How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

Red: Firey & high energy characters that act like that.

Blue: Intelligent & 'meta'. Lots of 'wizards' with that kind of personality.

Green: That might as well describe an Ent.

Yellow/White: Nice extroverted people, with a dash of self-righteousness

Black: Death and negativity.

(1) The sole reason for the feeling of "being surrounded by idiots" is lack of understanding of the other. If someone has different opinions/behaviors/moral values than I do, the easiest thing I could do is just label them "Idiot". Real understanding and empathy are just too hard. Actually, this also true when looking at one's own behaviour. We are mostly quick to judge and be angry at ourselves.

Having a system such as this (even if it is pseudo-scientific) gives one pause in judgement. For example: John isn't an idiot or an asshole, he's just a Green. The implicit idea here is that John doesn't do it on purpose, he's part of a group. So I should be more accepting of him and I should learn to deal with Greens' quirks better. This neutral judgement (instead of the negative one) automatically side-steps the anger, elicits more empathy and accepts partial responsibility for the interactions. It also gives a feeling of increased understanding of "how the world works" which feels good (even if it's false). This also works when introspectively looking at one's own behaviour: Us Blues have a hard time doing X. I should be easier with myself.

The actual underpinned theory is irrelevant (as so far as the aforementioned benefits are considered). It works just as well with "John's just a Gemini/INTP/Type 8". It's just the ability to attribute something to the person's actions I dislike other than stupidity or incompetence.

(2) People love this stuff. Personality segmentation models are abundant and people love taking assessment quizzes. Astrology, Enneagram, Big-5, Myer&Briggs and many others. I'd venture off saying that most people don't take these things too seriously. Even the theories themselves recognize that human's personality can't really fit nicely in n boxes, so all of them have "extensions": You can be several colors, Astrology has "horizons", Ennegram has "wings", Big5 gives a running score to each trait, etc. Proponents of a system can easily utter something like "Mary's not a typical Aries, though". So while there are some people that might take it too far, I feel it's mostly used benignly.

The fact that the theory behind some of these systems are anywhere between questionable to down right ludicrous is a pickle, though. But sometimes system benefit people even when the people don't understand the mechanism in which they do, or hold a wrong one. Therfor truth seeking shouldn't, in and of it self, be enough of a reason to tear down such a system. This idea was explored in an article posted here a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749

This was exactly the same color model, although we gave names to the colors, like red was commander, blue was analyst, etc. Of course, everyone wanted to be red.

I'm sure this course was expensive, and hundreds if not thousands of people took it. It was about as useful as you would imagine. I only wish I could find those blocks, as they were fun (and safe) to throw at people.

Of course they didn't mention the original book, because if they would have, I certainly would have remembered the title!