https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pCceO_D4AlY
Music So, I want to tell you, I’m going to make a little announcement first. I’m going to do a series of lectures, I think starting in May, maybe at the Isabel Bader Theatre, we’re trying to look into booking that, I’m going to do a psychological interpretation of the Bible from beginning to end, that’s the plan anyway, so I’m going to do that once a week. So if you’re interested in that, I would recommend that you, man maybe you’re not, and that’s fine obviously, but if you go onto my Twitter account, there’s a place you can sign up, it doesn’t mean that you’ll attend, I’m just trying to see if there are people who are interested in, I’ve been interested in doing that for a long time, and so I think I’m going to try it. So anyways, that’s the announcement, and then, is that about it? I guess so. Okay, so look, we’re going to switch gears today. The first half of this course, as you’ve no doubt already gathered, is because it’s grounded essentially in clinical theories of personality, it tends more towards the philosophical, and I told you that the reason for that was that I regard clinical psychology as a branch of engineering rather than a branch of science, it’s human engineering obviously, and because of that, it’s an applied science, and so that means it straddles the ground between a science and a practice, and because it involves human beings, it necessarily involves value, because we live inside value structures, and so the logical consequence of that is that investigation into the philosophy of value is necessary in order to understand clinical psychological theories, because really what you’re trying to do as a clinician, you could say you’re trying to do two things, one is to help people have less terrible lives, but you’re also trying to help them have better lives, and there’s obviously a value structure that’s inherent in that attempt, because you’re moving from something of less value to something of more value, and it’s best to just face that and all the complexities that come along with that head on. Now, I think what you do as a clinician to overcome whatever tendency you might have to impose your value structure on someone is you do an awful lot of listening, and so my basic practice with people is to say to them, well, obviously you’re here because you would like things to be better, but that’s okay, we can use your definition of what constitutes better, we can use your definition of what constitutes worse, or we can establish that through dialogue and negotiation. What are you aiming at? How would you like things to be better a year from now, say, if you could have what you wanted, if your life was put together, what would that look like? And you can have a very straightforward discussion with people about that, if you’re not trying to cram the way that they’re orienting the world into your particular perspective. Now, that’s one of the dangers of being the adherent of a given psychological school. Now, having said that, it’s also, there was research done many years ago showing that if you were an eclectic psychotherapist, which means that you sort of pick and chose from different psychotherapeutic schools, you tended to not be as effective as you were if you were the dedicated adherent of a given school. And I think the reason for that is that there’s so many schools of psychological thought that if you say that you pick and choose from all of them, what that really means is that you don’t know anything about any of them. And then there’s also the additional factor, maybe you might call it, that if someone comes to you and they’re very chaotic and confused, helping them impose any structure onto their life is likely to be an improvement over no structure at all. And you could think about that in a Piagetian sense, is that you’re going to be happier playing a game rather than no game. And there’s many games that you could play that are better than no game. And so if you go to a therapist that has a particular viewpoint, and they help you structure your understanding of the world within the confines of a given clinical model, and you came in there very chaotic and uncertain, then maybe that’s going to be a lot better for you than just floundering. And I think there’s some real truth in that. And I think that that’s part and parcel of another, what you might call it, reasonable observation about maturation, is that it’s very necessary for people at some point in their life to dedicate themselves to a single game of some sort, which is kind of what you’re doing in university. You have to become one thing at some point in your life. And the sacrifice, of course, is that you give up all the other things that you could become, but you don’t really have a choice because if you don’t decide voluntarily to become one thing, to become a disciplined adherent of some specific practice or profession or viewpoint, then you risk just aging chaotically. And you don’t get away with not aging. So you might as well age into something that’s actually something rather than just remaining or then just becoming an old child, which is really not a good thing. It’s not a good thing to see, especially by the time people hit about 40. It’s not pretty for them or anyone else. And even at 30, it’s getting pretty old at that point. 