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The reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work:

There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match.

This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex

(Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard




I think this is basically correct, and that the comparison to the way memeplexes (lol memeplices?)construct worldviews is a good point that goes unnoticed in a great deal of political discussion. Almost every ideology is anchored to the real world by some element of truth.

Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible.

One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.




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