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I go into this in my forthcoming book so I don't want to start in on it right now. But saying that human personality is just that which results from being human doesn't really answer anything. Personality is more of a player in the game. OK, so we are not all David Beckhams, but we are not so different from him either. The differences between people are far fewer than you think, quantifiable, and the similarities are there for a specific purpose.

AW: Like what?

Like being a fan of a hero.

AW: What do heroes have to do with it?

Well, if you are a fan of David Beckham say - and I am a fan - then it's because you see something of you in him. By being a fan you are expressing a particular part of your personality, the part that is linked to the survival of your genes. By being a fan you are expressing the part of you that's going on to reproduce. This has nothing to do with being sexually attracted to your hero or heroine, it's about using the hero or heroine to make yourself more attractive. By being a fan you have a means of expressing your best survival qualities and instincts and are therefore more likely to marry and reproduce.

We are all fans of personalities. If you do a quick poll around your pub or work place, you'll probably find that the number of football heroes that people are fans of comes out to around 30, or a multiple of a figure around 30 if you are in a very big place. There are in fact 64 principal personality types, but in the simplified descriptions of people in the media of those we take as our heroes and heroines some subtleties are bound to get lost. About half this number - 32 - for reasons I won't go into now (all those with Landscape in them) would be likely to be clearly in evidence. It's a trivial result but still it's nice to know why, in any given field, there are so many fewer fewer heroes than fans. Why should this be if we are all unique individuals?

AW: So being a fan is a healthy occupation?

It certainly is. We don't all have to be fans of footballers but it would be unusual for someone not to have any Landscape person as a hero. I am talking about being a fan of person here, and not being a fan of a team say, or an enthusisast for something. These are rather different things that I won't go into now.

AW: A Landscape person? What do you mean?

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