https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tibxs4mWI_k
I should just point out for everyone that’s listening is that work done in my lab by Colin DeYoung, particularly, we showed that you could break the big five down into 10 sub aspects, we call them. So you get some additional predictive utility sometimes if you use the more differentiated scales. And we did investigate as Dr. Kaufman just mentioned, we did investigate the effects of that on political belief. And we did find, as you said, that conservatives are more polite, and that liberals are more empathetic or more agreeable. And we don’t know what to make of that partly because we don’t really understand politeness exactly. It has something to do with, it’s something related to deference to authority, politeness. But it man, if like one of the best- Maybe just respect, respect for authority, it seems a little bit different than deference. It could be respect, sure. But then it’s complicated because conscientiousness is also associated, I would say, to some degree with respect for authority, right? And so what’s the difference? What is politeness adding that conscientiousness doesn’t already cover? So certainly- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was really excited by the political research, partly that was done in my lab, but also elsewhere, because it’s really, it’s quite revolutionary, I think, to think through the implications of the fact that your political viewpoints are determined by your temperament. Because what it means is that your biology, in large part, has provided you with a filter for the facts, right? So we like to think, well, you derive your rational conclusions from the set of facts that you’re exposed to, but unfortunately, you have to choose the facts, because there’s just too many of them. And so temperament is playing a major role in determining what you expose yourself to. We found that with fiction preference, for example, is like, open people are much more likely to read fiction, and fiction of certain sorts. And so the differences start with the information gathering process itself. Was that what they work with Marr? Yeah, I love that. I love that work so much, by the way. We had a hell of a time getting that stuff published. Although it’s crazy, no way when you publish what’s going to be published and what’s going to have an impact, you certainly can’t predict it. But yes, that all worked out quite well. So, okay, so back to, let’s go back to the, if you don’t mind, unless you want to take this somewhere else. Let’s go back to the humanism issue, which is central to your new book. So you got interested in what, what was it about the humanist define it and then tell me what it was that captured your attention. So it was in particular, it was humanistic psychology. And I actually distinguish that from the humanism movement that maybe you, you know, like that, that’s more a philosophical movement, you know, the humanistic psychology movement was in the fifties and sixties, a cadet of psychologists who were unconvinced that we were telling the full story about humanity and humans through the Freud approach or the behaviorism approach. They felt like we were neglecting higher principles. They felt like we were neglecting the investigation of the whole person as a system. Right. Freud focused a lot as an MD on psychopathology, on mental illness. Exactly. And the behaviorists took everything that was related to consciousness and subjective experience completely off the table. And we should point out that that had utility. Both those movements had tremendous utility, but there was this lacunae, let’s say, that the existentialists addressed in the fifties, the existentialist psychologist, and then the humanists in the sixties. By the way, I loved your lecture about Carl Rogers and the phenomenology approach. So that was, that was really cool. I liked that. Yeah. So in a big way, there was still a respect for those prior approaches. They weren’t saying they were complete shit. Like Abraham Maslow did really rigorous, great work in grad school in rats. You’re looking at reaction time tasks. But he got bored with it, and he felt that there was more to the story of humanity. So I guess what really captured my interest is this notion of studying the whole system, the whole person, and how all the parts work together. I think that we both agree in our philosophy that nothing is actually objective or absolutely good or bad, no psychological trait. It depends how it’s integrated into the system. This is why I’m critical of the distinction between positive and negative emotions. We can absolutely classify which emotions are positive and absolutely classify which ones are negative, as opposed to just, you have comfortable emotions, you have uncomfortable emotions. You can have the experience, but then we put the label on top of the experience. You’ve had some good lectures about the potential benefits of integrating your anger, anything you integrate in a healthy way into the whole system can be beneficial. You know, that’s the crucial issue there, right? Yeah. That’s the crucial issue that the existentialists and the humanists, and Jung as well, as far as I’m concerned, concentrated on, which is, well, when you’re talking about integration, let’s say, and so the psychoanalytic approach, even Freudian approach, would be to uncover something repressed and to bring it into the whole personality. Well, what exactly do you mean by the whole personality and what do you mean by integrated? For me, the humanists were the entry point to the answer to that question. Absolutely. Okay, so you’re updating Maslow with this new book. So walk us through what you were thinking. In one way, I’m updating Maslow, but in another way, I’m actually setting the record straight about Maslow because there’s so many misconceptions and things he never even said. So first of all, he never drew a pyramid. None of his papers did he ever draw a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs. He didn’t even really think of it in that way. In fact, I was talking to someone who knew him personally, and there’s a story where he was having lunch with him and he saw on the dollar bill, I think it’s the dollar bill where there’s a pyramid, and he looked at me and he said, I hate that pyramid. So look, he didn’t like it. That’s not how he thought about it. He actually says in his writings, he said, I would like to present my integrated hierarchy of human needs. And he was very clear to call it integrated. He said, every single need rests very carefully upon the lower need. But just because life is not like a video game where you reach one level of needs and then some voice from above is like, congrats, you’ve unlocked the next level, and then you never go back to the prior level. Integration fundamentally means that every single higher need depends on the lower need that came before. It depends on it in a very important way that gets missed by the way it’s often represented in modern, even psychology textbooks. I really think we need to update the psychology textbooks about this. Yeah, well, lots of great thinkers are poorly represented by their low order, their low resolution representation. I mean, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, who’s basically taught as a stage theorist, which was a tiny fraction of what he did, and certainly not the most important thing. He was fundamentally interested in reconciling the distinction between religion and science. And I never heard, hide nor hear of that till I started reading Piaget. Well, the translations, I couldn’t read it in the French original. So, you know, the ideas of creative geniuses are filtered through lesser minds when they’re taught and much of what’s complex and interesting disappears and what’s simplified is what remains. C’est la vie.