[Note: I’ve updated this post based on some feedback in the comments I received when I first wrote it.]

1. ADHD Focused Temperament

Since a core aspect of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) involves difficulty regulating focus, which may manifest as challenges in choosing what to focus on, and may involve hyper-focusing on a particular thing without feeling there’s a choice, an aspect of Focused Temperament would be finding it easy to focus on whatever you choose, and finding it easy to focus with whatever degree of intensity you choose. 

Since restlessness and fidgeting are other common symptoms of ADHD, Focused Temperament would involve finding it easy to still while doing nothing.

2. Schizophrenia Grounded Temperament

Since a core aspect of schizophrenia is seeing connections between things that aren’t really connected, an aspect of Grounded Temperament would be avoiding such false positives, but also failing to see hard-to-spot connections between things that really are connected. Since it’s common for schizophrenia to involve paranoia, Grounded Temperament would involve an absence of conspiratorial thinking and a tendency not to impute negative motives.

3. Imposter Syndrome Poster Syndrome

Since a core aspect of Imposter Syndrome is the belief that others see you as more capable than you really are, an aspect of Poster Syndrome would be a belief that others see you as less capable than you really are.

4. Autism Spectrum Social Savantism

Since a common aspect of being on the Autism Spectrum is having trouble spotting or interpreting subtle social cues, an aspect of Social Savantism would be an unusually strong ability to process and make accurate inferences from all subtle social information in interactions and to respond so as to produce the exact impression intended.

5. Borderline Personality Unreactive Personality

Since some of the major aspects of Borderline Personality are a high intensity and variability of emotion, an aspect of Unreactive Personality would be having dulled emotion with little fluctuation. Other aspects of Borderline Personality are a lack of sense of self/core identity, along with a strong attachment to others to root one’s identity to, so Unreactive Personality would involve a stable sense of self with unusually low attachment to others.

6. Sociopathy Selfless Personality

Since major aspects of sociopathy are a lack of (or greatly diminished capacity for) compassion and empathy, an aspect of Selfless Personality would involve extremely intense empathy and compassion, with these emotions driving an unusually large amount of the person’s actions.

And as a bonus, here’s one by John Nerst:

7. Nerd Wamb

Nerst describes a Wamb like this:

“Wamb is a vernacular label, not a scientific one, but it’s usually earned by a love for activities that are social and physical rather than intellectual — football, dancing, or socializing rather than learning, building things, or playing games. The leisure activities we associate with wambs — team sports, gossiping and partying — all depend on primal instincts like competition, alliance building, and mating, and tend not to involve intellectually complex exchange with others or the physical world.”

If you’d like to learn more about your own personality, you can take the ultimate personality test here, which gives MBTI-style, Big Five and Enneagram results all in one test.

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This piece was first written on January 7, 2023, and first appeared on this site on January 28, 2023.

After noticing a number of times that people’s feelings about formal credentials can differ dramatically and that this seems to impact their views on certain important topics, I’ve been working on defining a “credentialist” trait (or attitude).

In a nutshell, the non-credentialist/credentialist spectrum, as I’m defining it, captures how important a person thinks formal credentials are, as well as how they feel those credentials should influence who we should trust and who should express opinions (e.g., should only formalized experts comment on a topic, or is it good for non-experts to comment as well?)

I developed a 4-minute test to measure the trait, so if you’d like to find out if you are a “credentialist” or “non-credentialist” (which I define as being in the top or bottom 20th percentile of each trait) or find out your own credentialist score, you can take the test here:

https://programs.clearerthinking.org/credentialist_test.html

Here are simplified/extreme prototypes to illustrate the distinction (few people are as extreme as these prototypes):

*Credentialists* get annoyed when someone without the right credential is giving their opinion on a topic, are impressed by formal degrees (e.g. PhDs and MDs), do not like it when non-experts have their own personal theory about a topic, trust people a lot more when they have formal credentials, think its unlikely someone could get really good at a complex topic without formal training, think that non-experts should not contradict experts, would go to school to learn a topic if they wanted to get good at it, find it annoying if startup founders talk about disrupting industries they have not already worked in, tend to describe people in terms of their schooling and job history (rather than, for example, their personality), and trust the opinion’s of people a lot more if they went to an excellent college.

