Full transcript
0:00[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
0:12We've discussed the big five traits: extroversion, that's sensitivity to positive emotion.
0:18Neuroticism: it's sensitivity to negative emotion.
0:21Not all negative emotions. Mostly fear, anxiety, and emotional pain seem to load on neuroticism.
0:28Disgust, which is another negative emotion.
0:31It seems to be more associated [COUGHS] with conscientiousness, particularly its orderliness aspect.
0:40Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
0:43We're going to talk about agreeableness today.
0:45Agreeableness is a very difficult personality dimension to understand, I think.
0:50Partly because it's difficult to dissociate from neuroticism, and as well from extroversion.
0:57Because agreeable people like you, and so that kind of sounds like extroversion.
1:01And disagreeable people sound like they're hard to get along with. And they sort of are.
1:06But people who are high in neuroticism are hard to get along with too.
1:09And they tend to be volatile and irritable.
1:12And so most of the time, if you're engaged in a contentious issue with someone, and emotions flare, it usually has more to do with trait neuroticism than with disagreeableness per se.
1:23So what I'm going to do is try to describe to you what the agreeable trait is, on both of its dimensions.
1:29And also to lay out the pros and cons of existence on that normal distribution trait at more or less every point.
1:39Because I think, the way I look at it anyways, is, of all the traits, agreeableness is the one that seems to come with the most marked positive and negative aspects.
1:50Features, let's say, so we don't confuse it with aspects.
1:52The most positive and negative features at each point on the distribution.
1:56It seems to be a very, very complex dimension.
1:59So, I'll read you some of the questions from the Big Five Aspects Scale and that will give you an initial rule-of-thumb estimate about whether or not you're agreeable or disagreeable.
2:09And so here are some of the questions.
2:12Imagine that you're answering these for yourself on a scale from one to five, strongly disagree to strongly agree.
2:19So the first question is:
2:22I'm not interested in other people's problems.
2:25So, if you are interested in other people's problems, that tilts you towards agreeableness.
2:31Agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness.
2:34Which also sound like very positive things, right?
2:36Because everyone wants to be compassionate, and everyone wants to be polite.
2:39And so you might say, "Well, is that a virtue? Are those virtues, with the other end being actually negative, to be not compassionate, not polite."
2:49It's certainly worded that way.
2:51And that's actually a mistake, because we know that these traits are normally distributed, roughly speaking, right?
2:56And that that means that there has to be positive and negative features at every single position on the distribution.
3:04And so to make the pre-supposition, for example, that being extroverted is better than being introverted, or that being emotionally stable is necessarily better than being neurotic, is to make a kind of confusion of moral obligation with trait position.
3:24You have to assume that there's advantages and disadvantages all the way along, or the distribution wouldn't have set itself up that way.
3:30Especially because these things seem to be biologically instantiated traits.
3:35So
3:35Anyways
3:37If you're interested in other people's problems, they like to unburden themselves to you, you care about them: that's a mark of compassion.
3:44If you're more or less indifferent to other people's stupid problems and you wish they'd just get on with it, then you're less compassionate.
3:51You're harsher and more, well, at the extreme, more callous.
3:58Ah, let's see.
4:02Respect authority.
4:03That's politeness.
4:05That's part of agreeableness.
4:16Feel others' emotions.
4:18Compassion.
4:21Inquire about others' wellbeing.
4:23Compassion.
4:29Can't be bothered with others' needs.
4:32Take advantage of others.
4:34That's disagreeable, obviously.
4:37Sympathize with others' feelings.'
4:39Avoid imposing my will on others.
4:43Wait for others to lead the way.
4:46Okay, I think all of those are associated with the trait agreeableness or disagreeableness.
4:50So let's think about this for a minute.
4:52So I'm going to tell you how I conceptualize agreeableness.
4:56The first thing you want to know is that women are more agreeable than men.
4:58About half a standard deviation.
5:01And that's approximately enough so that if you took a random male and a random female out of the population, and you tried to guess who was more agreeable, and you guessed the female, you'd be right about 60% of the time.
5:12But what's interesting about that, and this is something also to keep in mind, about normal distributions, you know.
5:19Imagine you have normal distribution, so that most people are in the middle.
5:22And then you have another normal distribution, male and female, and mostly they overlap.
5:27But, you see, out here, and out here, they don't overlap at all.
5:32And so, even though on average, men and women aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group,
5:40if you go out and you look at the extremes, they're very different.
5:43So all of the most agreeable people are women, and all of the most disagreeable people are men.
5:48And the thing is, the extremes are often what matter, rather than what's in the middle.
5:52And so one of the ways that's reflected in society, by the way, is there's way more men in prison.
5:58And the best personality predictor of being in prison is to be low in agreeableness.
6:02It makes you callous.
6:04Now, you might think, "What's the opposite of compassion and politeness?"
6:07And the answer to that is, I think it's best conceptualized as a trading game.
6:14So let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games.
6:18And if you're very agreeable, then you're going to bargain harder on my behalf than you're going to bargain on your own behalf.
6:25Whereas if you're very disagreeable, you're going to do the reverse.
6:27You're going to think, "I'm in this trading game for me, and you're going to take care of your own interests."
6:32Where an agreeable person is going to say, "No, no, at worst this has to be 50-50, but I'd like to help you every way I can."
6:41Okay, so you kind of understand that.
6:43Now the advantage to being agreeable, then, is that you're good in teams and you're very much likely to give other people credit.
