The Expectation Field: A Different Take on the Four Tendencies, and Why Being a Questioner Can Feel Like Being an Obliger
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First off, go read The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, or at least listen to one of the interviews or podcast episodes where she describes the Four Tendencies framework. Also, take the Four Tendencies quiz to figure out which tendency you identify with. This post will make very little sense otherwise.
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Okay, so you’re a Rebel and you’re not going to follow my instructions to go read about the Tendencies. Fine. Here’s the summary version.
Rubin is a writer who studies happiness, and she came up with a way of looking at human personality that categorizes people based on how they deal with different kinds of expectations.
If they easily live up to their own inner expectations but resist the expectations placed on them from the outside world, they’re Questioners. If they readily meet outer expectations but have trouble listening to their inner impulses, they’re Obligers. If they embrace both inner and outer expectations, they’re Upholders. If they resist all expectations, outer and inner, they’re Rebels.
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I have a weakness for personality quizzes and typing systems. (In case you’re curious, I’m an INTJ.) I like Rubin’s way of looking at things because it has helped me to see a lot of my own experiences and issues in a new light. But there are many, many aspects to our personalities aside from the way we deal with expectations. The Four Tendencies is simply one perspective, and it’s new and fun. So, nothing I say here is meant to be taken too seriously.
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I’m a Questioner. We question everything and we like to look for ways to make systems work better. So, of course I’m about to point out a possible hole in Rubin’s framework, and suggest an extension and improvement.
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Rubin represents the four tendencies using a sort of Venn diagram:
Technically this isn’t a Venn diagram, as it doesn’t show all the possible logical relationships between the four tendencies. For example, there is no region where Upholders and Rebels overlap, or where Questioners and Obligers overlap. That actually makes it an Euler diagram. And this isn’t just a digression on set theory: it’s sort of key to my critique. (See Item 13.)
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For the longest time after I first read about the Four Tendencies, I resisted buying into the framework. And that wasn’t just because I’m a Questioner. It was because I didn’t feel like I fit squarely into any of the four types.
To be more specific, when I took the Four Tendencies quiz, sometimes it would tell me that I’m an Obliger, and other times it would tell me that I’m a Questioner. Weird, right?
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I desperately did not want to be an Obliger. Whenever the quiz told me I was an Obliger, it felt like knowing inside that I was a Gryffindor, but then putting on the Sorting Hat and ending up in Slytherin.
Still, I sort of understood the Obliger diagnosis. Feeling overly beholden to others and their expectations has been a real issue in my life (see item 10).
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After reading all the way through the Four Tendencies book and retaking the quiz many times, I am now pretty sure that I’m a Questioner. Which makes a lot more sense, considering that I’m a journalist and I make my living asking questions. I’ve been happily single for a while now, and I seem to be at my best when I’m working independently. So, yeah, I’m a Questioner. Phew!
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But questions linger. Obligers and Questioners are, ostensibly, opposites. Obligers have no problem doing what other people expect them to do, but they have a lot of trouble acting on their own hopes and dreams. Questioners are just the reverse. In Rubin’s diagram, the two types don’t overlap at all. So how could any Questioner ever be mistaken for an Obliger?
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On a more personal level: I feel a lot of sympathy and understanding toward Obligers. And if I’m being honest, I’ve sometimes felt like an Obliger. I’ve been in plenty of situations where the outer demands on me were so great that I had little time or energy to attend to my inner expectations. Sometimes I allowed those situations to go on for a long time. “Only an Obliger could live that way,” a reasonable observer might have said.
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In Rubin’s framework, each Tendency shares traits with the two neighboring Tendencies. Questioners are similar to Upholders, for example, in that they both embrace inner expectations. Questioners are like Rebels in that they both resist outer expectations. But, as noted above, Rubin’s schema—as reflected in the Euler diagram—doesn’t allow for any overlap between Obligers and Questioners, or between Upholders and Rebels.
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I suspect that real humans are not as black-and-white as Rubin’s poles and categories would imply, and that there is, in fact, room for some overlap between Questioners and Obligers.
In daily life, we don’t always deal with an expectation by embracing it or resisting it. There’s an often uncomfortable middle ground, and sometimes we move back and forth.
Also, expectations are not always cleanly inner or outer. The truth is that there’s a spectrum. An outer expectation can become an inner one, and vice versa. Rubin acknowledges as much when she says that Questioners can succeed by converting outer expectations into inner ones, and that Obligers can succeed by converting inner expectations into outer ones.