40, it’s almost irreparable at 40. And the reason for that is you start running out of opportunities. When you’re young and stupid, people don’t care because they think, well, whatever, you’ve got decades of possibilities still ready to unfold in you. But if you’re in the same unspecified position at 40, people are much less forgiving, especially because if they’re going to hire someone who doesn’t know what’s going on or employ them or engage them in some sort of productive activity, they might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential rather than someone who’s really lived more than half of their life already, because of course you have by the time you’re 40. Okay, so anyway, so that’s with regards to putting the first half of the course to bed, so to speak. The second half is more scientific. And there’s a bit of a gap, and it’s a gap I’m trying to resolve conceptually, because now we move into more biological models and into models that are psychometric. And psychometrics is the study of psychological measurement. And now if you’re a scientist, there’s a couple of things that you’re obliged to do if you’re a scientist. One is to utilize the scientific method, that’s usually the experimental method, where you take two groups randomly selected, apply a manipulation to one of them and not an equivalent manipulation of a different sort to another, hypothesize about what the outcome is likely to be, and then test it. That’s the technical experimental model anyways. You’re also obliged, as a scientist, to come up with a measurement, let’s just put it that way, that’s reliable and valid. Okay, and a reliable measure is one that measures the same way across multiple measurements. So for example, you wouldn’t want to take a ruler that’s made out of flexible rubber to measure things with, because it wouldn’t give you the same measurement if you put it in different situations. That’s reliable and valid. It’s a term you need to know. It means that the measurement tool produces stable results across different instances of the measurement. Without that, you don’t have a measurement. The other critical factor with regards to a measurement is that it has to be valid, which means that it actually has to measure what it purports to measure, and it has to be usable for an array of different purposes. And so you might think, well, the purpose of scientific endeavor is to predict and to control. You could say understand, predict and control, but understanding, prediction and controls are all manifestations of the same underlying, thoroughly designed comprehension. Now, here’s what’s happened with the measurement of personality. It’s a funny story. In some sense, a peculiar story, because in many ways, what we’ve come to understand about personality from a scientific perspective developed in a very a theoretical manner. It’s not very common in scientific endeavor that that occurs, is that what we know about personality emerged from, I would say, statistically rigorous observation, without it being the consequence of any real model of what we know about personality. So often what happens in scientific endeavor is that someone generates a model first, a theoretical understanding, and then they generate measurement tools based on that theoretical understanding, and then they test the measurement tools to see if the measurement tools perform properly, and if they fail at least to invalidate the underlying theory. That isn’t what happened with psychometrics, except in a loose way. So here’s the loose theory, and you’ve got to get this exactly right to understand this properly. You’ve got to get it exactly right. And it’s really important because insofar as you guys are interested in psychology, especially in the experimental end of psychology, measurement is everything, and so much of what psychologists publish and write about is incorrect. And the reason it’s incorrect is because they do not have their measurements properly instantiated. It’s a massive problem, especially in social psychology. In fact, it’s probably a fatal problem in that most of the things that social psychologists measure don’t exist. And social psychology has been rife with scandals for the last four or five years, and there’s good reason for it. But a big part of the problem is that the measurement, that people are not stringent and careful enough about their measurements. So we’re going to walk through this very, very carefully. So I’m going to set forward a set of propositions, and you have to think about them because each of them are axiomatic. So you sort of have to accept them before you go on to the next step, and there’s certainly room to question them. But here’s the bare bones of the psychometric model of personality. So we’ll call it roughly the Big Five model. And the reason it’s called the Big Five model is because the psychometric investigations have indicated that you can specify human personality along five basic dimensions. You might ask, well, what exactly is personality? And well, that’s partly what we’ve been trying to wrestle with the entire course so far. And I would say, or what exactly is a trait? Think of a trait as an element of personality. And I think the best way to think about a trait is as a sub-personality. So you’re made up of sub-personalities that are integrated into something vaguely resembling a unity, but the unity is diverse. There are describable, stable elements that characterize you, that are elements of your being. So for example, here’s some common ones. I might say, well, are you social or would you rather be alone? So here’s a good question for you to decide whether you’re extroverted or introverted. It’s pretty straightforward because that’s the first major dimension. Basically, if you take any set of questions that could be applied descriptively to a human being, and you subject them to a statistical process called factor analysis, you can determine how they group together. So what I would be interested in, let’s say I asked you a hundred questions. Let’s say I asked a hundred questions of you and a hundred other people. What I would find was that reliably, if some person answered question A, say on a scale of one to seven, six or seven, there would be other questions in the set of questions that they also tended to answer on the upper end of the scale. Or reliably, if they answered one question at the top of the scale, they’d answer another question at the bottom. That’s a pattern of covariation. So you’re looking for how the questions covary across large numbers of people. So let’s say, here’s a stupid example, but it’s really straightforward, easy to understand. I might say, how often do you smile? One to seven. How often are you happy? One to seven. Well, what you’d find, obviously, is that people who tended to answer that they smiled a lot would also tend to answer that they were happy a lot. And so smiling and happy are not exactly the same thing, which is why we have two different phrases to describe them. But they’re close enough so that they seem to be reflective of some underlying structure. And so that’s what a factor