https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hzMWpfHNYf0
Today we’re going to talk about, pretty much ends the section on traits. And we’re going to talk today about the practical utility of traits, essentially. It’s always nice if you’re doing psychological research to have a hard target. It turns out to be relatively uncommon among psychological researchers to actually try to predict something. I mean, if you use a regression equation, which is what most of the stats that you’d use if you were doing psychology research are based on, the purpose of the experiment or the research, hypothetically, is the derivation of a regression equation that might enable you to predict something useful in the future. But in psychology, a lot of that is devolved into sort of descriptive work, showing that two groups differ on some trait or some feature, but the actual utility of knowing that is not self-evident. It’s partly why I got interested in performance prediction, because you can measure performance and it actually matters. So that would be performance creatively, say, or academically, or if you’re working in an industrial area, so just say as a factory worker or in a job that can be reduced to essentially an algorithm. So if you’re in a job that can be reduced to an algorithm, once you learn it, you know how to do it. So those are simpler jobs. And then performance in complex jobs as well. Performance as an entrepreneur, those are all, in some sense, real world phenomena, although of course, you still have a measurement problem. So if you’re trying to measure, for example, how successful middle managers are in a corporation, it’s not that easy to specify, because if you’re measuring the performance of salesmen, you can see how much they sold and then you have a performance measure that’s basically But if you’re trying to measure the performance of managers, say, in an institution like the University of Toronto, or even in a profit-making institution, their connection with outside marketplace is not immediately obvious. So then you might ask, well, how in the world could you assess their performance? And the way it’s generally done is you can have them rate themselves. That has obvious problems, but it’s not without validity, completely without validity. You could have their managers rate them. That assumes that their managers know what they’re doing and that they’re accurate judges of their actual quality of performance. You can have their peers rate them, and you can have the people that are working for them rate them. And it turns out that if you do that on a fairly regular basis, say, once every quarter or once every six months or something like that, and you use a standardized questionnaire, so that you can do quantitative analysis, that you can get pretty reliable indicators of performance. Now the problem, of course, is just because your manager or the people that are working for you think you’re doing a good job, does that mean that the job you’re doing is adding anything to the actual productivity of the company? And the answer to that is you don’t know. So I think to some degree that’s why large companies tend to be somewhat unstable, is once they get large enough, there’s a lot of inside to them. It’s not attached to the market in any way. And so people can be working very hard and therefore productive from the perspective of actual labor input. But whether or not that actually is producing a profit or producing the kind of consequence that you’d want it to produce so that the company can keep going, that’s a completely different problem. So even when you’re trying to predict performance, which is a fairly, as I said, a fairly real world phenomenon, you still have the problem of how it is that you measure performance. So for example, you guys are being graded all the time and you might ask yourself, well, what’s the utility of those grades? What do they accurately represent? Well you know they’re going to be used in situations where you’re trying to enter higher education and the selection criteria are actually grades. So if you want to go on to graduate school or to law school or to medicine or any of the professional schools, then whether or not you get good grades actually matters. But then the relationship between grades and say achievement outside of those specific places where grades are necessary, you might argue that that’s less clear. One thing we do know about the grades at the University of Toronto is that their correlation with trait creativity is zero. And so you might hope that one of the things that you’d be assessed for while you’re in university would have something to do with creativity, right? You’re supposed to think originally and creatively and so on. But our research so far when we’ve analyzed what’s predicting grades at the U of T, it’s all IQ and conscientiousness. And introverts do slightly better, but not a tremendous amount. That’s probably because they’re not out partying all the time. That would be my suspicion. But openness, apart from IQ, has no relationship whatsoever. And I think that’s actually partly because it’s not that easy. First of all, you’re not going to get graded for being creative on a multiple choice test, right? Because the last thing you want to be on a multiple choice test is creative. And then with regards to an essay, well, the problem with writing a creative essay is in some sense you force the grader to come up with a scheme of grading that’s sort of unique to you, right? Because you’ve done something original and new, and so it’s not that easy for the person who’s grading it. You’re forcing them to step outside of their comfortable rubric. And of course, that’s a demand. And when your TAs are grading, for example, and they have a hundred papers to grade, the probability that on average they’re going to appreciate a clear, easy to read essay that does exactly what it was supposed to do is quite high rather than something that’s original and creative and that actually requires thought to understand. Now, you know, I don’t know if that’s actually the problem, although I suspect it could well be. But I do know that grades are not a good marker of creativity. So neither, you know, creative achievement per se, so that’s actually creative products that you’ve produced in your life, neither that nor trade openness nor measures of creative thinking are associated with grades. So I would say that the data sort of indicate that grades might be a good marker of managerial administrative ability, but they’re unlikely to be a good marker of creative and entrepreneurial ability. So anyways, in any institution, you know, there’s always a tension between the specific demands of the institution, which are kind of orderly and set, and then the requirement for creativity, which is very difficult thing for an institution to deal with because institutions try to make things algorithmic so they can be predictable. So I think that tension is always there wherever you go in your life, and that’s also probably why openness and conscientiousness are actually not correlated, right? Because they’re responses to really different forms of environments. So okay, so predicting performance is difficult, although it’s useful because performance exists, but assessing performance is also extremely difficult. So that’s why in some ways, that’s why you could regard market solutions to complex problems as almost inevitable. Imagine that, so how do you know if a company’s run well? Well, the answer to that is people buy its products and they buy them for enough so the company can keep running. Then you might ask, well, is there anything you could measure outside of that? An answer to that is possibly not because it’s so difficult. I remember I read once that under the communists, there were central committees that had to do pricing, and so this committee, if I remember correctly, had to make something on the order of 100,000 pricing decisions a day. So you can imagine you just try to think for a minute about how you would calculate what a nail is worth. Now remember, you don’t get any price data from the market because the market would say, well, a nail is worth whatever someone will pay for it. Well, say you don’t have a market. Well, how in the hell do you figure out what a nail is worth? The answer to that is you can’t because the nail is only worth something in relationship to every other thing that’s worth something. So you could imagine trying to compute the comparative cost of one thing against all other things and then having to do that against all other things. Well, hypothetically, that’s why markets actually work efficiently is because you could think of the market as a gigantic supercomputer made up of the brains of every single