Episode 143: The Psychology of Personality

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_00]: Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Surely you can't be serious.

[00:00:19] [SPEAKER_06]: I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

[00:00:26] [SPEAKER_03]: The Great End of the Spoken

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_03]: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

[00:00:51] [SPEAKER_06]: And with no more brains than you have.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_07]: Anybody can have a brain?

[00:01:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Very bad men.

[00:01:06] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm a very good man.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_02]: Dave, I know you're sad that Argentina had such a disappointing showing in the World Cup.

[00:01:21] [SPEAKER_02]: But it's hard to win with a one man team.

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Would you agree that I'm the Lionel Messi of this podcast?

[00:01:31] [SPEAKER_09]: You know, as many of you know I never know the questions Tamler is going to ask when he asks them.

[00:01:37] [SPEAKER_09]: And that one just hurt.

[00:01:38] [SPEAKER_09]: That just went straight.

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_09]: It was like a dagger straight through the heart, but the kind of dagger that has like those weird ridges on it that it's easy to go in and harder on the way out.

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_09]: Like a felt it was just like pulling.

[00:01:52] [SPEAKER_09]: Holotips.

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly.

[00:01:54] [SPEAKER_09]: It was a one man team.

[00:01:58] [SPEAKER_09]: You are the Leo Messi of this podcast.

[00:02:01] [SPEAKER_09]: You have consistently brought us close to victory, but always disappointed.

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_02]: And done very well on the individual level.

[00:02:15] [SPEAKER_02]: That's right.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_09]: You're like on...

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Barcelona is like Sam Harris for you.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_09]: You can excel when you're just you and him.

[00:02:27] [SPEAKER_02]: Do you have anyone you care about the tournament anymore?

[00:02:31] [SPEAKER_09]: I have like a pecking order of people to root for after Argentina leaves and it usually includes South American teams except for Brazil.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_09]: So right now I'm going for Uruguay over.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, because Uruguay is basically a province of Argentina and they hate for it, but it's like, you know, come on, it's practically.

[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_09]: I wanted Colombia to win, but unfortunately England took over them having a house guest from England right now.

[00:03:00] [SPEAKER_09]: This was very disappointing for me to not be able to have Columbia win and throw it in their face.

[00:03:08] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm glad I'm just glad that Germany is out.

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_09]: Yes.

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_09]: And I don't want Brazil to win.

[00:03:13] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm surprised.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_02]: I thought you'd be rooting for Germany as the second one seem to be a big fan of their policies.

[00:03:20] [SPEAKER_02]: In the last century.

[00:03:25] [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, that was nice to see them go out and just the way they went out too was very nice.

[00:03:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:03:32] [SPEAKER_02]: I like England.

[00:03:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm rooting for them because I'm...

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I wouldn't mind a England one.

[00:03:38] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like stepping into the stream, like testing the waters for being a hipster.

[00:03:46] [SPEAKER_02]: And liking Premier League, I think is, you know, that could be my entry.

[00:03:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Because I can't take the Apple stuff and all of that and I'm not going to dress like a hipster.

[00:03:57] [SPEAKER_02]: But I could get into Premier League and soccer a little bit because it's pretty fascinating actually.

[00:04:04] [SPEAKER_09]: You could explain to me the difference between Manchester City and Manchester United.

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, okay.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_09]: I think Namias is way into soccer.

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_09]: So if that's your goal, I mean you could be just like Namias.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_02]: That is the goal to be just like Namias.

[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_02]: Just like Eddie.

[00:04:24] [SPEAKER_02]: So today we have a couple of things that we're doing.

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_02]: We are doing an episode that was selected by our beloved Patreon listeners.

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_02]: We gave them a choice of five finalists, also determined by our Patreon listeners.

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Five topics that we could discuss and the one they chose was personality psychology, which surprised I think both of us,

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_02]: especially since implicit bias was another one of those topics, which we did recently anyway.

[00:04:57] [SPEAKER_02]: But that's what we'll be talking about in the second segment.

[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's funny because I knew, I think the reason they do this, they select episodes.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_02]: We've done this twice now.

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_02]: The first was the famous IQ episode and now this, like they seem to deliberately choose things that I know nothing about.

[00:05:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Get me to shut the fuck up or something for once.

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_09]: They want like an informative episode.

[00:05:29] [SPEAKER_09]: I thought you were going to say that they just choose things that are like, happen to be in the political news.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_09]: Just to fuck with me because like I don't really...

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_02]: But it's personality psychology and the political?

[00:05:42] [SPEAKER_09]: No, but it was because it was, I think it was a direct result of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco on Facebook

[00:05:48] [SPEAKER_09]: that used personality tests in order to...

[00:05:52] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh, I didn't know.

[00:05:53] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, like that's the data that got leaked.

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_09]: It was specific personality information.

[00:05:58] [SPEAKER_09]: And so the idea was that they could get these data to target people with presumably political ads or information.

[00:06:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Whether or not that's a successful strategy, whether or not we should be afraid of it, I think is an open question.

[00:06:14] [SPEAKER_09]: But it was definitely in the news at the time.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_02]: My sense was that the reason they selected it had to do with something with Jordan Peterson,

[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_02]: but I don't know why because I know too little about his work and what he's doing.

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_02]: But there was some connection there.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, Jordan Peterson is also a personality psychologist and I think he's just made claims about gender differences in personality

[00:06:41] [SPEAKER_09]: and how this might actually be some sort of explanation for what people putatively consider bias in things like hiring.

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Speaking of politics, which you love, there was a recent study published that cast some light on the way our political orientation

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_02]: might prime us to do things in the private arena like wipe our butts, wipe our asses.

[00:07:12] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, this is some sort of hot off the press story from...

[00:07:17] [SPEAKER_09]: It's a study from the Institute of Intridisciplinary Political and Fecal Science in England.

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Which is... I applied there, I got an APA interview but I didn't end up getting a non-campus.

[00:07:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, no, I just got a rejection letter three months later that was smeared and shit.

[00:07:40] [SPEAKER_09]: That could be good.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, they were really hard at work when they sent it to me.

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_09]: So you sent me this earlier today, which is really again a hoax article.

[00:07:52] [SPEAKER_09]: But this one's like really... he just like phoned it in but it's hilarious.

[00:07:58] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean it's a hoax article so we've talked about one other hoax article in detail.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_02]: But this one is designed to expose the nature of predatory journals and that's it.

[00:08:09] [SPEAKER_02]: It's not designed to expose anything about social psychology and this kind of research.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_02]: It is just to show that predatory journals will publish anything.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And by predatory journals it's just journals I guess that they exist by authors paying them to publish things, right?

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's right.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_02]: And by libraries subscribing to them.

[00:08:36] [SPEAKER_09]: That's right. So it's a really ugly practice that I think is bad for everybody.

[00:08:44] [SPEAKER_09]: But yeah, I get emails, I don't know if you get any of these but email saying like hey submit your work too

[00:08:50] [SPEAKER_09]: and then some really generic sounding journal and you could just tell that what they want is for you to send them whatever bullshit you want.

[00:09:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And they'll publish it, right?

[00:09:03] [SPEAKER_02]: So let's say what this is. So it's called by Jerry J. Lewis.

[00:09:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Right, it's actually a guy.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_02]: What?

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_02]: It's the pseudonym of Gary Lewis, a psychologist who published this.

[00:09:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Testing inter-hemispheric social priming theory in a sample of professional politicians, a brief report.

[00:09:24] [SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of just brilliantly written here that abstract the current study tests a critical prediction from inter-hemispheric social priming theory in the sample of professional politicians.

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_02]: We ask the question of whether one's political preferences are manifested in the hand used while cleaning one's posterior.

[00:09:45] [SPEAKER_02]: We find compelling evidence from a sample of professional politicians in the UK and equals eight that this is most certainly the case.

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_02]: The finding is a breakthrough and has implications for organizational management and beyond.

[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_02]: So the idea was if you're a politician on the right, you will wipe your ass with your left hand and vice versa.

[00:10:08] [SPEAKER_02]: That's the prediction and it was the results are striking, startlingly confirmed.

[00:10:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Presumably this is a tight theoretical story because as we all know, the right part of your brain controls the left side of your body.

[00:10:27] [SPEAKER_09]: The left side of your brain controls the right side of your body.

[00:10:30] [SPEAKER_09]: So obviously this is a very, very well thought out prediction coming from the neuroscientific expertise.

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know. There's like a lot of great quotes in there.

[00:10:46] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, there are.

[00:10:47] [SPEAKER_09]: So the methods are that the authors recruited participants from a UK political institution referred to colloquially as houses of parliament and they went up to politicians on the street.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_09]: These are all fake names but intended to be...

[00:11:06] [SPEAKER_09]: Theresa Mayby.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_09]: ...the real name.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Theresa Mayby.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Trasito Domingo.

[00:11:10] [SPEAKER_09]: Research assistant goes up to the politician, says that there are psychological scientists doing a study and asks them a series of questions including which hand they wipe with.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_09]: Tamler, which hand do you wipe with?

[00:11:22] [SPEAKER_09]: This is really, you know...

[00:11:24] [SPEAKER_09]: We could add two whole data points to this study.

[00:11:27] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, like I want to make it clear that like the correlation causation direction is not established by this study, right?

[00:11:35] [SPEAKER_09]: The author makes it very clear in the limitations section that experiments need to be done.

[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, but I think that I use my right hand, which means I would be a liberal in spite of what some of our listeners seem to be.

[00:11:50] [SPEAKER_02]: That's right.

[00:11:51] [SPEAKER_09]: I use my right hand and importantly always wipe front to back.

[00:11:57] [SPEAKER_09]: Front? What does that mean? You like anal?

[00:12:01] [SPEAKER_09]: It just means I don't like E. coli on my ball sack.

[00:12:07] [SPEAKER_09]: Is that what can happen? Wow.

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_09]: Well, it's especially important for women. This is the number one piece of advice to always give a little girl.

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Front to back. Front to back.

[00:12:18] [SPEAKER_09]: I think I should give...

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm not going to tell a lie to that, I think I should.

[00:12:22] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm not going to give out to advice to any other little girls other than one of my...

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_09]: So, yes, we are clearly both liberal.

[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_02]: You too, right hand.

[00:12:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, yeah, right handed. Right hand.

[00:12:37] [SPEAKER_02]: I like... so in the strengths and weaknesses, strengths of a study include the ecological validity.