analysis does. It allows you to take a large set of questions, to administer it to a large number of people, and then to statistically analyze it, looking how the questions relate to one another across the entire group, so that you can infer what the underlying structure is. And here’s the question in some sense. If I ask you a hundred questions, how many questions am I really asking you? Because you might say, well, are you, do you smile a lot? Are you happy? Do you wake up eager to start the day? You say, well, is that one question? Ask three ways? Ask three ways? Or is it three separate questions? And the answer is, well, if the answers reliably covary, then it’s reflection of an underlying single dimension. Now, obviously, those questions are slightly different. Now, but they’ll relate to one another stably. So you can infer out the central stable factors. Now, it might be the case that, so here’s an example. Because you might ask how many stable underlying dimensions are there in any set of questions? If I ask you questions that relate to your capacity to manipulate abstractions, I’ll find that there’s one factor. So imagine you had an infinite library of problem solving questions. Doesn’t matter what they are. Capital of Georgia. Here’s a sequence. Two, four, six, eight, ten. What’s the next number? Here’s five patterns. Here’s, and they transform predictably across the pattern array. Here’s five alternatives that the next pattern might be. Pick that one. Here’s ten words. Tell me what they mean. Anything like that. Here’s a mathematical operation. Compute it. Anything like that. Imagine you had a very large library of questions like that. An infinite library. And you took random sets of a hundred questions from that library. And you gave those sets to a thousand people. What you’d find was that people who, and the score, say you gave them a hundred questions, and then you summed across all the items to see how well they did. What you’d find was that people who did very well on one set of items would do very well on another set of items. And very well on another set of items. And that would be the same for people who did badly. If they did badly on any one of the sets of randomly chosen items of abstraction, they’d do badly on the rest. That’s basically IQ. That’s all there is to it. So what IQ does is correct that for age. But other than that, that’s all there is to it. And the thing that’s interesting about those random sets of abstract problem solving questions is there’s one dimension. That’s it. Intelligence has one dimension. And it’s one of the most terrifying statistics that are known to social scientists. And IQ is an extraordinarily powerful predictor of long term success. Especially in complex jobs. And the reason for that, it’s quite straightforward. Most complex jobs throw random sets of complex problems at you. That’s their definition. So for example, if you’re working as a lawyer on complex court cases, you have to be able to read very quickly. You have to be able to abstract. You have to be able to problem solve. You have to be able to formulate arguments. And you have to do that repeatedly in different ways across very large spans of time. And so the fact that your ability to solve any set of random problems is a really good predictor of your ability to solve any set of random legal problems. It’s more or less self-evident that that would be the case. But the thing that makes IQ so damn powerful, and it’s one of the personality traits, roughly speaking. The thing that makes IQ so powerful is you can basically get a decent measure of it in 20 minutes. It’s very terrifying. Anyways, we’ll go into IQ in some depth as we progress through the course. But you get one dimension out of a factor analysis of IQ. Now, in the personality domain, using descriptive items, you don’t. You get five dimensions. And so what are these dimensions exactly? Well, you could think about them as I think of them as sub-personalities. But here’s some other ways of thinking about them, because we want to flesh this out a little bit. You could think of them as a frame of reference so that if you’re an extrovert, I was going to tell you the extroverted question. Does being around groups of people make you energetic, or does it exhaust you? And if you’re the sort of person that will go to a party and interact with 20 people, and then you have to go home and be by yourself for like two weeks, then you’re introverted. Introverts are exhausted by social interactions. Extroverts are the opposite. They’re energized by social interactions. And you know, you might be in the middle so that you can take it or leave it with regards to social interactions, but you’re happy to go to them and you’re happy to spend time by yourself. But a real extrovert, there’ll be some of you in here, how many of you can’t stand spending time alone? Okay, so there’s only two that will admit it. Extroverts are more likely to admit that sort of thing too, by the way. And how many of you like to spend time alone, or would rather be alone? Okay, so there’s a preponderance of introverts in this class by all appearances. But that’s a pretty canonical question for extroversion versus introversion. It’s a very stable trait, by the way. It manifests itself early in life, and it’s stable across the age span. Not completely. Introverts can learn to be extroverted, and extroverts can learn to spend time on their own. I think that actually your capacity to expand your ability past the initial constraints of your biological temperament is something like the development of character or wisdom. So if you’re an introvert by nature, and you learn how to be extroverted, then that expands your domain of competence. And if you’re extroverted and you learn to be introverted, the same thing. But it’s almost like, imagine a distribution of introversion here, extroversion here, a normal distribution. You’re set, when you’re young, at somewhere along that distribution with some range around it. And I think what you do as you mature, if you develop your skills, is you expand that range. But the place at which you’re set doesn’t move that much. So you can think about them as sub-personalities. You can think about them as frames of