Communication style
Twelve requests about how you want to be addressed, each with the weight you put on it.
- Questions
- 36
- 9 min
- Twelve stated requests — no type, no colour
What this is
The four-colour vocabulary is a great deal older than any of the products sold under it. The four-temperament scheme descends from Galen, the function pairs are Jung's, and the two axes usually drawn underneath — how fast and how hard a person pushes, and whether they attend first to the task or to the people in the room — are published openly and belong to nobody. What does belong to somebody is every commercial version: Insights Discovery and its wheel are The Insights Group's, DiSC is John Wiley & Sons', SOCIAL STYLE is TRACOM's, True Colors is True Colors International's, and not one item, adjective, colour name or report page from any of them appears here or was worked backwards from. Every question below was written for this app. It is worth being exact about what that leaves, because the colours are the reason you are reading this note and they are not in the instrument: nothing you answer is tallied, you are not placed on either axis, and no colour is put on you at the end. Twelve questions are asked and the answers are handed back arranged. What comes out is not a type and not a measurement — it is a record of how you have asked to be addressed, and a request needs no evidence behind it. Which is as well, because there is none: no independent peer-reviewed finding shows that addressing someone in their stated preferred style improves anything, and the nearest properly designed literature, on matching teaching to stated learning preference, found the effect absent once it was tested for. The answers are worth having anyway. They are a request rather than a prediction, and the person reading them can act on a request without having to believe a theory.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedTwelve stated requests — no type, no colour
Four-part descriptions of how people communicate go back to Galen's temperaments, Jung (1921), Marston (1928), and Merrill and Reid (1981). None of that is applied here: nothing is computed and no colour or type is assigned. It records only what you say you want.
Written for this app
Nothing here is measured, so reliability and validity do not apply. It records the positions you state, how much each matters to you, and why.
Further reading
- Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychologische Typen (opens in a new tab). Rascher & Cie., Zürich. English translation by H. G. Baynes: Psychological types, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. (London) and Harcourt, Brace & Co. (New York), 1923original source
- Marston, W. M. (1928). Emotions of normal people (opens in a new tab). Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. (London); Harcourt, Brace and Company (New York)original source
- Merrill, D. W., & Reid, R. H. (1981). Personal styles and effective performance: Make your style work for you (opens in a new tab). Chilton Book Company, Radnor, PAoriginal source
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.