PeopleSmart in Business eBook - The Platinum Rule

plain our diff erences were made by astrologers who recorded the positions
of the heavens. Th e twelve signs in four basic groupings--Earth,
Air, Fire, and Water--are still used today.
In ancient Greece, Hippocrates’ concept of four temperaments followed---Sanguine,
Phlegmatic, Melancholy, and Choleric. He viewed
personality as shaped by blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. As
unpalatable as this might sound to us, people accepted these physical
or bodily causes for varying “humours” for centuries. Respected fi gures
from medical/physical sciences, metaphysics, mathematics, and
philosophy observed these four temperaments--including Aristotle,
Empedocles, Th eophrastus, and, in Roman times, Galen. References
to Hippocrates’ Big Four can be found in Shakespeare’s plays.
In 1923, Dr. Carl Jung wrote his famous Psychological Types, at that
time the most sophisticated scientifi c work on personality. In it, he
again described four behavioral styles--the Intuitor, Th inker, Feeler,
and Sensor.
Th is basic, four-type model spans all cultures? East and West, north
and south. For instance, Japanese people still study behavior and
physical composition. Advice on How to Form a Good Combination
of Blood Types, a former best seller by Toshitaka Nomi, claimed
100,000 documented cases of cross-referencing personalities with
blood types. Nomi indicated that 40 percent of Japan’s population has
Type A blood. He associated this with the conscientious, hard-working
behavior expected of engineers and technicians. He hypothesized
that this explained Japan’s emphasis on high-technology excellence.
Four styles with a difference
Today’s Information Age features more than a dozen varied models
of our behavioral diff erences. But they all have one common threadthe
grouping of behavior into four categories.
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