reference. So frame of reference would be something like, well, since you’re extroverted, you value being with people. And so you’re going to look at the world. For example, if you’re extroverted, you come into a room like this, you think, oh, look, it’s a whole field of opportunity for social interactions. And if you’re introverted, you think, well, maybe I’ll go sit up in the corner and hope everybody leaves me the hell alone. So it’s an a priori set of perceptual structures that you bring to bear on a whole sequence of environments. So for example, maybe you’re high in openness versus low in openness. That’s the creativity dimension. People who are high in openness tend to be artists and entrepreneurs. And open people will look at other people as opportunities to engage in interesting intellectual conversations. And so you can tell when you’re talking to someone open, especially if they’re very high in openness, because they’re going to want to talk to you about ideas or about aesthetics. It’s going to go right away. So that’s how they view you as a source of that sort of conversation. That’s how they view the landscape. Someone who’s high in neuroticism, which is a negative emotion dimension, is more likely to view the world as a place of threats to be protected against because they’re more anxious and more prone to emotional pain. So anyway, so that’s the frame of reference issue. So there’s something about your underlying fundamental psychological traits that determine or influence, at least, your value structures. And they do it at the level of perception. They also tend to set your goals. So extroverted people have as one goal the opportunity to engage with other people. So extroverts love parties. They live for parties. They love to tell jokes as well. That’s a very good behavioral marker of extroversion. And so because they value those sorts of things, they set them as goals in their life. Or you could say the extroversion operating within them sets them as goals within their life, depending on how deterministic you want to be about it. So there are patterns of behavior. That’s another at a micro level. You know, I showed you that sort of hierarchy of value slash frames of references that ranged from micro behaviors up to high order abstractions. You can extract out personality by looking at people’s micro actions as well. And one of the papers that I want you guys to read that’s on the course website has to do with our investigation into behavioral markers of the big five traits. Yep. What defines introversion? Is it simply the lack of extroversion? Maybe. We don’t know exactly. I’ll get back to that. At the moment, that’s kind of what it looks like. Is that introversion is something like the absence of extroversion. But let me explain extroversion more particularly. It’ll make more sense. OK. All right. So you can think about them as stable motivation. So, for example, people who are high in agreeableness, I can generally tell people who are high in agreeableness when they come into my clinical practice and I start asking them about their biases. I’m asking them about their biography. Because my experience has been that people who are agreeable will tell you their biography defined by relationships they’ve had over their life. So agreeable people are high in compassion and high in politeness. It looks like the maternal dimension. It looks like the pair bonding dimension. Something like that. And so agreeable people tend to characterize their lives in terms of the intimate relationships they’ve had. And so those are also people who would value an intimate relationship over anything else. So agreeableness is the uppermost trait that characterizes their personality. Then, well, systems of values. We already talked about that a little bit. The higher you are in a given trait, the more you value certain opportunities that are associated with that trait. And so I think it’s worthwhile thinking about traits along using all of those different conceptual schemes to understand what constitutes a trait. But what people are in some sense is a little melody of traits. Melody, not M-A-L-A-D-Y, although some people are like that. But melody like a song. Where different amounts of each of the canonical traits operate to a different degree at each person. And the person that manifests themselves is the panoply of those traits as they manifest themselves in the world. And so it’s actually very useful to understand your big five traits as far as I’m concerned. Actually, that’s why I have you do that exercise that you’re supposed to do for this class. That helps you identify your faults and virtues. And I use big five terminology to help you do that. So part of the reason it’s useful to know what your traits are is because it can help you figure out how you should orient your life. Like, so for example, if you’re high in extroversion, you’ve got a proclivity towards sales, for example. And you’re going to like occupations where you have a lot of opportunity for social interactions and social networking. You’re not going to be happy if your job requires you to sit alone for extended periods of time and work in the absence of social interaction. You’re going to be one of those annoying people then in one of those offices that instead of sitting alone in their office is going from doorway to doorway, engaging everyone in conversation. So you want to be in a position that capitalizes on your traits because it’s really difficult to work contrary to your traits. The other thing that’s worth thinking about too, we’re actually building a computer app for this, which is about which has been about 80 percent done for a whole year. We’ve got a hypothesis that we’re still working out that’s supported to some degree by the relevant literature. So imagine that you’re looking for a stable partner, right? So you might think, well, what do you want in a stable partner? And at least in principle, one of the things you don’t want is too much mismatch between you and that person on the five fundamental dimensions. So, for example, if you’re really extroverted and you have a really introverted partner, you’re going to engage in continual conflict about how much social activity the two of you should