[00:12:43] [SPEAKER_02]: Very few studies use real life politicians.

[00:12:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Weaknesses include the fact that we did not formally confirm the wiping hand.

[00:12:51] [SPEAKER_02]: To do so was thought to violate ethical and possibly national security protocol.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_09]: Have I talked ever on this podcast, if you remember, about a study that was conducted in the 70s

[00:13:09] [SPEAKER_09]: where they were looking at how long it took men to start urinating in a public bathroom?

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_09]: No.

[00:13:16] [SPEAKER_09]: I've never mentioned this.

[00:13:16] [SPEAKER_09]: So, that sentence that you just read made me especially laugh because there was a study conducted

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_09]: where they were interested in this hypothesis that the mere presence of other people,

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_09]: sort of like social presence of others increases arousal.

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Just arousal, not sexual, just general arousal in the body.

[00:13:38] [SPEAKER_09]: So, there were some reasons to believe that just other people being around would cause things

[00:13:44] [SPEAKER_09]: like your heart rate to go slightly up, your hands to get a little bit sweaty.

[00:13:48] [SPEAKER_09]: And they... it turns out that arousal is bad, that kind of physiological arousal is bad for peeing.

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_09]: Like you're basically like, you know, you get you shy bladder or whatever.

[00:14:01] [SPEAKER_09]: And so, they actually did a series of studies where when people came into the public restroom,

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_09]: they either put a research assistant in a urinal.

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_09]: They had a person right next to them or one urinal away.

[00:14:24] [SPEAKER_09]: Or nobody at all.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_09]: And depending on...

[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_09]: I think there's like four studies in this paper, they had another research assistant sitting over by the faucet

[00:14:37] [SPEAKER_09]: listening for the sound of the P-stream commencing and writing down how many seconds it took.

[00:14:43] [SPEAKER_09]: And then in a follow-up study that again just could be a parody article, it's hilarious.

[00:14:50] [SPEAKER_09]: They actually point to this limitation.

[00:14:52] [SPEAKER_09]: They say, well you know, that could have been not as accurate or as precise as we wanted.

[00:14:56] [SPEAKER_09]: So they actually constructed like a periscope-like instrument that a research assistant could be in a stall

[00:15:06] [SPEAKER_09]: and look around to actually visually observe when the guy's P-stream started.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_09]: And they made note of it.

[00:15:14] [SPEAKER_09]: Do you have institutional review boards?

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_09]: Well, so yeah, and this is one of the reasons I talk about this in my intro psych class

[00:15:22] [SPEAKER_09]: because it's fun to talk about, but it's also...

[00:15:24] [SPEAKER_09]: So one, they found evidence for their hypothesis.

[00:15:26] [SPEAKER_09]: I don't know, it's not been replicated for reasons.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_09]: Stage fright, like yeah.

[00:15:30] [SPEAKER_09]: Everyone knows that already.

[00:15:32] [SPEAKER_09]: Well now we do, talent.

[00:15:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Now we do.

[00:15:35] [SPEAKER_09]: Now we have a pyramid.

[00:15:36] [SPEAKER_09]: Well, I think it was in the American Psychologist, sort of the broad journal of the American Psychological Association.

[00:15:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Somebody published a pretty harsh critique of the ethics of doing this

[00:15:49] [SPEAKER_09]: and that actually did cause a lot of tightening.

[00:15:54] [SPEAKER_09]: You know, we always talk about Milgram and Zimbardo as being the things that caused the institutional review boards to get so strict with us.

[00:16:01] [SPEAKER_09]: But that also really did make people...

[00:16:04] [SPEAKER_09]: I hope so.

[00:16:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Like they're just looking, they have a periscope installed

[00:16:10] [SPEAKER_02]: that people who haven't agreed to participate in the study.

[00:16:13] [SPEAKER_09]: They anonymized the data, you know?

[00:16:17] [SPEAKER_09]: No identifying dick information.

[00:16:19] [SPEAKER_09]: No dick deeds were published.

[00:16:21] [SPEAKER_02]: I think my sample would have been thrown out just as too much of an outlier

[00:16:25] [SPEAKER_02]: because like it takes me forever to start P-ing.

[00:16:29] [SPEAKER_09]: I on the other hand just can't even make it to the stall.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm peeing before I even pull it out.

[00:16:37] [SPEAKER_02]: This is the kind of thing that you learn on very bad wizards.

[00:16:41] [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, after that detour, can we go back to this?

[00:16:45] [SPEAKER_02]: I think this one like they...

[00:16:47] [SPEAKER_02]: You can see that the IRB is more because they did not test whether the people actually wiped their hand.

[00:16:54] [SPEAKER_02]: So this is purely self-report.

[00:16:56] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, and as we know self-report is very unreliable.

[00:17:04] [SPEAKER_09]: I love this follow up code right after that sentence you read.

[00:17:10] [SPEAKER_09]: One of the anonymous reviewers noted...

[00:17:12] [SPEAKER_09]: One of the seven.

[00:17:13] [SPEAKER_09]: One of the seven called Dr. IP Daly who noted,

[00:17:17] [SPEAKER_09]: I can't help wondering though about the ass wiping practices of political centrists and independents.

[00:17:22] [SPEAKER_09]: Do they alternate hands or do they use both hands at the same time?

[00:17:25] [SPEAKER_09]: And he says, also recently I had to switch the hand I normally use as I acquired a painful blister.

[00:17:30] [SPEAKER_09]: I won't trouble you with the details of how.

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_09]: And now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I felt inexplicably drawn to the Daily Mail that day.

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_09]: Which is a UK joke I assume that is a right wing paper.

[00:17:43] [SPEAKER_02]: So you might consider supplementing this work with experimental manipulation.

[00:17:49] [SPEAKER_02]: I also love the conclusion future projects might extend the work by exploring if the findings extend to the hand with which one pleasures their genitals or strokes their beloved pet pooch.

[00:18:02] [SPEAKER_02]: We enthusiastically encourage their work.

[00:18:05] [SPEAKER_02]: So now that right there like you can't both pet your beloved pet pooch and your genitals with the same hand because you're doing it at the same time, right?

[00:18:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Like so how do you...

[00:18:22] [SPEAKER_09]: I did not even think about that, but as soon as you started that sentence.

[00:18:27] [SPEAKER_09]: You knew where that was going.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_09]: How it was going to end, yes. Since I'm not a dog owner currently, I don't remember how I did that.

[00:18:35] [SPEAKER_09]: You know there is an interesting question that I don't know, maybe somebody has done research on this,

[00:18:39] [SPEAKER_09]: is whether handedness being right handed or left handed, how good a predictor it is for masturbation hand.

[00:18:47] [SPEAKER_09]: Because my sense is that a lot of people who are right handed actually masturbate with their left hand.

[00:18:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, which is weird because you wipe your hand.

[00:18:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Like I bet it's like very close to 100% like wiping your ass.

[00:18:59] [SPEAKER_09]: Right wiping and jerking, yeah.

[00:19:02] [SPEAKER_02]: No, no, wiping your ass with your right hand.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_02]: Like if you're right handed.

[00:19:06] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:19:08] [SPEAKER_02]: But if you're... but then not jerking off.

[00:19:12] [SPEAKER_02]: So what explains that discrepancy?

[00:19:15] [SPEAKER_09]: These are the questions that keep us up at night as psychologists.

[00:19:18] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm glad we have the scientific method to...

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_09]: But it just made me think.

[00:19:24] [SPEAKER_09]: Very bad wizards listener surveys.

[00:19:27] [SPEAKER_09]: These are the questions we need to know.

[00:19:31] [SPEAKER_09]: We're gonna do this eventually.

[00:19:33] [SPEAKER_02]: We are.

[00:19:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Like in the methods last quote that I want to read.

[00:19:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[00:19:39] [SPEAKER_02]: Using structural equation modeling, us formally confirmed this finding.

[00:19:44] [SPEAKER_02]: The AIC was 1643.23 and the RMSEA was .02.

[00:19:52] [SPEAKER_02]: These are excellent fit statistics although the model makes little sense.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_02]: So good.

[00:20:01] [SPEAKER_02]: It's really fun.

[00:20:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Like it's really well written.

[00:20:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And I guess so, like it just shows like these journals will publish anything.

[00:20:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Like until you just don't even read it.

[00:20:11] [SPEAKER_09]: The best part and we'll put a link to his tweet, to Gary Loos's tweet,

[00:20:17] [SPEAKER_09]: is that he actually bargained them down to publish this for free.

[00:20:25] [SPEAKER_09]: So there you go.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_02]: What's the psychology behind deciding to start and run a predatory journal?

[00:20:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Like that's really how you're gonna make your money.

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Like if you're gonna be a con artist or a crook,

[00:20:40] [SPEAKER_02]: like why not do it in a more interesting way?

[00:20:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Like just rob old ladies for their jewels.

[00:20:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Something or like...

[00:20:47] [SPEAKER_09]: You know I think and I'm sure people know way more than I about this

[00:20:51] [SPEAKER_09]: but I think that there might be a lot of money

[00:20:53] [SPEAKER_09]: in lumping together some of these journals and selling them to libraries.

[00:20:59] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I...

[00:21:00] [SPEAKER_09]: But you also probably get a whole lot of desperate people,

[00:21:03] [SPEAKER_09]: often probably some international people who are looking to publish

[00:21:06] [SPEAKER_09]: in English journals who might not know any better.

[00:21:10] [SPEAKER_09]: And you know if you charge a few hundred dollars for an online fucking journal.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Like we could do this.

[00:21:16] [SPEAKER_09]: We could have like the very bad wizards.com slash publish here.

[00:21:20] [SPEAKER_09]: Charge people fifty dollars to publish.

[00:21:23] [SPEAKER_09]: And just put up any shit.

[00:21:25] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I don't know how long these things last.

[00:21:28] [SPEAKER_09]: I don't know if they're taken down after a while.

[00:21:30] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean this has been all over Twitter and it's still available online so...

[00:21:37] [SPEAKER_09]: There you go man.

[00:21:39] [SPEAKER_09]: This is our Royal Road to Full Professorship, Tamla.

[00:21:44] [SPEAKER_02]: It's not the podcast that's for sure.

