the four tendencies -- a book review

Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies:  The Indispensable Personality Profiles that Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (And Other People's Lives Better, Too) brings the perspective that made her Happiness Project an amazing book to this new endeavor:  Sorting ersonalities into four "tendencies" -- upholders, questioners, obligers, and rebels -- according to people's motivations for undertaking actions.  The Four Tendencies is a light reading in pop psychology, but it ultimately left me feeling like I need to revisit my copy of Please Understand Me for a better template of human personality.

Each tendency gets two separate chapters devoted to understanding and dealing with people with a specific trait.  There's even a Venn diagram and brief, if arbitrary, quiz.  The simplicity of the profiles is comforting, but the science is questionable.  While Rubin created a brief survey, the anecdotal evidence is used to support The Four Tendencies, and all the while I hear my psychology profs from college issuing challenges about supporting research with anecdotes.

Rubin diagnoses her friends and social-media followers using her framework, sometimes sounding wise, at other times smug.  Supposedly there's no hierarchy to the tendencies, but the author, an upholder, can't quite hide her preference for her own tendency, with her husband's questioner tendency running a near second.

In its best moments, The Four Tendencies offers a reminder that not everyone is the same.  But for anything of depth, I'd turn elsewhere.
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I received a free copy of this game from Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest review here.