Divergent Thinking (5 page)

Who are we? What are we? And where do we belong?

THE FACTIONS, PERSONALITY, AND THE BIG FIVE

The faction system is introduced to us as a way in which groups of people dedicate themselves to different virtues. Each faction, we are told in
Divergent
, was founded on the belief that a specific vice was to blame for the world's evils. Those who blamed dishonesty formed Candor; those who blamed cowardice became the Dauntless; those who eschewed selfishness became Abnegation; those who despised ignorance became Erudite; and those who swore off aggression became Amity. In this sense, the Choosing Ceremony asks teenagers to decide which virtue they want to live their lives by. It is up to them, Tris and her age-mates are told by a somber Marcus, “to decide what kind of people they will be” (
Divergent
).

On the surface, then, the ceremony asks young people to decide what they believe. What they
value.
Choosing to switch factions reflects a rejection of everything a person has been raised to believe, parallel in some ways to a child who has been raised in one religious tradition choosing to convert to another. And yet, for all that the factions are purportedly based on virtues, I do not think the powerful and compelling concept the faction system taps into really
is
belief.

Tris seems to come to a similar conclusion herself. In
Divergent
, when Four asks Tris if she thinks she made the right choice in coming to Dauntless, she says that she doesn't think there
was
a choice. For Tris, the ceremony isn't about deciding who she
will be.
It is about acknowledging who she
already is.
“I didn't jump off the roof because I wanted to be like the Dauntless,” Tris realizes midway through
Divergent.
“I jumped off because I already was like them, and I wanted to show myself to them.”

At their core, these five factions are not merely about what a person believes or what they value. To my psychologist's eye, what the faction system is really tapping into is the enduring internal traits that make us who we are: our
personalities.
This is occasionally acknowledged in the text: the vices that the factions are fighting against are initially referred to as faults in “human personality.” In
Insurgent
, Jeanine describes Divergents as having “flexible personalities,” while Fernando refers to transferring from Abnegation to Dauntless as “a leap in personality.” Even those who have been raised within the faction system seem to recognize that choosing a faction has as much to do with your aptitude for specific traits as your belief about which virtue is the most virtuous of them all.

What the residents of Tris' community don't seem to realize, however, is just how closely their faction system maps onto personality psychology more broadly. Just as there are five factions, psychologists refer to the “Big Five” personality traits: five traits that can describe the vast variation we see in human personality—each corresponding to one of the five factions in the Divergent series. Some of the parallels are obvious—you don't need to be a psychologist to realize that Amity has a lot of parallels with the trait referred to as
Agreeableness
—while others require parsing your way through the text with an eye for detail.

Dauntless: Openness to Experience

The first of the Big Five is a trait referred to as
Openness to Experience.
People who are low in openness are frequently described as being cautious, clinging to routines, and disliking the idea of going outside of their comfort zones. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have people high in openness, who tend to be curious. They
like
hearing new ideas and doing things that they've never done before. They are not cautious, but instead—as the term suggests—are open to whatever new experiences the world has to offer. Openness to experience tends to co-occur with a variety of other things, among them creativity, risk taking, and sensation seeking.

My college roommate, when she takes personality tests, scores off the charts on the openness variable—and I cannot help but notice that this is the same college roommate who has decided that we will be spending her bachelorette party skydiving. The college roommate who once talked me into zip-lining. The college roommate who read
Divergent
and told me, with all confidence, that she would be Dauntless.

The parallels between Dauntless and this dimension of personality go beyond the fact that the Dauntless are a skydiving, zip-lining, jumping-off-buildings kind of group. Openness isn't just about being open to physical risks. Just as there are three levels to the Dauntless initiation—the physical, the emotional, and the mental—openness to experience also operates on all three levels. Tris is high in openness not only because she's willing to jump off a moving train, but also because she's the type of person who is curious about what's outside the fence—and willing to go off into the unknown to get her answer. Toward the beginning of
Divergent
, Tori actually comments on Tris' curiosity, saying that she's “never met a curious Abnegation before.” (Tris and the others may assume that curiosity is the reason she shows an aptitude for Erudite, but I would argue that this trait, as much as a desire to be fearless, is what makes Tris choose Dauntless—and that Tris' Erudite side taps into a different quality altogether, one that we'll return to later.)

Interestingly, people who are high in openness to experience also tend to be more easily hypnotized than other individuals—which seems fitting, given that the Dauntless end up more or less neurologically hypnotized into doing Jeanine's bidding at the end of the first book. Equally striking is the fact that the openness variable tends to decline with age—and the Dauntless in the Divergent series force older faction members out.

Abnegation: Extraversion (and the Lack Thereof)

In many ways, Abnegation is the faction that it is hardest to classify in terms of the Big Five—until you realize that this faction does not just require putting other people first; they endorse a full-scale denial of the self. As part of Abnegation, Tris is only allowed to look in a mirror once every three months. She and her family do not celebrate their birthdays. The Abnegation are told they must try to forget themselves and fade into the background. When the Abnegation flirt, they flirt “in the tentative way known only to the Abnegation” (
Divergent
), exchanging shy looks and slight smiles. Tris says that it is difficult for the Abnegation to make friends because “it's impossible to have real friendship when no one feels like they can accept help or even talk about themselves” (
Divergent
).

From this perspective, I would argue that the Big Five personality trait that Abnegation maps onto is actually
Extraversion
—or more specifically, introversion, the word we use to describe people who are extremely low on the extraversion personality scale. The extraverted individual is talkative, assertive, and the life of the party—not someone that anyone else would ever refer to as a
Stiff.
Extraverts
like
being the center of attention. Introverts, in contrast, tend to be described as solitary and reserved. Introverted individuals keep in the background, they don't like to draw attention to themselves, and they can be hard to get to know.