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_02]: So I guess we'll have to do this.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_02]: There ya.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Alright, well now you're going to have a chance to prove that you are full professor worthy

[00:21:56] [SPEAKER_02]: in the next segment as we talk about personality psychology.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:23:12] [SPEAKER_02]: At this point we like to take a moment to thank all of our listeners for getting in touch

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[00:24:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Is that what you do?

[00:24:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Follow us.

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[00:24:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Fuck, I did that last time too I think.

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[00:24:16] [SPEAKER_09]: You sound like you're 45 years old.

[00:24:19] [SPEAKER_02]: What about Snapchat?

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Like what do you do on Snapchat?

[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_09]: I think you follow but I just, that for the life of me I cannot understand.

[00:24:27] [SPEAKER_02]: Sexed us on Snapchat.

[00:24:30] [SPEAKER_09]: Well yeah, almost at any of those.

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_02]: At any of those.

[00:24:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can really sex us everywhere except Reddit.

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[00:25:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Every so often we let them decide what topic an episode is going to be as is the case with this episode.

[00:25:40] [SPEAKER_02]: And both times they have chosen, I think wisely, the last one is one of our...

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_02]: It's definitely our most downloaded non-Sam Harris episode ever.

[00:25:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know if that will be the case now.

[00:25:58] [SPEAKER_02]: But it does suggest that maybe you're the Lionel Messi of the podcast rather than me.

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Because you did the heavy lifting with the last one and you might do the heavy lifting here.

[00:26:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Given how little I know about personality psychology.

[00:26:18] [SPEAKER_02]: But yes, you can go to patreon.com.com.

[00:26:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Look at the various reward tiers and become part of that community.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_02]: We really, really appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:26:30] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, thanks to everybody.

[00:26:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Take it away.

[00:26:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I think that there's something wrong with the system because I did have to do a lot of preparation for this one.

[00:26:41] [SPEAKER_09]: And the last one, I feel like a sucker.

[00:26:45] [SPEAKER_09]: But then again, you wrote a book and we did an episode on that.

[00:26:49] [SPEAKER_09]: We did two episodes. We published one.

[00:26:52] [SPEAKER_09]: Okay, I'll start as broadly as possible.

[00:26:56] [SPEAKER_09]: The study of personality in psychology is broadly trying to figure out a few general questions about the human mind.

[00:27:10] [SPEAKER_09]: And let me start by distinguishing it from a lot of the psychology that we talk about, a lot of psychology that I do.

[00:27:18] [SPEAKER_09]: And that most psychologists do.

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_09]: We're just trying to find similarities across human beings.

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_09]: We want to know how memory works.

[00:27:27] [SPEAKER_09]: We want to know how emotions work.

[00:27:29] [SPEAKER_09]: And we were looking for broad universal principles, broad specific mechanisms that are features of every human mind.

[00:27:41] [SPEAKER_09]: And the differences are often sort of noise in the sense that it's not so much what you're interested in.

[00:27:49] [SPEAKER_09]: If you want to know how short-term memory and long-term memory work, well, of course you're going to get these differences in individuals.

[00:27:57] [SPEAKER_09]: But you hope that what you're getting when you study enough people is sort of an understanding of in general how the mechanism works.

[00:28:04] [SPEAKER_09]: Some people have better memory than others, but that's not what you might be interested in.

[00:28:09] [SPEAKER_09]: So a lot of psychology really is interested in finding the universals because I think makes sense.

[00:28:18] [SPEAKER_09]: If you want to find universal laws that govern behavior, look for similarities.

[00:28:22] [SPEAKER_09]: But so the study of personality in psychology is really trying to focus on a different sense of universality.

[00:28:30] [SPEAKER_09]: It's trying to understand whether the differences across people, the individual differences, can be explained with sort of universal mechanisms

[00:28:41] [SPEAKER_09]: that we would understand as giving rise to those differences.

[00:28:45] [SPEAKER_09]: So it's not that they're not focused on universal mechanisms or processes.

[00:28:48] [SPEAKER_09]: They want to explain what makes the difference between people across a series of traits.

[00:28:54] [SPEAKER_09]: And it's not just any individual difference, right?

[00:28:58] [SPEAKER_09]: Because you know, the study of IQ and the study of differences, individual differences in memory,

[00:29:03] [SPEAKER_09]: you can study a whole bunch of individual differences.

[00:29:06] [SPEAKER_09]: But the study of personality in psychology is really trying to focus on relevant differences in social interactions,

[00:29:18] [SPEAKER_09]: in subjective conscious experience.

[00:29:22] [SPEAKER_09]: Things that would be relevant for us by dint of being social creatures and by dint of having a rich inner subjective world.

[00:29:33] [SPEAKER_09]: So what is picked by personality psychologists to study is an interesting question.

[00:29:42] [SPEAKER_09]: But broadly speaking, personality is more than just individual differences.

[00:29:45] [SPEAKER_09]: It's individual differences in the kinds of things that we would be interested in, you know, roughly speaking as in,

[00:29:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Tamler if you tell me that you have a friend that you'd like me to meet and I say, what are they like?

[00:29:57] [SPEAKER_09]: You would use general sort of trait terms to tell me how they are different to other people and how they are similar to other people.

[00:30:03] [SPEAKER_09]: So you might say, well, this guy that I want you meet is very shy but he's also super funny and he's really smart.

[00:30:12] [SPEAKER_09]: He's just a lover of life.

[00:30:14] [SPEAKER_09]: He likes to try a whole bunch of new things is what he did last year.

[00:30:19] [SPEAKER_09]: That kind of information.

[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_09]: So the question broadly is what is it that people differ in and why do they differ in that?

[00:30:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. Yeah.

[00:30:31] [SPEAKER_02]: So that's the central question is what are the character traits that people, even in the same cultures will exhibit different characters.

[00:30:44] [SPEAKER_09]: So one, here's one. I think this is from David Funder.

[00:30:49] [SPEAKER_09]: Characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors and the psychological mechanisms that might be behind those patterns.

[00:30:56] [SPEAKER_09]: So the idea for personality, the theoretical approaches usually trying to find out if there are consistent patterns in individuals across situations and across time.

[00:31:12] [SPEAKER_09]: Trying to see if we can come up with a taxonomy of those differences and trying to understand what might give rise to those differences to begin with.

[00:31:21] [SPEAKER_09]: And then a whole host of other questions like does it make, is it important to understand these differences if what I want to do is say predict job performance or I want to predict life's subjective well-being or longevity or health?

[00:31:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And also how consistent are the differences over the course of a lifetime?

[00:31:43] [SPEAKER_09]: That's right. That's right. So if I ask you questions about your extroversion when you're 12 and it turns out you're really introverted, will that score predicts your introversion, extroversion at age 30 and then at age 70?

[00:32:01] [SPEAKER_09]: So there are some interesting findings there just very briefly like it turns out that past a certain age your personality traits tend to be fixed.

[00:32:12] [SPEAKER_09]: So the difference between age 30 and age 70 will be much smaller than the difference between age 12 and age 30.

[00:32:18] [SPEAKER_09]: So there's some evidence that you kind of sort of, these traits congeal some point during adulthood.

[00:32:25] [SPEAKER_02]: And when you're 29, that's your last chance.

[00:32:29] [SPEAKER_09]: It's your last shot at turning from an extrovert to an introvert.

[00:32:32] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly. Like right that night that you turned.

[00:32:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Right. It's amazing that people like devote time to celebrating their birthday when they really should just be focused on self-improvement.

[00:32:46] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. You know that particular finding makes sense to me given just my own observation of my own life.

[00:32:56] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I actually, like the things that I liked when I was in college for instance they kind of just got stuck there.

[00:33:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. But college, I'm surprised it's not younger frankly.

[00:33:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Like I'm surprised that it's not like when you're in high school or when you're in college that the cutoff is.

[00:33:16] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, that's right. I think college for people who do attend college is like it's forcing you to be exposed to a whole bunch of variety

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_09]: in a way that you'll never be exposed for the rest of your life.

[00:33:27] [SPEAKER_09]: You're exposed to so many different people. You socialize every single day and you're getting this, it's like a buffet of sociability

[00:33:35] [SPEAKER_09]: and then all of a sudden you become an adult with a job and you never fucking talk to anybody.

[00:33:42] [SPEAKER_09]: Never grow.

[00:33:45] [SPEAKER_02]: So you sent me a test that I think is representative of a lot of the personality tests that try to sort of delineate where people are,

[00:33:56] [SPEAKER_02]: what the differences are, what kind of personality you have.

[00:33:59] [SPEAKER_02]: So I took it, maybe we could start by talking about these tests because this is something that I have lived my life sort of innocent of.

[00:34:06] [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't even do the Facebook ones, never mind like a real one like this and it sort of surprises me that it's more than a Facebook quiz.

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Like what friends character are you or what sex in the city, I don't know, like ex-boyfriend are you or whatever.

[00:34:27] [SPEAKER_02]: But people take this stuff seriously like this actually matters and I just want to know about this.

[00:34:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Why are these tests so important and why do we think they have the validity that we apparently think they do?

[00:34:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Right, so it's a good place to start. We'll put a link for those who, I feel like we don't say this enough

[00:34:53] [SPEAKER_09]: but if you go to the website or in your podcast player, we have show notes and we have a bunch of links.

[00:34:59] [SPEAKER_09]: I have a bunch of links that I'll post. One of them will be to taking a personality test that gives you your score

[00:35:07] [SPEAKER_09]: and I think that it's a good place to start to try to understand what it is that personality psychologists are measuring.

[00:35:13] [SPEAKER_09]: So this test that I gave you is one of many tests that are trying to assess where you lie on five different dimensions

[00:35:21] [SPEAKER_09]: and I'll get into why this division into five traits, five very very broad personality components exists.

[00:35:33] [SPEAKER_09]: And the way that they assess this is by just giving you a bunch of questions like I am the life of the party,

[00:35:39] [SPEAKER_09]: I think my ideas are great, I pay careful attention to detail in my work, a whole bunch of these questions.

[00:35:47] [SPEAKER_02]: I care about others, I'm interested in their problems.

[00:35:51] [SPEAKER_09]: That's right. So the five traits that are, and this is the dominant theory of personality within personality psychologists

[00:35:59] [SPEAKER_09]: or at least taxonomy I should say, the big five, the mnemonic is easy, ocean are the first letters of each of these dimensions.

[00:36:12] [SPEAKER_09]: So ocean's openness to experience is one of them. Conscientiousness, which is like how orderly are you, how careful are you,

[00:36:21] [SPEAKER_09]: how good are you at self-control?