subject yourself to. And it’s very, very difficult for people who broadly differ, widely differ on those dimensions to come to consensus because it’s not just a matter of opinion, right? It’s really a matter of different, if you’re looking at extremes of really different types of people. And the thing about introverts is they just don’t enjoy large scale social interaction that much. One on one, they’re often fine, but in a group, they don’t like that. And it tires them out. Whereas a real extrovert, it’s like you isolate them and they just wither on the vine because a huge part of what actually motivates them in a positive way is tangled up with social interaction. And so if you’re an agreeable person and you have a particularly disagreeable partner, you’re also going to run into problems because the agreeable person will say whatever you want whenever. And the disagreeable person will say, well I’d like to know what the hell you want for a change. And be much more harsh and much more demanding in the situation. The agreeable person is going to find the disagreeable person harsh and unpleasant. And the disagreeable person is going to find the agreeable person wishy-washy and unable to stand up for themselves. And again, that’s actually one of the primary sources of tension between men and women. Because women tend to be higher in agreeableness than men. It’s about half a standard deviation, which is quite a large difference by psychological standards. And so what that means, I probably haven’t got this statistic quite right, but I think I’ve got it about right. What that means fundamentally, just so you have some sense of how large an effect that is, is that if you have a group of men and women and you pick out random pairs, the woman is going to be more agreeable than the man 60% of the time. So that’s not an overwhelming proportion, but it’s reliable and it’s quite large by psychological standards. So there’s the problem with agreeableness. With conscientiousness, well, if you’re conscientious, you’re industrious and orderly. And orderly people seem to be sensitive to disgust, which is something we’ll talk about in detail later. We’ve had a hard time specifying exactly what makes industrious people industrious. Because it’s hard to come up with an animal model for that sort of thing, and there’s no theoretical model. But our latest idea is that, it’s not my idea, it’s actually the idea of my graduate student, Christine Brophy, is that industrious people find it unpleasant and unsettling to not be doing something. So it isn’t so much that industriousness makes them happy or fills them with positive emotion. That would be more extroversion, right? Because extroversion is the positive emotion dimension. It’s that industrious people can’t stand sitting around doing nothing. And you know, this is speculation, but you know, human beings are obviously always engaged in the exchange of labour, especially the reciprocal exchange of labour. And you can imagine that in a community where everyone knows everyone, the people who work hard are going to be pretty irritated on a fairly chronic basis with the people who are completely unproductive. And my suspicions are that plenty of people who were completely unproductive in the history of the evolution of our species were wiped out by people who were unhappy with their lack of productivity. And so I think, generally speaking, human beings have this sense of ethical obligation with regards to one another to share labour. And people who are conscientious really, really feel that. So they feel bad if they’re not busily working on something that’s productive all the time. And so the advantage to being with someone conscientious is, well, they’re going to work like mad. But the disadvantage is they’re going to work like mad. So, you know, if you’re looking for a partner that you want to relax with or have fun with or who isn’t uptight, then a conscientious person is probably not a very good choice. On the other hand, if you’re a conscientious person and you’re living with someone who’s really unconscious, that’s good because they might be able to help you relax. But you’re not going to be happy with them because they don’t work nearly as hard as you do. But even worse, on the orderly dimension, you know, some of you have had roommates and maybe you’re more orderly than your roommate. What does it mean? It means you’re annoyed by mess before they are. And you don’t have to be annoyed by mess much before you’re less orderly roommate for you to be the one that’s always running around picking things up. And so actually one of the things that’s emerged from the psychometric analysis is that women are slightly more orderly than men. And I suspect that has something to do with what would you call it, inequitable distribution of housework. Because even if you’re, imagine that your proclivity is to be triggered by disorder 25 seconds before your partner’s. Well, you’re going to end up, it doesn’t take much difference for you to be the one that’s always concerned about the mess first. So anyways, and so if you’re a really orderly person and you live with a disorderly person, well good luck getting along with them. They’re going to regard you as like uptight and over concerned with details and unwilling to relax, that’s for sure. And they’re going to regard you as well, just a bloody mess. And how can anyone possibly live with someone like you? And so, so another reason why it’s useful to understand your personality is because I think it gives you a better crack at finding someone that you can actually live with over the long run. And we don’t know what the optimal, I don’t think you want to live with someone who’s exactly like you because then both of you have the same strengths and weaknesses. And there’s a bit of a problem there, right? Because maybe an agreeable person can use a bit of disagreeable person around them to balance each other out and vice versa, right? So we don’t understand the optimal balance for long term thriving in a relationship. But I think we do understand the fact that if you’re too different in your traits, that where you’re different is going to constitute a chronic source of conflict. So, so anyway, so you can think