that when we find someone who fits one of them, our
hearts leap? Are we always measuring new people like this? And what are we
doing with people we already know, people we have already measured, when
we meet them again after 'life' has changed their attitudes and altered their
horizons? What could modelling people's behaviour in our heads actually
mean?
In the real world, we can't analyse people because we can't test them. We
can't take someone we have just met into a laboratory and make them fill
out standardized tests. (There's a lot to say about these tests, a whole book
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 6

on its own. They have their drawbacks, one of which is circularity. If there
are only 4 boxes to tick and you tick one, then I guess you immediately fall
into one of four types7.) We can't standardize conditions in a cocktail party
and check repeated responses (although many cocktail parties often seem
like the same one repeated). We cannot set up control groups in a bus
queue as a standard against which we can measure the stranger we are talk-
ing to. What do we do when we try to 'read' a person's potential for expres-
sion and capacity of thought and style of action? It is a conundrum.
This conundrum of personality has found fresh expression in popular
culture. Look at what television is currently (these years of the new millen-
nium) preoccupied with: show after show about strangers amongst us.
These are soaps with a difference. We see ordinary people, ordinary societ-
ies beset by vampires, aliens, super beings and monsters in disguise. The
problem for our ordinary heroes is no longer how to get the fortune and
marry well; the goal is to discover who is a human and who isn't. The en-
emies of the state look normal, have got the look of being human down,
but they are a real threat to genuine humanity.
These television fictions go beyond the Clarke Kent/Superman fantasy
(given a new spin in the Harry Potter sagas), where the super-being hides
his or her real capabilities simply by pretending to be someone who lacks
them. It used to be a very common plot in popular entertainment.
Nowadays, the television shows are depicting tales of vaster conspiracies of
deception. The vampires, aliens, lizards and all the rest are trying to force
themselves inside the 'skin' of humans and to become like them. We see the
problem from the human side of things and it's two-sided. How do you re-
cognise a true person from a monster and how do you let others know that
you are a true person and not a monster?
So, what are people really like? Once more, Television is giving us the
chance, now, to think about this question more deeply. We are able to con-
duct our own experiments on personality with real subjects. Reality-TV
shows like Big Brother and Survivor are peepholes into the secrets of per-
sonality. We, as the audience, are invited to assess each player in the closed
situation created by the television companies and vote from time to time
on the one we would like to see excluded from the group, the one we don't
like8. These shows are just personality tests, but the key is they are about
ordinary people which is to say, people who are not, in the beginning, trying
to present a false account of themselves. There are 'star' versions of course,
but these appear to be less popular.
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Television is right now (in the beginnings of the 21st century) conducting
a love affair with ordinary people and ordinary backgrounds as if the studio-
created star personality of the past no longer serves any function in our
lives. What we like to see is the ordinary person unchanged by their modest
talents, remaining true to themselves and to their origins, and by doing so,
throw into sharp relief the manufactured and false personalities that bear
little relation to the world we know.
So why should the opportunity to size up strangers on a television show
be so popular? It is because sizing people up is, in its crudest evolutionary
form, how we further our genes in future generations; it is how we form re-
lationships and make and bring up our children.
So how are the humans of today coping with this propensity? Not well,
by many accounts. Humans seem to be having great difficulty in knowing
how to make and sustain relationships. Not only do at least as many first
marriages fall apart as last9, more and more re-marriages fail10. The relative
ease with which people can now live together mirrors the ease with which
they separate. At the same time, the desire to have children in liberal soci-
eties has been falling dramatically. The two seem to be connected, but how?
The mystery of falling birth rates in developing countries follows the liber-
alisation pattern more than rising prosperity. The more people are able to
choose to have children within their relationships, the less they choose
them. The more they have a second chance at making relationships, the
more they try. Relationships are taking up more and more of our time and
yet are less and less productive. What can this mean?
Even more curious is the emergence, in the western world at least, of
the phenomenon of the militant non-parent11. What can it possibly mean in
evolutionary terms to have a personality that firmly refuses to have children
and rejects the pressure from others in society to have them? Of course,
single childless people can have a useful role in society as carers and stand-
ins for others. But there are, no doubt, as many childless and single mean-
spirited, frustrated and despairing individuals who disrupt society, as there
are childless and selfless educators, administrators, disinterested politicians
and reformers who help it along. Not wanting children means something
but what can it be?
