Oldham styles

John M. Oldham, M.D. is a professional psychiatrist renowned for his work on personality disorders. Based on them, he proposed that healthy people have 16 personality styles, and the likeliest personality disorder they are prone to eventually develop is correlated to which of the 16 is the most predominant.

Since it is concerned with how healthy persons of different types become psychologically unhealthy along different paths, it has similarities with the Enneagram of Personality but probably backed by more concrete empirical observations. Attempts have been made to correlate his personality styles with the types of other theories as in this site.

His personality styles are:

  • Adventurous

  • Aggressive

  • Artistic

  • Conscientious

  • Devoted

  • Dramatic

  • Idiosyncratic

  • Inventive

  • Leisurely

  • Mercurial

  • Self-Confident

  • Self-Sacrificing

  • Sensitive

  • Serious

  • Solitary

  • Vigilant

Correlation to socionics types

On occasion suggestions have been made about possible correlations between Oldham’s styles and the 16 socionics types, for example the original creator of The16types.info. This is perhaps a possibility worth investigating, since psychiatric statistics of the frequence of the relevant disorder might say something about the distribution of the socionics types.

This approach would present some difficulties, though. For example, a superficial reading of brief descriptions of Oldham’s styles suggests the following:

  • SLE seems to be the best fit for three styles: Adventurous, Aggressive, and Self-Confident.

  • SEI is the best fit for Artistic.

  • all logical introverts, and especially logical IJs, can fit Solitary.

  • LSE, ESI and LSI could fit Conscientious.

  • SEI and ESE fit Devoted best.

  • EIE is the best fit for Dramatic.

  • ILI, IEI and perhaps LII fit Idiosyncratic best.

  • ILE and IEE fit Inventive best.

  • SLI is the best match for Leisurely.

  • SEE and SEI fit Mercurial partly, but not very well.

  • EII is perhaps a match for Self-sacrificing in some situations.

  • LIE might be one match for Vigilant.