6:49The down side of being agreeable is that you're not good at putting forward your own interests.
6:54And so one of the things that predicts salary across time, for example, is agreeableness, and it predicts it negatively.
7:00And so it's part of the reason why women get paid less than men, and this is something for the women in the class to really listen to.
7:07Because how you get paid across time depends on a very large number of things, right?
7:12It depends on your skills and your abilities and your position and your social network and all of that.
7:17But the other thing it depends on is whether or not you actually go ask for money.
7:20Or maybe that you don't even ask.
7:22Because actually, you don't ask for money.
7:24You tell people that you need to be paid more or something they don't like will happen.
7:28And I don't mean as a threat.
7:29I mean that you have to be willing, when you're negotiating, to have an alternative.
7:34You go talk to your boss, who isn't going to give you money, because everyone wants money, right?
7:38It's a competitive game.
7:40You're going to have to go there and say, "Look, here's what I do. Here's why it's useful. Here's why you have to give me more money. And this is my opportunities if you don't."
7:50And then, you're not taking your boss's money anyway, because it's very frequently the case that he's working for a whopping big company.
7:57But he needs an excuse to give you money because everyone's asking for money all the time.
8:03And so you have to put your case forward powerfully and disagreeably.
8:08Now, you don't want to do it too disagreeably because then he's gonna think that you're a son of a bitch and maybe he's not gonna give you anything and maybe you'll get fired for being mouthy, and all of that.
8:16And that certainly happens to people who are too disagreeable.
8:19You gotta get the balance right.
8:21But it's definitely the case.
8:22And the other thing that happens to women that's also worth noting, and this is probably because they're higher in negative emotion, is they tend to underestimate their own utility in business settings.
8:31Right, because if you're trying to evaluate what you're like, and you're more tilted toward negative emotion, then the things that you do that are wrong are gonna stand out more on the foreground than the things that you do that are right.
8:43So if you go into a negotiation, and you're uncertain already, because you have self doubts, and then you're agreeable in the negotiation, what's going to happen is that you're not going to win as often.
8:55And winning, in a business setting, or in a career development setting, means more opportunity for promotion and more revenue generated.
9:02Now, the downside of that, of course, is as you climb the business hierarchy, you also have to take on more responsibility, and that responsibility is sometimes unpleasant as well, especially to people who are agreeable.
9:13Because you're not necessarily liked if you're in a position of authority.
9:17And agreeable people really like to be liked.
9:19It's their primary motivator because they're concerned about the maintenance of intimate, positive relationships.
9:27That also makes them conflict avoidant.
9:30Okay so now, you guys can think about this, but I'll tell you why I think the personality differences between men and women exist.
9:39Now, these are speculative hypotheses, but they're reasonably well documented by the relevant literature.
9:46So let's think about it.
9:47The first thing we might think about is: what's the difference between men and women?
9:51How do they differ?
9:53Well the first thing we might observe is that if you look at personality differences between pre-pubescent boys and girls, they're not very large.
10:01Boys and girls don't differ in terms of their trait neuroticism, for example.
10:06What happens is that, when puberty kicks in, women's trait neuroticism rises and it stays higher than men for the rest of their life.
10:13And this is why you see this reflected in the different kinds of psychopathology that beset the two sexes.
10:19So men are over-represented in alcoholism, drug abuse, anti-social personality, and a host of learning disorders as well as attention deficit disorder.
10:27And women are over-represented in depression and anxiety, primarily.
10:31That seems to be tightly associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism.
10:34Because if you're at the 95th percentile or higher, let's say, in trait neuroticism,
10:40there isn't much difference between that and being somewhat prone to depression and anxiety.
10:45And because the curves overlap, the curves aren't identical,
10:51the normal distributions aren't identical for men and women, you tilt the women's curve to the right towards higher levels of neuroticism.
10:59You go out and you look for the person in twenty who has the highest levels of negative emotion.
11:04It's much more likely to be female than male.
11:06Okay, so let's see if we can figure out why.
11:08So, we're gonna tell you some basic differences between men and women and you can tell me what you think about it, if you agree or disagree.
11:15Okay, first.
11:17Size differential emerges between men and women at puberty, right?
11:21Because boys and girls are roughly the same size and roughly the same strength.
11:24But men get bigger at puberty, when testosterone kicks in.
11:27And more importantly, not only do they get taller and heavier, but their upper body strength is much higher.
11:33And that's a real issue for combat, because human beings punch, and there's other animals that do that.
11:39Kangaroos do that too, so we're not the only people that punch.
11:43But we have clubs on the ends of our arms, and so that's how we defend ourselves.
11:47And so if you have a lot of upper body strength, especially across the shoulders, and you're heavier, then you can step into the punch and it's a lot more devastating.
11:55Now it is the case that, if you look at the statistics for physical altercations in marriage, women attack their husbands more often than husbands attack their wives.
12:04Well, you think, "Why is that?"
12:06Well, let's assume that there isn't any reason, other than both people in a relationship can get upset, and the women know that if they hit their husbands, nothing's really going to happen.
12:16Right, because if you're a woman about that high, and your husband is, say, my height,
12:22unless you hit me with an object or something that's sharp, the probability that you're going to do me any serious damage is pretty low.
12:28You might hurt me.
12:29But if I do the reverse, and hit you, and I really hit you then I might kill you.
12:33And so, at least one of the reasons why women can be more physically aggressive in minor ways in a relationship
12:40is because everyone knows, the wife and the husband equally, that the consequence of the physical aggression is much more limited.