*Non-credentialists* think that it fine (or even good) to express opinions when you’re a non-expert, are not particularly impressed by formal degrees, don’t view degrees or certifications as a strong indicator of trust, think it’s fine (or even good) for non-experts to criticize the views of experts, are prone to teach themselves material rather than going to school for it, don’t mind startup founders attempting to disrupt industries from the outside, tend not to describe people in terms of their schooling and job history, and don’t view the quality of the college a person went to as a significant factor in whether to trust their opinions.

I measured the trait on a 0 to 1 scale, and on the 143 people I collected it for, it has a mean of 0.55 and a standard deviation of 0.16, with a pretty nice bell curve shape.

Interestingly, I found a very low correlation between credentialist scores and education [r=0.03], identifying as female [r=-0.04], and income [r=0.03], and little correlation with age [r=-.08]. This suggests that credentialist differences have little to do with demographic characteristics!

Furthermore, whether you are a credentialist does not even seem to have that much to do with whether you yourself have credentials, as responses to the question “I myself have substantial formal credentials” had a correlation of only about r=0.13 with the credentialist scores. It also has little to do with how ambitious people are, as responses to “I have highly ambitious goals for what I will achieve in my life” had a correlation of only r=0.07 to credentialist scores.

Of the 22 questions I tested people’s agreement on in order to measure the trait, the 2 most effective questions (in the sense that they correlate highly with the average of the other questions but don’t correlate very highly with each other) are:

Q1: It annoys me when someone without the right credential is giving their opinion on a topic (e.g., a non-doctor commenting about medicine or a non-accountant commenting on accounting)

[r=0.71 against the average of the other 21 questions]

and

Q2: I am very impressed by formal degrees (e.g., PhDs, MDs, JDs, etc.)

[r=0.54 against the average of the other 21 questions, yet a fairly low r=0.24 with respect to Q1]

The 22 questions I developed hang together nicely and point in generally the same direction. Basic factor analysis revealed only one main factor in the questions, and the question least correlated to the others still had a positive correlation of r=0.34 with the average of the other questions (which was “If I heard that someone had won a prize in their field, I would think very highly of it”).

Most people fall in the middle of this trait, of course (e.g., viewing credentials as at least somewhat positive but the lack of them not that negative), without an extreme viewpoint either way. However, here are some anonymized qualitative responses I collected from people at the tail ends of the spectrum:

Credentialists:

“I don’t respect people who don’t have formal credentials, and one of my biggest pet peeves is people–even really intelligent people–speaking about things they aren’t experts on. Just because someone is known, or even renowned in another field, doesn’t place their opinion on another topic anywhere above another non-educated person.”

“People with formal credentials have generally gone through a rigorous peer review process that demands a considerable depth of understanding and knowledge.”

“People who don’t have credentials have no business talking about things they know nothing about. That’s how misinformation gets spread, and misinformation is harmful to society as a whole.”

Non-credentialists:

“I think that people can have a valid voice no matter their level of formal schooling. The opposite also holds true: a degree is not necessarily representative of ability.”

“I feel that colleges have become scams. They are money sponges that make you pay for your own brainwashing. I value intelligence and how well-read someone is on a subject, and we don’t need a self-appointed team of left-wing experts to ‘allow’ us to do that for ourselves anymore. People with credentials have more money than sense and have been taught what NOT to think more than they have been taught HOW to think.”

“While I respect those who have worked to earn professional credentials, people who are self-taught oftentimes know much more about a subject than someone with an expensive degree.”

Note: designing this scale and writing this post is a very non-credentialist thing to do since I’m not a social scientist.

This piece was first written on July 21, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 10, 2025.