It’s an old truism that everyone’s unique. And yet, for more than a century, psychologists in the field of individual differences have sought a small number of categories or dimensions for dividing people into personality types.
Based on the personality theory of Carl Jung, the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator classifies people into sixteen personality types. The Big Five, perhaps the most widely accepted personality theory today, proposes five dimensions of personality, with each of us having a unique score on each of the five dimensions.
Another way to classify people is in terms of their relationship styles. In the mid-twentieth century, British psychologist John Bowlby developed his well-known attachment theory, based on his studies of orphans during and after World War II. The theory was further developed by his student Mary Ainsworth.
Attachment is the deep emotional bond that develops between the newborn infant and its caregiver, almost always the mother. Most children develop a secure attachment with Mom, knowing that they can rely on her as a safe base from which to explore the world. But others form an insecure attachment. On the one hand, children with anxious attachment are clingy and fussy—they don’t trust Mom, and they lack confidence to strike out on their own. On the other hand, children with avoidant attachment are aloof and independent—they also don’t trust Mom, but they’ve learned how meet their emotional needs by themselves.
It’s generally assumed that childhood attachment serves as the model for adult relationships, and there’s some evidence from longitudinal studies that support this notion. At any rate, we can certainly see secure, anxious, and avoidant relationship styles playing out in adult interactions. Secure adults form trusting relationships with others, anxious adults often drive others away with their lack of trust, and avoidant adults remain aloof and fiercely independent in their relationships.
As a description of relationship styles, there’s nothing wrong with labeling people as secure, anxious, or avoidant. All too often, though, we treat one category as “normal” and the others as “deviant.” If you recognize yourself as having an anxious or avoidant relationship style, you’ve no doubt experienced shame and a loss of self-worth for your “abnormal” behavior.
In a recent article, Israeli psychologists Tsachi Ein-Dor and Gilad Hirschberger argue that it’s high time psychologists recognize that adults with anxious or avoidant relationship styles are not broken or in need of fixing. Rather, they play important roles in human society that those with secure attachments cannot fill.
Taking an evolutionary approach, Ein-Dor and Hirschberger build on the arguments of U.C. Davis psychologist Jay Belsky and his colleagues. Belsky has proposed that under certain environmental conditions an insecure attachment style may be more adaptive. When resources are scarce, demanding children may get more than their fair share. And when Mom is overwhelmed, children are better off learning soon how to fend for themselves.
Ein-Dor and Hirschberger argue, however, that it isn’t just in extreme situations that insecure attachment styles are adaptive. Rather, even in ordinary circumstances, all of us benefit from having some anxious and avoidant types in our group. This is especially true when the group as a whole is faced with a threat and needs to decide how to respond.
The researchers set up a mock-dangerous situation to see how adults with different relationship styles respond when they are alone and in groups. As participants sat at a keyboard completing a task, non-toxic smoke started to spew forth from the computer. The researchers were looking to see how long it would take them to recognize the potential danger and to leave the room.
Because adults with secure relationship styles are trusting and self-confident, they are rather slow at responding to the smoke. And especially if others are present, they’re slow at evacuating the room. They seem to put the needs of others before themselves, and they see to it that their colleagues are ready to leave before they do so themselves.
Deciding as a group how to respond to an emergency can take time. And in some cases, a group response can be too slow. But here’s where people with anxious and avoidant relationship styles contribute to the survival of the group.
Anxious adults are constantly on the look-out for potential threats. In relationships, this means that they’re suspicious of their friends and intimate partners, and their repeated demands for proof of commitment tend to drive others away. This, of course, only confirms their prior belief that other people are not to be trusted.
In the smoking computer experiment, though, anxious adults noticed the smoke faster than the secure or avoidant adults. And when they were in groups, they were quick to voice their concerns. Thus, anxious adults serve the role of sentinel, looking out for potential threats to the group.
Avoidant adults tend to view themselves as more capable than others. Hence, they prefer working alone to collaborating, and this aloofness is often interpreted as self-centeredness by others. The relationships that avoidant adults enter into tend to be shallow and easy to break.
When avoidant adults took part in the smoking computer experiment, they were slow to interpret the smoke as a danger, but once they did, they quickly evacuated the room. In group situations, they tended to leave without warning others. This seemingly selfish behavior, however, benefited the group. That is, avoidant adults are extremely good at self-preservation, and once they detect a means of escape for themselves, others quickly follow.
Ein-Dor and colleagues tested various group configurations, and they found that a mix of secure, anxious, and avoidant adults led to the quickest retreat from the emergency. The anxious persons were the first to detect the danger, and the avoidant persons were the first to find a way out. In this way, the group as a whole responded effectively.
In our striving to be “normal,” we lose sight of the fact that each of has a role to play in society—not in spite of our quirks and oddities, but because of them. Diversity is what makes a community strong, not uniformity. Indeed, it takes all sorts to make a world.
Reference
Ein-Dor, T. & Hirschberger, G. (2016). Rethinking attachment theory: From a theory of relationships to a theory of individual and group survival. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 223-227.
David Ludden is the author of The Psychology of Language: An Integrated Approach (SAGE Publications).
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