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View submission: The NewToReddit Encyclopaedia Redditica v2
Amateur psychological classification of different types of people is rampant on the Internet, and it’s almost a trope of its own to dislike Redditors[1]. Type the words “Redditor Starter Pack” into your favourite image search engine and you’ll be faced with pages of images like these[2]. Sometimes, certain subreddits or groups of people can be generally considered intolerable[3] but of course Reddit isn’t all like that. In reality, *The Average Redditor*™ is a mythical being borne from our instinctive need to classify people into archetypes[4].
1: https://www.quora.com/What-dont-some-people-like-about-Reddit
2: https://i.redd.it/jk7dkwan0f091.jpg
3: https://www.businessinsider.com/10-types-of-reddit-users-people-hate-2013-7?r=US&IR=T
4: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-jungs-4-major-archetypes-2795439
It's hard not to be sensitive to differences among the people around us. As a result, we’ve been trying to find a way to classify personalities ever since Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks proposed four basic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic) and we’re still trying to find new ways of doing so[5] today. Reddit, as you would expect, has many Subreddits concerning the various methods of determining personality types.
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_type
Pop culture has its own methods of grouping people. In the “Dungeons & Dragons” (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, *alignment* is a categorisation of the ethical and moral perspective of player characters, non-player characters, and creatures. The co-creator, Gary Gygax, introduced the two-axis alignment table[6] as far back as 1978, with one scale being that from Good to Evil and the other being from Lawful (which emphasises “honour, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability”) to Chaotic (which emphasises “freedom, adaptability, and flexibility”). This then led to the development of a basic alignment chart[7] which can be easily customised to categorise anything from sandwiches[8] in the “Cube Rule of Food Identification” to alignment charts themselves[9].
6: https://i.redd.it/eehbzp3obf091.jpg
7: https://i.redd.it/wjrefljocf091.png
8: https://i.redd.it/5db143a014191.jpg
9: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2251:_Alignment_Chart_Alignment_Chart
Reddit, as you would expect, has embraced this concept wholeheartedly and the results can be seen at r/AlignmentCharts.
Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) created many theories and ideas that are still used in psychology today, known as analytical psychology or Jungian Analysis. Jung spent his life learning from observation and read exceptionally widely on all manner of subjects, eventually creating the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, extraversion (outer world) and introversion (internal world). ELI5 have a short introduction[10] to his complex work, and a short animation[11] on the r/philosophy Subreddit explores Jung’s two fundamental ideas: the collective unconscious and the stages of life.
10: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/udlgl/eli5_the_work_of_carl_jung/
11: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/ckps5n/the_modern_shaman_an_animated_guide_to_the/
A Subreddit devoted to this is r/Jung.
Katharine Briggs began her research into personality in 1917 as a means to understand what she saw as an unlikely attraction between her daughter, Isabel, and fiancé, Clarence Myers. Over 20 years, the mother-daughter team worked to develop the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, drawing heavily on the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Subreddits devoted to this include:
And this Multireddit[12] contains 17 more communities related to the different MBTI types.
Often called the “Big Five,” the five-factor model is a set of personality traits derived from a statistical study of words commonly used to describe psychological characteristics across cultures and languages. The categories are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
A Subreddit devoted to this is r/BigFive.
This is a system designed by Shannon and Dave Powers, that has been in function since 2014. They started by using Carl Jung’s 16 personality types, then, due to different behaviours shown by people with the same personality type, introduced a new typology called the Objective Personality System (OPS or OP) increasing these personality types from 16 to 512.
A Subreddit devoted to this is r/ObjectivePersonality.
Socionics is a theory of interpersonal interaction based on patterns of information selection and processing. Socionics has 16 types and 16 kinds of intertype relations. It even divides information itself into 8 varieties. The primary source of inspiration was, once again, Jung's Typology. However, Socionics developed in the 1970s and 80s in the former Soviet Union and was cut off from western psychology, including similar typological systems such as the MBTI. Today Socionics is popular in the Russian speaking world and is beginning to make inroads into other cultural realms.
A Subreddit devoted to this is r/Socionics.
The Enneagram is a typology system that describes human personality as a number of interconnected personality types consisting of 3 centres of intelligence, 9 main Enneagram types[13], 18 wings, 3 subtypes and triadic styles. Contemporary Enneagram theories are principally derived from the teachings of the Bolivian psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo from the 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s. Naranjo's theories were also influenced by some earlier teachings about personality by George Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way tradition. Subreddits devoted to this include:
13: https://i.redd.it/jv2r2gzcl8191.jpg
And of course, because Reddit will Reddit, we also have r/enneagrammemes.
Reddit also has many places to discuss the broader aspects of typology and psychology both seriously and in more typical Reddit style, such as:
Finally, here’s a more comprehensive list of subreddits concerning psychology[14].
14: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/wiki/psychology
Many of the subreddits mentioned here will have links to other related subs in their sidebar or “About” tab. As always, it is important to check the rules[15] before commenting or posting on an unfamiliar Subreddit.
15: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnToReddit/comments/pjsazs/finding_a_subreddits_rules/
I would be remiss here in not mentioning r/psych - a subreddit devoted to all things Psych: the TV show. If you do believe in *The Average Redditor*™, then r/averageredditor is the sub for you. For the “starter pack” meme we have r/starterpack and r/starterpacks. “Dungeons & Dragons” fans are well catered for at r/DungeonsAndDragons and r/DnD - a subreddit dedicated to the various iterations of Dungeons & Dragons, from its First Edition roots to its Fifth Edition future. Other subs include r/dndnext, r/DMAcademy, r/DnDBehindTheScreen and, of course, r/dndmemes.
Finally, as I referred above to The Cube Rule of Food Identification[16], I should mention r/toast, r/Sandwiches and r/eatsandwiches, r/tacos, r/sushi, r/calzone and r/hotdogs. Is a hotdog a sandwich? The NewToReddit Mods[17] weigh in on the perennial debate[18].
17: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/uqxx56/comment/i8tzbsh/
19: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/qbb173/comment/i64qffd/
20: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/qbb173/comment/hha87cw/
21: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/qbb173/comment/hhsl520/
There's nothing here!
