The Wakefield Doctrine is based on the premise that behavior is a response to perception. Within individuals, these behaviors tend to repeat themselves over time, and (with repetition) become a defining and characteristic type of behavior, in other words, personality.

The Wakefield Doctrine proposes to describe personality on the basis of perception rather than the behavior that results (from perception).

The three characteristic ways to perceive the world are identified as: clarks, scotts and rogers. It is a given that we all start our lives with the potential to perceive the world as any of the three. However at some point in our early, early childhood  we become predominantly a clark, a scott or a roger. How we perceive the world around us becomes established as our personal reality, our ‘predominant worldview’.

We become clarks, scotts or rogers.

…clarks think, scotts act and rogers feel…

rogers (adv. rogerian; pronunciation: ‘roe -jeer -riann’)

The ‘initial behavioral metaphor’ of the personality type referred to as a roger is that of a herd animal.  Diametrically opposed to the worldview of clarks, the roger’s worldview is predicated on being a group member.

rogers  live in a world that is quantifiable and is based on rules and principles that exist and are maintained independently of the people and events that make up this world. As a person who has accepted life in a world built around the central theme of the group before individual, herd mentality, everything they perceive is in a context of the group. Further, as a perspective of this ‘view from the herd’ the rogerian personality accepts the idea that there are values and rules and standards that exist in the abstract but nevertheless apply to life.

Corollaries to the Initial Behavioral Metaphor (of rogers) when ‘in numbers’, the people of their world gather they form herds, which serves as the basic natural unit of social interaction. To the roger, the world is one that is by nature an ordered place, a universe that is, at its core, a quantifiable place.  To take this essential quality of the rogerian worldview further, to a roger the world is basically good. That is, it is imbued with a quality of order, with rules and guidelines and laws that are contained within the nature and the experience of their world. The primary drive in life for a roger (second, of course to the need to affiliate) is the drive to elicit from day to day life the underlying rules and order. Discovering and utilizing, these rules and guidelines represent the highest form of living to the rogerian personality type. rogers assume that the world can and should be subjected to analysis and measurement.   There is a tertiary drive to impose upon others the Rules and Order that the roger perceives as being essential to the well-being of others.

If clarks are the quintessential outsiders, then rogers are the ultimate insiders. The world as experienced by rogers is one of the group, or in the parlance of the Wakefield Doctrine, the herd.

Viewed from a more global perspective, it is the rogerian personality type (in particular) and the rogerian world view, in general, that accounts for organized societies and other groups of humans, in other words, were it not for rogers there would be no lasting cultures or civilizations.  Their drive to organize and ( to codify as custom, laws, rules and tradition) as a means not only to organize but to fix in a form that will serve to perpetuation the development of the rules of society. Rogers are driven to discover the Rules of Life (as they are convinced that such rules exist, independent of a social context) and once discovered they (also) have a need to bring order to life through the promulgation of these rules. They are the traditionalists, the conservatives (not necessarily in a political sense of the word). They maintain what was and codify what is. Rogers organize and (having organized), will put all their efforts towards maintaining this order. When it was that said, ‘the devil lives in the details’, they were seeing the world as a roger.

Childhood

As children, rogers will experience the world as being composed of groups of people that have some degree of affiliation with each other. There is always the sense that things connect, that everything is related on one level or another. For the rogerian child, it is the implied intrinsic relationship to (both) people and possessions that confers value and utility, as opposed to the mere fact of a use of a possession, or in knowing a person.

In most cases, the first ‘group’ the rogerian child encounters is comprised of members of their immediate family. The development of a relationship with this ‘first herd’ is critical in shaping the expectations that he/she will project onto the larger groups that will be encountered when the child ventures beyond the home environment; elementary school being the first of these experiences with groups of people that do not share a direct relationship with the child.

The rogerian child’s first experience and exposure to society is, as with all children, the immediate family. Where the clarklike child feels apart, the rogerian child knows that it belongs. Within the context of his/her immediate family, the roger will focus on siblings before parents. Their first experiments and reinforcement of social skills and strategies are tested on brothers and sisters rather than adult parents.

For most children the first exposure to true organized society starts with the beginning of education outside the home, usually elementary school. Stepping through the doors of a school, the rogerian child knows that he belongs, but does not know how welcomed he will be by the group.

As defined, a roger will assume that they ‘belong’.

The family, while being a small society and having all the elements of the society found in the world at large, lacks two qualities, dynamics if you will that a true society possesses, rejection and ostracism. When a child gets off that school bus, they are effectively alone and are confronted with a new society, a new group in the form of classmates.
The rogerian child, while subject to the same fears as the scottian and clarklike child, does not question that they belong. However they can feel that they may not be welcomed into the group. In contrast to the clarklike child, the rogerian child may feel un-welcome but he/she will react to the group with an underlying assumption that the clark does not share. The rogerian child will assume his/her right to membership. When they perceive rejection, they may very well react with anger, outright aggression or they may withdraw. It is important to note that rogers feel their rejection as a state that has been imposed by other individuals, not as a judgment of ‘non-membership’.

