Black-box thinking might have lost its traction amongst contemporary psychologists (Ryan 2019), but restraints of behaviorism from the previous century persist through the field's arduous investments in empirical validations and methods of these validations. It is small wonder then that Allport's essential question—'what is the basic unit of personality?'—whose answer must only lie deep inside the black box—remains unanswered for almost a century now. 

Super3io® Types Integrator takes another route: philosophy; the birthplace, in fact, of psychological enquiries. And an answer is found in Aristotle's age-old Nichomachean Ethics.  The philosopher's twin theses of 'eudaimonia' (roughly 'happiness') and 'agathon' ('good') have now been widely accepted in psychological sciences and validated through a sample size of over 2.7 billion Facebook users, respectively. It is upon the twin-phenomena, what Aristotle called 'final ends', that the basic unit of personality is set. Aristotle's thesis, however, had not yet systematically accounted for diverse (natural) perspectives on what may be deemed as 'good' and what constitutes 'happiness' by different individuals. Nor did Christian Wolff's philosophical psychology of 'maxim' in the 18th century. Nor did Hazel Rose Markus' psychology of 'self-schemata' in contemporary psychology, which runs in a similar vein with Wolff's thesis.

A systematic audit is conducted to account for personal differences on what is 'good' and what is 'happiness', drawing from scientifically well-documented constructs from personality and neuro- psychologies. The basic units of personality are observed on another two-factor phenomenon comprising the natural neuropsychological species of emotion, cognition, and instinct and the Jungian psychological orientations of introversion and extraversion (and 'interversion'); which resulted in a basic taxonomy of 9 value-types. These nine fundamental values are in turn validated as factors through qualitative factor analysis on 1,695 value terms abstracted from the English dictionary, per Allport's (1927) 'lexical psychology'; resulting in a world's first taxonomy of types in 2,400 years. 


Natural Imperative, x-is-good

Drawing from Aristotle's good/happiness universal ends, Wolff locates the 'motivating ground' (Kitcher 2003) of natural behaviour in a general 'maxim', 'x is good' (McCarty 2024). Wolff's maxim is a condition of necessity for any and every human act, because it functions as a standard of evaluation and selection, without which human agents cannot 'determine ourselves to do certain actions' out of numberless possible others (Wolff 2003). On common observation, Wolff's x is good is an highly intuitive and conflated x-is-good that inclines agents toward particular courses of action. Hence these first-order natural values are called 'natural imperatives' (Chong 2024). The natural imperative, x-is-good, is the 'basic unit of personality' located at the start of any and every action, resulting in diversely thematic and typic behavioral traits; each relative to an actual x.

On a combined neurosciences (the left- and right- (Sperry 1961) and middle- (Stevens et. al. 2011) brain model, the top-mid-lower brain model (MacLean 1990), and the three-brain model (Armour 1991, Gershon 2011)), x is factored down to three natural species: x is either emotive, instinctive, or cognitive. Via the natural imperative thesis, the basic unit of personality is hypothesized in three basic types. The natural imperative proposition that x-is-good is a necessary and universal motivating ground in natural behavior is backed by a longitudinal consistency of well over 2,000 years amongst n. (literally numberless) scholarships from the ancient Plato and Aristotle, to Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, to Wolff, to, more recently, Eduard Spranger (1928) a philosopher and psychologist, to almost every present-day philosopher of ethics (Zimmerman and Bradley 2019) regardless of their different schools of thought.