12:47So, men do more serious damage to women.
12:50But women are more aggressive in relationships.
12:53So that's interesting.
12:54So ok, so there's a body size difference that's important,
12:57a strength differential that's important.
12:59Next thing, I think...
13:02So let's assume that the reason that women are higher in sensitivity to negative emotion
13:05is because the world is actually more dangerous to women, right?
13:09Because that would be the most logical reason why there would be a
13:12sex difference in something like fear sensitivity and punishment.
13:17Well first there's the danger of physical altercation.
13:20Second, there's the sexual danger.
13:23So women become sexually vulnerable at puberty.
13:26And why do I say vulnerable?
13:27Well it's straightforward.
13:29It's because the cost of sex for women is way higher than it is for men.
13:32Or it certainly has been throughout our evolutionary history.
13:35Because if a man has an unwanted sexual encounter,
13:39well then he walks away and maybe he is persecuted by the the state or prosecuted by the state for it.
13:43But if a woman has an unwanted, unwarranted, or incautious sexual encounter,
13:48and she ends up pregnant,
13:50then, well, in traditional societies, you're just done.
13:54And even in modern societies that are rich like ours,
13:56you're... it's a... I don't have to go into that.
14:01It's big trouble.
14:02No matter what you do about it, it's big trouble.
14:04So being more nervous about that makes perfect sense.
14:08But then, here's the last thing.
14:11I think that women's nervous systems are not adapted to women.
14:16I think women's nervous systems are adapted to the mother-infant dyad.
14:21Because you are not the same creature when you have an infant.
14:24Not at all.
14:24You're way more vulnerable.
14:26And it's partly because you have to express the vulnerability of the infant.
14:30And you also have to care for it.
14:32Right, so, you think about an infant, especially under nine months.
14:35So let's say, how are you going to be wired up if you're going to optimally care for an infant under nine months?
14:41And I'm saying under nine months because women generally do the bulk of child care for infants who are under nine months old.
14:47And part of the reason for that, there's a whole host of reasons, but part of the reasons for that, obviously,
14:51is that they breast-feed.
14:53But imagine what you need to be wired up biologically in order to care for an infant.
14:57First of all, they're very demanding.
15:00Right?
15:00Because they're completely helpless.
15:02And they're demanding twenty-four hours a day.
15:05And it's quite an emotional load.
15:10And an infant under nine months is never wrong.
15:13Right?
15:13What you do to an infant under nine months, is, when they're in distress, you always respond.
15:18You never tell the infant, "Get your act together and stop whining."
15:22Right?
15:23Which you can do to a child that's eighteen months old.
15:26You can start having that sort of conversation.
15:28But under nine months, it's like, nothing is the infant's fault,
15:33it's surrounded in an extraordinarily threatening world,
15:36and you have to be responsive to what it needs, regardless of what you want.
15:39And you have to be very sensitive to the threats that emerge in the environment.
15:43And so I think the price that women pay for that ability to have an intimate relationship with infants in the very earliest stages of development
15:51is that their nervous systems are actually wired so that they can perform that role optimally.
15:56And the disadvantage to that is that having a temperament like that doesn't work that well when you're dealing with adult men.
16:03Especially when you're dealing with them in a business environment.
16:06Because it's not the same thing.
16:08Not at all.
16:09It's a competitive environment.
16:10So agreeable people are compassionate and polite.
16:13What are disagreeable people like?
16:15They're tough-minded, they're blunt, they're competitive, and they won't do a damn thing they don't want to do.
16:21So it isn't exactly that they're aggressive, although they will push you the hell out of their way if you're in the way.
16:26They're not volatile like you are if you're high in neuroticism.
16:31It isn't defensive aggression, it's more like predatory aggression.
16:35It's dominance behavior.
16:37And so for someone who's highly disagreeable,
16:41they look at the world as a place in which they can compete and win.
16:45And I'll tell you a story.
16:46I have a friend.
16:48I gave him my personality test, the Big Five Aspect Scale that Colin DeYoung developed, in my lab.
16:56I knew he was a disagreeable guy.
16:58By interacting with him.
16:59I mean, he's even rude to people sort of spontaneously on the street.
17:03I actually like him quite a bit.
17:04He's very, very funny.
17:05He's also very conscientious, so you can trust him.
17:07But he's disagreeable as hell.
17:10So I gave him this test because I thought it would be funny, and he came out as the most disagreeable person in ten thousand.
17:17[STUDENTS LAUGH]
17:18Reasonable in compassion, about thirtieth percentile, but point zero-zero-one in politeness.
17:25So he's extraordinarily blunt.
17:26He'll just say absolutely anything, no matter how horrible it is.
17:30And he was often brought into corporations to sort of clean them up.
17:33So if a corporation was tilting and not doing well, they'd bring him in to find out who the useless people were and fire them.
17:40And I talked to him about that, because I had the mis-opportunity to have to not have graduate students in my lab, for example, that weren't performing well.
17:47And I find it very, very difficult, to, you know, to dress someone down, and certainly difficult to fire them.
17:52I just hate it because I'm actually quite an agreeable person, much to my chagrin.
17:56And I asked him about that.
17:57And I said, "Well, what do you do? You have to fire people all the time. How do you handle that?"
18:01He says, "Handle it? I enjoy it!"
18:03[STUDENTS LAUGH]
18:04And I thought, "Wow, that's so interesting, that someone would have that response."
18:07So I said, "Well, what do you mean you enjoy it?"
