Models
Models, drawn
Frameworks people use to sort character and relationships, each drawn so its shape is clear at a glance.
Enneagram (overview)A system of nine character types, each organised around a core fear, a compensating core desire and a habitual emotional distortion called the passion (anger, pride, deceit or vanity, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust, sloth). Lines on the diagram claim each type moves toward another type's worse traits under stress and another's better traits in growth.Attachment theoryPeople are born with a behavioural system that seeks closeness to a protective figure when threatened, and the reliability of early care shapes expectations of whether others will come and whether one deserves it. In adults the same system runs with partners and close friends, and more weakly with bosses, mentors and institutions; it is best measured as two dimensions, attachment anxiety and avoidance, rather than as boxes.DISCA workplace profile sorting behavioural style into four quadrants: Dominance (direct, results-focused), Influence (enthusiastic, persuasive), Steadiness (patient, supportive) and Conscientiousness (careful, analytical). The quadrants come from two axes: outgoing against reserved, and task-focused against people-focused.Big Five (Five-Factor Model)Five broad, continuous dimensions that capture most of the stable differences between people: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Everyone sits somewhere on each dimension; nobody is a 'type'.Interpersonal circumplex (Leary, Wiggins)A map of social behaviour on two axes: dominance, or agency (control, assertion, status), running from dominant to submissive, and warmth, or communion (affection, affiliation), running from warm to cold. Every interpersonal act, and every person's typical style, sits somewhere on the circle.Drama triangle (persecutor, victim, rescuer)Three roles people take up in conflict: Persecutor (blames, controls), Victim (helpless, aggrieved) and Rescuer (fixes, unasked). The roles are interchangeable, and the drama lies in the moment people switch seats.Conflict modes (Thomas-Kilmann)Five ways of handling conflict, plotted on two dimensions, assertiveness (concern for your own goals) and cooperativeness (concern for the other’s): competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. Each fits some situations; trouble starts when a person uses one mode for everything.Ego states: Parent, Adult, Child (Transactional Analysis)Three coherent sets of thinking, feeling and behaviour a person moves between: Parent (copied from caregivers, critical or nurturing), Adult (here-and-now reasoning) and Child (replayed from childhood, free or adapted). A transaction is crossed when someone answers from a state the speaker didn't address.Horney's three neurotic trends (toward, against, away)Three strategies for managing basic anxiety, the child's sense of being helpless in a potentially hostile world: moving toward people (compliance, seeking love and approval), moving against people (aggression, seeking power and mastery) and moving away from people (detachment, seeking independence and self-sufficiency). Everyone uses all three; trouble starts when one becomes compulsive and the others are repressed.Riemann's four basic forms of anxietyFour character styles defined by the anxiety each avoids, set on two axes: closeness against distance, and permanence against change. The schizoid style fears closeness and self-loss and seeks distance; the depressive fears separation and seeks closeness; the obsessive fears change and seeks permanence; the hysterical fears permanence and finality and seeks change.Four temperamentsAn ancient sorting of character into four kinds, once attributed to an excess of one bodily humour: sanguine (sociable, optimistic), choleric (forceful, quick to anger), melancholic (serious, brooding) and phlegmatic (calm, slow to react). In modern terms they are the four corners of extraversion crossed with emotional stability.Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)A questionnaire that sorts people into one of 16 types from four forced choices: extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. It treats each preference as an either-or, though the underlying scores pile up in the middle like most traits.HEXACO modelA six-factor model of personality: Honesty-humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness. It re-cuts agreeableness and neuroticism and adds a dimension for fairness and lack of greed.Enneagram instinctual variantsThree areas of life where people concentrate attention and anxiety: self-preservation (material security, health, comfort), social (standing, belonging, role in the group) and sexual or one-to-one (intensity, attraction, the charged bond). Each person is said to lead with one and neglect another, which colours their type.Maslow's hierarchy of needsA model of human needs ordered from physiological and safety needs through belonging and esteem to self-actualisation, with the claim that lower needs take priority until reasonably satisfied.Spiral DynamicsA stage model of values and worldviews, colour-coded from survival (beige) through tribal (purple), power (red), order and rules (blue), achievement (orange), egalitarian community (green) to systemic (yellow) and holistic (turquoise). It claims individuals and cultures move up through these in response to life conditions.Window of toleranceThe range of arousal within which a person can feel emotions and still think, relate and act effectively; above it is hyperarousal, below it is hypoarousal.Four horsemen (Gottman)Four ways of fighting that predict relationship breakdown: criticism (attacking the person rather than the behaviour), contempt (speaking from superiority), defensiveness (counter-attack or innocent victimhood) and stonewalling (shutting down).Love languagesThe claim that people give and receive love chiefly through one of five channels: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Relationships suffer, it says, when partners speak different languages.Dark Triad and Dark TetradA cluster of socially aversive traits found in the normal population: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, with everyday sadism added in the Tetrad. They share a core of callousness and self-interest at others' expense.