[00:36:26] [SPEAKER_09]: I scored very low on conscientiousness.

[00:36:28] [SPEAKER_09]: Conscientiousness is my lowest. Some sample questions there are like I'm exacting in my work, I follow a schedule,

[00:36:35] [SPEAKER_09]: I get chores done right away, I pay attention to details.

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_09]: None of those things.

[00:36:42] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. Some examples for openness to experience are I am full of ideas, I am quick to understand things,

[00:36:51] [SPEAKER_09]: I like abstract ideas. The openness to experience is often called intellect as well.

[00:36:56] [SPEAKER_09]: So it lumps together.

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah that's what I had. I didn't have openness to experience.

[00:37:01] [SPEAKER_09]: Intellect imagination.

[00:37:03] [SPEAKER_09]: Intellect imagination, it lumps together sort of a curiosity dimension that captures intellectual curiosity as well as how open you are to novelty.

[00:37:17] [SPEAKER_09]: Extraversion, introversion is the other dimension and that one has been around for a long time.

[00:37:23] [SPEAKER_09]: Hopefully that's self-explanatory but some sample items would be like I'm the life of the party,

[00:37:28] [SPEAKER_09]: I talk to lots of different people at parties, reverse scored things like I am quite around strangers.

[00:37:37] [SPEAKER_09]: I think a lot before I speak or act, I suspect that both you and I score high on extraversion.

[00:37:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I scored, that was my highest score.

[00:37:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah me too.

[00:37:47] [SPEAKER_09]: Agreeableness is other one, the fourth one.

[00:37:49] [SPEAKER_09]: And it's sort of a concern for social harmony, making sure that people are getting along,

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_09]: that you're getting along with people, your interest in how other people are feeling.

[00:38:01] [SPEAKER_09]: So some sample items are I'm interested in people have a soft heart, I feel others emotions,

[00:38:06] [SPEAKER_09]: I make people feel at ease, reverse coded, I'm not interested in other people's problems.

[00:38:13] [SPEAKER_09]: The opposite, I feel little concern for others.

[00:38:16] [SPEAKER_09]: Just a general concern for the way other people are feeling and for just being liked and having a desire for social harmony.

[00:38:25] [SPEAKER_09]: And the final one is neuroticism which is a, I don't think in the test we took it's called neuroticism.

[00:38:32] [SPEAKER_02]: It's called emotional stability.

[00:38:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Right, so stability or instability and that's a much better way of saying it because neuroticism is so easily conflated with some clinical disorders.

[00:38:45] [SPEAKER_09]: And that just literally means like how, you know, how labile are your emotional responses?

[00:38:50] [SPEAKER_09]: Like do you go...

[00:38:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Labile, that sounds sexual.

[00:38:53] [SPEAKER_09]: That's if you want it to be.

[00:38:56] [SPEAKER_09]: But yeah, how stable are your emotional reactions?

[00:39:00] [SPEAKER_09]: Are you sort of like constantly just a rock and you don't change your emotions,

[00:39:07] [SPEAKER_09]: you don't have swings in your emotions or are you the kind of person who can be very happy

[00:39:14] [SPEAKER_09]: and all of a sudden sort of just like be super pissed that something happened and react emotionally wrong?

[00:39:20] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, and presumably not to the clinical level but just as a sort of quote unquote normal dimension.

[00:39:28] [SPEAKER_09]: Are you the sort of person who you're having a great vacation and then all of a sudden the soup that the waiter brings you is cold

[00:39:35] [SPEAKER_09]: and you're like I can't fucking believe this, you know?

[00:39:38] [SPEAKER_09]: So some of the sample items are I get irritated easily, I get upset easily, I have frequent mood swings,

[00:39:44] [SPEAKER_09]: I worry about things, I'm anxious, I seldom reverse coded, I seldom feel blue.

[00:39:53] [SPEAKER_09]: So you can view this kind of as the presence of negative emotionality even though it's more defined as a swing between positive and negative

[00:40:02] [SPEAKER_09]: but a lot of people view this particular dimension as a rough index of how often you're feeling negative emotions.

[00:40:14] [SPEAKER_09]: So yeah, so those are the five.

[00:40:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Should we just guess each other's or reveal them, divulge them?

[00:40:23] [SPEAKER_09]: Let's do it and I think the best way to try to do this is to just rank them

[00:40:31] [SPEAKER_09]: because the percentile scores, we can give our percentiles but to guess each other's

[00:40:37] [SPEAKER_09]: I would be surprised if we're that different in our rank order.

[00:40:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Just a quick clarification, emotional stability is the score that they give in this test that we took that we're linking to.

[00:40:53] [SPEAKER_09]: When it's called neuroticism it means the higher the number the less stable so the more emotional instability.

[00:40:59] [SPEAKER_09]: In our case the higher the number the more stable.

[00:41:02] [SPEAKER_09]: So we have scores for extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness and intellect imagination.

[00:41:07] [SPEAKER_09]: We've already divulged that extraversion was our highest and we've already divulged that conscientiousness is our lowest.

[00:41:13] [SPEAKER_09]: But by a lot.

[00:41:15] [SPEAKER_09]: By a lot. No this is like a full...

[00:41:18] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm in the second percentile for conscientiousness.

[00:41:21] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm in the twelfth percentile for conscientiousness and I'm in the ninety-sixth percentile for extroversion.

[00:41:25] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm ninety-fifth.

[00:41:26] [SPEAKER_09]: Which is weird because I'm really an introvert.

[00:41:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm really conscientious.

[00:41:33] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm gonna guess that your next one, your next highest one after extroversion is intellect and imagination.

[00:41:39] [SPEAKER_02]: No, that's actually all the way down to fourth.

[00:41:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh wow okay, I'm wrong.

[00:41:46] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know why like I'm a little insulted by that score.

[00:41:51] [SPEAKER_02]: I have like the fifty ninth percentile for that.

[00:41:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Like what the hell?

[00:41:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Like I think I'm imagining it too.

[00:41:56] [SPEAKER_02]: I am smart I think.

[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_09]: Kind of smart enough.

[00:42:02] [SPEAKER_09]: Well like openness to experience is maybe in some ways like a less value laden way of calling it.

[00:42:12] [SPEAKER_09]: But yeah, so...

[00:42:13] [SPEAKER_09]: I've done math.

[00:42:14] [SPEAKER_09]: All right, so I think that then your next one is agreeableness as much as the painting.

[00:42:24] [SPEAKER_02]: They're tied essentially.

[00:42:27] [SPEAKER_02]: Emotional stability and agreeableness.

[00:42:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Emotional stability is the next one but they're both like one of them 78th the other 76th percentile.

[00:42:37] [SPEAKER_09]: So you're 78 in stability?

[00:42:39] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[00:42:39] [SPEAKER_09]: So percentile.

[00:42:41] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm 74th percentile in stability.

[00:42:44] [SPEAKER_09]: What about agreeableness?

[00:42:45] [SPEAKER_09]: And agreeableness is my second biggest one, 87th percentile.

[00:42:49] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh wow, you're way more agreeable than I am.

[00:42:50] [SPEAKER_09]: I really care what people think.

[00:42:52] [SPEAKER_09]: But then I have violent mood swings when they don't like me.

[00:42:57] [SPEAKER_09]: What's your stability score?

[00:42:59] [SPEAKER_09]: My stability is 74th percentile.

[00:43:03] [SPEAKER_09]: Intellect imaginations, 80th percentile and then congenitus this goes all the way down to 12th.

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_09]: Now, it does seem weird that a set of like I think they were 50 questions like the ones

[00:43:13] [SPEAKER_09]: that I was telling you would be the way that you could accurately assess anything.

[00:43:19] [SPEAKER_02]: It seems...

[00:43:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Especially since a lot of the questions are essentially asking the same thing.

[00:43:23] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's really like...

[00:43:24] [SPEAKER_02]: You're asking five things.

[00:43:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right.

[00:43:27] [SPEAKER_02]: They're getting at five but some of them are different ways of getting at it and

[00:43:32] [SPEAKER_02]: others are essentially the same question.

[00:43:34] [SPEAKER_09]: So just to use this as a starting point to talk a little bit about how personality

[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_09]: psychologists came up with this taxonomy.

[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_09]: I think that getting an understanding for the actual items is important.

[00:43:47] [SPEAKER_09]: And as you say, it feels a little weird that they're asking the same thing over and

[00:43:50] [SPEAKER_09]: over again and they're getting your self-report.

[00:43:52] [SPEAKER_09]: So why wouldn't people just say like,

[00:43:55] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm really smart on the life of the party?

[00:43:58] [SPEAKER_09]: But the truth is people don't really have that much trouble saying it, right?

[00:44:00] [SPEAKER_09]: So like there is a very normal distribution of these.

[00:44:07] [SPEAKER_09]: You could be high and low on these and people don't have much problem saying that they...

[00:44:13] [SPEAKER_09]: I wish I were more conscientious but I'm in the 12th percentile.

[00:44:17] [SPEAKER_09]: If I really, really wanted to...

[00:44:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Better than the second percentile.

[00:44:25] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[00:44:26] [SPEAKER_09]: So, you know, I don't think that it's that much of a problem that itself report.

[00:44:36] [SPEAKER_09]: But there definitely are many other ways to assess this and so many of the common ways

[00:44:42] [SPEAKER_09]: to try to get around that is to get other people reporting.

[00:44:46] [SPEAKER_09]: So people who know you well like classmates or parents, friends to rate other people on this

[00:44:53] [SPEAKER_09]: and or teachers for instance, and you can look at peer reports, teacher parent reports

[00:44:58] [SPEAKER_09]: and self-reports and you can kind of get a sense of whether or not the self-report tests

[00:45:05] [SPEAKER_09]: are tracking that and they by and large are.

[00:45:09] [SPEAKER_09]: There's not that much of a difference.

[00:45:11] [SPEAKER_02]: But like so for example the intellect imagination one there are questions that are essentially

[00:45:17] [SPEAKER_02]: do you have an active imagination?

[00:45:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Are you imaginative that like, you know, I answered neutral on those

[00:45:24] [SPEAKER_02]: because I don't know if I have more of an imagination than others.

[00:45:27] [SPEAKER_02]: It seems like people have fucked up imaginations and like I don't have that.

[00:45:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Like I don't have these weird like I don't want someone watching me take a shower.