Modern cultural biases would even have us believe that the biological
connection between parent and child is irrelevant, and that the children
can be successfully brought up by anybody. The implicit idea is that the par-
ental relationship is as negative to its children as positive12. That this idea is
not true is irrelevant13. It is novel, and has been introduced to serve the in-
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 8

terests of people who cannot understand their relationships and the nature
of parenthood and who need somehow to be free of any of the constraints
that such a relationship might impose. We are afraid of the profound mean-
ing of parenthood and we no longer understand quite what it could mean
for our lives.
There is a persistent belief, too, that human beings are selfish: that we
are driven by the need to satisfy our own desires and to heck with anybody
else—even our own children. This belief is belied by the fact that research
into markets14 has ended up with the realisation that individuals don't actu-
ally know enough about what their needs are to act in a truly selfish man-
ner. We are hopeless at calculating what seem to be our best interests and
intuitively take apparently wrong options all the time15. Not only that, many
studies show people acting far more generously than they should, given
their self-interest16. Why is this? It is, I suggest, because we are not cold cal-
culating scientists considering only abstract numbers, we look for the per-
son behind the data, the relationship behind the act.
Even in this modern age, what are called pseudoscientific beliefs or bor-
derline belief systems are, apparently, on the rise. Human beings continue
to believe in the existence of paranormal entities and explanations, and
continue to fall for the same old frauds exploiting these beliefs. Why
should this be? Does the person in the street actually know more about the
truth of the world than a sceptical scientist? No. It is surely that ordinary
people are making judgements and constructing beliefs on different criter-
ia. They are using information about human personality to judge and pre-
dict the meaning of the information they receive. What do you get when
you deliberately take human personality out of the picture? You get 'sci-
ence'.
Questions of personality are a force in our culture. Aside from Art, the
other major arena in which personality dominates is consumerism. But
modern consumerism is not about materialism per se; it also has a rather
more esoteric function. Consumers acquire specific things for a purpose
other than their nominal function, and consequently producers try and sell
things to include this extra dimension. Society has named the trappings of
our success and the scope of our leisure as a lifestyle, and we, as consumers,
are now absorbed in the quest for lifestyle to define ourselves as human be-
ings.
Long ago, I went to live in a remote valley among mountains. I was con-
stantly applauded for having found a perfect lifestyle: clean, rural, and
autonomous. Friends referred to the way I lived as a 'great lifestyle',
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 9

reckoned I had it 'sussed' and wished they could do the same. In fact, few, if
any, of the people I know could actually have lived the way I chose to. The
truth is I have this 'lifestyle' because I am me, not because I picked this
lifestyle out of a shop window. My friends have the idea that all there is to
my lifestyle is finding a remote house in the mountains and moving into it.
They don't seem to think that who they are matters.
Lifestyle and personality: this is where we become confused. The reading
of who a person is has become crucially enmeshed in what that person has.
Capitalism has long made use of this confusion, and producers sell products
by connecting them to personalities. Why? Why does it help the sale of
products to associate them with popular athletes, beautiful models or suc-
cessful actors? Product endorsement has little to do with explaining quite
what is the best about an item (endorsers often do not have the skills, train-
ing or know-how associated specifically with the product they endorse17) or
getting consumers to associate with winners (although there is something
of that in it); it's about getting across the idea that you can have a winning
or attractive personality without having to go through the messy business of
winning or being attractive first. Buying a sponsored product helps you be
the attractive person who is sponsoring it. If you buy Arnold Palmer's golf
clubs you won't just play better golf, you will become a little like Arnold
Palmer himself. It's a delightful fact that many outstanding winners and
achievers have tried and failed to make good product endorsers in spite of
their successes: their personalities have just not come across as attractive
enough. On the other hand, people who have done nothing at all in life can
still endorse products and generate interest in their activities if they can
somehow be presented as attractive people with whom the general con-
sumer can relate. (I'm thinking here of say, Paris Hilton.)
This association of human personality with the content of objects, the
paraphernalia of life, pervades our culture. But it isn't a modern phenomen-
on. Objects have always been totems for us. When my friends tell me they
want my lifestyle, they are saying, in effect, that they want to be like me.
