I got the impression Sheldon's stuff had been ditched with psychoanalysis, phlogiston, and alchemy. You could make the argument he made it before mass availability of high-calorie processed food, turning weight into a huge negative Conscientiousness indicator.
Also note a mid BMI could be muscular or just somewhat fat; there's no indicator of muscularity.
I got the impression Sheldon's stuff had been ditched with psychoanalysis, phlogiston, and alchemy. You could make the argument he made it before mass availability of high-calorie processed food, turning weight into a huge negative Conscientiousness indicator.
Also note a mid BMI could be muscular or just somewhat fat; there's no indicator of muscularity.
The comparison between Sheldon's ideas and psychoanalysis etc. isn't unwarranted. But scientifically speaking Sheldon comes out looking somewhat better than Freud or Ge Hong, not necessarily because his ideas were on the mark, but because he developed objective methods for testing them using real, honest-to-goodness *numbers,* by golly:
Better known researchers like Hans Eysenck also actually worked in Sheldon's tradition, largely by talking past Sheldon, however (who I understand was politically smelly) and focusing on the two factors of 1. body size and 2. Leptomorphy vs Eurymorphy. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2236697/pdf/jroyalcgprac00376-0053.pdf for an example. Though these papers aren't generally available online, they found a few modest correlations between these factors and measurable traits like IQ.
Unfortunately psychoanalysis is all over the place despite some fairly strong empirical refutations, while body type continues to show a handful of modest but significant correlations with psychology. For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3754851/ says about what you say it should: BMI is a small negative Conscientiousness factor.
Eysenck was politically smelly too later on. Interestingly, he appears to have been an example of an antifascist racist (by modern standards)--he believed in the correlation of race with intelligence, but opposed the Nazis! (He was a quarter Jewish--his grandma had converted but died in a concentration camp.) He got into a bunch of other dubious ideas like the cancer-prone personality.
The Wikipedia article's been slanted left, of course, but from what little I can tell he was following the data and far-right people picked up on it.
As for Sheldon, yeah, I'd guess athletic people work out more and people with poor impulse control eat more and neurotic people with good impulse control do neither, so I would think his types had some validity at least at the point of development. The difference is now everyone looks more endomorphic so things might be different.
I got the impression Sheldon's stuff had been ditched with psychoanalysis, phlogiston, and alchemy. You could make the argument he made it before mass availability of high-calorie processed food, turning weight into a huge negative Conscientiousness indicator.
Also note a mid BMI could be muscular or just somewhat fat; there's no indicator of muscularity.
The comparison between Sheldon's ideas and psychoanalysis etc. isn't unwarranted. But scientifically speaking Sheldon comes out looking somewhat better than Freud or Ge Hong, not necessarily because his ideas were on the mark, but because he developed objective methods for testing them using real, honest-to-goodness *numbers,* by golly:
http://www.innerexplorations.com/psytext/shel.htm
Better known researchers like Hans Eysenck also actually worked in Sheldon's tradition, largely by talking past Sheldon, however (who I understand was politically smelly) and focusing on the two factors of 1. body size and 2. Leptomorphy vs Eurymorphy. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2236697/pdf/jroyalcgprac00376-0053.pdf for an example. Though these papers aren't generally available online, they found a few modest correlations between these factors and measurable traits like IQ.
Unfortunately psychoanalysis is all over the place despite some fairly strong empirical refutations, while body type continues to show a handful of modest but significant correlations with psychology. For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3754851/ says about what you say it should: BMI is a small negative Conscientiousness factor.
Eysenck was politically smelly too later on. Interestingly, he appears to have been an example of an antifascist racist (by modern standards)--he believed in the correlation of race with intelligence, but opposed the Nazis! (He was a quarter Jewish--his grandma had converted but died in a concentration camp.) He got into a bunch of other dubious ideas like the cancer-prone personality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Eysenck
The Wikipedia article's been slanted left, of course, but from what little I can tell he was following the data and far-right people picked up on it.
As for Sheldon, yeah, I'd guess athletic people work out more and people with poor impulse control eat more and neurotic people with good impulse control do neither, so I would think his types had some validity at least at the point of development. The difference is now everyone looks more endomorphic so things might be different.