https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zUfkgUFm9qM
Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. We’re going to talk about agreeableness today. Agreeableness is a very difficult personality dimension to understand, I think. Partly because it’s difficult to dissociate from neuroticism, and as well from extroversion. Because agreeable people like you, and so that kind of sounds like extroversion. And disagreeable people sound like they’re hard to get along with, and they sort of are. But people who are high in neuroticism are hard to get along with too, and they tend to be volatile and irritable. And 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. So what I’m going to do is try to describe to you what the agreeable trait is, on both of its dimensions, and also to lay out the pros and cons of existence on that normal distribution, trait normal distribution, at more or less every point. Because I think, the way I look at it anyways, is that of all the traits, agreeableness is the one that seems to come with the most marked positive and negative aspect features, let’s say, so we don’t confuse it with aspects, the most positive and negative features at each point on the distribution. It’s a very complex, seems to be a very very complex dimension. So I’ll read you some of the questions from the Big Five Aspect Scale, and that’ll give you kind of an initial rule of thumb estimate about whether or not you’re agreeable or disagreeable. And so here are some of the questions. Imagine that you’re answering these for yourself on a scale from one to five, strongly disagree to strongly agree. So the first question is, So if you are interested in other people’s problems, that tilts you towards agreeableness, and I believe that’s a, agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Which also sounds like very positive things, right? Because everyone wants to be compassionate and everyone wants to be polite, and 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? It’s certainly worded that way. And that’s actually a mistake, because we know that these traits are normally distributed, roughly speaking, right? And that means that there has to be positive and negative features at every single position on the distribution. And so to make the presupposition, 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. You have to assume that there’s advantages and disadvantages all the way along, or the distribution wouldn’t have set itself up that way, especially because these seem to be biologically instantiated traits. So, anyways. If you’re interested in other people’s problems, they like to unburden themselves to you, you care about it, that’s a mark of compassion. If 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, you’re harsher, and more, and more, well, at the extreme, more callous. Ah, let’s see. Respect authority. That’s politeness. That’s part of agreeableness. Rarely, let’s see… Feel others’ emotions, compassion. Inquire about others’ well-being, compassion. Can’t be bothered with others’ needs. Take advantage of others. That’s disagreeable, obviously. Sympathize with others’ feelings. Avoid imposing my will on others. Wait for others to lead the way. Okay, I think all of those were associated with trait agreeableness or disagreeableness. So let’s think about this for a minute. So I’m going to tell you how I conceptualize agreeableness. The first thing you want to know is that women are more agreeable than men. About half a standard deviation. And 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. So, but what’s interesting about that, and this is something also to keep in mind, is about normal distributions. So imagine you have a normal distribution, so that most people are in the middle. And then you have another normal distribution, male and female, and mostly they overlap. But you see out here, and out here, they don’t overlap at all. And so even though on average men and women aren’t that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group, if you go out and you look at the extremes, they’re very different. So all of the most agreeable people are women, and all of the most disagreeable people are men. And the thing is, the extremes are often what matter, rather than what’s in the middle. And so one of the ways that’s reflected in society, by the way, is there’s way more men in prison. And the best personality predictor of being imprisoned is to be low in agreeableness. It makes you callous. Now you may think, well what’s the opposite of compassion and politeness? And the answer to that is, I think it’s best sort of conceptualized as a trading game. So let’s say that we’re going to play repeated trading games. And 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. Whereas if you’re very disagreeable, you’re going to do the reverse. You’re going to think, I’m in this trading game for me, and you’re going to take care of your own interests. Where 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. Okay, so you kind of understand that. Now the advantage to being agreeable then is that you’re good in teams and you’re very much likely to give other people credit. The downside of being agreeable is that you’re not very good at putting forward your own interests. And so one of the things that predicts salary across time, for example, is agreeableness, and it predicts it negatively. And 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. Because how you get paid across time depends on a very large number of things, right? It depends on your skills and your abilities and your position and your social network and all of that. But the other thing it depends on is whether or not you actually go ask for money. Or maybe that you don’t even ask. Because actually you don’t ask for money. You tell people that you need to be paid more or something they don’t like will happen. And I don’t mean as a threat. I mean that you have to be willing, when you’re negotiating, to have an alternative. You go talk to your boss who isn’t going to give you money because everyone wants money, right? It’s a competitive game. You’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. And then you’re not taking your boss’s money anyways because it’s very frequently the case that he’s working for a whopping big company. But he needs an excuse to give you money. Because everyone’s asking for money all the time. And so you have to put your case forward powerfully and disagreeably. Now you don’t want to do it too disagreeably because then he’s going to think that you’re a son of a bitch. And maybe he’s not going to give you anything and maybe you’ll get fired for being mouthy and all of that. And that certainly happens to people who are too disagreeable. You’ve got to get the balance right. But it’s definitely the case. And 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. Right? Because if you’re trying to evaluate what you’re like and you’re more tilted towards negative emotion, then the things that you do that are wrong are going to stand out more on the foreground than the things that you do that are right. So 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. And winning in a business setting or in a career development setting means more opportunity for promotion and more revenue generated. Now the downside of that of course is as you climb the business hierarchy is that you also have to take on more responsibility. And that responsibility is sometimes unpleasant as well, especially to people who are agreeable. Because you’re not necessarily liked if you’re in a position of authority. And agreeable people really like to be liked. It’s their primary motivator because they’re concerned about the maintenance, I would say, of intimate positive relationships. And that also makes them conflict avoidant.