Divergent Thinking

by Leah Wilson

  Enough literature. Let’s talk about The Avengers. Because not every hero can be everything all on their own. Sometimes heroes need buddies to round them out.

  The Avengers are a heroic team. Their group works because it’s balanced; it includes examples of all five factions in individuals. Tony Stark: Erudite, because obviously. Captain America: Candor, because of truth, justice, and the American way. Thor: Amity, because he keeps trying to make peace with Loki and Loki keeps taking advantage of him. (Also, Amity’s symbol at the Choosing Ceremony is Earth, and Thor is a little thick.) The Hulk: Dauntless, because he is all emotion and impulse. (Also, HULK SMASH!) Agent Coulson: Abnegation, of course. He’s the administrative arm of S.H.I.E.L.D., a behind-the-scenes sort of fellow, but most of all, he sacrifices himself for the team.

  Constructing a balanced team isn’t an exact science. The other team members—Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Nick Fury—also go into making the Avengers function. It’s not as simple as “equal parts Amity, Dauntless, etc.” (And you might have a different opinion for which Avenger should represent which faction.) But thanks to the individual talents and strengths of its members, the team as a whole is Divergent.

  Being a part of a balanced team can make the individuals more balanced, too. Over the course of the movie, I think most of the Avengers have to become a little more Divergent. (One of the reasons I like that movie so much is that each character has their own Growth Moment.) Being superheroes, they’re all a bit Dauntless. Bruce Banner has to make peace with his anger so he can control becoming the Hulk. Black Widow is a very different type of Erudite than Tony Stark, being both canny and shifty, but she also has a moment of real self-honesty when she talks about the “red in her ledger.”

  The biggest change, however, comes to Tony Stark, who is arguably (as in, I will make this argument with anyone) the film’s main hero in two ways: 1) even though saving the world takes the whole team, it’s Stark that does That Thing At The End, and 2) in order to do it, he is the character who makes the biggest transformation.

  He starts out a textbook Erudite—too smart for his own good, and smart aleck to go with it. Billionaire genius playboy. He even lives in a tower full of gadgets and tech like the Erudite in Chicago. Throughout the movie, the other Avengers challenge him about his lack of honesty, empathy, and selflessness, and he deflects them with wisecracks. But in the pivotal big bad boss fight, it isn’t being smarter than everyone else that allows him to save the world. It’s being brave and selfless. Iron Man doesn’t start out the film as Divergent, but he ends it that way.

  In Divergent, I don’t think it’s an accident that Tris’ friends and allies at Dauntless are faction transfers—besides the fact that the newbies would stick together. They are a divergent group: Christina is from Candor, Will from Erudite, Tobias/Four from Abnegation. (Amity is underrepresented, but as I said before, it’s not an exact science.)

  Tris is identified as Divergent by the aptitude test very early on, but she has to keep it a secret. Obviously, it influences her at the Choosing Ceremony, and she waffles between factions—and symbolically, between the facets of her personality. But she doesn’t really own it until the end of the first book. Still, even before that, it’s when she shows her Divergence that Tris has her most heroic moments. Taking Al’s place in front of the target was an act of bravery, but also of empathy and self-sacrifice. Tris is clever enough to work out what Erudite is really doing with the serums they inject into the Dauntless, and later, to create a plan for getting back into Dauntless headquarters to stop the simulation. She’s also brave enough to enact that plan, but in the process she must also lead Caleb, her father, and Marcus, talking them through the hard parts of jumping from a moving train (onto a roof, no less). That takes empathy, an Abnegation trait, as well as leadership.

  Not that Tris is perfectly Divergent. There’s not much of Amity in her. She is not big on peace or forgiveness. Honesty isn’t her strongest virtue, either. And while she is very smart, Tris acknowledges the Abnegation part of herself more than she does the Erudite.

  However, in the climactic confrontation with the simulation-controlled Tobias, it really is all three of her Divergent aspects that allow her to save him, and herself: cleverness to come up with an action drastic enough to reach him, self-sacrifice to put the gun into his hand, and a hell of a lot of bravery to trust her plan would work.