person who’s making purchasing decisions, and you just don’t even bother solving the problem. You just throw things out there and some of them succeed in a sort of Darwinian way and some of them fail, and that’s that. You might say, well, the market, there’s problems with the way that the market values things, and the proper response to that is, yes, no doubt, but what are you going to do that might constitute a better alternative? And I’ll tell you, if you start wrestling with that problem, it gets extraordinarily difficult. It’s just, it’s so technically complex that I don’t actually think it’s manageable. I think you can’t do anything probably but make it worse anyways. So I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between pursuing a career in psychology and pursuing scientific truth. I want to tell you about that because one of the things I’ve learned from trying to predict performance is that a whole lot of things that psychologists talk about, research psychologists don’t exist really at all. And I’m not saying that because I’m cynical about psychology because I think that any human venture has to produce a tremendous amount of waste and nonsense in order to produce any incremented knowledge whatsoever. You know, so like if you’re thinking that every piece of research is going to produce new knowledge, genuine knowledge, then you’re naive because there’s lots of reasons why psychologists do research. Some of it is, well, because they have to, and some of it is because they have to train undergraduates and so undergraduates basically have to do bad research because, well, you only have four months to do it and you’re really going to discover something new in four months? It’s like, no. And then master students are kind of in the same situation as they’re kind of getting up and running. And so they have to do some experiments and they have to be doable in the time that’s allowed and they don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t know the statistics. So of course they have to do bad research and then, but they’re being trained at least in how to do it. And like most human enterprises aren’t very efficient. So for example, what do you guys think is, what do you think is the average percent of profit that a typical, say, North American corporation makes over like a 50 year period if you averaged it? What’s a good rate of return? 10 percent. Anybody else? 25? Anybody else? Three. Anybody else? Okay, so three is the most accurate guess so far. Now it’s a little higher than that, but not much. And you can kind of tell that because if business produced a higher rate of return than say three to seven percent, no one would put their money in the bank. They’d all put their money in the stock market, right? Because how much do you get right now if you put your money in the bank? Nothing, right? One percent maybe if you’re really lucky. So obviously business has to produce more of a return than that or everybody would put their money in the bank. But it’s not a tremendous amount more. And so what that means is that for your typical corporation, 97 percent of what it does is merely to keep itself running. Only three percent, five percent is profit. So why would you expect anything different in scientific research? It’s like 95 percent of it’s probably rubbish. But five percent is a lot when you think that there’s tens of thousands of research papers being produced on a monthly basis. So how fast do you want things to move forward? To me in some sense, I think they’re moving forward fast enough, right? I mean, it’s already hard to keep up with things like phones or anything electronic because they change so frequently that you have to continually force yourself to readapt. So it’s not even obvious how fast you want new knowledge to be generated. So the reason I’m telling you all this is because I’m going to tell you a bunch of things that I think psychologists do wrong. But I’m not telling you that because I think psychologists do things particularly wrong. that almost everything that people do is mostly just to keep things going. And then there’s this little fraction of the enterprise that might be profit or it’s equivalent in scientific endeavor which would be the generation of new knowledge. And so you don’t want to be cynical about that. You need to know something about base rates. You know, and these sorts of things help you too if you do something like apply to graduate school. So I’ll just talk to you very briefly about that. If you’re going to apply to any place where you have a low probability of getting in, high school, graduate school, medical school, business school, some of what predicts whether or not you get in is you. Grades, letters of reference, and your scores on the standardized test. Those are important. Grades are the most important. And then performance on the standardized tests. But once you hit threshold, so maybe you’re like an A minus student and you do 75th percentile or above on the typical standardized exam, GRE or MCAT or whatever it is, then what determines whether or not you get in are random factors. So and you need to know that because all the time when you’re trying to progress in your life, some of whether or not you progress is going to be dependent on you, your intelligence and your diligence and perhaps your creativity and your emotional stability and other things that we’ve talked about. But some of it is just the variation in the marketplace and it’s random. And so then the question is, well, how do you beat randomness in the marketplace? And the answer to that is by playing many different lotteries because it’s all a lottery. So if you want to go to clinical graduate school, then you apply to 30 of them, not two or three or four. Thirty. And there’s about that many in Canada that are accredited now. And there’s schools in the US that you can apply to. And that’s hard. And it costs, I think, 50 to 75 dollars an application. But that’s trivial. Like that’s nothing. That’s an investment. You don’t worry about that. You borrow for that if you have to. And then you might say, well, I don’t want to go to some little ratty town somewhere in northern Ontario, say, or there’s ratty little towns everywhere. And the answer to that is, well, you can always say no when they accept you. Right? So maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll get to go to somewhere you want to go or you think you want to go. And fine, go there. But maybe you won’t get so lucky, but someone will offer you a place at a smaller institution. Well then you have to think, are you sure that there’s not more opportunity at that smaller institution than you can make use of? And the answer to that is, yeah, there is. So for example, where you go to get a research degree is nowhere near as important as whether or not you go. So the difference between no degree and a degree is way bigger than the difference between where you got your degree. So if you’re going, this is the same with applying for jobs. Like one of the things you might realize is that the return on a CV is probably 2 percent, if that. So you configure 25 applications for one interview. And then maybe one out of three interviews or one out of four interviews is going to get you a job. So and you need to know that because otherwise when you’re applying for jobs, you’re going to get all disappointed because you’re going to think, well, Jesus, I’ve sent out like 30 job applications. I haven’t got one response. You know, there must be something wrong with the job environment or there must be something wrong with me. It’s like, well, no, there might be something wrong with you and there might be something wrong with the job environment. But you need to keep baselines in mind. It’s a low probability event. And so then what you have to do when you’re applying for a job is like apply for two hours a day and assume you’re going to do that for six months and don’t burn yourself out and don’t get depressed or oppressed by the fact that it’s extremely difficult because it is extremely difficult. So it isn’t it isn’t a commentary on you. It’s not a commentary on society. It’s just that it’s a low base rate phenomena. Lots of jobs that are posted aren’t really they don’t even exist. The companies are just trying to keep a turnover of hot resumes. Some of them are have they’ve already picked a candidate lots of places and but they have to advertise by law. You know, so there’s a whole bunch of reasons why you’re not going to get called back. It’s not the right day when they pick up your resume. They’ve been flooded with resumes. There’s all sorts of reasons. So anyways, baselines matter. So back to psychologists, what does psychologists do? Well, they do two things. Basically they have to