[00:45:36] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want like so like I always put like neutral for those things

[00:45:41] [SPEAKER_02]: but that's just because of how I'm interpreting imagination maybe.

[00:45:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah so there is the fear that some of the ways in which these traits are described

[00:45:52] [SPEAKER_09]: are actually ambiguous enough that they're going to be read differently by different people

[00:45:57] [SPEAKER_09]: and that's one of the reasons that they try to assess it with a whole bunch of different questions.

[00:46:02] [SPEAKER_09]: Now whether or not that gets around that problem like it's still affecting your score

[00:46:07] [SPEAKER_09]: we should specify that these were where they four point like a yeah, they were five point scales.

[00:46:11] [SPEAKER_09]: So there are two broad things that I think really need to be talked about

[00:46:16] [SPEAKER_09]: when we talk about modern personality psychology and the big five

[00:46:20] [SPEAKER_09]: and any other way, any other theoretical approach.

[00:46:23] [SPEAKER_09]: One is like how the fuck do you come up with a five?

[00:46:26] [SPEAKER_09]: Like why these five?

[00:46:28] [SPEAKER_09]: Like are these actually capturing a real thing

[00:46:31] [SPEAKER_09]: and what it means for a personality trait or attribute to be a real thing at all?

[00:46:37] [SPEAKER_09]: Like what does it even mean to say that you have a trait of extroversion?

[00:46:43] [SPEAKER_09]: Because you could be accused of circularity by saying like well if you behave in an extroverted fashion

[00:46:49] [SPEAKER_09]: is because you possess this underlying trait of extroversion that's causing you to behave

[00:46:53] [SPEAKER_09]: dormant extroverted mesh kind of.

[00:46:55] [SPEAKER_09]: Right yeah.

[00:46:56] [SPEAKER_09]: The other thing I wanted to briefly mention is that early personality psychologists

[00:47:01] [SPEAKER_09]: tried really hard to avoid moral or evaluative as traits.

[00:47:06] [SPEAKER_09]: So what you don't see here is things like what we might call character or virtues.

[00:47:15] [SPEAKER_09]: You don't see things like honesty, you know, or hardworking and that's because courageous or courageous.

[00:47:22] [SPEAKER_09]: They wanted it to be not value laden.

[00:47:25] [SPEAKER_09]: They wanted these to be traits that people that are merely descriptive and not evaluative

[00:47:29] [SPEAKER_09]: and that's changed a little bit.

[00:47:31] [SPEAKER_09]: Like there's been a resurgence in interest in character and character traits.

[00:47:35] [SPEAKER_09]: One of the newer theories of personality psychology is called the hexaco model

[00:47:43] [SPEAKER_09]: and that's just taking the big five and adding an honesty dimension to it.

[00:47:48] [SPEAKER_09]: And the argument there is that there is a reliable individual difference in broadly speaking this kind of moral character trait.

[00:47:58] [SPEAKER_09]: So it was I think it was a judgment call to avoid the evaluative stuff for fear of being accused perhaps

[00:48:08] [SPEAKER_09]: or maybe just out of desire to be rigorous scientifically and not be making value claims

[00:48:12] [SPEAKER_09]: but also maybe out of a fear of being accused of what some of the early people who were interested

[00:48:17] [SPEAKER_09]: in individual differences like Francis Galton who really were comfortable making value claims

[00:48:22] [SPEAKER_09]: and promoting eugenics and stuff like that.

[00:48:24] [SPEAKER_09]: But why the five and this is a really I think super clever and interesting way of trying to figure out how many actual underlying traits you might have.

[00:48:36] [SPEAKER_09]: Like one way of thinking of it is if you take all of the ways in which we can vary

[00:48:43] [SPEAKER_09]: in what we might call our social behavior and our inner subjective life

[00:48:48] [SPEAKER_09]: and you take all of the ways in which we describe each other.

[00:48:51] [SPEAKER_09]: So like if you asked me to describe you Tamela and I list off a whole bunch of things.

[00:48:56] [SPEAKER_09]: How many things am I really saying like when I say that you're funny and that you're outgoing

[00:49:02] [SPEAKER_09]: and that you are the life of the party.

[00:49:05] [SPEAKER_09]: Have I said three things or have I said one thing and the way in which early personality psychologists

[00:49:11] [SPEAKER_09]: actually went about trying to figure out how many dimensions there would be a personality

[00:49:15] [SPEAKER_09]: how many traits are broad broad traits or attributes was just that they took all of the descriptors they could find in a dictionary.

[00:49:25] [SPEAKER_09]: Like how many of these words are describing something that individuals differ on and then they removed the things that were not important.

[00:49:34] [SPEAKER_09]: They're not interesting.

[00:49:35] [SPEAKER_09]: This part was a sort of a judgment call like I don't.

[00:49:40] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah you could differ in height but I'm not right so tall and short describe individuals differences but that's not what I'm interested in.

[00:49:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't relate to personality.

[00:49:50] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah those don't relate to personality so they called all of those words and they were left with thousands of words that described something that you would roughly say as a personality trait.

[00:50:01] [SPEAKER_09]: And what they did then was a statistical method called factor analysis where you take all of those descriptors and they just have people rate themselves rate other people on these traits and they see which of them stick together.

[00:50:20] [SPEAKER_09]: So if I said you were outgoing would I also say that you're funny would I also say that you're the life of the party would it you know they just basically statistically looks to see how many bins.

[00:50:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Would all of these terms fit into and it's a mathematical task and it's very a theoretical it is and you have to make some assumptions but you're basically putting all of that data all of those data into this technique to reduce the data

[00:50:49] [SPEAKER_09]: and you're you're trying to see what the best solution is that's why it one of the reasons I was laughing at the fit of the model in the in the hoax article that we talked about in in part one where he said this is a very good fit although the model makes no sense.

[00:51:05] [SPEAKER_09]: You could it could be the case that right one of the criticisms is that this is completely a theoretical there is nothing that's driving this other than just like brute brute data collection.

[00:51:17] [SPEAKER_09]: But that's nonetheless what they did so and then a few other people did more of that and they did it better and a lot of people have done this it's called sort of a lexical analysis so you're just taking all of the terms that we use to socially describe other people and you're you're getting those ratings

[00:51:34] [SPEAKER_09]: and you're trying to see how many how many how many dimensions there are there's some argument about how many dimensions there are you could force there to be one or two or five or eight but there has been consensus looking at a whole bunch of data that five seems to be the right the right number of dimensions that captures everything seems kind of convenient that all the data.

[00:52:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Kind of points in that direction.

[00:52:05] [SPEAKER_09]: Right well it may then maybe it'll it'll put you at ease to know that a lot of the people who are doing this hate each other and they have arguments about how many.

[00:52:14] [SPEAKER_09]: So some people say there's 16 some people say there's six.

[00:52:19] [SPEAKER_09]: I should say that Sanjay Sravastava co-host of the Black Goat podcast.

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_09]: He's a personality psychologist as is his co-host Samin Vizier they've done a lot of really interesting work on this Sanjay is the one who gave us all of these readings and he's done a lot of work on the big five personality and he wrote a chapter that that informed me a lot on this like it but in some ways it's not that interesting you we could have this question about are there five or six or eight.

[00:52:47] [SPEAKER_09]: But what you end up doing is just splitting the conscientious one conscientiousness dimension into two different ones and just measuring those.

[00:52:58] [SPEAKER_09]: And well that's a loaded way of describing what you end up doing right like to the person who thinks those are two different dimensions like absolutely well and I say that to say that it is to mean that if this is all you're doing if all you're doing is a lexical analysis of terms.

[00:53:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Then you're really you have no leg to stand on if you argue whether there are there 16 or other five.

[00:53:25] [SPEAKER_09]: You're basically getting down to the math like how you interpret the factor analysis statistics.

[00:53:32] [SPEAKER_09]: Well so here's my question about this.

[00:53:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:53:34] [SPEAKER_02]: So what is the way of resolving some of these disagreements.

[00:53:39] [SPEAKER_02]: Is it how predictive of behavior.

[00:53:44] [SPEAKER_02]: The traits turn out to be how predictive of life outcomes.

[00:53:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah well being or how predictive it is on a in a variety of domains is that like what's the check on determining how accurate these methods are.

[00:54:04] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:54:05] [SPEAKER_09]: So that's a good question.

[00:54:07] [SPEAKER_09]: It depends on what you mean by how accurate or how good this is.

[00:54:10] [SPEAKER_09]: So if what you want to know is how many dimensions of personality are there then it's it's a pretty difficult thing because the truth is the more factors and the more questions you toss in there the more predictive it'll be basically the more the more specific I get the better I will be at predicting behavior in specific situations.

[00:54:33] [SPEAKER_09]: If you want to know whether or not I'm you're saying something interesting about the underlying psychological mechanisms like is it some is it really the case that extra version introversion is a meaningful dimension that we could understand sort of in a deeper psychological sense or maybe even in a biological sense then you have to go another route.

[00:54:58] [SPEAKER_09]: So here's a few ways in which people have have tried to get better information about this.

[00:55:04] [SPEAKER_09]: So when you want to look across languages right so so if it really is the case that we lump together that basically we're saying one of five broad things when we describe personality you would want it to be true in other languages.

[00:55:20] [SPEAKER_09]: It's kind of true right like this is that like there's really been not that much research across languages but it's not it's not different enough that you would say there's something deeply wrong with with this big five theory.

[00:55:33] [SPEAKER_09]: A more interesting way to do it is to try to tie it to psychological mechanisms that you might see early in life.

[00:55:42] [SPEAKER_09]: And here's a distinction that's often made a distinction between temperament and personality where temperament is something that is a broader difference that is often tied to basic psychological functioning that you can observe early in life so you can save a baby that it has.

[00:56:03] [SPEAKER_09]: Sort of a negative temperament it's crying a lot is very different than saying they're neurotic.

[00:56:11] [SPEAKER_09]: It's a broader thing but you can measure this and so plenty of people have done these these trying to look at individual differences in the temperament say of infants or of animals even and you can sort of see some of these differences early on in life so if you startle a baby.

[00:56:33] [SPEAKER_09]: As you've had a baby so you know this to be true if you startle a baby you dangle like a novel toy in front of it say and it starts crying.

