Thread: My BS detector went off upon viewing "sleeping position determining personality"

Someone showed me "16 Things You Didn't Know About Sleep" which can be seen at 16 Things You Didn't Know About Sleep

Number 8 says:

Sleep position may determine your personality. The most common positions:

• a. Fetal (41%) - People are gruff initially, but have warm and open hearts
• b. Log (15%) - Social butterflies
• c. The Yearner (13%) - Perceived as open, but truly suspicious
• d. Soldier (8%) - Reserved
• e. Freefall (7%) - Fun and fantastic at parties
• f. Starfish (5%) - Excellent listeners

I'm extremely interested in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, and while I don't have a Ph.D. in psychology or neuroscience, I do have critical thinking skills and what is colloquially known as a "BS detector." When I read this, my detector went off.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a human's personality is an extremely complex characteristic (or more accurately, set of characteristics). From my self-taught knowledge on the subject (yes, there are people who can and do learn things on their own; look up "auto-didact" on wikipedia), scientists have yet to find any way of accurately predicting personalities based on a single piece of information such as "sleeping position." To me, the above smacks of horoscopes, palm reading, and other such pseudoscientific nonsense. Like I said, I love learning about psychology and neuroscience, and I'm sure "psychologydegree.net" is a wonderful place, but if this is the kind of simple-minded misinformation they're spreading, I think it would be in everyone's best interest to take a closer look at some of the things they're saying and make sure the truth is known.

I'd like to point out that I have no bone to pick with anyone or a grudge or anything like that. I'm simply interested in the truth, or at least the truth to the best of our current understanding, and by "our" I mean the collective human endeavor of science

Could someone who is knowledgeable on this subject shed some light on this? Thanks.

Always remember that many such study "conclusions" are correlation data points. I agree that personality is complex with many contributory factors. I did not read the study mentioned and you're right to be skeptical. I'd be curious to see if these "habits" related more to temperament which is related to sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance of the autonomic nervous system. Since we are easily roused during REM sleep, presumably so that we can flee a predator (evolutionary psychology) and that our dominant tendencies toward Symp-ANS or ParaS-ANS responses to any "threat" perceived by the brain, perhaps that's why a person could develop a habit of sleeping in one position over another? That's the only way that I could see a plausible bio-mechanism for the correlations. Perhaps? But, absolutely...we should question :-)

There's a lot of white flags on that site, even within the references. You're looking at loosely associated qualities within a group/groups. You'll see that often and the best thing to do is to take from it your curiosities and delve on that angle but don't look at it so literal. Even looking at sleep within the spectrum - you have other influences such as stress, physical health or impairments, disabilities, even cultural elements. This probably came from Chris Idzikowski's study.

And that's not to say personality traits can't be factored out from said sleeping position but so much more would have to be brought before it could be anything but a limited view into the window that is personality. I think R34498 hit it on an interesting angle. I personally sleep like Chuck Norris, anyone who gets near my vortex of sleep doom is destroyed. That probably means I don't like to be woken up.

I agree that sleeping positions can't predict personality, but I can see how personality (temperament plus life experiences - including the mattress you're used to! LOL) predict which sleeping position one may choose. I'm a scare-ty cat, so I choose to sleep curled up on my side, so the boogey man can't grab my toes! LOL