The Observer
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argues for
family survival
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↑
argues for
physical survival
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↑
argues for
tribal survival
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Benefits
Intelligent, creative, observant
Drawbacks
Anxious, fawning, avoidant
Benefits
Details-oriented, connected
Drawbacks
Gullible, shameful, easily exploited
Emotions work like a jury of the three arguments, which combine in beats. Eristic beats are fast, like a heartbeat.
The Observer leads with fear and lands on guilt to form the characteristic beat of anxiety.
The Observer uses fear and guilt primarily through the anxiety beat, making for an analytical, clear-sighted, and truth-seeking archetype.
The Observer is characterized by anxiety, the combination of fear then guilt.
Anxiety spans from fear to guilt.
Anxiety is the emotion best suited to taking in and analyzing information, so the Observer is something of an information sponge.
Anxiety is often future-focused, making the Observer good at prediction. At its highest levels, it makes the Observer an anxious mess, but at lower levels anxiety is, plainly put, just good at figuring things out.
The Observer is the smartest archetype in terms of handling complexity. Systems and logic come easily to this archetype. The Observer will often lean towards science, technology, engineering and math.
These are the beats the Observer is good at.
These are the beats the Observer struggles with.
These are the beats the Observer more rarely uses.
Personal rankings: Your score percentage for each archetype is calculated when you complete the test.
The base emotions are like underlying survival needs.
Hatred fulfills disgust and anger, for example.
Duress fulfills fear, guilt and disgust, leaving love, anger and pride unfulfilled.
Explore how the 9 emotional archetypes position across 15 behavioral dimensions. Switch either axis or select a preset.
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Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hard-working.
Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.
Satisfaction culture, usually for smaller groups, focuses on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.
The Observer fits in better to the devotion/contempt societal pattern:
Devotion/contempt cultures have simpler-but-stricter rules.
The Observer isn't as good at handling contempt as the Giver. He or she may also need to supplement anxiety, the Observer's characteristic emotion, with love in order to "fill out" devotion:
Love and anxiety together function like devotion.
The other societal pattern, attachment/envy/zeal, may present more of a challenge to the Observer:
Anxiety straddles attachment and envy.
The Observer is naturally worse at dealing with attachment and envy, but does tend to do well with zeal. In an attachment/envy/zeal culture, the Observer is best at focusing on zeal— or in more practical terms, focusing on work/career.
The Observer can follow this pattern to fit in with attachment/envy/zeal.
Attaining love and disgust simultaneously is important to the Observer as a way to escape anxiety without the coping emotion of zeal:
Love and disgust fulfill the missing needs of the self argument.
The Observer gets the most out of "nerdy" hobbies and entertainment, which essentially combine these self emotions, action and narrative in this pattern:
The combination of love, disgust, and zeal makes a good pairing for the Observer.
Since the coping emotion shares the same arguments (self/world/society) in inverted polarities, it effectively pauses the characteristic emotion, providing relief from overwhelming intensity.
The coping emotion serves as a shadow archetype, characterizing the feeler in periods of acute emotional stress.
Zeal, the combination of anger and pride, is the Observer's coping emotion. It provides relief from their characteristic emotion of anxiety.
As the highest-energy emotion, zeal can take a toll on the archetype.
Huge undertakings: The Observer may take on huge projects or join them.
Organized anger: The "do something" emotion and the narrativizing emotion of pride together can push the Observer to join activist— and sometimes extremist— organizations.
Jumping to conclusions: Anger can have the same "truth feeling" of fear, sometimes leading the Observer to premature conclusions.
Anxiety/zeal are both high-energy emotions in their respective all-internalizing and all-externalizing groups. As a result, extreme emotions may be exhausting to the Observer.
The Observer is naturally good at honor and fairness which work like fear and guilt.
The Observer should aim to develop courage and diligence, which work to moderate fear and guilt.
The hardest-to-develop virtue for The Observer is compassion, corresponding to their blind spot.
Virtues act like the opposite of their emotion—coping made conscious and disciplined. For The Observer, developing compassion actively balances their unengaged disgust argument.