[00:56:41] [SPEAKER_09]: One of the things you can do is measure how long before it stops crying that measure right how long does it take the baby to calm down turns out to be a fairly stable measure of negative affect that negative affect that we might call neuroticism that you measure if you get enough measures of a baby of a baby's negative affect.

[00:57:04] [SPEAKER_09]: That's predictive of adult personality.

[00:57:07] [SPEAKER_09]: And so you'd want there to be perhaps if you're if you want to make a claim that this extroversion introversion or this neuroticism dimension is capturing something quote unquote real it's not just a quirk of language the way that we describe it not entirely socially constructed.

[00:57:27] [SPEAKER_09]: You'd want it to tie to some sort of biological differences or some sort of early emergent differences differences across animals.

[00:57:35] [SPEAKER_09]: Cross cultural cross cultural differences you'd want all that converging evidence to say hey it really does seem like these these are tapping something real.

[00:57:46] [SPEAKER_09]: And there is a lot of interesting animal work showing that if you observe the behavior of animals and you probably notice this in the dogs that you've had.

[00:57:54] [SPEAKER_09]: Some of them do seem sort of very outgoing and friendly.

[00:57:59] [SPEAKER_09]: And some of them seem super anxious and neurotic right like the Chihuahua Chihuahua was in general.

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_02]: No my pitfall I was like neurotic.

[00:58:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah yeah and the basset hound is like as more relaxed than I will ever be in my whole life at any point.

[00:58:16] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. You can see these differences people have done these observations and notice that at least some of these actually are seen in nonhumans.

[00:58:28] [SPEAKER_09]: So extroversion neuroticism and agreeableness you can actually see across species.

[00:58:34] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's interesting because they they also manifest themselves in this kind of non evaluative way like I love my pit bull mix even though he's so neurotic because it that trait manifolds.

[00:58:46] [SPEAKER_02]: And he manifests itself in other ways the kind of neediness and the kind of that we really like.

[00:58:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And then the other and then the basset mixes he sometimes too chill like you want him to play and get so it has that I take it the big five is supposed to be like that where it's not bad to be high or low in a particular trait.

[00:59:07] [SPEAKER_02]: There are good and bad things about where you are on the spectrum at every point right.

[00:59:13] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly. That's exactly right. That's that that is exactly the way that it's supposed to be interpreted and it's hard like when I teach this to students it's hard you know when you use a term like neuroticism is very hard to try to describe it in a neutral way.

[00:59:29] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. But but there is you know there is he should meet my friend he's really neurotic.

[00:59:34] [SPEAKER_09]: He would love him. Yeah. But you know like in some ways neuroticism is a trait that I I actually value in other people comes along with some some good stuff that that actually like I like it when people get really upset that something didn't go the way that they wanted to go because that's how we get the iPhone because Steve Jobs is neurotic.

[01:00:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Right. Which is currently ruining an entire generation of lives but yeah. Thankfully the neurotic Steve Jobs like decided to do that. Exactly. Worth it. Totally worth the ruining of a generation.

[01:00:13] [SPEAKER_09]: I think I'll say is that there are you know some people point to the heritability research if you look at these big five traits in twin studies for instance.

[01:00:23] [SPEAKER_09]: Much much like any other psychological trait you actually find that there's quite a high degree of heritability. Some are more more than others openness to experiences highly heritable extraversion.

[01:00:35] [SPEAKER_09]: These are like a right around 50 percent heritability index which is it's not a guarantee that just because they're heritable they are biologically based like but you know it it still is is something that people point to as evidence for the biological basis.

[01:00:51] [SPEAKER_02]: So what I what I don't get in the answer to my previous question is what determines whether we say there are five basic personality traits or whether we say there are 10.

[01:01:09] [SPEAKER_02]: How do you decide that you said that you can't go by predictive power because it will always be more predictive to get more specific. And then you you say the way in which you justify that a trait is a trait at all is tying it to either biological or early childhood development research.

[01:01:36] [SPEAKER_02]: But how do you but so like the people who think there are 10 or the people who think yeah like how are they supposed to make their case that we're running together too many things with just having five.

[01:01:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. So if I understand this correctly and eventually we'll have perhaps on your some mean on here to correct me. It really is the case that you are arguing the fit of your mathematical model.

[01:02:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Right to the data. So you're doing not you're doing a couple things you're trying to conceptually make sense of it so if they're like 18 and you look at the data that it mathematically fits with 18 different factors and it doesn't conceptually make sense.

[01:02:24] [SPEAKER_09]: You can't see the similarity between these items in this these items you you you're theoretical and conceptual understanding of something that's sensical does play a role. You're making a kind of a judgment call the items that stick together need to make sense to me.

[01:02:41] [SPEAKER_09]: And then and then you're looking at the fit with more and more data. And so really the reason that we landed on five is because that seemed to be when people were doing these lexical kinds of studies it really did seem to be like mathematically the best fit over and over and over again.

[01:03:00] [SPEAKER_09]: And so if you want to say that there aren't five you have to show that your six factor model fits the data better like when you insert say questions about honesty that in fact that they the items fall into six bins more easily than they fall into five bins.

[01:03:19] [SPEAKER_09]: So you have to show it with the statistics or you have to say look I don't care that it fits so good with the five. You are conceptually conflating in you're conflating two things that conceptually don't make sense. One of them is broadly speaking how much I care about about sorry and agreeableness how much I care about being a moral person versus how much I care about other people like him or something like that.

[01:03:46] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. So so those are really the two ways as I understand it that you would have to argue about how many how many there are.

[01:03:54] [SPEAKER_02]: But then also like so this is going to be a naive question but so one of the ways that we're different you and I that we've talked about is you have this like crippling fear of death.

[01:04:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. And I don't. Yeah. Right. Like I don't really that's just not something that is at the center of my consciousness. But none of the factors could explain that. Right. Yeah. There's nothing in our results that would predict that or that would explain it or that would do anything about that.

[01:04:32] [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sure there's so many of those kinds of things where oh here are people who scored very similar on the big five traits but they seem to be really different when you talk to them in all these significant ways.

[01:04:47] [SPEAKER_09]: I mean yeah. I mean yeah so so that's a really good question right so you might think that it's the neuroticism score that that is that I actually have negative a negative affective reaction to the thoughts of death that can get me from a good mood to a nasty mood very quickly.

[01:05:09] [SPEAKER_09]: And you could say that that's actually captured but there might be something else where you are very similar scores on that. Yeah. And there might be something else.

[01:05:17] [SPEAKER_09]: That you are more you know you might be way more triggered you know by someone insulting your manhood than I am. So so yeah I mean there is a level of abstraction that you it really is a functional like you have to have like what is this theory intended to do right.

[01:05:39] [SPEAKER_09]: And you're going to sacrifice specific predictive power the more you abstract away from something. So say I wanted to categorize cars and trucks you could say look there are there are these things called vehicles there's one dimension that's it is either a vehicle or it isn't but then you might say but like when I'm trying to decide what to drive to work every day I don't want a snowmobile.

[01:06:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Like that really matters to me. And so you say OK let's come up with some more specific categories you have cars you have trucks you have snowmobiles you have boats and and you come up with those and now you're in a sort of a better situation if what you want to do is figure out what to take to commute to work.

[01:06:26] [SPEAKER_09]: But somebody might say but you're losing so much information in your category categorization of cars because there are sedans there are sports cars and that really matters to me. And so you might say fine OK like it would be bad if you want to drive across country to take a Ferrari.

[01:06:42] [SPEAKER_09]: There's very little room in it. It's horrible gas mileage stick shift. And so you could say it is true that there are sports cars and sedans and there are SUVs and there are pickup trucks and you're just it's really just a call that it's a model that has to make sense given what your theoretical

[01:07:00] [SPEAKER_09]: What level. Yeah what level of analysis are you interested in. And one of the ways that that is that researchers justify this level of analysis saying five is good it's good enough is that these seem to capture all of the things broadly that people are interested in when they describe someone else but you're but you're right.

[01:07:24] [SPEAKER_09]: And so one of the criticisms is this the following if we rely on the words that we use to describe each other it's going to be heavily weighted in favor of the things that I care about knowing about somebody that I haven't met yet for instance.

[01:07:41] [SPEAKER_09]: So the psychologist Dan McAdams calls this the psychology of the stranger. It's heavily weighted on information that I want to know about before I meet you for instance I want to know are you easy to get along with.

[01:07:53] [SPEAKER_09]: I want to know are you neat and tidy. But because it's so heavily reliant on the words that we've come up to describe each other. You might really be missing out on a lot of things that are important to us as individuals but that we don't often communicate.

[01:08:08] [SPEAKER_09]: And we don't know that it is important to us. Exactly like it might really matter to me to have sort of like you know it could in fact be that my personal death anxiety is really dominates my psychology like I'm feeling it all the time.

[01:08:25] [SPEAKER_02]: Now nobody would describe you that way like oh this is my friend Dave he's a really nice guy he's really funny because a terrible fear of death.

[01:08:35] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly and and and really what would be more important is if you tell me he's an anxious person right like if you just say he's just a generally anxious person like what do I what do I care if you are anxious because you know because of work or whether you're anxious

[01:08:52] [SPEAKER_09]: because of death or whether you're anxious because whatever. I care that you're anxious.