do both of these to be successful. They have to pursue scientific truth and they have to pursue careers. Now the problem is, is that pursuing a career and pursuing scientific truth are not the same thing. And so primarily people focus on pursuing their career and secondarily on scientific truth. And maybe it has to be that way. It’s possible that it has to be that way. But that’s not so good. It’s better to pursue scientific truth and then do what you can for your career along the way. Because otherwise you end up chasing things that don’t exist for your whole life and polluting the scientific literature with nonsense. And that can have pretty bad personal and also social consequences because you can end up discovering things that don’t exist and then policymakers will make educational policies, say on the basis of those recommendations and then that’s not good. And that happens a lot. So here’s how you pursue scientific truth. Well the first thing, I’m not saying this is the only way of defining reality. You know we’ve talked about the phenomenologists for example and the phenomenologists talk about reality as lived, right? So it’s a reality that encompasses your entire experience, emotions, motivations, dreams, all the things that are subjective plus the objective world. That isn’t how it works in science. There’s a rule in science and one of them is if your phenomena can’t be defined well enough to measure it, then it doesn’t exist scientifically. And so that’s the first rule. You have to come up with a measurement tool for your concept. And I’ll tell you why that’s important a little bit later. Then you have to take your measurement and you have to see if it measures what it’s supposed to measure. And that’s a very tricky thing because you have to figure out well what is it supposed to measure? So let’s say you come up with a measure of anxiety. A, well, A, what’s the measure? And B, what’s it supposed to predict exactly? A heart rate increase, say. Well no, sometimes people’s heart rate decreases when they get anxiety. And sometimes people’s heart rate increases because they’re excited. So skin conductance increases. Well the same problem there is skin conductance tends to rise generally whenever you’re put in any sort of motivated state. Well self-report. Well that’s not so bad except maybe people aren’t that good at distinguishing between guilt and shame and disgust and anxiety and emotional pain and frustration and disappointment, assuming that those things are actually different. So it’s a complicated problem to design a measure and then to determine whether it measures anything and also to determine whether or not it measures what it’s supposed to measure. And you do that. The rules are quite straightforward. You should be able to measure the phenomena using a variety of different methods. So then you get into the problem of what constitutes different. But you can think about it, the analogy of your senses. You have five senses. And if all five of them tell you that something is there, the probability that it’s there is quite high. And that’s why we all manage to live, right? Once you get five different reporting systems telling you the same thing, the probability that it’s not there or that you’re wrong starts to become vanishingly small. So you sort of have to do that with your measure. So maybe it’d be a physiological measure and a conceptual measure and a self-report measure and an observational measure and a behavioral measure. If you can get all of that and it converges, you know, all the measures correlate, then you might think, well, there’s something actually there. And then, you know, you might also want to target something in the real world to predict, and that’s criterion-related validity. So you have to see if your measurement is reliable, measures the same thing more than once in a row, whether it can be, the phenomena can be detected in a variety of different ways, and whether that actually predicts something that might be useful. So I really like the last one, and I think that’s one where psychologists, like, there’s a lot of complaints about psychology as a field right now, especially in social psychology. There’s been a lot of scandal in the general scientific literature, including medical literature. You know, people have been, there was a guy a while back, unfortunately, I can’t remember his name, he had a Greek last name. He published a paper showing mathematically that on average the reports that were submitted, say in medical journals, had to be wrong. They were too improbable, he figured it out statistically. You know, and then there’s been a recent attempt to replicate some of the most fundamental findings in psychology. success at that, but there’s been plenty of failure too. So one of the things I think that is useful if you’re thinking about a research career is to pick a hard target, see if you can make progress on that, because that’s one of the things that puts constraints on your theorizing. You know, like what I try to do when I’m working out a concept, I like to find out, you could probably figure that out from this course, I like to see if there’s a solid theoretical basis, so the philosophy is solid. Then I like to see if there’s a brain model, that’d be kind of helpful. I’d like it if it was derived from animal experimentation rather than human, because I think that’s more valid. I’d like to see if there’s a pharmacological level of analysis, if that supports it, that’d be really good. Some behaviors would be nice, and then if there’s self-report data, well, that’s all to the good. And if you get something that you can measure across all five of those levels, I think I mentioned five, then you kind of think, oh man, there’s probably something there. Anxiety is a good example of that, because you can measure anxiety with self-report questionnaires, you can get behavioral observations, you can measure psychophysiology. There’s really good animal experimental models, plus there’s a pharmacology, because we know, for example, that you can give people benzodiazepines or alcohol or barbiturates, and that dampens the response, and there are the reverse of those, actually. There are drugs you can take that make you more anxious, that work on the same basic systems. You can kind of think, a lot of that’s been Jeffrey Gray’s work, or the stuff he summarized. You can kind of think there’s something there, and then there’s the animal behavior and so forth, that also is indicative of anxiety. Your triangulation’s getting pretty complete by the time you have five separate sources of information all pointing to the same direction. And you really got to be skeptical if you’re a scientist, because the probability that you’re discovering something is very, very low. And so, it’s easy to, especially with the statistics, because you tend to think of statistics as a sort of little machine. You dump in numbers at the top, and you crank it, and out comes knowledge at the bottom. That’s just not true at all. Statistics is an exploratory technique, fundamentally, and you’re making decisions all the time about what constitutes valid data. So you know there’s an outlier problem, right? So if you graph your data one dimension across another, you’ll see people who are way the hell out on the measurements for one reason or another. And then you don’t know whether you should include them in the analysis, which is deadly if it’s a regression analysis, because it’s really sensitive to outliers, or whether you should toss them out. But then there’s the problem if you toss them out, then maybe that makes it easier for you to prove your hypothesis. And you want to do that because you want results, because then you can publish them. So it’s a really tricky business. And it’s an ethical business all the way, because you have to make these decisions that depend on your judgment. And then you’ve got to ask yourself, well, when is your judgment valid? And as far as I can tell, the only answer to that is when you actually know what you’re aiming at. And so, for example, if you’re going to go into science as a career, you kind of have to decide, is it a career, in which case the scientific element of it is subordinate, or are you trying to find something out and building a career as a consequence of that? And it’s really good to walk through that consciously, because you think about the value hierarchies we’ve talked about before. Your value hierarchy determines the decisions that you make. And if you’re conflicted about whether it’s career promotion or truth, well, career promotion is going to win out, because it’s expedient. There’s a lot of pressure pushing on you to get results, to get good results, to get publishable results, and to get lots of them. And so