18:09He said, "Look, I go into these companies, and I analyze the performance of groups of people.
18:13Right, and in those groups there are people who are really striving, really trying hard and working, themselves,
18:19really hard, and being productive. And then there's these people that are just doing nothing.
18:23They're completely in the way. They don't carry their weight at all. They take advantage every chance they get.
18:27And they're always whining about why they can't work. It's like, I find out who they are, I call them into my office, and I tell them exactly what they've been doing.
18:34It's like, hit the road, buddy. You've had your run of it."
18:38And I thought, "Oh yeah, okay, fair enough."
18:41Well, I can tell you, you know, I've had situations in my lab where I had under-performing graduate students.
18:47And one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really hard on the high-performing graduate students.
18:53You know, because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing.
19:01You know? And that's exactly right.
19:02And so this is also why there's a conscientiousness trait and an agreeableness trait.
19:08Because conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments, right?
19:12They don't give a damn about your feelings.
19:14Not a bit.
19:15It's like, "Are you doing the work, or not?"
19:17Whereas agreeable people think, "Well, you know, your mother's sick, and you've got a bunch of family problems, and we all have to take care of each other."
19:25"And it's no wonder that you're having a rough time."
19:27You can't say that one of those attitudes is correct and the other isn't correct.
19:32You can't say that!
19:33There wouldn't be those two dimensions if there wasn't something correct about both of them.
19:37But you can certainly point out that often they conflict.
19:41You know, and so the demand for inclusiveness and unity and care,
19:45and the demand for high level performance in a hierarchical structure- they're very different orientations in the world.
19:53It's complicated for people who are agreeable AND conscientious.
19:57And actually, I think often, that large corporations, large institutions of any sort, run on the un-heralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness.
20:09And they're disproportionately women.
20:11My experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately,
20:18No, not appropriately..
20:19If you want to hire someone to exploit productively, you hire middle-aged women who are hyper-conscientious and who are agreeable.
20:26Because they'll do everything.
20:27They won't take credit for it, and they won't complain.
20:30And that's nasty.
20:31And I think that happens all the time.
20:33And so one of the things you have to be careful of, if you're agreeable, is not to be exploited.
20:38Because you'll line up to be exploited.
20:40And I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants.
20:45And so, that just doesn't work so well in the actual world.
20:49One of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy,
20:52you know, people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons.
20:55But one of them is they often come because they're too agreeable.
20:58And so what they get is so-called "assertiveness training."
21:00Although it's not exactly assertiveness that's being trained.
21:03What it is the ability to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf.
21:07And one of the things I tell agreeable people, especially if they're conscientious, is
21:12Say what you think. Tell the truth about what you think.
21:15There's gonna be things you think that you think are nasty and harsh.
21:18And they probably are nasty and harsh.
21:21But they're also probably true.
21:23And you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message.
21:25And it's not straightforward at all because agreeable people do not like conflict.
21:31Not at all.
21:32They smooth the water.
21:33And you can see why that is, in accordance with the hypothesis that I've been putting forward.
21:39You don't want conflict around infants.
21:41It's too damn dangerous.
21:42You don't want fights to break out.
21:44You don't want anything to disturb the relative peace.
21:48If you're also more prone to being hurt, physically, and perhaps emotionally, you're also maybe loathe to engage in the kind of high intensity conflict that will solve problems in the short term.
21:58Because it takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term.
22:03And if that can spiral up to where it's dangerous, which it can, it gets uncontrolled,
22:08it might be safer in the short term to keep the waters smooth,
22:12and to not delve into those situations where conflict emerges.
22:16The problem with that is it's not a very good medium to long-term strategy.
22:19Right, because lots of times there's things you have to talk about.
22:23Because they're not going to go away.
22:25And so partly what you do with agreeable people is, you get them to figure out- and they have a hard time with this too.
22:31If you ask a disagreeable person what he wants, say, or she wants, they'll tell you right away.
22:35They go, "This is what I want, and this is how I'm going to get it."
22:38Agreeable people, especially if they're really agreeable, are so agreeable, that they often don't even know what they want.
22:44Because they're so accustomed to living for other people, and to finding out what other people want, and to trying to make them comfortable, and so forth,
22:51that it's harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life.
22:56And that's not... look, there's situations where that's advantageous, but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to forge yourself a career.
23:06That just doesn't work at all.
23:08So...
23:11All right.
23:13What else do I want to tell you about agreeableness?
23:16Well, I can tell you a little bit about the regulation of aggression.
23:20One of the things I studied, especially when I was in Montreal, was the development of antisocial behavior in children and in adolescents.
23:30Antisocial children, so they tend to be aggressive, antisocial children tend to turn into antisocial...
23:36It's conduct disorder, technically speaking.
23:38Conduct disordered children tend to turn into conduct disordered adolescents.
23:41And then they tend to turn into antisocial and criminal adults.
23:45And so I can tell you little bit about how that progresses, I think, because it's quite interesting.
23:49And it isn't what people generally think.
23:51So, the first thing is, if you want to be criminal, the best way to do it is to be really low in agreeableness and really low in conscientiousness.
23:58Because low in agreeableness means, "Things are for me and not for you.
24:02And you're not going to get me to do a damn that I don't want to do, and I'll stand my ground."
24:07And low in conscientiousness means you can do all the work and I'll sit back and take the benefits.
24:11And so if you have someone who's really disagreeable, and really unconscientious, you have someone who's starting to border on psychopath.