It's the same process of identification found in rituals the world over. When
the high priest puts on the bear skin, the tiger skin, the vestments of the
gods, or even when a citizen puts on a uniform, dresses for carnival or even
buys a set of Arnold Palmer's golf clubs, he or she is trying to acquire the
personality of the creature or the spirit he or she admires, don the mantle
of a greater personality. The person is trying to acquire different capabilit-
ies, or at least present himself or herself as someone who can access these
capabilities. For a moment perhaps, the warrior wearing a tiger skin may
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 2 0

become a tiger and find within himself the spirit and the cunning of the an-
imal to use in battle. In practice, such efforts, even in the modern con-
sumerist world, are short-lived: if it were that easy to acquire different
personality characteristics, there would be no problem in making the rela-
tionships of our desires. These tactics are, for the most part, a deception.
They confuse the issue rather than solve it.
Another confusion is the widely marketed belief that men and women
have profoundly different personalities. Much research shows they occupy
slightly different ranges of similar abilities but such that it's impossible to
predict which sex is which from looking at the performance figures alone.
A raft of books have appeared in recent years describing the differing beha-
viours and traits of the sexes that underline this belief 18, John Gray's, Men
are "om Mars and Women are "om Venus is one of the early ones laying out the
problem territory of relating for the rest.
At the heart of all these books is the struggle to make us believe that hu-
man relationships don't just fall apart; they are hardly possible in the first
place. Men and women are not suited to each other, and, to get a mate, a
woman requires sophisticated tactical knowledge of men's psychological
weaknesses and cultural dominance. The fatuousness of such an analysis
doesn't lessen the popularity of these books, even though it must be clear
that if men and women were not two halves of a single strategy humans
would die out pretty quickly. We don't only mate, we also bring up our off-
spring within a community, something which the sex-biased strategies for
dating and mating of these books hardly touch upon. Nor do the dubious
sociobiological discussions help us understand the formation of life-long
friendships, or the love of a grandparent, or why geniuses can be stimulat-
ing but not lovable, or why dullards can be lovable but not stimulating, or
what determines the choices of liars who don't lie all the time, or of misan-
thropes who actually like some people. Sex-biased traits do not clearly ex-
plain how we are in the full experience of the person nor do they seem to
determine who we decide to like or to whom we will commit ourselves.
It is clear, however, and as the picture built up from the TO8 shows, men
and women, although they have sex-related biases in some areas of activity
and cognition, actually share the same human personality structure, and
that all the difficulties we have in using it to further our happiness is best
understood by considering it in terms of a shared mechanism.
Much of our social existence is spent struggling with the problems of ex-
pressing and reading the mechanism of personality19 that has arisen through
evolution in order to help us further our genes, while the cultural tools to
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hand are confusing our path to success. Our artistic efforts are directed at
finding solutions to the conundrum of perceiving personality, and which al-
low us to rehearse and refine our apparent empathic understanding of
people, while a great deal of our economic behaviour runs against these ef-
forts by allowing us to dominate and to deceive in ways unavailable in the
past aeons in which Modern Man arose. Personality has become a trap for
the unwary as well as a route to success and fulfilment.
The most recent experiences humans have had in trying to make mean-
ingful connections with each other using the Internet serves to underline
the traps that still exist. The great hopes many had for social networking
have proved just as disappointing as exciting. Certainly it can unite and
even animate dispersed individuals with common aims, but web sites that
exploit our innate desire for social kinship by facilitating interpersonal
communications hardly escape the same old playground obsessions we ex-
perienced as children20. They readily provide outlets for the inexperienced,
the obsessive and the liar to make their presence felt through abuse and
misinformation21 and rather than deepen and enhance a relationship, they
tend to intensify belonging22 at the expense of private spaces where con-
science and character can grow. Even sites such as Friendster.com that 'vet'
contacts by displaying who also links to them is much less successful at al-
lowing strangers to become one's friends than providing a quick way to
'surf ' what your friends are thinking or where they are going in the evening.
People have hopes that the Twitter fad will grow from a game of social 'tag'
to a form of social 'brain' and guardian of people power, forgetting that it's
owners need to make money out of the system to pay back the $55 million
it raised to create it. The picture and video posting web sites like, Facebook,
and YouTube successfully provide worldwide reportage and the ability to
share and comment upon the mundane details of one's life with hundreds
of others at the press of a button, but there is no evidence that they have
made people get to know each other better. In fact, it is hard to escape the
feeling that all these sites will simply target advertisements to people's pref-
erences (the same way the on-line bookseller Amazon.com keeps track of
what you bought on their site and brings you news of what other people
who bought the same book also bought). They have yet to prove themselves
as genuine relationship facilitators.