When Tris expresses a desire in
Divergent
to be “loud and daring and free,” she is expressing a desire to shake off her introverted roots and become more extraverted. She transfers to Dauntless not only because she is curious and longs to experience a wider range of what life has to offer, but also because she is tired of feeling like she has to keep everything inside. She is tired of fading into the background, tired of wearing gray clothes and behaving in an unassuming way, tired of trying to forget herself, and tired of being forgotten.

In some ways, this aspect of Tris' story parallels the classic teen movie trope of an introverted teenager making the conscious decision to break out of her shell. Shortly after Tris joins Dauntless, Christina even gives her a makeover, replacing her gray clothes with a little black dress, lining her eyes with eyeliner, and declaring, “I'm going for noticeable” (
Divergent
). And yet, even after Tris transfers to Dauntless, aspects of her Abnegation roots remain. She is never a
look at me, look at me
kind of brave. She leads quietly and by example. For many people—even Four—she remains difficult to know.

Erudite: Conscientiousness

The third faction that Tris shows an aptitude for is Erudite, the faction that prizes knowledge and intelligence above all else. And yet, the Erudite are not defined merely by being smart. After all, there are plenty of intelligent people in the other factions, too. Rather, the Erudite seem to be a very specific kind of smart—extremely organized, unemotional, almost pathological in their devotion to logic and reason.

In terms of the Big Five, this cluster of traits maps onto
Conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness is associated with self-discipline: perfectionists, workaholics, and those driven to achieve all rate high on this trait. Conscientious individuals plan ahead. They pay attention to details. They are highly organized, highly efficient, and they finish what they start.

Sound like anyone we know?

The Erudite are known as meticulous record keepers. Jeanine is slavishly devoted to her master plan. She's a “walking, talking computer” (
Divergent
). Caleb finds Jeanine persuasive at least in part because he, too, has a thirst not just for knowledge, but for singularity of purpose. Even Cara, in the final book in the trilogy, founds the Allegiant to work toward a two-pronged goal: to overthrow Evelyn and to send a scouting party outside of the city. The way she presents this to the others feels almost like she's checking items off a to-do list, even if those items involve “escape to unknown” and “rebel.” When she ultimately discovers that the plan has no meaning—that the faction system is part of an experiment and the Edith Prior tape was contrived—she is lost. Cara doesn't know who she is without the plan, without purpose: “I'm an Erudite, you know,” she tells Tris. “It's the only thing I am” (
Allegiant
).

Tris has an aptitude for Erudite not because she's studious or a lover of books, but because she is a strategist. Whether it's for capture the flag or a preemptive strike against those playing with the lives of those she loves, she is a planner who will go to great lengths to see things through to the end. Ultimately, the difference between Tris and Jeanine is not in their ability to form plans or to execute them—it's the fact that Jeanine is willing to do so at great costs to
others
, and Tris does so no matter the cost to
herself.

Candor: Low on Neuroticism

Candor prizes honesty. It is difficult at first to see how this could correspond to any of the five traits we use to classify human personalities—until we unpack a bit more about what this means on a day-to-day basis. The Candor wear black and white; they don't get bogged down in shades of gray. Their manifesto proudly declares, “We have no suspicions and no one suspects us” (
Divergent
bonus materials). Candor initiation involves the forced confession of an initiate's darkest secrets. Afterward, no one has anything to hide, and as a result, they do not have to worry about the consequences of telling the truth.

The personality trait associated with worrying about how other people view you is
Neuroticism.
People who are high in neuroticism are prone to embarrassment. They tend to be insecure and highly anxious. Other people might describe them as
sensitive.
In other words, they are the exact personality type that could not survive in Candor. In contrast, individuals who are low in neuroticism are not easily embarrassed. They are confident, tend not to worry, and are not easily bothered. Both aspects of Candor—always telling the truth yourself and weathering the emotional costs of constantly being told what other people think of you—require a personality type that is relatively immune to anxiety. For individuals high in neuroticism, things are not always black and white—and the difference between gray and dark gray might be worth agonizing over in and of itself.

During her simulation, Tris proves that she does not have an aptitude for Candor by lying when asked if she knows a man. In that moment, her heart pounds. She is overcome with anxiety and convinced—
convinced
—that if she tells the truth, something awful will happen. That fear—of an unknown, ambiguous
something
—is a prime example of neuroticism, and ultimately, it's the reason that Tris adamantly does
not
belong in Candor.

Amity: Agreeableness

Finally, we have Amity, the faction that most clearly maps onto one of the Big Five—so much so that it might as well be called
agreeableness.
Individuals who are high on agreeableness are friendly, warm, and cooperative. They may be overly trusting. They tend to lose arguments—and may refuse to argue altogether. Highly agreeable individuals avoid conflict, find it difficult to hold grudges, and may express little to no desire for vengeance when they are wronged.

When I take personality tests, this tends to be the variable on which I score the highest. With the possible exception of a life-or-death struggle, I cannot imagine hitting another person—and yelling is almost as out of the question. I do stand up for what I believe in, but I also pick my battles, and they tend to be very
polite
battles. Once, when I was crossing the street and got nicked by a car, I apologized to the person who hit me.

In
Insurgent
, when Marcus refuses to share the secret of Edith Prior's video with Johanna, she makes a similar apology. Rather than confronting him for being secretive, she apologizes for whatever it is that
she's
done to make
him
think she's not trustworthy. When the Amity vote, it is expected that it will be unanimous; and when they vote to allow Tris and company to stay at the Amity compound in the beginning of
Insurgent
, the condition on that invitation is that the guests aren't allowed to even
reference
the conflict.