  DIVERGENCE IN ACTION

  In Allegiant, the whole faction rug gets ripped out from under us. Instead of factions, our heroes are struggling with questions of individual identity. But never has being Divergent been more important. Not because of genetic purity or superperson status, but because the old paradigm has been erased, and being just one thing is no longer an option. Decisions and alliances are no longer confined to what a faction demands. That can be overwhelming if you’re used to a limited number of choices.

  But the Divergent have always—at least privately—had more choices, because their Divergence allows them to adapt. A Divergent hero can weigh her options. She can use brains or brawn, be honest or be crafty, compromise for peace or stick to her guns.

  After the revelations in Allegiant, it’s worth pointing out that Divergence is not merely a genetic factor. Tris might be Divergent in biology, but Tobias is Divergent in action. The five faction symbols tattooed on his back show he understands the need for balance between the factions and their guiding principles. All through the series he doesn’t just evidence bravery or selflessness. He demonstrates intelligence and kindness. He learns honesty and peace.

  Divergence, whether it’s in your genes, your upbringing, or the process of learning, is what allows you to make individual choices. It allows for bravery, honesty, reconciliation, wisdom, and sacrifice whenever each, or all, are necessary.

  Over our lifetimes, we choose factions over and over again. We leave one behind and choose another. We have the freedom of concentric or overlapping circles of friends and family. We don’t have to pick one path, one trait, one ideal, and close our minds to all others. We can be Divergent. And we definitely should.

  Rosemary Clement-Moore is the author of a bunch of awesome books like The Splendor Falls, Texas Gothic, and Spirit and Dust, which have been recommended by the ALA Best Books for Teens, the TAYSHAS reading list, and her mother’s book club. She’s a water sign, an introvert, her patronus is an otter, and New!Kirk is her Enterprise Captain. Besides internet quizzes, she is addicted to coffee, books, knitting, and the Discovery Channel. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with a miniature yeti disguised as a Pomeranian.

  ___________________

  1 I am taking my life in my hands to make this joke. No one who has seen what happens when you poke a badger would ever underestimate a Hufflepuff—a perfect example of the dangers of labels and stereotypes.

  2 My aforementioned BFF is one of the most moral people I know, but back in our tabletop-role-playing-game days, she loved playing the evil-genius characters. And she was frighteningly good at it.

  3 This practice is still in use as an alternative medicine.

  4 Pretty much anything that was wrong with you required a surgeon to drain off some of your blood to get rid of the excess bile or phlegm or whatever was making you ill. And even after science had disproven the idea of humors, all the way to the mid-1800s, bloodletting was a common treatment for just about everything from fever to upset stomach, and particularly for psychological problems.

  5 I was going to say, “It’s all in fun!” and then I remembered how serious people get about their favorite Doctor.

  6 If you want to learn more about these traits, a Google search will turn up plenty.

  7 Types are based on personality rather than the unchangeable factor of your birthdate, obviously. Still, this is probably not what Ms. Briggs and Ms. Myers had in mind.

  8 I admit some bias here. I had a friend who was totally Candor—talented, funny, wickedly smart, and brutally honest. She truly believed that if someone was hurt by her opinion, it was
because they were too sensitive. To be fair, she would have called me an Amity wimp who would rather keep the peace than be completely honest. And she wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. So it’s all a matter of degrees.

  9 There’s a pretty dead-on real-world example of this in Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister in the 1930s. In order to preserve peace, he allowed Hitler’s Germany to stomp over a good part of Europe until it became clear that Adolph wasn’t going to stop unless someone made him.

  There are a lot of ways to sort people, and as we saw in Rosemary’s essay, these methods often have a lot in common, even going back thousands of years. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, YA novelist and PhD in psychology, maps the Divergent trilogy’s factions onto another real-life method for describing our personalities, this one favored by modern psychologists: the Five Factor Model, otherwise known as the Big Five.