While these tools may well be a useful counterbalance of social power
for the ordinary person at street level, I do not think the situation will stay
that way. At the moment, instant news is fun—a kind of social ticker-tape
—but these tools are promoting the sensations of 'discovery' and the youth-
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 2 2

ful desire to be present at whatever is going on hoping we will all get too
hooked to realise that their purposes are rooted in commerce and the mar-
ket and little to do with expressing the range of what is stable and what is
possible in the social reality we immerse ourselves in. Even as I write, the
social networks have been hi-jacked by commercial interests who use them
to convey not just opinions and information but also manufactured gossip,
rumour and 'buzz' to market their wares to the unsuspecting 23. Outside of
the professionally written blogs (or ghosted 'tweats' on the Twitter system)
designed to leak details of products or to emphasise commercial or political
viewpoints, a trawl through blogs and chat sites shows that almost all the
general public's output of opinion is banal and often very unappetising24.
Individuals are beginning to bypass the propaganda in any event, preferring
to establish a virtual reality presence in artificial worlds and spend real
money (it's hard to believe this) trying out different versions of themselves
in role playing with similarly created 'avatars', vividly expressing the search
for another reality to human interaction.
The practical consequences of my proposals are to illuminate this key
area of our lives—the making of relationships. It is clear that humans em-
ploy methods of forming kinship-like relationships outside of our genetic
dispositions to family kinship. We can readily hate our gene-related families
and yet love the tribe or commit to strangers quite unrelated to us. Parents
can dislike one of their offspring while preferring the others. They can of-
ten be mean to their own children while they delight in other people's chil-
dren. Children prefer their friends to their siblings. We are often mean and
unsympathetic to our brothers and sisters while at the same time sacrifice
our lives to individuals and causes that have no genetic bias in our direc-
tion. We form friends, link up with partners and find fulfilment in work in
ways that are not predicted or accounted for by our intellectual abilities or
physical talents. How are these community effects explained either by tra-
ditional genetic calculation or by cultural methods of characterising person-
ality?
The cooperative eclecticism of our society, extended over time and
space, is something of a puzzle to evolutionary biologists, and while few
modern researchers have moved in this direction, I find myself admiring
the attempts of an earlier Russian philosopher, Kropotkin, to explain it.
Kropotkin tried to show that some forms of 'society', animal or human, ex-
press something collective outside of that produced by the survival-of-the-
fittest view of evolution. Kropotkin, a Russian prince, was also a geologist
and contributed to scientific knowledge. Yet, he was taken by the need to
 A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 2 3

find a new political direction. He renounced his title and his possessions
and became a writer and thinker for the anarchist cause. He published in
1902, Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, in which he described hundreds of
examples of co-operation in the animal kingdom in which mutual aid (as
distinct from biological altruism or even reciprocal altruism) was the rule
rather than the exception. He extrapolated from them to the human condi-
tion and tried to describe a genetic basis for co-operation, although he
lacked a true understanding of any mechanism by which this co-operative
impulse might be programmed into human existence. Kropotkin had a
democratic political agenda and was trying to out-manoeuvre basic Dar-
winian selection which many philosophers used to prove that poverty and
privilege were programmed into human beings through the survival of the
fittest.
My system of personality typing has also given me an insight into the
human collective. But it is not driven by any political attitude or belief, and
Darwinian selection lies at the heart of my argument. If I am right,
however, then this understanding of relationships does have political reper-
cussions. Individuals who are free to find their best partner, and who are
free to love, reproduce and raise their offspring in the light of the mechan-
isms outlined in this book are likely to make a society more enlightened, re-
silient, charitable and democratic than those who are not.
It is not a new idea, although my discoveries only serve to strengthen it.
It is present, for example, in George Orwell's remarkable 1984, where he
describes how the only antidote to perverse political theorists and tyrants is
the force of natural love. Lao Tze, a Chinese philosopher of the 6th century
BC (by tradition) also remarked, at a time when tyrant philosophies were
gaining ground, that it is the happy relations in a family that lead to the
perfect State. Gaining a correct view of the people with whom we have
contact ends up being a political force, and forming a life-long loving part-
nership is a political act. It is an intriguing irony of the Reality TV age, that
a program designed to reveal diverse individuals in their natural state form-
ing relationships with each under the full gaze of the public should be
named after Orwell's nightmare tyrant who mercilessly quashed all semb-
lance of individuality and love—Big Brother.