Are you a jokester, doomster, gloomster or cool cat? Oxford Academic reveals exactly what
In the film Wicked, why does Elphaba – the misunderstood future Wicked Witch of the West – take everything to heart, whereas her friend Glinda seems to breeze through life?
Could it be because Elphaba’s an Agoniser, while her friend is, by contrast, a Happy Camper?
Does the succession of violent conflicts in Game Of Thrones only make sense once you realise Daenerys Targaryen is a Hothead, Jon Snow is a Gloomster and Varys is a Cool Cat?
And why does it take Elizabeth Bennet so long to realise Mr Darcy’s humour makes him a Jokester?
Confused? Oxford academic Marius Ostrowski – a social theorist – believes that many of the world’s problems can be attributed to the fact that we’re surrounded by people who we don’t understand, simply because they think differently to us.
So he’s set out to define the main ‘thinking types’ so we can recognise our own thought processes, understand why our partner can drive us mad, our boss’s reasoning seems unfathomable and our friends sometimes act incomprehensibly.
Ostrowski’s aim is to go beyond the well-known personality profile tests such as Myers-Briggs or Type A/B classification that are familiar parts of job applications.
Instead, he puts together a formula that goes deeper by taking into account the emotions we feel, the information we gather, the predispositions we judge by, and the way we reason.
The result is his ten ‘thinker types’: the Happy Camper, the Jokester, the Gloomster, the Agoniser, the Hothead, the Cool Cat, the Keen Bean, the Worrywart, the Quibbler and the Reveller.
Ostrowski stresses that he’s not talking about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ types here. All I will say is that if, after reading about the types, you recognise yourself as a Happy Camper, Reveller or a Cool Cat, you’re likely to feel much better about it than if you’re categorised as a Gloomster or a Worrywart. Or perhaps that’s the point.
I’m guessing Ostrowski would define himself as a Keen Bean. He’s frighteningly clever – he got ten A-levels before going into academia.
Outside work he’s an accomplished pianist and speaks five languages. The most negative thing he mentions in his life is that he’s a ‘long-suffering supporter of Portsmouth FC’.
He also has a talent for clear, accessible writing, with the extensive research behind his work largely confined to the epilogue.
If anything, I’d have liked a bit more visible science in the main part of the book. Of the 13 chapters, ten are devoted to describing each individual type, and of necessity it feels slightly repetitive.
The Wodehousian terms for the types slightly jarred with me (can Mr Darcy ever really be termed a Jokester?) and as he also writes continually in the first-person plural (e.g. ‘We Revellers are unapologetic go-getters’) I ended up feeling slightly left out, if it wasn’t a type I identified with.
Or maybe, as he’d tell me, at heart I’m just a Quibbler.