about that. So. Alright, so how have psychologists studied personality? Well, I’m going to talk most about the statistical psychometric approach to begin with. But there are other approaches that we will talk about as well. So let me give you some let me give you the background on the self report methodology first, because it’s really formed the backbone of psychological research into personality. So imagine that you took a comprehensive sample of all the descriptive adjectives in the English language. Now, it’s trickier than you think, because actually what constitutes an adjective isn’t that easy to determine, because many words have forms that are adjective, verb and noun, depending on how they’re how the same word is written out. So distinguishing adjectives from verbs or adverbs turns out to be more difficult than you might think. But let’s just say for the sake of argument that you could collect all of the descriptive adjectives in the English language and that then perhaps you decided because you don’t want to use the same words. You decided that you were going to use the most common thousand of them. And there are tables that enable you to look up the frequency of words. And it turns out that in common parlance, it’s like 5% of the vocabulary of English language accounts for 95% of the usage. It’s an example of this phenomenon called the Pareto distribution, which we will talk about later. So in fact, most discourse is done with 500 words. You can get about 80%, something like that, of speech in terms of single word comprehension with 500 words. So let’s say you took the thousand, you took all the descriptive adjectives and then you took the ones that were the most common thousand. And so here’s the hypothesis part. And this is a critical thing to know. This is called the linguistic hypothesis. The linguistic hypothesis is that variation in personality among human beings is of sufficient import so that it’s become accurately coded in the lexicon. So what that means is that, roughly speaking, is that over the course of the evolution of any language, we’ll use English as the example here, descriptive terms have been generated that actually do cover the variation in personality and that essentially cover them without bias. Now, that’s a hypothesis. Actually, it’s an axiom. It’s because the hypothesis in some sense isn’t, it’s not exactly testable. We’ll leave that aside for now. It’s testable a little bit, but not easily. So that’s the first thing you have to accept. You have to accept that it’s possible to extract out what constitutes personality by looking at the linguistic representation of descriptors insofar as they’re encapsulated in language. Okay, so when people talk about trait models like the Big Five being comprehensive representations of personality, that isn’t exactly what they mean. And you need to know this. What they mean is that it’s a comprehensive representation of personality insofar as personality has been encapsulated in language. There may be elements of personality that we haven’t been able to talk about or we don’t know how to talk about that are of crucial importance. And there may not be, but the Big Five theorists assume that there aren’t. Alright, so that’s a limitation of the theory. But if you accept that, then you say, well, the first thing you want to do is take a relatively random cross-section of the descriptive terms, because then you don’t introduce bias into the initial stages of the inquiry. So, I’ll tell you something that we did recently, and you can tell me what you think about it. It’s analogous. We were trying to study political correctness. And so the first thing we were trying to figure out was, is there even such a thing? Because if you look at the political dialogue, what you find is that people on the side of the political spectrum who have been defined as politically correct tend to say that it doesn’t exist and that that category is just a pejorative term that was invented by people who hold alternative political opinions. And so the first question is, well, what do you mean does it exist? What do you mean by exist? How do you tell if a psychological concept is real? Like, is anger something that exists objectively? Is it an objective phenomena? Well, it’s not that easy to determine. You say, well, we act like it is, and we understand what anger means. But no one goes around in the world and says anger, you know, without saying anything else, or you’d run away from them, you know. What they do is they place the word anger into a sentence and place the sentence within a conversation. And they enable you to infer exactly what they mean by the word anger by listening to the surrounding context, right? And if you’re going to turn that into something like an objective term, what you do is you pull out the term anger, and then you make the hypothesis that it represents something real in the objective world. But it’s not that easy to determine if something does exist, especially if it’s a psychological phenomena, in the real world. What do you mean by exist? That’s the problem of construct validation, OK? So that’s another term you really need to know if you’re interested in experimental psychology, especially on the personality end. A construct is a representation of something psychological that hypothetically exists objectively. How do you establish its existence objectively? Well, does fear exist? No, you have the problem with all the emotional terms. Does joy exist? Does surprise exist? Does embarrassment exist? Does guilt exist? Shame? How are they related to one another? Guilt and shame, for example, seem quite similar to one another, right? And pain and fear and anger all seem to share the attribute of unpleasant and negative emotions. And so how similar, how something, if something exists, it should be the same as some things and different from other things. And that’s part of construct validation as well, to specify how the construct is the same as some things and different from others. Anger should be reliably distinguishable from joy, for example, because otherwise they’re not different. And anger and fear should be somewhat the same if they’re both negative emotions. And so it’s extraordinarily complex to