that’s a lot of pressure pushing you to produce data that looks better than it is. And these are all micro-judgments, too. Say the problem of handling outliers is, well, there are rules. If somebody has three standard deviations beyond the mean in a particular measure, well, then you can throw them out, because they’re an outlier. But what if there are 2.75 standard deviations from the mean? And there’s only one of them, so they stick way out there, or even two standard deviations. It’s like, how do you know when to get rid of them? And the answer is, you have to use your judgment so that you’re modeling the data in the best way possible. And one of the ways that I sort of protect myself against that and my students is I tell them to use their statistics destructively, which means, OK, you’ve got a result. See if you can make it go away. Fiddle with the data till it goes away. See how hard that was. Or can you get the same result using three different approaches, three different statistical approaches, different cutoffs, and so forth? If you play with it multiple ways, does your result only come out once? If that’s the case, well, maybe it’s not there. If you can make it go away, maybe it’s not there. And that’s hard on the students, because I had one student in particular, he must have done eight studies. A lot of them were replications. He’d get a result, and then we’d try to replicate it, and it wouldn’t replicate. And so he did that for like four years. He never got anything that would replicate. And he could have published, because I could have let him publish before he replicated. But well, the problem with that is then you set up these red herrings that people chase. You know, he’d chase it, and other people would chase it, and that can happen forever. So here’s how you pursue a career. This is sort of the opposite to pursuing scientific truth, and one is invent a scale or a construct or rename a scale that already exists, refuse to validate it so you don’t actually test it against anything where it’s a critical test, and then correlate it with some other phenomena that maybe doesn’t exist. So I can tell you a couple of examples of that. One of them most recently, and I think most scandalously, was a concept called GRIT. So a woman whose name I can’t remember at the moment, Duckworth, I think that’s her name. I hope that’s her name. She did some research at the West Point, which is the place where the Americans train their soldiers, and she was trying to figure out what predicted their achievement. And what she found was that there were questions in a questionnaire that she called GRIT that predicted performance. And this was big news, man. She got a MacArthur Genius grant for this work, which is a very rare thing to get, and it was like headlines all over the place, GRIT. And now, if you look at the federal government’s publications on improving education in the US, it’s like, well, we have to teach our children GRIT. But if you look at her paper, you find out that GRIT, which is derived from a questionnaire, and we already know the questionnaire rules, right? What’s the questionnaire rule? If it’s a questionnaire, then it measures one or more of the big five traits, either well or badly. That’s the rule. Well, her GRIT questionnaire correlated with conscientiousness at about .75. And she said, well, that only accounts for 50% of the variance, .75 squared. But as we know, hopefully, .75 is an insanely high correlation. It’s like if you give someone a questionnaire once, and then you give them the questionnaire again, and you correlate their two scores, unless it’s a deadly good questionnaire, the test-retest reliability is only going to be about .75. And so what that meant was GRIT measures conscientiousness, and conscientiousness predicts performance. Of course, we already know that conscientiousness predicts performance. So that’s not, you know, at best, that would be an incremental addition to a literature that’s already well established. But hey, who cares about that? Name it GRIT. And then, you know, your career progresses rapidly, especially if you’re talking to people who are clueless, but you warp the whole structure of the, say, the educational establishment, because now they’re all shorting out, and you ask about teaching students GRIT. It’s like, first of all, it doesn’t exist because it’s conscientiousness. Second, conscientiousness has a pretty vicious biological basis. Third, to the degree that it’s malleable, we don’t know how to teach it. No one, I’ve never seen a study ever that showed that it increased people’s conscientiousness. How do you do that? I mean, your parents tried to do that to you for like 18 years. Did it work? You know, work harder. You know, be more diligent, pay more attention, don’t waste so much time. It’s like, well, they probably spent, I don’t know, half an hour a day on you trying to teach you that, maybe. It’s like 150 hours a year. It’s about 2,200 hours over the course of your life, assuming that they were that diligent. So that’s 2,200 hours made you as conscientious as you are now. Another 20 hours of training is really going to make a difference? It’s like highly improbable. So then, remember another study, this was done by Shelly Taylor, and Taylor was the proponent of positive illusions. How many of you have heard about positive illusions? Okay, so what’s a positive illusion? Do you remember? Well, she would have called it less than grandiose. The theory fundamentally is that people buttress their self-concepts with these sort of mild deceptions about how wonderful they are. And she thinks that, so for example, she draws on data showing that if you ask, well, let’s try this. How many of you think you are above average drivers? Really, let’s do this, because I’d like to replicate the experiment. How many of you think that? Okay, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. How many of you think you’re average drivers? Okay, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. How many of you think you’re below average drivers? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven? Is that your vote or hers? Okay, okay. So look, so Taylor’s hypothesis was that if you ask often undergraduates in particular, if they think they’re better than average drivers, I think maybe this is a self-report rather than in an audience like this, that most of them say they’re above average. Now, you guys failed that, so that was a non-replication as far as I’m concerned, because about two-thirds of you said you were either average or below average. But anyways, hypothetically, the evidence for this pervasive sort of self-aggrandizement in mild ways is quite high. And people who are like that are happier. Well, their well-being is better, whatever well-being is. So anyways, she published this paper, and it was in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and she took all these, so you might say, well, what’s a positive illusion? And the answer to that is, well, who knows? Try defining it. Well, how much, when does it become a lie? Well, if it’s too big. Well, exactly how big? Exactly when is it an illusion, and when is it a positive illusion, when does that turn into like a deception, and when does that turn into a lie? It’s like, that’s really hard to, it’s not hard to specify, it’s bloody impossible to specify. And then, exactly what do you mean by well-being? Okay, so what she did in this one paper was she took a bunch of measures that were hypothetically aligned in some way with positive illusions. And then she factor-analyzed them, okay, and she took out the first factor, and she said, well, that’s a positive illusion factor. Got that? Okay, then she took a bunch of outcome measures, which were like quasi-psychiatric scales that purported to measure well-being and mental health. And she factor-analyzed that and took out the first factor, and then she showed that the first factor from the predictors correlated with the first factor from the outcome measures. Of course, whether it was an outcome measure or a predictor was, you know, just happened to be which column you put them in. But even worse, if you take questionnaires and you factor-analyze them, the first factor is usually extraversion. So basically what she did was factor-analyze one group of questionnaires and got extraversion, which she called positive illusions, and then she factor-analyzed another set of questionnaires and took out the first factor, and she called that psychological well-being, and then she showed that positive illusion predicted well-being, except what she really showed was that extraversion predicted extraversion, which is to show nothing at all. Right? But, right? But you really got to watch this, because you got to assume that