I agree it's interesting, but my original impression was also true: this isn't about discovering basic personality types. It's about correlating play across four 2 x 2 experimental games. This is a very, very narrow domain of social behaviour. Standard personality psychology, by contrast, aims to predict behaviour across a much wider range of situations. (I still think that is true, even if individual correlations are low in any one situation. But, if you know better and personality measures actually a crock of crap, feel free to correct me!)
Of course, it's possible that there really are four deep types of human personality, that you can capture them in these four games, and that they predict behaviour in lots and lots of domains. But I doubt it, and this article provides no evidence for it.
What's more interesting is the comparison between this unsupervised clustering method, and more theory-driven ways of categorising play in games, like inequality aversion models. I think there is an interesting race between psychologists, who pay greater attention to internal validity, and experimental economists who focus on theory consistency. I'd like to know which kind of models does better at predicting out of sample.
I agree it's interesting, but my original impression was also true: this isn't about discovering basic personality types. It's about correlating play across four 2 x 2 experimental games. This is a very, very narrow domain of social behaviour. Standard personality psychology, by contrast, aims to predict behaviour across a much wider range of situations. (I still think that is true, even if individual correlations are low in any one situation. But, if you know better and personality measures actually a crock of crap, feel free to correct me!)
Of course, it's possible that there really are four deep types of human personality, that you can capture them in these four games, and that they predict behaviour in lots and lots of domains. But I doubt it, and this article provides no evidence for it.
What's more interesting is the comparison between this unsupervised clustering method, and more theory-driven ways of categorising play in games, like inequality aversion models. I think there is an interesting race between psychologists, who pay greater attention to internal validity, and experimental economists who focus on theory consistency. I'd like to know which kind of models does better at predicting out of sample.