[01:08:57] [SPEAKER_02]: So wait so let me just see if I understand it because I think the car analogy is really helpful like we have we have kind of figured out a way of dividing cars into categories that we care about like SUV sedan

[01:09:13] [SPEAKER_02]: subcompact hybrid like there are these sort of categories that when you're looking to buy a new car use this I want to buy this kind of car and then you will Google that and they'll give you like the rankings of that kind of car and so that seems completely

[01:09:33] [SPEAKER_02]: unproblematic it doesn't seem like it's carving nature at the joints or it's capturing some like real platonic difference between right it's just a useful way of distinguishing what consumers want and what car makers are making

[01:09:51] [SPEAKER_02]: and if you want to get more specific than that you can right you know I want to stand I want to stick shift and I want an automatic transmission or I want a NS like a lot like a compact SUV or large SUV like a large

[01:10:05] [SPEAKER_09]: you're making me feel like I'm renting a car because all of this kind of car I don't know

[01:10:10] [SPEAKER_02]: right then car rental sometimes this is what I was saying like this is what happens when the categories are bad they have like because they're trying to do something else exactly not yeah they're giving you like you know subcompact compact

[01:10:23] [SPEAKER_02]: right like mid range and like those are kind of meaningless you don't really know unless you know the car yeah because they're not trying to categorize it in a helpful way they're trying to categorize it in a way that'll make you buy the car

[01:10:38] [SPEAKER_02]: so you can see exactly so so that's all very helpful what and if that's what the like personality psychology is doing then great but what strikes me as and you alluded to this earlier is something that we all really do want to know

[01:10:58] [SPEAKER_02]: that isn't captured in these traits as far as I can see is that more evaluative or moral dimension so far we're describing you I would say you're yes you're funny you can be a little anxious sometimes but but you're like a good person you're

[01:11:17] [SPEAKER_09]: a generous person I think you'll stand up for principle and stand up for yourself when it's called like I would describe certain aspects of you that I don't see in these division I think that's a really fair criticism and this is why the I would say like in the last 10-15 maybe more years an interest in character has really emerged because of this dissatisfaction

[01:11:47] [SPEAKER_09]: genuinely I think that this was some sort of weird desire like a mix of just empiricism and positivism and what science needed to be that we took away those dimensions the evaluative aspect of it because we

[01:12:05] [SPEAKER_09]: I think there when you said carving nature at its joints there is a real desire by some personality theorists to to really carve nature at its joints and say that like extroversion introversion anxiety you know neuroticism that these are actually tied to particular biological systems that will be seen across not just humans

[01:12:30] [SPEAKER_09]: but other mammals and perhaps other non mammals and that is what makes it the true dimension and I think you could argue that and you could say well that's why if I'm interested in the biological aspect of personality and I look at temperament and I look at

[01:12:47] [SPEAKER_09]: you know approach avoidance systems in the brain and I look at emotion and how biology causes positive and negative emotion based on these biological goals you I think you'd be fine saying like I think there are these three dimensions or two dimensions that are are capturing personality in a deep fundamental way

[01:13:08] [SPEAKER_09]: and fuck your evaluative part but if what you want to do is really capture something that is more than that something that is would be true of all humans and important to humans even even in an evolutionary sense right some have argued exactly

[01:13:25] [SPEAKER_09]: you say the first thing I want to know about somebody isn't whether they're neurotic it is whether or not they're good right whether they're trustworthy whether they're whether you can count on them whether exactly and as to as two people who study at like ethics broadly speaking yeah it's almost

[01:13:47] [SPEAKER_09]: it's almost just a super obvious loudly telling me when I look at these lists I don't want to say a moral thing like yeah it's almost like they're doing gymnastics theoretical gymnastics to not let you put honesty or goodness or trustworthiness and any of these so it's kind of lumped between agreeableness and and conscientiousness

[01:14:10] [SPEAKER_09]: maybe and maybe with a dab in rotticism there they are on purpose not doing it and and so some have argued that even if you take like a hardcore evolutionary approach and you say what is the social information that I'm interested in not just the biological not just the sort of

[01:14:39] [SPEAKER_02]: in that kind of information and that that alone should be reason to tweak your conceptual model to include it and it's an obvious mistake right yeah anytime like you know you look at cultures with arranged marriages and that's what is their concerned with is this person a good person are they an honest

[01:14:59] [SPEAKER_02]: person are they a courageous person

[01:15:02] [SPEAKER_02]: and so I mean it's bizarre because that like fundamentally we know right it's not controversial that we are social creatures but also moral creatures in that we are concerned about norms social norms moral norms and living up to them and punishing people who transgress them and rewarding people who adhere to them right I mean that's that's something

[01:15:28] [SPEAKER_09]: that you see in cultural psychology evolutionary psychology all of it yeah so my I agree I totally agree there is I alluded to this newer model of personality called the hexagon model which is just the the big five plus this dimension and I'll put a link to the to the Wikipedia of this

[01:15:50] [SPEAKER_09]: dimension called honesty humility so

[01:15:55] [SPEAKER_09]: so honesty humility is sincerity fairness greed avoidance and modesty and so the kinds of adjectives you would use are since he's this she's sincere honest faithful loyal unassuming

[01:16:11] [SPEAKER_09]: versus the opposite slide deceitful greedy pretentious hypocritical boastful pompous so that they think that with the six you might capture more of the the traits that you might be interested in even that I don't know that's that seems like you're lumping a hundred different things together all in one category of moral right like whether somebody

[01:16:34] [SPEAKER_02]: is loyal I wouldn't think has much to do with whether their pompous

[01:16:41] [SPEAKER_09]: and that gets us yeah that's a good segue sorry I didn't mean to know that's yeah that's all I wanted to say that yeah that that I totally agree and that gets to the question then of alright say that I want to predict your behavior in a given situation are these tests doing a good job like is this is this actually doing

[01:17:03] [SPEAKER_09]: because you can argue till whatever the cows come home is that the phrase to the dog cow dogs come out cows cows I was raised by him it by dogs are already home the dogs are about how many dimensions there ought to be conceptually or given your factor analysis or whatever

[01:17:22] [SPEAKER_09]: and you might like like I said before you might just say well if I can't see it in nonhuman animals then it's not what I want my model to be but you're there you're just really making a judgment about level of analysis you're saying well I want to I want to tie these to bio biology

[01:17:41] [SPEAKER_09]: but if you don't if you're willing to admit that this is a social human thing then the then the question changes a little bit and then I think it's important to say like if for instance

[01:17:52] [SPEAKER_09]: if I want to predict how another person is going to act what information do I need are is is information on on these five dimensions enough is the sixth dimension enough should there be more and there's where you get into some of the the predictive validity issues about these tests so

[01:18:15] [SPEAKER_09]: a little bit of background very quickly personality psychology almost died entirely at the end of the 60s because of something we've talked about before called the situation is critique so the claim was all you personality psychologists who have been studying all these personality traits are dumb because if you look across situations

[01:18:41] [SPEAKER_09]: the situation shapes behavior way more than any personality trait and if you look across studies personality traits are really really bad at predicting behavior in any given situation so so the power of this situation trumps personality and it literally that critique

[01:19:03] [SPEAKER_09]: even though it was more nuanced than that it was more of a claim of like you have to study both things and how they interact it was taken as sort of a death blow to personality psychology and really between 1968 which is when Walter Michelle published that book that critiqued it and probably the 80s there was just barely any research on personality

[01:19:26] [SPEAKER_09]: but then the virtue emphasis struck back and then they came back the air take turn

[01:19:32] [SPEAKER_09]: it grew and there were like it was realized that there were problems with the criticism like how you measure behavior and and how good the measures of personality are really matter and it turns out that there is a lot of predictive validity in in personality

[01:19:55] [SPEAKER_09]: and how to test it depends on what you're trying to predict what behavior you're trying to predict and this gets to the but the thing that it the way it's predictive is like it will predict job performance or that kind of thing

[01:20:08] [SPEAKER_09]: right reported self report well being or yeah all of those things so we know for instance that people who are high in extraversion tend to be happier tend to report these dimensions happy because these

[01:20:23] [SPEAKER_09]: but yeah well yeah that's that could be a problem and we have no good way of assessing well being that's not subjective assessment but yes I mean and it's even more problematic because extraversion say and neuroticism because they roughly adhere to positive emotion

[01:20:43] [SPEAKER_09]: and negative emotion is no surprise that people who are high in positive emotion report being happier right and also report being higher and positive emotion yeah or it being happier right but it's even no surprise that people who report being super high

[01:21:01] [SPEAKER_09]: and conscientiousness are more organized in their job place right so right that's not you know unless people are lying and in fact I'll put a link to this to some of the really interesting work in personality has been done by Sam Gosling at

[01:21:29] [SPEAKER_09]: the end of the day. So if you can assess people's personality traits by just looking at their shit not their literal shit but like I like tea leaves but like their stuff so if I come into your office at work or say your dorm room

[01:21:45] [SPEAKER_09]: here's a really obvious one that is the easiest to assess openness to experience so if I go and I look at your bookshelf it's not that hard to predict openness to experience by looking at the range of books that you're interested in right you can you can predict things like

[01:22:05] [SPEAKER_09]: extraversion and conscientiousness obviously like if you have a very well organized room right you might be high in consciousness and so one way of describing these findings is that it's cool and sexy that you can predict people's scores on the personality

[01:22:24] [SPEAKER_02]: inventories by looking at their stuff so you say that sexy that you can sexier right like you're going break into somebody's house and look at their stuff and like predict things about them is sexy which which gets us scientifically sexy but that gets us exactly to that

[01:22:43] [SPEAKER_09]: creepiness that you just described gets us exactly to the Cambridge Analytica Facebook fiasco because what you can do is use Facebook data now in the case of Cambridge Analytica it was a personality psychologist who just did one of those like one of the questionnaires that you took today that we both took is like something

[01:23:04] [SPEAKER_09]: like that a shorter version of that and sold those data to people who were interested in targeting political ads self report in many cases self report peer report whatever scores on these dimensions do a decent job of predicting certain kinds of behaviors whether or not the fear that Cambridge Analytica was going to get like give people a

[01:23:25] [SPEAKER_09]: political enhancement by matching their personality to their behavior that's super doubtful like I don't think that they could have done very much with these data that would have made their political ads any better than just the simple like is this person a liberal or conservative

[01:23:43] [SPEAKER_09]: so the hope might have been on something that I wanted to get around talking to you that political orientation actually is predicted by your score on certain of these big five so so I'll leave it like I want to see what you what you would think predicts liberal or conservative in the big five

[01:24:02] [SPEAKER_02]: okay interesting yeah yeah extra version I'm going to say more conservative higher and extra version more conservative

[01:24:17] [SPEAKER_09]: okay before I tell you then what's up before I give you the answer what do you think is a high liberal high liberal I guess the one that's like empathy agreeableness is that the one agreeableness yeah agreeableness so

[01:24:34] [SPEAKER_02]: but I but I you know it's it's complicated like I'm not sure like these are these are wild guesses conscientiousness maybe

[01:24:41] [SPEAKER_09]: so the I think that a good representation of the findings in general or that openness to experience like trying out new things oh that's live that's going to be liberal that's that's the highest distinguish between liberals right that yeah you're high

[01:24:55] [SPEAKER_09]: almost by definition right like again it's almost like a conservative who does not like change and a liberal who wants new things right yeah conservatives are actually higher on conscientiousness so like that

[01:25:11] [SPEAKER_09]: tightness that order desire for order like that yeah that is more likely a conservative trick extreme it's the Germans like exactly totalitarian keep order at least the trains run on time

