1. Social Styles and Interaction Styles

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    Most of my research on Social Styles is from the books by Bolton and Bolton. The Tracom website has a nice animated explanation so I see that it is very similar to the general sense of Social Styles that I know about. In my early research on Social Styles, I noticed that some of the style descriptions were similar to aspects of temperament, but the four temperaments were not fully represented. It seemed to me that the styles were ‘fused’ with temperament. For example, The Amiable style seemed quite ISFJ like and the Analytic style seemed to have a mix of Stabilizer (Guardian or SJ) temperament that didn’t fit for me and. I finally figured out that I’m an analytic Amiable in that model. It wasn’t until I had worked for a while with a differentiation of the four temperaments outlined by David Keirsey that I went back to Social Styles. In the late 1980’s and through the 1990’s we at Interstrength® Associates had begun to notice that there was a pattern to the intersection of the two dichotomies that Keirsey outlined: Role Directing vs Role Informing and Initiating vs Responding. What eventually resulted was our Interaction Styles model, which...