  DIVERGENT PSYCHOLOGY

  JENNIFER LYNN BARNES

  Veronica Roth has stated that she got the idea for Divergent while studying exposure therapy in Psych 101, but the psychology underlying the world of Divergent and threaded throughout the series goes far beyond studies on what it means to confront and overcome our fears. Psychology can explain the significance of the five factions, what it really means to be Divergent, and why, as readers, we’re faced with the same challenges that Tris confronts: to look beyond the simulation, to carve out an identity, to find the place where we belong.

  In our case, the simulation is the book itself. When I’m not writing young adult novels, I study the science of fiction and the question of why we get so invested in fictional stories. Why, psychologists ask, do we invest so much time and spend so much money on things that we know are not real? And why is it that knowing that Tris and Four aren’t real doesn’t render her death painless for us as readers? Why would we ever cry real tears for people we know are make-believe?

  One answer that scientists have come up with to this question is that fictional stories are simulations—and, yes, they do use that exact word. Even though we know these fictional stories are not real, we feel like they are. As Tris comments inside her fear landscape, “Simulations aren’t real; they pose no real threat to me, so logically, I shouldn’t be afraid of them.” And yet, despite knowing that the simulation isn’t real, Tris’ reactions to it are, as she puts it, “visceral” (Divergent). So, too, are our reactions as readers.

  My goal for this essay is to dig beneath the surface of the simulation, with an eye to what the psychological sciences can tell us about the books. Like Tris, we can’t just turn off our emotions in response to something that seems so real, but we can use our awareness of the simulation to ask why the world Veronica Roth has built is so compelling. The answer, I am going to argue, is that the faction system challenges us as readers to ask the same questions that plague Tris throughout the series:

  Who are we? What are we? And where do we belong?

  THE FACTIONS, PERSONALITY, AND THE BIG FIVE

  The faction system is introduced to us as a way in which groups of people dedicate themselves to different virtues. Each faction, we are told in Divergent, was founded on the belief that a specific vice was to blame for the world’s evils. Those who blamed dishonesty formed Candor; those who blamed cowardice became the Dauntless; those who eschewed selfishness became Abnegation; those who despised ignorance became Erudite; and those who swore off aggression became Amity. In this sense, the Choosing Ceremony asks teenagers to decide which virtue they want to live their lives by. It is up to them, Tris and her age-mates are told by a somber Marcus, “to decide what kind of people they will be” (Divergent).

  On the surface, then, the ceremony asks young people to decide what they believe. What they value. Choosing to switch factions reflects a rejection of everything a person has been raised to believe, parallel in some ways to a child who has been raised in one religious tradition choosing to convert to another. And yet, for all that the factions are purportedly based on virtues, I do not think the powerful and compelling concept the faction system taps into really is belief.

  Tris seems to come to a similar conclusion herself. In Divergent, when Four asks Tris if she thinks she made the right choice in coming to Dauntless, she says that she doesn’t think there was a choice. For Tris, the ceremony isn’t about deciding who she will be. It is about acknowledging who she already is. “I didn’t jump off the roof because I wanted to be like the Dauntless,” Tris realizes midway through Divergent. “I jumped off because I already was like them, and I wanted to show myself to them.”

  At their core, these five factions are not merely about what a person believes or what they value. To my psychologist’s eye, what the faction system is really tapping into is the enduring internal traits that make us who we are: our personalities. This is occasionally acknowledged in the text: the vices that the factions are fighting against are initially referred to as faults in “human personality.” In Insurgent, Jeanine describes Divergents as having “flexible personalities,” while Fernando refers to transferring from Abnegation to Dauntless as “a leap in personality.” Even those who have been raised within the faction system seem to recognize that choosing a faction has as much to do with your aptitude for specific traits as your belief about which virtue is the most virtuous of them all.