most of the psychological studies that you’re reading are wrong in some important way. And unfortunately, you can only figure that out if you read the actual results, which is actually very difficult. You can’t read the results in 10 minutes. Like, you know, it took somebody a whole year to do it. You have to think through it, and it’s hard. And you know, like that paper, for example, criticizing how to critique that is not obvious. You have to know that if you take questionnaires that measure emotion, roughly speaking, or something akin to personality, and you factor-analyze them, that the first factor you’re likely to pull out is extraversion. If you didn’t know that, then you wouldn’t know what sort of games were being played with the data. So, and that happens all the time. So here’s some things. Oh yes, so then what do you do? Once you’ve got your little phenomena, you publish it, and then you get some other people who are interested in it, so that’s your little primate dominance hierarchy. And you don’t want too many people in that, because then it’s hard to climb to the top. You don’t want too few, because if it’s just you and some other jerk, then, you know, who cares about you? So it has to be of moderate size, right? And then you use a bunch of jargon so that you can separate yourself from the criticisms of other people, and then you compete with each other to climb up the hierarchy. And it’s a fairly small hierarchy, so you have a pretty good chance of being like at least, you know, vice president or something like that. Use your statistics selectively, and then enjoy the fruits of your success. It’s like, it’s a crummy way to go about it, and it’s dangerous. You know, it’s dangerous because public policy people jump all over this sort of stuff, and then bad things happen. So and I’ll tell you some stories about that. So I told you already that psychologists are having a hard time with replication. It’s like, yeah, yeah, everybody has a hard time with replication. But there’s other problems too, eh, because the damn journals won’t publish replications. So if you’re going to publish something, so we’ve done studies, like seven studies in a row, say, trying to replicate based on a finding that’s hypothetically well established in psychology. So we’re using it as a measure. And be damned if we can get it to work. So we have like seven studies where it doesn’t work. So you’d think you could publish seven studies saying, you know what, this thing that everybody thinks works, it doesn’t work. You can’t. You can’t publish non-replications. So that’s a big problem. You know, the journals won’t take them. And so not only that, the journals will rarely publish replications themselves, even if they’re successful, because they don’t contribute anything new to knowledge. You know, and so you can work yourself half to death and do a really good study, you know. And you find out, oh, that didn’t work. And so maybe it took you two years. Like you’re basically screwed. Because what are you going to do with that? You put it in a drawer somewhere. And you know, maybe you’re a bit wiser. But it doesn’t advance your career. So that’s a big problem. So part of the problem with science is that we force scientists to only discover things. You know, and they don’t get rewarded otherwise. And so it’s a big problem. And it’s certainly not just psychologists that have it. So OK. Here’s some things I think don’t exist. So if you’re going to predict anything in the real world, here’s some things not to use. I don’t think self-esteem exists. There’s really one scale. So Roman Tafrotti made a self-esteem scale that’s pretty good. But the standard one is the Rosenberg. And I can’t remember how many items it has. Fifteen or something? Not enough items to really be reliable. I think there were, yeah, 25,000 published papers on self-esteem. Figure 10 grand a paper, which is a comparatively conservative estimation. So you can do the math. 25,000 times 10,000. So that’s the total amount of research funding that’s gone into looking at self-esteem. It’s like, well, what’s self-esteem? It’s a word. Actually, it’s two words, right? And it’s sort of something you think you might have or not have. But that’s a figure of speech. That’s not an empirical phenomena. And so most of extroversion is just neuroticism, as it turns out. It’s like if you have a lot of negative emotion, you don’t feel that good about yourself. Well, isn’t that a surprise? You have a lot of negative emotion. And if you want to fix it up a little bit, then you can also subtract positive emotion from that. Because if you have a lot of negative emotion and you don’t have a lot of positive emotion, so that’s neuroticism minus extroversion, then your self-esteem is even lower. And then maybe over time, conscientiousness starts to make a bit of a difference. Because if you’re conscientious and you work hard, you can start to see that that’s paying off. And Tafferotti’s done some work that seems to sort of indicate that. But the first thing that happened is everybody went on a self-esteem bender, even though the measures were pretty appalling and even though you could model it with the big five. And then one of the things that happened as a consequence of that was that the whole California school system started to teach students self-esteem. It’s like, A, what makes you think you should have high self-esteem? Like maybe you’re a miserable little worm. God only knows, right? It’s not the case that you should have a good opinion of yourself in every bloody situation. But if you’re a bully who pounds people out in the schoolyard, bullies, by the way, do have higher self-esteem than normal. So they’re, because it’s not like they’re feeling bad about themselves when they pound you, they’re feeling bad about you. And the best work, you know, the low self-esteem equals bully hypothesis, lots of people believe that. But if you read Dan Olweus, who’s the world’s leading authority on bullying and who’s actually done something about it, what he says is that bullies have inappropriately high self-esteem, which is why they think they’re in a perfectly good position to pound you out if you happen to be on the playground. So it’s not like they’re suffering from a, you know, neurotic weakness of self-image. It’s quite the contrary. So anyways, in the California school system, they tried to teach kids self-esteem. And you know, there’s no evidence that you can do that first because neuroticism is actually quite hard to shift. So and if we knew how to treat it, well, hooray, everybody would be thrilled about that, but it’s not easy. And second, there are people like, what’s her name? Jean Twenge used to be a student of Roy Baumeister’s, who claims that all that self-esteem training has just, you know, made younger people like you guys more, what do you call that? Narcissistic. Yeah, because the self-esteem becomes disconnected from the actual accomplishment because you might hope, well, you’d sort of feel good. How good should you feel about yourself? Well, you know, you might say, well, you should grant yourself the right to exist like you do everyone else. You know, that’s sort of like a basic human right. As a human being, you’re valuable. And then maybe you should sort of think you’re about as valuable as other people roughly think you are. That seems about right, right? So the right amount of self-esteem would be your perception of your value within the context of a group. It’s got to be something like that. You know, so there should be a concordance because like maybe you need to improve. You know, you could well be, you know, and are you going to improve if you’re feeling really good about yourself? Well, the answer to that is, well, we don’t know. How much misery about yourself do you have to have before you’re motivated to improve yourself? None? Well, that doesn’t seem right, but we also don’t know whether it’s shame or guilt or anxiety or pain or, you know, these negative emotions that motivate you. Now it’s clear that if you have enough negative emotion, that can paralyze you. But that’s like depression and, you know, psychiatrically high levels of anxiety. That’s not like low self-esteem. So that’s a problem. I don’t believe that working memory and executive function are distinguishable from IQ, especially G. Our research, we’ve done a lot of it. I’ve factor analyzed a battery of 10 dorsolateral prefrontal tests given to 3,000 people. It’s a very big sample. We haven’t published this for a variety of reasons, but one factor comes out. You know, and Carroll’s rule for IQ was you take cognitive tests, a bunch of them, you factor analyze them, you pull out the first factor. That’s fluid intelligence. It’s like, well, that’s basically what we