Gender and Adolescence

rogerian children grow into young adulthood with the  least trauma of the three. With a social context that is oriented to ‘the group’,  when observed in the context of  ‘mass culture’ rogers will ‘conform to the norm’ almost without question, thought, reflection. This ‘group tropism’ is so fundamental to the rogerian worldview as to be the distinguishing characteristic of the pre and post adolescent rogerian child. Without regard to what the culture, (in which the rogerian child is born), deems the ideal, the rogerian child/young adult will be possessed of the traits and interests that characterize the culture’s ideal child. It might be said that these rogerian children are the Rosetta Stone for the commercial marketing interests (of the society in which they are members).

Adulthood and maturity

In terms of the roles assumed by rogers in society, they are naturally drawn to occupations, avocations, professions and jobs that involve discovering, enforcing and otherwise imposing order on an otherwise dis-ordered world:

Accountants and bankers, engineers and carpenters, doctors and cooks, computer programmers and musicians, priests, lawyers and journalists…are all rogers.

In any environment in which the rules are regarded as more important than the individual, you will find rogers, i.e. the military, organized religion, all governmental functions.

Primary identifiers and characteristics

As adults, rogers will be found to be well-adjusted, even-tempered logically behaving people, unless, of course, they are not, in which, case they are likely to become mob-participating, paranoid, xenophobes.

• rogers are the friendly and sociable ones; of the three personality types, the person you will mostly likely recall having a pleasant conversation with recently
• rogers are the warp and woof to whatever social fabric you might care to consider: civic, religious, scientific or other cultural expression.
• rogers believe that there are rules and standards that are separate from practical reality, they believe in an abstract value of order.
• rogers are, in fact, the  reason that  human civilization has any continuity whatsoever
• rogers do not create. They maintain, they assemble, they are the machine operators
• rogers are the engineers, accountants and physicians
• rogers are the judges, the firefighters and high school teachers (except for gym teachers)
• when you are new to a neighborhood, rogers are the ones who come over to introduce themselves, and they will appear in a group ( herd)

As you can recognize a scott by their eyes and clarks by (their) hunched and defensive posture, you will know the rogerian personality type by these rogerian expressions, as well as the excessive use of the personal pronouns. 

Rogers live to be with those who they perceive to be like themselves. rogers  accept the existence of others (non-herd members), but do not concern themselves with any of the ideas or notions held by outsiders.

Having said that, without rogers there would be no civilization; they are the traditionalists, the conservatives (not necessarily in a political sense of the word), they maintain what was and codify what is, rogers organize and (having organized), will put all their efforts towards maintaining this order. When whoever it was that said, ‘the devil lives in the details’, they were seeing the world as a roger.

A rogerian expression is an idiosyncratic statement made only by a roger,  is incorrect but nonetheless very powerful.  A rogerian expression is not simply an incorrect use of words, rather it is a deliberate use of the wrong words that results in a statement that somehow denies the listener the option to ignore it.. You know them when you hear them. There is a moment of disbelief, then you laugh and shake your head in admiration for the sentence that was made.  Examples:

 First recorded rogerian expression. When asked at dinner one night by his wife, Camille, if he wanted more mashed potatoes, Roger replied, ‘no thanks, I think I’ll surpass on that’

(other examples):

…looking at his paycheck, a roger was heard to say: ‘Oh man! Look at how much they deducted for aggravated security‘

…talking about  a new DVD release for a movie: ‘No, I’m going to wait until they release the un-abashed edition’

…about to talk to a client: ‘I know I have to give them the bad news with the good news, I just won’t baby-coat it’

(and the most recent recorded rogerian expression)…

…writing in a blog about how egotistical certain real estate agents tend to be an unknown roger wrote: ‘ I have to say that as a professional class, most agents are much too self-absorbent…”

(November 2017: in a description of a guitar where they’d put extra effort into an attractive finish, the writer said, ‘this is ‘Exponentially stunning…’)

December 17 2022: on a cable show involving excavators and ponds and such the host said:   “…this pond is astronomically deep

As you can recognise a scott by their eyes and clarks by (their) hunched shoulders, you will know the roger  by these rogerian expressions

This comprises the positive aspect of rogers, an ability to focus on details, minutiae.  Rogers are the ones that will read and follow the instructions in the box. To the letter.

When a roger expresses the (characteristic) belief in the intrinsic value of Rules as they apply to people, they will be found in a vocation as priests, ministers and bureaucrats.

Any environment in which the rules are regarded as more important than the individual, you will find rogers, i.e. the military, organized religion, all government.

First of the Common Language: referential authority: the quality of reality in the rogerian worldview that maintains there is always a source of authority  in any and all situations and it is always good and sufficient to justify the actions being taken (by the roger in question)