24:19And if you add high intelligence and high emotional stability to that, then you have someone who won't work but will reap the benefits, who doesn't give a damn about you, who is assertive as hell and who's smart.
24:29And a person like that's also going to be charismatic because extroverted disagreeable people are kind of narcissistic.
24:36But they're... they'll put themselves forward strongly.
24:39And if they don't show any signs of fear, that also indicates that they're confident.
24:43And it's easy for people to confuse that with competence.
24:46And that's how psychopaths get away with what they're doing.
24:48Although they have to move from person to person because their reputation will track them.
24:53So anyways, back to the development of aggression in children, the development of criminality in adults.
24:59Here's how it seem to work, at least in part.
25:01It's more complicated than this, but I'll put in some of the sociological elements as well.
25:05So
25:06If you take
25:08children
25:09and you group them together in groups defined by age,
25:16So let's say you have 30 two year olds, 30 three year olds, 30 four year olds, all the way up to eighteen.
25:22And then you watch them interact, and you code their behavior for kicking, biting, fighting, and property theft,
25:32then what you'll find is that the two year olds are by far the most aggressive of the lot.
25:36So that's pretty interesting, you know, because you think,
25:39"Well, children are naturally peaceful, and if they're aggressive it's because they learn it."
25:42It's like, no, that's true for a small minority of children.
25:47But there's a substantial number of children who are aggressive at two, by nature.
25:53Most of them are male.
25:54Now that doesn't mean most children are like that, because they're not, even if you look at two year olds, who are the most aggressive human beings.
26:01Most two year olds aren't aggressive.
26:03But some of them are.
26:04And most of those are male.
26:06Okay, so then let's say you identify this cohort of aggressive two year olds.
26:10And you track them across time.
26:12Track them for the next 2-4 years. Track them until they're four years old.
26:17What you find is the vast majority of the hyper-aggressive male two year olds get socialized perfectly well.
26:25So by the time they're four, they're temperamentally probably still more aggressive, but they become civilized little monsters.
26:31So other people can tolerate them.
26:32And that means that they've had parents, or peers, or educational experiences, that enabled them to learn how to interact productively with other kids.
26:41And to bring their aggressive nature under control.
26:44Some of that seems to be mediated by the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play.
26:48And that's one of the things that we know that that helps socialize rats, for example.
26:52It's vital to them, but it also seems to really be good for socializing young kids.
26:57And rough-and-tumble play, which is something that adult males particularly like to do with young kids, by the way,
27:03not before nine months, because they're just too little,
27:06but once they become ambulatory, and kind of puppy-like so that they're a little bit more robust, then you can play a lot with them.
27:13And you can play with them right at the edge of danger, too, which kids, they absolutely go nuts for that.
27:18They love that.
27:20When I had little kids, I made this kind of wrestling ring out of these two couches that we had that would hook together.
27:25And I'd bring them on there and, you know, toss them up in the air and catch them, you know.
27:29Eight, ten feet- no, no.
27:31[STUDENT LAUGHTER]
27:33A foot in the air and catch them, and they'd go like this, and then, you know, I'd catch them, and they'd laugh,
27:38and I'd throw them up and they're all freaked out and then they'd laugh.
27:41So they're learning trust with that in the bodied way, and they're also learning,
27:45and this is from stretching them out, and wrestling them, and twisting them around, and letting them pull on your hair and hit you, and all of those things,
27:51they learn deep in their bones exactly what can hurt them and what doesn't.
27:56And you want to kind of push them to the edge, you know, so that they can tell the difference between what hurts and what's still within the realm of the game.
28:03And you do the same thing when they're wrestling with you.
28:05So they learn not to, you know, awkwardly stick their thumb in your eye.
28:08Or do things that are actually painful like grab your lip and pull it.
28:13It's like, no, no, you let go of my lip, you know?
28:17And so, that seems to help regulate the aggressive impulses.
28:21And help the child find a more appropriate embodiment.
28:25You can think that what you're doing, in some sense, when you're rough-and-tumble playing with kids is teaching them how to dance.
28:30Because that is what you're doing.
28:31You know? You're making them comfortable in their bodies in all of its extension.
28:36And building in that kind of body fluency that you see in people who are well-situated inside themselves.
28:42And so that's something to really think about, you know?
28:43And it's appalling.
28:45We know that the ability to engage in rough-and-tumble play among rats inhibits aggression, impulsive aggression, among rats.
28:51We also know that if you deprive rats of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play, they show pre-frontal cortical developmental deficits.
29:00And manifest behaviors that are akin to attention deficit disorder, which you can then treat with Ritalin.
29:05And so one of the things that's happening with boys, because they're way more dosed with attention deficit disorder medication than girls is that their natural proclivity to engage in robust and troublesome active play isn't appropriate for a school environment
29:20where you're supposed to sit down and shut up.
29:23And so the kids get hyperactive.
29:25And instead of letting them out to run around until they fall over half exhausted, which is exactly what you should do,
29:30you know, and you medicate them, so that their exploratory systems, the activity of which is facilitated by the dopaminergic agonist,
29:40that's the ADHD medication, suppresses the play function.
29:44It's absolutely appalling. There's no excuse for it.
29:47You know, but it's a good indictment of the education system, because why in the world would you take six year old kids
29:54and get them to sit without moving for five hours, unless you want them to grow up fat and stupid?
30:00Why in the world would you train them to do that?
30:02Well it's easier. That's one thing.
30:04And when they're sitting there, there's nothing disruptive about the rough-and-tumble play, and that can be quite disruptive.
