Probably no one needs to be convinced of the importance of understanding the characters of the people you meet every day, whether they are relatives or employees. Meanwhile, the idea of the types of characters we sometimes have is very abstract. We often make mistakes in the assessment of the person we are interested in. Such mistakes sometimes cost us a lot: it can be a mistake in choosing a friend, assistant, employee, spouse, etc. The fact is that we are poorly guided by the characters, sometimes do not notice the best features of others. We pass by that valuable thing that is in the person, we are not able to help him to open up.
A person as a person, of course, is not reduced to a character. A person is defined, first of all, by the social activity that he carries out. A personality has social orientations, ideals, attitudes towards others and different aspects of life, knowledge, skills, abilities, level of their development, temperament. Personalities are characterized by harmony of development in general, learning ability, flexibility of behavior, the ability to restructure, the ability to solve organizational issues, etc. However, character traits are also essential for understanding personality. The brighter the character, the more it affects the personality, the more it affects the behavior.
Numerous attempts to classify the types of characters as a whole (rather than individual traits) have so far failed. In addition to the diversity and versatility of character traits, the diversity of the proposed classifications is also explained by the differences in the attributes that can be used as a basis for them.
The Greek philosopher and physician Theophrastus (372-287 B.C.) in his treatise "Ethical Characteristics" described 31 characters: flatterer, chatterbox, braggart, etc. He understood character as a mark in the moral life of society.
The French moralist writer Labrouillard (1645-1696) gave 1120 such characteristics, dividing his work into a number of chapters: the city, the capital, the nobles, etc. He, like Theophrastus, in his characteristics revealed the inner essence of man through his deeds. For example, he wrote: "Rogues tend to consider others to be rogues; they are almost impossible to deceive, but they do not deceive for long" [161, p. 231].
From Aristotle comes the identification of character with the volitional traits of personality, and hence the division of character into strong and weak in its intensity volitional traits. More correctly, the strong character should be understood as the correspondence of human behavior to his worldview and beliefs. A person with a strong character is a reliable person. Knowing his beliefs, you can always anticipate what he will do in a particular situation. This is the kind of person they say: "This one will not let you down. A person with a weak character cannot be said in advance what he or she will do in this or that situation.
Another example of character classification is the attempt to subdivide them into intellectual, emotional and volitional ones (Ben, 1818-1903). You can still hear the characteristics: "This is a man of pure reason", or: "He lives in the mood of the present day. Attempts were made to divide characters into only two groups: sensitive and volitional (Ribo, 1839-1916) or extroverted (aimed at external objects) and introverted (aimed at their own thoughts and experiences) - Jung (1875-1961). Russian psychologist A.I. Galich (1783-1848) divided characters into bad, kind and great ones. There were attempts to give more complex classifications of characters.
The most widespread is the division of characters by their social value. This assessment is sometimes expressed by the word "good" character (and in contrast to it - "bad"),
It is also common in everyday life to divide characters into lungs (typical of the resilient, pleasant people around and easily in contact with them) and heavy ones.
Some authors (Lombroso, Kretschmer), not only temperament but also the character tried to connect with the constitution of man, understanding the latter features of the body structure, inherent in a person in a given period of time.
In recent years, in practical psychology, mainly due to the efforts of K. Leonard (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) and A. E. Lichko (Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute), there have been formed ideas about the most vivid (so-called accentuated) characters, which are very interesting and useful for practice, including in the organization of production activities. Some stable combinations of characterological features were noticed, and it turned out that such combinations are not an infinite number, but a little more than a dozen. At present, there is no single classification of characters. The state of affairs in this field of knowledge can be compared with the situation in the description of chemical elements before the creation of the periodic system by D.I. Mendeleev. However, it can be noted that many of the views are well established.
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