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Here’s a more flexible way of visualizing the Four Tendencies. It’s a graph of what you might call the Expectation Field. The x axis represents where expectations come from, on a spectrum from “inner” to “outer.” The y axis represents how we deal with those expectations, on a spectrum from “embrace” to “resist.”
When you arrange the Four Tendencies this way, a new pattern emerges, something like a Roman numeral X.
Rebels and Upholders still exist in totally different worlds. This makes sense: Upholders embrace all expectations while Rebels resist them. So they have nothing in common, beyond the fact that they both have to deal with expectations, as we all do.
But here’s the interesting thing: Obligers and Questioners end up forming diagonals that cross in the middle.
Questioners embrace inner expectations and resist outer expectations, so the Questioners of the world cluster around a line that runs from lower left to upper right. Obligers resist inner expectations and embrace outer expectations, so their line runs from upper left to lower right.
In the middle there’s a very interesting intersection—a gray zone. I’d say it’s the place where we haven’t firmly identified or labeled an expectation as coming from the outside or coming from ourselves, and where we’re stuck halfway between resisting the expectation and embracing it.
That intersection, I suggest, is the spot where being like a Questioner can feel exactly like being an Obliger, and vice versa.
I still think I’m a Questioner and not some funny hybrid Questioner-Obliger. The tipoff is the fact that when I work really hard for an extended period purely to meet someone else’s expectations, it makes me absolutely miserable. An Obliger would have no problem doing that.
What I’m really trying to say here is that when you visualize the tendencies using the Expectation Field rather than the Euler diagram, you can see that Questioners and Obligers share something important. It’s the possibility that we’ll get bogged down in the middle of the field, in that region where it’s not clear where an expectation is coming from, and we haven’t decided what to do about it.
Whether you’re an Obliger or a Questioner, that situation feels the same — generally, tense and icky.
We eventually resolve the tension and revert to type by moving in one direction or the other.
Speaking for Questioners, I’d say that we get out of the gray zone either by adopting an outer expectation as an inner expectation and learning to embrace it, or by coming to see an expectation as an unjustified imposition and rejecting it altogether.
I’m not sure how Obligers resolve the tension, or if it bothers them as much as it bothers me. At some point, presumably, they just get comfortable living up to outer expectations and ignoring inner ones. I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work for me.
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I haven’t gone back to deconstruct the Four Tendencies quiz, but my guess is that some of the questions evoke situations that fall into that fuzzy middle area. So it’s possible to get tipped into the Obliger bucket or the Questioner bucket, depending on how you’re feeling on the day you take the quiz. The Sorting Hat is not infallible.
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I suppose you could try to to fix the Euler diagram so that it makes room for the insight from the Expectation Field graph. You’d have to draw it so that Obligers and Questioners intersect with each other, and with Rebels and Upholders, but Rebels and Upholders never intersect. Like this:
In this version, the gray overlap between Obligers and Questioners represents the space where we haven’t firmly labeled an expectation as inner or outer.
Okay, that’s all I came here to say! Take it or leave it. I’m not trying to argue that the Four Tendencies framework is invalid. I’m just suggesting a modification that accounts for my own feelings and experiences as an Obliger-susceptible Questioner.
If you’re into the Four Tendencies framework, I’d love to hear what you think. Leave a comment, tweet at me at my Wade Roush account, or email me at wade dot roush at gmail dot com.
16 If You Enjoyed This
…Please check out my podcast, Soonish. It’s a thoughtful, story-driven show about technology, culture, and the future. My most recent episode looked at how brain-machine interfaces can help us become better meditators.
17 Postscript
July, 2018: It occurred to me recently that the “Roman numeral X” pattern in the Expectation Field diagram is what you would get if you
- Started with Rubin’s original Euler Diagram
- Stretched it out so that the circles were more like long ovals, but still overlapping at the ends
- Twisted that whole thing by 180 degrees around an imaginary central axis, in the z dimension (the dimension perpendicular to the x-y plane of the page or the screen) sort of like DNA twisting into a helix.
I’m not enough of a mathematican to say if that means anything deep. But topologically, it does seem as if the Expectation Field and the original Euler diagram are the same. I’ve just applied a transformation that brings two formerly non-adjacent areas into contact.
