Volume 2.0 · A working document
The Method.
The Dialogue Signature.
01 / The six archetypes
Two axes. Six archetypes.
Click one to read what it does at the table.
AcrossTruth, Meaning, Provocation. What someone is after.
DownAdvances, Interrogates. How they push to get there.
Cross those two axes and six positions fall out. One of them carries each person's voice when the room gets hard.
The framework that decides who sits next to whom. Three years of building and arguing about what counts; the citations are at the bottom of this page if you'd like to argue with us.
A behavioral assessment instrument for measuring conversational behavior under conditions of intellectual tension, social pressure, and disagreement. Built to predict what people do in one specific high-stakes context, not who they are in general.
02 / What this is not
Not a personality test.
Personality describes who you are over time, in general, on average. The Dialogue Signature predicts what you do in one specific situation: structured conversation under disagreement, depth, audience.
The same personality profile produces different conversational signatures depending on context, training, and intention. Big Five and MBTI describe traits; we describe behaviors. Narrower, more predictive, and not interchangeable.
03 / The assessment
Fifteen questions. About six minutes.
Each answer maps to one or more archetypes. The resulting distribution determines a primary signature and, when the gap between top scores is small, a subdominant. A confidence band also surfaces: clear, borderline, ambiguous.
There are no right answers. The instrument doesn't reward you for picking what sounds correct; it reads what you'd actually do at a table.
04 / Common questions
Things people ask.
What is the Dialogue Signature?
A behavioral assessment instrument that classifies members across six conversational archetypes (Compass, Lens, Loom, Mirror, Spark, Root) based on how each person engages with disagreement, depth, and audience in structured dialogue. It powers the way Colère Nu composes rooms.
Is this a personality test?
No. Personality describes broad behavioral tendencies across all life domains. The Dialogue Signature predicts behavior in one specific high-stakes context: structured dialogue involving disagreement, depth, and audience. The same personality profile can produce different conversational behaviors depending on context, training, and intention. The Dialogue Signature captures the conversational expression of personality, not personality itself.
What are the six archetypes?
Compass (truth, advances), Lens (truth, interrogates), Loom (meaning, advances), Mirror (meaning, interrogates), Spark (provocation, advances), and Root (provocation, interrogates). Each is the cross-product of two axes: orientation (what the person is trying to achieve in dialogue) and energy (how that drive is expressed in turn-taking).
How is this different from the Big Five or MBTI?
Big Five and MBTI describe enduring personality traits that hold across most domains. The Dialogue Signature measures how those traits express specifically in conversational behavior under disagreement. It is a narrower, more predictive instrument for dialogue-specific outcomes; and a more defensible proprietary construct because of that specificity.
What is the academic grounding?
Theoretical foundations include Bakhtin's dialogic philosophy, Higgins's Regulatory Focus Theory (1997), Fleeson's Density Distribution Model of Personality (2001), Goldman's reliabilist epistemology (1986), Zagzebski's virtue epistemology (1996), and Geertz's thick description (1973). Drafting began in 2023; the current document is Version 2.0, dated April 2026.
How does the assessment work?
It is a 15-question instrument that takes about six minutes. There are no right answers, only honest ones. Each answer maps to one or more archetypes; the resulting distribution determines the member's primary and (when the gap between top scores is small) secondary signature. A confidence band (clear, borderline, or ambiguous) also surfaces.
Who is Colère Nu for?
People who take conversation seriously. Members are admitted by application only; the Dialogue Signature is the gate. The collective is Boston-based for V1, expanding to additional cities as the model proves out. It is not a dating app, not a mass-market social club, not a wellness network.
How do I become a member?
Apply at colerenu.com. Take the assessment. A host conducts a 15-minute conversation. From there, applicants are either approved as full members or vouched in provisionally on social trust pending the assessment. Once approved, members can RSVP, host, contribute to the Pulse, list themselves in the Garage, and use the directory.
This document is an open précis of the Dialogue Signature framework. The full operational specification (the calibrated item bank, the answer-to-archetype scoring algorithm, the mechanistic boundary tables) is held as a trade secret and is not publicly disclosed.