30:11So anyways, most of these kids
30:13are reasonably well socialized by the time they're the age of four,
30:17using one mechanism or another.
30:18They learn how to regulate their aggression and they learn how to engage in fictional play structures with other kids.
30:24They learn how to cooperate and compete.
30:26And the advantage to having a well-socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way.
30:32So if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized, that person can be quite the creature, you know?
30:38Because they're very forward-moving in their nature and very difficult to stop.
30:43But if you don't get them successfully "domesticated," tamed, roughly speaking, by the time they're four,
30:51their peers reject them.
30:53And that's a big problem because
30:55your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four.
31:00You want to burn that into your brain.
31:03Because people don't know that.
31:05That's your job.
31:06And here's why, it's easy if you think about it carefully.
31:10So you imagine, you've got a three year old child, so halfway through that initial period of socialization,
31:16and you take that child out in public.
31:19Okay, what do you want for the child?
31:21Who care about you?
31:22What do you want for the child?
31:24You want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults,
31:29so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her, and the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly.
31:37And if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining or you don't know how to do that properly,
31:43then what they're going to do is, they're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children, and false smiles from other parents and adults.
31:51So then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying.
31:59And that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the wellbeing of your child.
32:04If your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior, like don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much,
32:10and pay attention, and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary,
32:15and share and play properly, then when they meet other kids, the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them,
32:22and that's going to go well, and then they're going to go off, and socialize each other for the rest of their lives.
32:27Because that's what happens, is that from four years old onwards, the primary socialization with children takes place among other children.
32:35And so if the kids don't get in on that early,
32:38they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind.
32:42And you can imagine how terrible that is, because a four year old will not play with another four year old who's two.
32:49But a five year old certainly will not play with a five year old who's two.
32:53Right, because the gap is just starting to become unbelievably large.
32:56And so the kids start out behind, and then the peers leave them behind,
33:00and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life.
33:06Those are the ones that grow up to be long-term anti-social.
33:09They're already aggressive. It doesn't dip down.
33:12Now what happens to normal boys, roughly speaking,
33:15imagine the aggressive two year old types,
33:18they get socialized, so their level of aggression goes down, and then they hit puberty, and testosterone kicks in, and bang!
33:24Levels of aggression go back up.
33:26And so that's why males are criminals between the ages roughly of sixteen and about twenty-five.
33:31And it matches the creativity curve, by the way. It's so cool.
33:34If you look at the spike of creativity among men, sixteen to twenty-five, it starts to go down,
33:40criminality matches that absolutely perfectly.
33:42So that's quite cool.
33:44So the testosterone levels raise the average level of aggression among men,
33:50more dominance than aggression, actually, and testosterone is by no means all bad,
33:54and then it starts to decrease around age twenty-five or twenty-six, which is usually, with men,
33:59stop staying up late at night, stop drinking as much, develop a full time career, and take on the burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family.
34:13So that's the development of what I would call predatory aggression, because I also think that the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression,
34:26versus maternal sympathy.
34:27It's something like that.
34:29So if you look at other mammals that are predators, because we're predators as well as prey animals,
34:35if you look at other animals like bears,
34:37the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants.
34:40In fact, the female bears will keep the male the hell away because he's likely to kill the infants,
34:45and maybe even to eat them.
34:47So there's no maternality at all in solitary, male, mammalian predators.
34:54Now it depends on how social they are, but roughly speaking, that's the situation.
34:58Whereas with human beings, males are quite maternal.
35:02So, but anyways, I think the extreme of agreeableness,
35:07on the low end, so disagreeableness, is predation.
35:11And the extreme on the upper end is maternal caring.
35:14And those two things compete, right?
35:16Obviously, it's very difficult to be both of those at the same time.
35:21And so men, of course, in the wild, so to speak, are...
35:24Very, very few women hunt
35:27in modern societies or in archaic societies.
35:29And you can also understand why that it because hunting actually requires hurting something, killing it.
35:35And it's usually something that's not very impressed about being hurt or killed, and it will emit a lot of distress while it's happening.
35:41And so for anybody who's compassionate, who's got compassion as one of the fundamental elements of their temperament,
35:48that's something they're just not going to be able to tolerate at all.
35:51In the evolutionary landscape, because that's really what we're talking about,
35:55there's tension behind the development of different modes of being in the world.
36:00And if you're good at one thing, that sometimes means that you can't be good at the other thing at the same time.
36:06So...
36:08I was going to have a guest speaker for you last week, but the person I had invited in had some familial trouble,
36:13so that didn't work out.
36:14She's a graduate student of mine and one of the things that we'd be working on in my lab, generally speaking,
36:20is the delineation of the relationship between personality traits and political belief.
36:26And so I told you a little bit about the things that distinguish liberals from conservatives, right?
36:30The conservatives are high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness,
36:34and low in trait openness.
36:37And so that means a conservative is someone who puts someone in boxes, puts the boxes in order,
36:42and doesn't like them to be messed up.
36:45So they like the borders between things to remain determinate and what would you say,
36:53inviolable.
36:54And I think that's true at every level from the conceptual all the way up to the political.
36:58I think that the fundamental political question
37:02and I think this is why the temperaments align across these political dimensions,
37:06is whether the borders between things should be open or closed.
37:09We see this reflected worldwide right now in then arguments about immigration, right?
37:14Because the liberal types are saying, "Open the gates."
37:16And the conservatives are saying, "Wait, you don't know what you're inviting in."
