https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=G8-QZn4Gl-g
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, I’m not interested in other people’s problems. 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 sound 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. Let’s see. Respect authority. That’s politeness. That’s part of agreeableness. Rarely, let’s see, Feel others’ emotions. Compassion. Inquire about others’ wellbeing. 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. I’m not going to be able to do that. I’m not going to be able to do that. I’m not going to be able to do that. 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. But what’s interesting about that, and this is something also to keep in mind, is about normal distributions. So imagine you have 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. So 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 by 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. 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. That also makes them conflict-avoidant. Okay, so now, you guys can think about this, but I’ll tell you why I think the personality differences between men and women exist. Now, these are speculative hypotheses, but they’re reasonably well documented by the relevant literature. So let’s think about it. The first thing we might think about is, what’s the difference between men and women? How do they differ? Well, 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. Boys and girls don’t differ in terms of their trait neuroticism, for example. What happens is that when puberty kicks in, women’s trait neuroticism rises, and it stays higher than men for the rest of their life. And this is why you see this reflected in the different kinds of psychopathology. Men are overrepresented in alcoholism, drug abuse, antisocial personality, and a host of learning disorders, as well as attention deficit disorder. And women are overrepresented in depression and anxiety, primarily. That seems to be tightly associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism. Because maybe it’s… If you’re at the 95th percentile or higher, let’s say, in trait neuroticism, there isn’t much difference between that and being somewhat prone to depression and anxiety. And because the curves overlap, the normal distributions aren’t identical for men and women. You tilt the women’s curve to the right, towards higher levels of neuroticism, you go out and you look for the person in 20 who has the highest levels of negative emotion. It’s much more likely to be female than male. Okay, so let’s see if we can figure out why. So, I’m going to tell you some things, basic differences between men and women, and you can tell me what you think about it if you want to. What you think about it if you agree or disagree. Okay, first, size differential emerges between men and women at puberty. Because boys and girls are roughly the same size and roughly the same strength. But men get bigger at puberty when the testosterone kicks in. And more importantly, not only do they get taller and heavier, but their upper body strength is much higher. And that’s a real issue for combat, because human beings punch… There’s other animals that do that, kangaroos do that too. So we’re not the only people that punch, but we have clubs on the ends of our arms. And so that’s how we defend ourselves. And 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. Now it is the case that, if you look at the statistics for physical altercations in marriage, women attack their husbands more often than the husbands attack their wives. Why is that? Well, 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. Because if you’re a woman about that high, and your husband is, say, my height, unless 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. You might hurt me. But if I do the reverse and hit you, and I really hit you, then I might kill you. And so the reason, at least one of the reasons, why women can be more physically aggressive in minor ways in a relationship is because everyone knows, the wife and the husband equally, that the consequence of the physical aggression is much more limited. So men do more serious damage to women, but women are more aggressive in relationships.