[01:25:28] [SPEAKER_09]: as a french guy being German now I was like a bad Italian because of Mussolini it's about Mussolini's at least I didn't train the renon time liberals are high liberals are higher in neuroticism yeah I think that's I think that's just racism against Jews but whatever

[01:25:49] [SPEAKER_02]: the and American and extroversion doesn't seem to predict so you have that that makes now this is all like pre like all we need is to know which hand they wipe their ass with right like I guess that that that that was just published so they did

[01:26:05] [SPEAKER_09]: the the hope the real contribution of that study is that you we wouldn't need to ask people like all these stupid big five questions we can just ask them one

[01:26:16] [SPEAKER_09]: need the periscope under the toilet alright so there's one there's one thing that I wanted to say about your value like the moral question because I think that you're right about the motivation to know about someone's personality is that it is valenced and you

[01:26:35] [SPEAKER_09]: I think that you can't shake the fact that it is valenced so by removing by trying your best to avoid value judgments in personality traits I think you're missing the motivation that people have to know usually right like let's say you and I like we have similar aged daughters

[01:26:53] [SPEAKER_02]: and let's say we go away for I don't know a month somewhere and then we find out that both of our daughters have boyfriends and now we're asking what's the kid like right I mean God forbid this ever happens that they do get boyfriends but

[01:27:11] [SPEAKER_02]: well then I get girlfriends don't don't be so heteronormative that's right I won't be heteronormative so what are the questions you're going to ask is he a scumbag is he is he funny is he like so there's a lot of questions but the idea that

[01:27:26] [SPEAKER_09]: moral questions aren't going to be at the forefront of what we care about is is insane yeah yeah no I totally agree and I think again I think it's a mix of this desire to be quote unquote scientific and avoid value judgments which is dumb and and some desire to to find like biological substrates

[01:27:51] [SPEAKER_02]: like a cross speech which is a bizarre thing to yeah well even with dogs you don't want like like I don't care like if I want to know if you're but like in the market for a dog and let's say you're going purebred you know you're not going to look only for traits that would also describe turtles or would also describe

[01:28:10] [SPEAKER_09]: like tigers no but but to be fair like to be fair there is one of the reasons that that people look to the biology right it's not that they so much want the conceptual you know the propositional knowledge of what distinguishes turtles from each other it's more that

[01:28:28] [SPEAKER_09]: there is an understanding that at least in the mammalian brain there are these systems that are dedicated to approach versus avoidance behavior so you have you know everybody has roughly a system that is about reward like dopamine right like approach novelty but then roughly a system that's that's fear and avoidance and it's meant to protect you from threat

[01:28:53] [SPEAKER_09]: and if you understand those two broad systems as being present in the in the brains of most mammals and perhaps other animals then you can understand positive emotionality and a desire for novelty like things that really underlie extraversion and openness to experience as being your sort of your set point being higher for the approach system

[01:29:15] [SPEAKER_09]: and if and neuroticism and you know like emotional ability and anxiety and and skepticism about you know being low on openness to experience that's your threat system your avoidance system is set higher so that the the at least the hope and the claim is that understanding the how individuals differ in their biological set points for those two systems is an interesting way of understanding why it is that

[01:29:43] [SPEAKER_09]: say conservatives and liberals believe the things they do because it really does boil down to to a biological feature of their nervous system that gave rise to these more complex social characteristics and behavior.

[01:29:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay so that's it so there are two things at play here that that might be in tension at a certain point but now I think I'm starting to get it on the one hand you have what is the biological explanation for why people might differ along certain dimensions and having cross species evidence can cast

[01:30:28] [SPEAKER_02]: a lot of light on that question and is also just independently fascinating the fact that you know we might share certain traits with dogs and other animals and have certain differences.

[01:30:45] [SPEAKER_02]: With you know within the species that are parallel to the differences within their species that's really interesting and then there's this other question which I so so I understand that motivation but then there's this other question of what do you want to know about a person when you're describing them to distinguish them for another person

[01:31:05] [SPEAKER_02]: and the and the things those are two really different questions that might have very different kinds of answers or might produce very different kinds of models for for answering those questions both are important but it seems like they will be conflated or they'll have to you'll

[01:31:24] [SPEAKER_02]: have to sacrifice one goal to get the other goal if you're looking for one unitary model.

[01:31:31] [SPEAKER_09]: No you the way you said that is exactly right and I wish I had been able to say that.

[01:31:39] [SPEAKER_09]: Only because before given me the.

[01:31:43] [SPEAKER_09]: But this is exactly the right now I don't know that I would have said it without without this discussion because you can imagine that there is some overlap between those two and you could say that.

[01:31:55] [SPEAKER_09]: I am like I want to know whether or not somebody is brave and and you could imagine that that has some overlap with the biological system that is low on threat response and high on curiosity and and novelty and risk taking.

[01:32:16] [SPEAKER_09]: And so so it makes sense that at least some of the things that we're interested in in learning about other people were interested in by dint of being animals that have to navigate an environment and we have different different designs but.

[01:32:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Obviously by dint of being social animals with language and the ability to do you know to lie for instance that is creates a whole other thing and like I don't really give a fuck like if that is a biological substrate to honesty.

[01:32:46] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I just care whether or not there's a reliable way to know whether or not somebody's honest right and if you tell me that honesty is very different from.

[01:32:55] [SPEAKER_09]: From bravery then OK I'll ask two questions you know or whatever it takes because that like that's what I want to know.

[01:33:04] [SPEAKER_09]: And you can imagine that you could come up with a kind of carving nature at its joints way of of accounting for these these differences you might say that like evolutionary pressures that gave rise to you know to the way in which we coordinate socially and what what traits are important.

[01:33:23] [SPEAKER_09]: You know like being able to detect cheaters and punish them or being you know being altruistic.

[01:33:28] [SPEAKER_09]: It could be that that that influences our minds to care about this information but it could also be that it's like just something that emerged like because of our the complexity of our culture right and you might even expect that there is differences in cultures like I don't really care that much about risk taking in bravery.

[01:33:49] [SPEAKER_09]: You know if I'm thinking about like who I want to be friends with.

[01:33:53] [SPEAKER_09]: But you know but I might care if I'm asking them to join my hunting group.

[01:34:01] [SPEAKER_09]: And so it could just be that there is a huge layer of socially constructed things that are interesting and that would give us motivation to say there are 16 things I care about.

[01:34:14] [SPEAKER_09]: And that wouldn't have to map on one to one to anything biological other than knowing the biology causes minds.

[01:34:21] [SPEAKER_09]: Right like it's not of course biology.

[01:34:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah and you're interested in them for different reasons often.

[01:34:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah like the sometimes you're interested in knowing the personality without giving a shit why the person has that.

[01:34:41] [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly whether it's biological or whether it's their culture or whether it's because of social media or whatever it is or because they had a trauma.

[01:34:50] [SPEAKER_02]: It's just you just want to know how they are.

[01:34:53] [SPEAKER_02]: And then other times you're fascinated by the question of well what what gives rise to the fact that this person is highly anxious or highly neurotic.

[01:35:03] [SPEAKER_09]: So actually that that reminds me of one maybe last thing because we've been talking for a long time but that there are a lot of people who believe that many forms of mental illness are simply being an extreme on basic personality dimensions.

[01:35:23] [SPEAKER_09]: And so one of my friends Rachel Grazipli and studied this in graduate school.

[01:35:29] [SPEAKER_09]: The claim would be that if you are super duper high in openness to experience you start developing what people might call schizophrenia if I remember it correctly that this individual variation that many forms of mental illness are simply capturing people at the tail ends of the distribution of normal personality variation.

[01:35:52] [SPEAKER_09]: Which might be a proof of way of understanding mental illness is just like sucks for you you happen to have like really big feet sucks for you you happen to be really really high on this trade trade.

[01:36:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah I mean we should do a mental illness episode at some point.

[01:36:07] [SPEAKER_02]: I was coming across a lot of this research on how we define mental illness and how culturally variable that can be and how that's changed across periods of time as well.

[01:36:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's probably some parallel kind of ideas here where the ways in which these categories get delineated has to do with certain contingent and cultural factors as well.

[01:36:36] [SPEAKER_09]: I have a friend here who is a professor of I think Greek.

[01:36:43] [SPEAKER_09]: He's super interested in in how mental illness has been defined across time and across cultures and he has a lot to say on the matter but by basically just by looking at the ancients right and like what they talked about.

[01:36:58] [SPEAKER_09]: But it's like one of his central interests.

[01:37:00] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah there's a lot to be unpacked there about what the disease model you know why why we why we have the classifications that we do.

[01:37:13] [SPEAKER_09]: And a lot of it is super arbitrary.

[01:37:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah all of a sudden like everyone has a dd.

[01:37:20] [SPEAKER_02]: You know so we can get at her all.

[01:37:22] [SPEAKER_09]: I mean there's yeah that's the that's the functional reason.

[01:37:25] [SPEAKER_09]: So it's a big pharmaceutical can.

[01:37:28] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah it's like the reason I have baldness is to take propitia.

[01:37:37] [SPEAKER_02]: All right well we hope we've done the topic justice I learned a lot anyway.

[01:37:42] [SPEAKER_09]: I hope so too to my personality psychologist friends I apologize for misrepresenting large swaths of what you said.

[01:37:49] [SPEAKER_09]: But yeah I'll put links to a lot of what I discussed link to Sanjay's website they just the black goat podcast I just saw did an episode on situationism.

[01:38:01] [SPEAKER_09]: That I haven't listened to yet but I think it'd be interesting for our listeners because as personality psychologists they really care about that critique and so there might be some more more info for you guys if you're interested in that.

[01:38:13] [SPEAKER_02]: They might be extra hard on Zimbardo and some of them.

[01:38:19] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure this is why.

[01:38:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Psychology psychology almost died.

[01:38:24] [SPEAKER_09]: We already know that Sanjay is a methodological terrorist.

[01:38:28] [SPEAKER_09]: And he and a bully Samine is very very nice.

[01:38:33] [SPEAKER_09]: She never comes across as a bully.

[01:38:35] [SPEAKER_02]: But maybe she's the kind of bully that does it behind the scenes.

[01:38:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah so so they're all bullies.

[01:38:45] [SPEAKER_02]: All right well join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:38:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks again to our Patreon listeners for suggesting the topic.