validate a construct. And so here’s what we did with political correctness. And the reason I’m using the political examples is because that’s an obvious place where self-serving bias can enter the scientific arena, right? So if I wanted to make a point about political correctness or if I wanted to make a point about right-wing fascism, I could build my biases into the measurement instruments accidentally. And then they would produce as output what I put into them as input. And I want to protect myself against that if I actually want to do the scientific investigation properly. So what we did when we started to construct our measures of political correctness was employ a number of people to go to the scientific research. To go through as many news sources as they could get their hands on to identify any attitude or behavior, roughly that, that had been described by anyone at all as potentially politically correct. So it was kind of agnostic. And we were trying to do it as randomly as possible, you know, to get as many news sources as we possibly could so that we were sampling across the environment without bias. Okay, so then we came up with, I don’t remember how many, a couple hundred, maybe more, a couple hundred items that were roughly indicative of what you might describe as political correctness. But that’s not good enough, right? Because just because you have this random assemblage of items doesn’t indicate at all that they’re all measuring something that was similar. But that’s just implicit. They’re all called political correctness. But you don’t know if those attitudes co-variant. What that means is, if you held one attitude of that list, were you more likely to hold another or multiple others? Right? So is the conditional probability of holding multiple items, is there a high probability of holding true multiple items simultaneously? Well, you figure that out with factor analysis. So what we did is we turned that into a questionnaire using different question types, and we administered it to several hundred people. And we did a factor analysis and we found actually that there was such a thing as political correctness because the questions clumped together. People would reliably answer them in a patterned manner, but that there were actually two dimensions that were quite separate. So there isn’t one political correctness, there seems to be two. And then we looked at the personality predictors and the IQ predictors and a variety of other predictors that would enable us to come to some understanding of the temperamental proclivity towards those political attitudes that we have. And we looked at those political attitudes, if any. We knew already that political conservatives tended to be low in trade openness, that’s the creativity dimension, and high in trade conscientiousness. Whereas political liberals tended to be high in trade openness and low in conscientiousness. And so one of the things that’s extraordinarily interesting to know from a Big Five perspective is that your political proclivities are very powerfully influenced by your temperament. And so one of the things you can think about with regards to ongoing political discussions in the real world is that those discussions are actually attempts by people of different temperament. One, to impose their temperamental viewpoints on the world. And two, to engage in a dialogue with people who are actually quite different than they are. So like conscientious people, they value hard work, rules, order, reliability, integrity, and structure. And so they’re dutiful. We analyzed what predicted military performance, for example, in the US Army. Overwhelmingly conscientiousness. It’s not surprising, right? Because it’s a very structured, rule-ordered, top-down, follow procedure sort of endeavor. Now the armed forces had problems with that to some degree because they were also simultaneously looking for people who could think independently on their feet. Because if you’re in a battlefield, for example, especially if you’re isolated from your command structure, there’s going to be times when you have to make extraordinarily difficult decisions on your own. But if you’re selected primarily for conscientiousness, that’s not going to be your forte. Because if you’re a conscientious person, what happens is that you enter into a contract with someone, even yourself, and then you carry it out. So now we’ve also spent a lot of time selecting entrepreneurs. I work with this company in California that has started schools for entrepreneurs in 160 different countries all over the world. The guy who started this, whose name is Adeo Ressi, is a real, he’s an absolute monster. The guy started all those schools in five years. 165 schools all across the world. Eight different languages. And we’ve been screening people for entrepreneurial ability. And if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you almost have the opposite profile as a soldier. You’re very high in openness, and you’re lower in conscientiousness, or at least conscientiousness is irrelevant. And the reason for that seems to be that if you’re an orderly person, and you like to follow procedures and rules, it’s kind of hard for you to start a company. Because when you first start a company, or engage in any other creative process, because entrepreneurs turn out to be the same as artists, you’re not operating within a rule-governed structure. In fact, there may be many times where you have to break a small rule to move properly at a higher level of analysis. There’s no algorithmic way of generating a new company, obviously. And so it’s people who are very high in openness who happen to be good entrepreneurs. And so this is something I thought was extraordinarily cool, because we’d also already known what predicts managerial, administrative, and academic ability. IQ is crucial for any complex job, so we’ll just leave that behind. But what predicts academic ability, for example, at the University of Toronto, is intelligence, obviously, but also conscientiousness. The correlation between creativity and grades at the U of T is zero. Zero. Right. But it’s not surprising. The thing is, it’s easy to be cynical about that, but one of the things you have to understand