found. And so if you look at the correlation between each of the single tests and the first factor, it’s only about 0.3 or 0.4. But that’s also what you find in IQ tests. You know, each individual test only correlates with the aggregate at about 0.3. But if you aggregate enough of them, you get fluid intelligence. And it’s just as solid as a rock. So emotional intelligence, not only does that probably not exist because it’s agreeableness, you know how you always hear you need emotional intelligence to thrive in the workplace? It turns out that’s exactly backwards. Disagreeable people do better as managers in the workplace. So it’s actually if you lack emotional intelligence, you’re more likely to be an effective manager. So emotional intelligence is a great indicator of sort of pathology and psychology because it was invented by a journalist. You know, you can’t just have some word invented by a journalist and then go make a whole bloody enterprise out of it. You’ve got to find out if it’s really there. And there’s not a lot of evidence that it is. And what does it mean anyways? Emotional intelligence. What does that mean? I can infer what you’re feeling? Well, is that IQ? Are smart people better at that? Or am I mirroring you in some way? Or do I care for you? Maybe I can figure out exactly what you’re feeling and I just don’t give a damn. Is that still emotional intelligence? Well, I don’t know, right? How would you separate that from sympathy or empathy? What if you’re over sympathetic to someone? Is that emotional intelligence? Maybe you feel way too sorry for your children. So it’s like you’re all empathetic and all that, but you’re not doing them any good. Or sometimes you would be, but sometimes you should say, you know, quit whining, go the hell outside. Because that’s the right response sometimes. So these things are not straightforward at all. And of course, emotional intelligence is generally measured with questionnaires. And we know the rule for questionnaires. What’s the rule for questionnaires? Hmm? One answer for me or? That’s right. Exactly. You’re doing one or more of the big five either well or badly. Okay. So, and as far as I can tell, that doesn’t mean that personality has a five dimensional structure. I’m not making that argument. Because who the hell knows? I don’t think it does likely. Although it’s very difficult to say. But what the big five theorists have really demonstrated, as far as I’m concerned, is that if you factor analyze questionnaires, what you get looks a lot like a five factor structure and you can do that cross-culturally. And so I think we sort of nailed the question of how are questionnaires structured. So you can’t just invent some new thing and term it something and then pretend it’s something new without testing it against. And I would test it against IQ because that bloody thing. We know, for example, IQ eats up most of the variance in disgust sensitivity scales. You would think, well why would IQ be related to disgust sensitivity? It’s inversely related by the way. The smarter you are, the less sensitive you are to disgust. Now I don’t know if that’s because maybe your cortical inhibition of underlying limbic motivational systems is better. Who the hell knows? We don’t know why. But we do know that it’s a major predictor. Orderliness also predicts. But the thing about IQ is that it predicts things that you’d never expect. So you should validate your scale against IQ and against the big five. And not some trivial little ten item measure of the big five either. Because then if you use two questions per trait, you’re going to have a lousy measure of the big five. And if your stupid questionnaire predicts over and above that, all that means is that you didn’t test it against, you know, you didn’t set it up for a good challenge. You set it up for a weak challenge. So grit, that’s very annoying. Yes, that’s very annoying. Because it’s clearly, I think it was correlated, I think I told you this, it was correlated with conscientiousness at .75. I don’t believe that optimism and pessimism exist. I don’t believe that promotion and prevention exist. Empathy, we tried measuring empathy. It’s like we used, you can measure empathy like mad if you use one measure. But if you use three, then all of a sudden your empathy measures don’t correlate. So that really sucks. So the way out of that is just to use one measure, right? Well obviously not. If your three empathy measures don’t correlate, well you’ve got a problem. It’s like you have three rulers and you measure something and you get different numbers from each. So that’s probably, you’re either measuring like bubble gum while it’s stretching or there’s something wrong with your rulers. So I don’t think psychopathy exists. I think it’s low agreeableness and low conscientiousness because that would make you a predator, that’s low agreeableness, and a parasite because that’s low conscientiousness. So that kind of sums up psychopaths. In terms of personality disorders, there was a bunch of them. And you know, over the last 20 years people have been, the psychometricians in particular, have been trying to cram those things into the Big Five structure and they’re reaching, you know, they’re experiencing a tremendous amount of resistance from the established psychiatric community and no wonder. But still the Big Five does seem to be able to provide a pretty good model of what constitutes personality pathology. And that’s kind of surprising because you may remember, I told you when the personality measures were first originated, they threw out all the evaluative words like evil, you know, or bad, or good for that matter. And you know, you could imagine that that would attenuate the relationship between personality and psychopathology because you tend to use more, you know, more judgmental words when you’re describing psychopathology. Like antisocial, for example, which isn’t in a personality questionnaire, but which, if it was, would likely load primarily on agreeableness. Low. Positive illusions. I told you about that already. Practical intelligence? It’s like no, that does not exist. There’s no evidence that it exists. So Sternberg, who has said that part of the reason he was interested in practical intelligence was because he didn’t do very well on his GREs. So you know, he’s got this idea that, well there’s a difference between book smarts, and that sort of you nerdy people, and like, you know, street smarts, which is like, I don’t know, the punk who makes it out in the real world, something like that. And street smarts is like practical intelligence. But the problem is that he never really puts his practical intelligence measures, which really don’t exist, up against IQ in a fair head-to-head fight. And he’s been just slaughtered for this in the scientific press, especially by Linda Godfordsen, who wrote that paper that I had you guys read on, you know, the complexity of everyday life. Godfordsen, she’s a smart cookie, that woman. She’s brave too, you know, because she follows the data where it goes, and she’s a very, very clear thinker. She really gave Sternberg a couple of good whacks, and he certainly deserved it. Multiple intelligences, you’ve heard about that, I imagine. What are they? Sensory motor, kinesthetic, emotional, I don’t remember. What’s that? Interpersonal, yeah, yeah. Those aren’t intelligences. First of all, A, who knows if they exist, and B, we had a perfectly good word for them, which was talent. It’s like you can’t just take a word, you know, like that’s been studied for a hundred years, like intelligence, which has a very, very specific definition, more specific than anything social scientists measure, right? So if you believe in social science at all, you have to take IQ into account. He just swipes the word, says, oh well, everybody wins. You know, it’s like, yeah, yeah, people have talents. Fair enough, you know, and they’re not trivial. But to call them intelligences, and then he also says, when people harass him about his concepts, he says, well, I don’t really believe in measurement. It’s like, okay, okay, that’s fine, except if you’re, like, if you’re not going to believe in measurement, then what are you doing? It’s not science. It might be, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s educational philosophy or something like that. But it’s not science. And so it’s 20 years later with his multiple intelligence theories, and there’s been no published measures of them. And whenever people have tried to measure them and set them up head to head against, say, intelligence plus personality, intelligence and personality just eats them up. And so, you know, multiple intelligence theory had a big effect on educational theory. You know, it’s like, well, every