37:20And you might say, "Well, who's right?"
37:22And the answer is you don't know.
37:25That's the thing.
37:26Because sometimes the right answer is, "Open the gates, these are interesting people, we could trade with them, we could learn from each other."
37:32And sometimes the answer is, "Don't bother. What's going to come in is going to wipe you out and kill you, and really do it."
37:38I mean, so, here's an example.
37:41This is why I think orderliness is associated with disgust sensitivity.
37:45And it's one of the determining factors of conservative political belief.
37:49What happened when the Europeans came to North America?
37:51What happened when the Spaniards came to North America?
37:5595% of the Native Americans died.
37:58Why?
38:00Because the Spaniards brought illness.
38:02Smallpox, measles, chicken pox, all these things that the Native Americans had absolutely no resistance to.
38:08There were hardly any diseases at all in North and South America.
38:12The Spaniards showed up, within 15-20 years, 19 out of 20 of the Native Americans were dead.
38:18You never know what people are bringing with them.
38:21And so what that means is that how should you respond to people who are outside of your circle of familiarity?
38:28Well the answer is
38:30One, they might kill you, in all sorts of ways .
38:33Two, they might bring with them things to trade that are of inestimable value.
38:38So you're stuck. It's like, how the hell are you going to reconcile that problem?
38:42And the answer is, well we reconcile it temperamentally, roughly speaking.
38:46So half the people are temperamentally wired up to say, "No, no, no! Let's keep the damn boxes closed. Took a long time to pack everything in there and to get it into order."
38:56And the liberals say, "Well wait a minute. You don't know if you've got things in the right boxes to begin with. The things that you're keeping in there were getting stale and old. And maybe we need some new ideas and new people to rejuvenate the situation."
39:09That's political discussion.
39:11And the political discussion has to proceed because there's no way of solving that problem except by discussing it.
39:18Well, how does that relate to agreeableness?
39:20We also looked at political correctness.
39:23And so here's an interesting thing.
39:25Purely from a scientific perspective.
39:27You might ask yourself,
39:29If you talk about political correctness, one of the things that the people who tend to be labeled as politically correct say is
39:36there's no such thing as political correctness.
39:38It's just a pejorative label that people who are opposed to those views impose on a set of beliefs to demonize it.
39:46Perfectly reasonable objection, and you never know, it might be true.
39:49But the thing is, psychometrically, you can solve that problem,
39:52and you solve it the same way that you solve the problem of what constitutes human personality.
39:57So this is the way we tried to solve it.
39:58You can think about it methodologically, because that's how you should think about it.
40:02The first thing we did was collect a very large number of statements from press accounts that seemed to indicate what people generally referred to as political correctnes.
40:11So we had a small team of people combing media reports
40:15to come out with opinions or attitudes that looked like they were characteristic of the differentiation between politically correct people and people who aren't politically correct.
40:24So we got about four hundred statements like that.
40:27And what you want to do is, you imagine that there's a core set of beliefs and statements that people are defining in a particular way.
40:35And you're trying to get a handle on what that is, and even if it exists.
40:39What you do is over-sample it.
40:41If you can find questions that might even tangentially be related to the phenomena in question,
40:48you include those.
40:50Because the statistics will take care of the excess.
40:53Okay, so then what you do is you take your four hundred items, roughly speaking,
40:56and you get people to register the degree to which they agree or disagree with them, get a thousand people to do that.
41:03And then you subject that to a factor analysis.
41:05And what the factor analysis does is tell how those questions clump.
41:10Now, they might not clump.
41:12So for example, you could do a factor analysis of a set of questions, and you could find that there are
41:17two hundred factors, let's say you have four hundred items.
41:20There's two hundred factors.
41:21And none of them... there's no big set of questions that are clumping together.
41:25And you say, "Well, there's no evidence here that there is a single, underlying phenomena that unifies those questions that you can reasonably characterize with a name."
41:35Well that isn't what we found.
41:37We found that there were two dimensions of political correctness.
41:40One of them looked like liberalism,
41:43except that the people who were politically correct, in addition to being liberal, were very high in trait agreeableness.
41:51And agreeableness has almost nothing to do with the classic liberal-conservative divide.
41:55It's weakly related in that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals,
41:59Sorry, liberals are more compassionate than conservatives, the difference isn't huge,
42:03and conservatives are more polite than liberals, and the difference isn't huge.
42:08So those are the two aspects of agreeableness.
42:09If you put them together, they cancel each other out.
42:12And so on average, conservatives and liberals don't differ in agreeableness.
42:15But political correctness did clump together into two categories,
42:22PC liberalism, we call it PC authoritarianism.
42:25The PC liberals were high in openness,
42:28high in verbal intelligence, and high in agreeableness.
42:32And the second group was PC authoritarians.
42:34And they were also high in agreeableness, but they were high in orderliness, and the correlation with that was negative in relationship to verbal intelligence.
42:41So we found that there were two categories of political correctness, that it does in fact exist,
42:47but that it's a very unstable construct because
42:50factor one, which was PC liberalism, and factor two, which was PC authoritarianism, were only correlated at 0.1.
42:58And so what it indicates, and this is our prediction, roughly speaking, from the lab, is to the degree that there's unity, so to speak, on the politically correct left,
43:05it'll fragment into two groups.
43:07One will be the PC liberals, and the other will be the PC authoritarians, because although they're united by their tendency to agreeableness, they're not united by other temperamental traits, nor in their core beliefs.