about creative people is that they continually step outside of the domain of evaluation structures. Because if you’re going to say you’re going to evaluate the performance of 100 professors on their lecturing ability, well, you kind of have to measure what’s common across all the professors in order to come up with the standards for evaluation. Well, that means you’re not going to be able to use that structure to evaluate a particularly creative professor, because he or she is going to do something in a way that’s so different that it won’t show up on the evaluation measure. And of course, that’s what happens in universities. Somebody sent me, a couple of days ago, somebody sent me an essay that they had written for their master’s thesis that was wildly creative, and they were basically told to leave the program, and that they couldn’t continue. Not in the mean way. What happened was that what they were thinking was so outside of the conventions in the discipline is that no one had any idea what to do with the essay. So that’s really the lot of creative people, right? They’re always stepping outside of evaluation structures. And so it’s not that surprising that the relationship between creativity and grades at the U of T is zero. We found out as well, by looking at graduate student performance across multiple institutions, that there was a negative correlation between creativity and graduate school performance. It wasn’t even zero. It was worse than negative. Being creative was negative. And you think, well, that could make you cynical as well, but you can’t be cynical in that way, because one of the things that happens in science is that science tends to progress incrementally, rather than in great leaps. Now and then someone comes along who blows the structure out of a science and advances it ridiculously, like Einstein, but like most people aren’t Einstein, and maybe thank God for that. Most of the time, you’re in a discipline, you understand the discipline, and then once you’ve developed understanding of the discipline, you know what the next micro question is that should be answered. And part of the reason that science is so powerful is because it allows people who aren’t genius level creatives to make real advances in the generation of knowledge. One tiny micro step at a time. Doesn’t matter if there’s a hundred thousand people doing it, and each of them is making a micro step. Man, we’re zipping along as fast as we possibly want to zip along. And so it turns out to be conscientiousness that’s the excellent predictor of graduate student performance. That’s the best predictor for law. It’s the best predictor for managerial positions. It’s the best predictor for administrative positions. Anything that has a structure of rules that needs to be applied, conscientiousness is a great predictor. But it’s not good for predicting artistic ability or entrepreneurial ability. And that’s also really important because one of the things, this is partly why bureaucracy stultify, right? Because what happens is as they develop, they get chock full of conscientious people, with a few psychopaths thrown in there just for good measure, they get chock full of conscientious people busily zooming efficiently down a single track, and then all of a sudden the landscape shifts and they’re going very, very efficiently in exactly the wrong direction. And then the whole bloody thing falls apart. So you need to have some creative wing nuts in your organization to come up with completely absurd ideas that might just on the off chance be true. And so creativity is strange in that manner too because it’s a high risk, high return game. You’re a lot safer in your life to find a functioning entity and to operate as a cog within it, as long as the entity keeps functioning. Because if you’re creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there’s some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time and you’re going to become hyper successful as a consequence. But there’s much more probability that even though some of your ideas might be highly valuable, the probability that this is the right time and place for them is extraordinarily low. So to produce a successful creative product, for example, in the marketplace, you need a ridiculous combination of creativity so that you keep generating ideas and then a network around you of people who have skills that you don’t. And then the production of a product, let’s say whatever that happens to be, that’s actually in demand by the marketplace at exactly that moment and that someone else hasn’t already done better. So the sensible thing to tell anybody who wants to be creative is that’s stupid. You shouldn’t do it. It’s your probability of success is so low that it’s better just to do something sensible. But the problem with that is that creative people can’t do that because they’re creative. And if they shut down their creativity, it’s like an extrovert who’s gone to live in a, you know, in an isolated cell, a creative person who isn’t being creative. They just they just wither and die. So they’re stuck with it. So but it is a high risk, high return strategy. So probably better if you want to be creative or if you are. And you should take this advice to heart because I’ve been watching people for a long time. If you want to engage in a creative pursuit, you should find something stable to do that will generate you an income and you should pursue the thing that you’re creative about on the side because monetizing creative production is so bloody difficult that especially now, like especially in like artistic domains, generation of music and that sort of thing. It’s like you just have no idea how many million songs there are on the Internet and the vast majority of them commercially available. Get downloaded zero times like 80. I think there’s 80 million songs or something like that on the net. And I believe it’s something in the neighborhood of 70 million get downloaded zero times. And then there’s 100 that can get downloaded like 350 million times. And so those people are wildly successful and everyone else collapses in failure. Yep. No, we’ll talk about that more. Okay, so that’s not a bad overview for for initial foray into psychometrics.