child should have the opportunity to develop their own particular form of intelligence. It’s like, yeah, well, that’s great, except you can’t measure it. We don’t know if it exists. And even if it does, you don’t know how to develop it. And you haven’t shown that you can develop it. And you haven’t shown that you’re not doing harm by, you know, pretending that these things exist and act as if that’s actual knowledge. So things that might exist. Well, I told you about these already. Well, there’s lots. You know, I talked to you a lot about the big five, you know, but personality isn’t that great a predictor of individual behavior because people are very variable in their behavior from situation to situation. So the best you ever get out of a personality measure is about 0.3 or maybe about 0.4. That was discovered in 1968. There was a big hubbub about that made by Walter Michel, who said, well, personality scales, they give you 0.2, 0.3. That’s like 9% of the variance at best. So what about the other 90%? And why are we chasing such a trivial amount? And that killed personality research stone dead for, till 1992. So for 20, that’s 24 years, I believe, because everybody went, oh, yeah, these are trivial effects. But then no one ever looked to see what the effects were in all the rest of psychology because it turned out that 0.2, 0.3 is about on the upper end of the effects that you get in most forms of psychology. And so that even if it isn’t that great, it’s as good or better than whatever one else is doing. And so then there were also economic analysis, which I’ll show you later done in the 1990s that showed that because human variability in productivity is so great, especially on the Pareto distribution, that you don’t need very accurate predictors for them to be extremely useful economically. Because the question might be, you know, like, so you’re paying your employee 25 million, which is not very helpful for you. But if you’re extroverted, you’re going to get out there a bit and be enthusiastic about what you’re producing, and maybe that gives you an opportunity to market it. We also know that openness and extroversion together make up plasticity, right? And plasticity actually seems to be a better predictor of creative achievement than openness per se. So which is, there’s several hundred people in this particular sample. So you guys know about this already. Extroversion is associated with happiness, optimism, enthusiasm, gregariousness, and assertiveness. Neuroticism, it correlates negatively with long-term life outcome a bit. It’s not that powerful, but it’s there. People high in neuroticism have a hard time with stress. So they can get, I think what happens with neuroticism is you pass a certain point of vulnerability. You know, if you’re too high in neuroticism and then some life event comes along that’s just too much and it sucker punches you, and then that further destabilizes your nervous system and you’re kind of out of the game at that point. So if you’re high in negative emotion, you know, you want to, I would say, the first thing I would say is make sure you eat breakfast. Sounds like a weird suggestion, but I know from my clinical practice that if I can get my clients who are high in negative emotion to eat a decent breakfast that helps stabilize their nervous system throughout the day, you really got to watch yourself if you’re high in negative emotion because your stress tolerance isn’t that great. So you might also want to not take like really, really stressful jobs because they grind you down over time. So that’s something to think about. So agreeableness, compliance, empathy, maternality, kinship, on the negative side if it gets extremely serious, it’s criminality, but disagreeable people are tough minded, they’re hard to push around, you know, and they can be a little bit on the callous side and you know, you think, well, is that a useful attribute? I know this one guy who is just disagreeable as you can possibly imagine, you know, like, and he, I was watching him work at a large corporation, he was firing people because the corporation was shrinking like mad, it was like, it was having a real rough time, so they had to downsize. I asked him how he handled the emotional stress of having to fire people and he said that he enjoyed it. And I thought, wow, that’s not something that I’ve heard very often. He said, yeah, I mean, most of the people that I fire, they’ve been useless and they’ve been like existing on other people’s labour for like 10 years and no one’s ever called them on it, so it doesn’t bother me a bit. I just think of all the people who they’ve been interfering with and I think, well, good, you deserve to be gone. And you don’t have to be a tough son of a bitch to do that, you know. You know, you think about that, you think about that because, and I do a fair bit of management consulting, so let’s say you’re a manager and you’ve got 10 employees and one of them is hard to get along with and not productive. And so, because they’re hard to get along with, they make everyone else’s life more miserable than it has to be and because they’re not productive, then everybody else has to do their work. So then you might say, well, you know, what are you going to do about that person? I don’t know, maybe they have like a sick parent, you know, that too, because people are complicated. So what do you think? Wow, this person’s in a rough place in their life and so what do you do about that? Well, you think maybe if you’re compassionate, you think, well, you know, they’ve got a difficult situation at home, they’ve got a sick parent, this isn’t a really good time to fire them, blah, blah, blah. But then you think, what about those other nine people? You know, going to work for them, that’s not near as good as it could be and like, they’re working hard but they’re not benefiting from it and plus the fact that this person gets away with it is demotivating and unfair. So then you’ve got to ask yourself, well, exactly who are you being empathic with? And this is a hard question, like seriously, this is a very difficult question when you’re in an organization and you’re trying to build something that goes in a particular direction. It’s like, what’s your threshold? Like my experience, and I wouldn’t say I’m very good at this because I’m kind of tender-hearted much to my chagrin, so, but my experience doing management consulting with people is that if they have someone who’s a problem and they’ve been a problem for say a substantial amount of time, everybody’s happier when that person leaves. Often the person themself, not always, obviously. But sometimes people are miserable and hard to get along with and unproductive because they hate their bloody job and someone should just kick them out of it so they can go on and find something, you know, that they might be half decent at. So and people tend to be quite resilient. So even if they do end up out of a job, it isn’t exactly clear that six months later that’s worse for them. So anyway, so that’s, I think, disagreeable people are better at that. So if there’s a rule, a disagreeable person will say, you abide by the rule, I don’t care about your damn feelings. It’s like, well, that’s kind of harsh. Maybe. Conscientiousness, that’s a big predictor. Openness, that’s associated with creativity and intelligence. Here’s some combinations. If you’re disagreeable and neurotic, you tend to have personality disorder. So those are the two big personality markers of personality disorders. If you’re extroverted and disagreeable, think about that. You know people like this. They’re really social and they’re really, you know, they’re not that empathic. They’re selfish. They’re narcissists. If you’re extroverted and disagreeable, you have a proclivity towards narcissism. And you might think, well, that’s an awful thing. Maybe it is, but actors? I mean, how narcissistic do you have to be to be an actor? Oh, that’s a hard question, right? Because you obviously have to have some self-confidence that goes beyond the norm. So anyways. This is a summary of what we know about emotion and motivation in relationship to the emotions. So we know that extroversion is associated with incentive reward, hope, curiosity, play, enthusiasm. That seems to be associated with dopaminergic function and with the part of the hypothalamus that governs exploratory behavior. So it’s an approach circuit. And so it seems that people who are extroverted have a lower threshold for having that circuit activated. Maybe it’s something like that or maybe they’re, unless they’re stimulated, they don’t have enough positive emotion. It’s not that easy to tell. Extroverts harvest attention from the social group. So you think about these as ways of adapting to