  What the residents of Tris’ community don’t seem to realize, however, is just how closely their faction system maps onto personality psychology more broadly. Just as there are five factions, psychologists refer to the “Big Five” personality traits: five traits that can describe the vast variation we see in human personality—each corresponding to one of the five factions in the Divergent series. Some of the parallels are obvious—you don’t need to be a psychologist to realize that Amity has a lot of parallels with the trait referred to as Agreeableness—while others require parsing your way through the text with an eye for detail.

  Dauntless: Openness to Experience

  The first of the Big Five is a trait referred to as Openness to Experience. People who are low in openness are frequently described as being cautious, clinging to routines, and disliking the idea of going outside of their comfort zones. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have people high in openness, who tend to be curious. They like hearing new ideas and doing things that they’ve never done before. They are not cautious, but instead—as the term suggests—are open to whatever new experiences the world has to offer. Openness to experience tends to co-occur with a variety of other things, among them creativity, risk taking, and sensation seeking.

  My college roommate, when she takes personality tests, scores off the charts on the openness variable—and I cannot help but notice that this is the same college roommate who has decided that we will be spending her bachelorette party skydiving. The college roommate who once talked me into zip-lining. The college roommate who read Divergent and told me, with all confidence, that she would be Dauntless.

  The parallels between Dauntless and this dimension of personality go beyond the fact that the Dauntless are a skydiving, zip-lining, jumping-off-buildings kind of group. Openness isn’t just about being open to physical risks. Just as there are three levels to the Dauntless initiation—the physical, the emotional, and the mental—openness to experience also operates on all three levels. Tris is high in openness not only because she’s willing to jump off a moving train, but also because she’s the type of person who is curious about what’s outside the fence—and willing to go off into the unknown to get her answer. Toward the beginning of Divergent, Tori actually comments on Tris’ curiosity, saying that she’s “never met a curious Abnegation before.” (Tris and the others may assume that curiosity is the reason she shows an aptitude for Erudite, but I would argue that this trait, as much as a desire to be fearless, is what makes Tris choose Dauntless—and that Tris’ Erudite side taps into a different quality altogether, one that we’ll return to later.)

  Interestingly, people who are high in openness to experience also tend to be more easily h
ypnotized than other individuals—which seems fitting, given that the Dauntless end up more or less neurologically hypnotized into doing Jeanine’s bidding at the end of the first book. Equally striking is the fact that the openness variable tends to decline with age—and the Dauntless in the Divergent series force older faction members out.

  Abnegation: Extraversion (and the Lack Thereof)

  In many ways, Abnegation is the faction that it is hardest to classify in terms of the Big Five—until you realize that this faction does not just require putting other people first; they endorse a full-scale denial of the self. As part of Abnegation, Tris is only allowed to look in a mirror once every three months. She and her family do not celebrate their birthdays. The Abnegation are told they must try to forget themselves and fade into the background. When the Abnegation flirt, they flirt “in the tentative way known only to the Abnegation” (Divergent), exchanging shy looks and slight smiles. Tris says that it is difficult for the Abnegation to make friends because “it’s impossible to have real friendship when no one feels like they can accept help or even talk about themselves” (Divergent).

  From this perspective, I would argue that the Big Five personality trait that Abnegation maps onto is actually Extraversion—or more specifically, introversion, the word we use to describe people who are extremely low on the extraversion personality scale. The extraverted individual is talkative, assertive, and the life of the party—not someone that anyone else would ever refer to as a Stiff. Extraverts like being the center of attention. Introverts, in contrast, tend to be described as solitary and reserved. Introverted individuals keep in the background, they don’t like to draw attention to themselves, and they can be hard to get to know.

  When Tris expresses a desire in Divergent to be “loud and daring and free,” she is expressing a desire to shake off her introverted roots and become more extraverted. She transfers to Dauntless not only because she is curious and longs to experience a wider range of what life has to offer, but also because she is tired of feeling like she has to keep everything inside. She is tired of fading into the background, tired of wearing gray clothes and behaving in an unassuming way, tired of trying to forget herself, and tired of being forgotten.