43:18So the PC authoritarian types, for example, are very obsessed with language control.
43:24And it's funny that it's agreeableness. I've really been thinking about that.
43:27You know, again, this is a hypothesis in development, but I think what's happening is that
43:33you know, your temperamental proclivity allows you to lay out a kind of radical simplification on the world.
43:40That's part of the advantage of having a temperament.
43:42So if you're a conscientious person, the world is a place to go out there and work.
43:46If you're an open person, the world is a place to go out there to discover new ideas and do artistic things.
43:50If you're an agreeable person, the world's a place to go out there and establish intimate relationships.
43:55So they're simplifying
43:59perspectives, and simplifying personalities.
44:02They're the manner in which you're adapted to a particular niche.
44:09I think what you see in agreeableness in relationship to political belief is a proclivity for people to divide the world into defenseless infants and predatory oppressors.
44:21And that that's blasted forward onto the political landscape, and things are conceptualized along that temperamental variable.
44:29Anyways, that's where we're at with regards to the analysis of political belief.
44:35Well, we've got three minutes left, and I'm wondering if anyone has a particularly intelligent question or failing that, any question at all?
44:43Because I told you a lot of things that are, I would say contentious.
44:46But I also think they're very much worth knowing.
44:49So I, yes?
44:51Did you say that high in agreeableness is the simplified perspective of the mother-infant dynamic?
44:58Yeah, that's what it looks like to me, yeah.
45:02Projected onto the world, period. Yeah.
45:06So what would you say is the best way to go about, knowing that we have these simplified ways of looking at the world, what then?
45:13It's really useful to investigate the viewpoints of people who have opposing views to yours.
45:20Because they'll tell you things, not only will they tell you things you don't know,
45:24they'll also tell you how to see the world in ways that you don't see it.
45:28And they'll also have skills that you don't have, that you could develop.
45:32So for example, if you're an introverted person, it's very useful to watch an extroverted person, because the extroverted person has ways of being in the social world that aren't natural to you,
45:40that you can use to improve your toolkit.
45:43And if you're disagreeable, one of the best things to do with disagreeable people, especially if that's alienating them from other people, for example, because it can,
45:51you know, people treat you like you're a selfish, arrogant son-of-a-bitch, and maybe that's because you are.
45:55It's like, okay, so what do you do about that?
45:57One of the most promising "treatments," let's say,
46:03is get the person to do something for someone else once a day.
46:06Just as a practice, and learn how to do it.
46:09Maybe you can wake the circuit up, you know, if you think that it's lying dormant in you, which is probably right.
46:14You know, I think we have a very wide range of propensities within us.
46:18Some are switched on.
46:20Genetic propensity. Some are switched on.
46:22But I think that if you put yourself in the right situation or walk yourself through the right exercises, you can switch some of these other things on as well.
46:28But it takes work and dedication and discipline to do it.
46:31So actively confront the things which are not a part of our personality?
46:35Yes. Well, I would say, generally speaking, if you want to adapt yourself properly to life, you should find a niche in the environment that corresponds with your temperament.
46:43Right? You shouldn't work at cross-purposes to your temperament, because it's just too damn difficult.
46:48But having done that,
46:50then you should work on developing the skills and viewpoints that exist in the space opposite to your personality.
46:58Because that's where you're fundamentally underdeveloped.
47:00That way you can extend out your temperamental capability across a wider range, and to me that's roughly equivalent as bringing a richer toolkit to each situation.
47:11You know, so if you're hyper-extroverted, you should probably learn to shut up at parties now and then.
47:14And listen just to see what's going on, to see if you can manage it.
47:18And if you're introverted, well then you should learn how to speak in public, and to learn how to go to parties without hiding in the corner and saying nothing to anyone.
47:27And if you're agreeable, then you need to learn how to be disagreeable, so people can't push you around.
47:31And if you're disagreeable, you need to learn how to be agreeable so that you're not an evil son-of-a-bitch, you know?
47:36And the same thing applies even in the conscientious domain.
47:40If you're too conscientious, you need to learn to relax and let go a little bit.
47:46And if you're unconscientious, it's time, like, get out and Google "calendar," man, and start scheduling your day, right, and beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick until you're disciplined enough so that you can actually stick to something for some length of time.
47:59And not living in absolute squalor, which is something that would characterize someone who is very disorderly, for example.
48:05Because they just don't notice. It doesn't bother them, disorder.
48:10It's like, maybe they can see it, but it doesn't have any emotional valence and so it doesn't have any motivational significance.
48:18The other thing you might want to think about, too, if you're choosing a partner, is try not to choose someone who's too distant from you on the temperamental variables.
48:26Because you're going to have a hard time bridging the gap.
48:28You know, it's hard for an introverted person and an extroverted person to co-exist.
48:33And it's really hard for an orderly person and a disorderly person to co-exist because they will drive each other nuts.
48:39Why don't you pick up?
48:40Why are you so obsessed by it?
48:42That's the basic argument.
48:45So it's useful to know about your temperament so that you can negotiate the space with your partner as well, and I don't think you should try to find someone who's exactly the same as you,
48:54because then you don't have the benefits of the alternative viewpoint.
48:58But you've gotta watch it because you may hit irreconcilable differences of various sorts.
49:02And I've seen that most particularly among couples who are high and low in openness, that's a rough one.
49:09And also high and low in conscientiousness, that's another rough one, because they just cannot see how the other person sees the world at all.
49:18Okay, I'll see you on Tuesday.