the world. Like the social group is full of resources. And if you’re assertive and you’re popular, then you can benefit from the accrual of social resources. It puts you up the dominance hierarchy. So it’s a good strategy for moving. It’s one good strategy for moving ahead. Neuroticism, pain, frustration, disappointment, fear, anxiety, those seem to be associated with GABA circuits because those are the circuits that Valium and barbiturates and benzodiazepines affect. And it’s also the case that as you move up the dominance hierarchy and your serotonin levels rise, your negative emotion gets more well regulated. Whereas if you fall down the dominance hierarchy, then your negative emotions get less regulated. Probably your positive emotions too. Agreeableness, empathy, sympathy, compliance, care system. That’s the care system that Jaak Panksepp described. So if you’re interested in that, you could read a bit more about that. That’s maternal circuitry essentially. That runs on oxytocin. So agreeable people can always tell when I have an agreeable person in my clinical practice because what happens when they come in is that they instantly start to talk about relationships. So they’ll lay out their biography. And like a conscientious person will talk about the things they have to do and the things they’ve done over their life. And an open person will say, well, here’s the things I’m really interested in. So an agreeable person will say, well, from 1982 to 1987, I went out with this person and then I had a relationship with this person. And so they naturally seem to configure their biographies in terms of dyadic intimate relationships. So whereas the disagreeable people, well, they’re not so good at that kind of thing. And if you talk to engineers, for example, and I’ve talked to a lot of them in Silicon Valley, they’re pretty oriented towards things and their interpersonal skills can be, well, interesting to say the least. But you know, they invent lots of interesting things. So like, hooray, go engineers. We’ve talked about conscientiousness and it seems to be associated with disgust and guilt and shame. And if you think about it as an adaptive strategy, orderliness means stay uncontaminated and sparkly clean. It’s like an efficiency strategy, everything in its place. And so that way you don’t have to expend as much energy to get the results of your labor. You know what it’s like if you’re trying to work in your office and it’s a complete bloody disaster, right? You expend a whole bunch of energy just coping with the fact that you’re surrounded by chaos before you even get down to what it is that you’re supposed to work at. Industriousness, well industrious people seem to implement their goals. And maybe they’ve got to be of some social utility too, I would suspect, right? Because if you’re an industrious person and you get a reputation for that, then people are going to want you around because you’ll do the work. And one thing I will tell you that might also be useful as you progress through life is that if you get into an organization and you are diligent and you really commit to what you’re doing, you might think, you might be cynical about whether or not that’s going to be noticed. But I’ll tell you, if you’re not conscientious, you’ll never figure out why you don’t advance. What’ll happen is that a bunch of doors that could open to you just won’t. Because if you’re conscientious, so like I find this with my students, some of them I can say, because I have more opportunities than I know what to do with usually, and so if I have students, I can say, well, here, you could do this. And then if they come back three weeks later and they say, well, here’s four reasons why I couldn’t do it, and they’re all good reasons, but it’s not done, and then someone else comes back and it’s four weeks later and they say, here it is, then the next time I have an opportunity, then the person who did it gets it. And so what happens is that in almost all organizations, there’s a certain percentage of people who are conscientious and intelligent and are doing almost all the work. And they’re always looking around for other people who are like that. Like, they don’t go out of their way to advertise it, but if you’re like that and you come to their attention, they’ll open doors for you and you won’t even know it. And so it’ll be like you progress upwards and there’s no reason that you’ll even necessarily know why. Whereas if you’re not doing it, people won’t come out and whack you on the head and say, well, you should improve in these six ways and pay a lot of attention to you. They just won’t allow you to have any opportunities and then you won’t even know it. So that’s not good unless you’re not that ambitious, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Open people. Well, open people are good at manipulating abstractions, and so what they seem to do is to model the world abstractly and to figure out what strategies will work, and then maybe they can implement them if they’re conscientious. And if they can’t implement them, well, maybe they can offer them to other people. So you have good ideas that have some value. And so I was thinking that we don’t exactly know how to integrate the trait theory into the narrative theories, because almost all the clinical theories of psychology are narrative theories and they all seem to have to do with this kind of story that you act out. But I’ve been thinking that maybe this is one of the ways that you could conceptualize it anyway. The little frames of reference that you find yourself in that govern your perceptions and that help you determine your actions are maybe motivated by constellations of fundamental motivational systems. So we talked a little bit about hypothalamic function and the really basic motivational and emotional states. Well, it seems like they sort of clump together in the traits. So we know extroversion is where the positive emotions clump and negative. Eroticism is where the negative emotions clump. Play seems to go along with extroversion. And then abstract creativity and exploration seems to go along with openness and so on. And so there’s these, like maybe the traits are something like amalgams, stable amalgams of emotions and motivation, something like that. And then those stable amalgams produce the frameworks within which you operate. So here’s an example. So if you’re extroverted, your goal is going to be, well, there’s a group. I’m going to integrate myself into it. And I’m going to make my presence known and enjoyable. Because we know, for example, that extroverts like parties. And so that’s an adaptive strategy because they have the social hierarchy out there. And that’s a place where rewards can be obtained. And so their fundamental tilt is towards exploitation of the social surround. It’s probably a bit of a trade because extroverts, they can be very amusing to be with. And they’re always trying to entertain people. So it’s not like it’s a one-way street. Whereas someone who’s more conscientious is going to be, well, this place is in bad order and it needs to be repaired. And we should do something to straighten that up. And so that’s like a generalized rubric that they’re using to apply to the world in every different situation. So it’s sort of like base level motivations and emotions, the first order aggregation, which gives you maybe the five dimensions, and then those act as the underlying primarily biological systems that tilt your perceptions and your actions towards certain niches in the environment. So the agreeable person is going to go for relationships. The disagreeable person is going to be selfish somewhat or self-oriented anyways and competitive. These are all ways that you can go through the world. If you’re high negative emotion, then you’re going to be quite concerned with making sure that things are secure and safe. You can see that those are all valid a priori theories about how you might adapt to the different niches that the world provides. So then I would say that it’s something like that these hierarchies of values are built around the fundamental trait orientations. It’s something like that. So you know for an extrovert, something down here might be tell a joke, plan a party, go to a bar. Those are all made up of obviously implementable behaviors, but they’re fairly, they’re fractional elements of what constitutes extroversion. Well that’s probably pretty good. Yeah, okay, so we’ll stop there and then I’ll see you on Thursday and that’s it. You guys know the final is not cumulative, I presume. So it’ll only be covering the material that was from the last test and it’ll be the same format as the other tests, so you’re familiar with them. You know what’s coming. Okay? See you on Thursday.