https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=D9bS7BCKRk8
About a month ago I had my funding for my ongoing research projects refused by the federal government Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Ezra Levant from Rebel Media decided to host an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to replace it which was very good of him so thank you to Ezra and also to Aitan Gilbord who helped out a lot and to Hannah van der Kooij for managing it was extraordinarily helpful we raised about 180,000 300,000 across five years so that’s basically three years of funding so I’m extraordinarily impressed by that and also very thankful so for all of you who donated thank you very much I’ve put together this video with two of my graduate students whose academic careers will be supported as a consequence of this funding so that you know a little bit more about them and also about what it is that you helped out with the third Christine Brophy is working on political correctness and the relationship between personality and political belief as well as on the on the biological basis of the big five personality traits she couldn’t contribute to the video for for various reasons this time around although she did a lengthy interview with rebel media that you can catch on on social justice issues and and their basis in personality and so after this very brief introduction I’m going to let the students speak for each for five minutes they prepared a video telling you what they’re up to so anyways thanks very much we have one day left of the funding campaign runs for 24 more hours so this is the final update in all likelihood bye bye hi everyone my name is John Tennant I’m a first-year master’s student in dr. Peterson’s lab my research interests include technology for cognitive enhancement personality development and music cognition my background is a little bit different I did my bachelor’s degree in music theory and my undergraduate research focused on mathematical models of musical harmony and timbre this year I’ll be designing and testing a biofeedback system for increasing people’s ability to flow self-regulate and get in tune with one another I’m using a variety of sensors to measure things like heart rate breathing arousal and brainwaves I’ll be turning these signals into quasi musical stimuli to give people feedback about their body and mind in real time this should be able to help people better understand themselves and regulate their stress and emotions if used in pairs it might even be able to help people sync up with one another perhaps fostering empathy and helping them get into a kind of interpersonal flow state I have a huge personal interest in combining music psychology and technology in my undergraduate work with dr. Peterson I tackled theoretical issues surrounding visual representations of music while working on that project I developed a method for making important musical parameters such as harmony pitch rhythm and timbre accessible to our visual system I created two software music visualizers based on these principles I found these techniques also translate well to other applications such as the visualization of biological data if you’d like to see the music visualizes I developed or read about the principles behind them you can check out my website at John Matthew tenant comm there you can also find my undergraduate paper on math and musical harmony in my personality research this year I looked at female mate preference in an online study women read the profile of a fictional man and saw his picture women then rated the man’s attractiveness and personality they also answered questions about their own personality and completed an IQ test from this data we were able to build a what kinds of personalities are attractive to who on average women tended to prefer men who are conscientious extroverted agreeable emotionally stable and open to experience higher IQ participants however rated the men is much less attractive on average and they were less moved by those traditionally attractive characteristics like extraversion conscientiousness and emotional stability for more intelligent women the only things that made a significant difference were creativity and politeness which are sub aspects of openness and agreeableness we think creativity might be especially attractive because it indicates competence in unfamiliar situations the attraction to agreeableness might be due to a desire for a partner who will share resources and care for children in my upcoming personality research I’m developing a new method for investigating the structure of personality in traditional personality studies participants rate themselves on every item this limits the number of items that can be analyzed simultaneously instead we’re going to use collaborative ratings of fictional characters and public figures multiple people will provide ratings of the targets personality and we can build up a complete description from the multiple readers this will allow us to investigate the personality data contained inside larger sets of descriptors this will help us rapidly expand the vocabulary of words we can use to measure personality which should increase the precision of our models the first study to use this method will attempt to integrate positive and negative person descriptors with our existing personality models this is important because when the original scales were devised researchers purposely omitted words like evil untrustworthy wise and admirable by adding these words to our models of personality will be able to further explore the virtues and vices associated with personality dimensions we might also be able to pick up on new effects and correlations this can be especially useful in the labs ongoing research into the personality underpinnings of political belief so I’d like to thank everyone for supporting our research it makes a really big difference especially to us the graduate students if you’re interested in any of my work I’d love to hear from you you can also check out my site at John Matthew Tennant comm I have demos and papers posted there thanks for watching my name is Victor Swift and I’m a PhD student in Jordan Peterson’s lab I joined the lab in 2013 as a master’s student primarily researching how mental health is shaped by the ways in which people relate to their own descriptions of the world today my overall research investigates the nature of the big five personality traits the big five represent distinct patterns of feeling thinking and acting that are shared by all of us humans and higher primates seem to possess five distinct dispositions hence the name openness a tendency to seek novel ideas and experiences neuroticism a tendency to seek certainty and experience negative emotions extraversion a tendency to seek attention and experience positive emotions agreeableness a tendency to seek social harmony through politeness and compassion and finally conscientiousness a tendency to adhere to standards and goals by working hard and staying organized this final trait has been the focus of my research for reasons that I will explain shortly every person has these five traits to some degree and these traits remain relatively stable throughout adulthood as such the big five traits are important to both industry and academia because they can be used to reliably capture who a person is now we are confident that the big five model represents a real and meaningful psychological construct because it has been arrived at through several independent methodologies however we do not yet know why human dispositions cluster into these five traits nor do we know how to ascertain big five traits without directly asking people to introspect about themselves this is where my research comes in for the past three years I have been investigating how the big five traits can be detected without self-report this effort has taken many forms which I will continue to pursue throughout the course of my PhD for instance I’ve been investigating whether the big five traits map on to the differences in fundamental cognitive processes such as attention thus far I have found support for the idea that conscientious people are remarkably better at deliberately attending to specific features under distractions while people who score high on openness are notably flexible at attending to changing attentional demands this research suggests that the big five traits may have a basis in fundamental cognitive processes and this may lead to the development of personality screening measures that have a basis in part on cognitive performance I’ve also been investigating whether the big five traits reveal themselves in motivational reactions to positive and negative feedback on a variety of tasks so far this line of research has revealed that conscientious and neurotic people can be provoked to work harder by using negative feedback however this effect only emerges when the task is somewhat enjoyable and the effect is reversed if the task is frustrating this line of research suggests that the big five may have a basis in more fundamental motivational tendencies and this may lead to the development of a motivational intervention that’s tailored to specific personality profiles one of my most promising research projects concerns the detection of personality through language use this research is founded on the presupposition that character can be revealed through the words that individuals tend to use this idea is intuitive we think about simple dispositions such as pessimism and optimism for example we would expect an optimist to use a disproportionate amount of positive words however it was unclear as to whether this would extend to complex dispositions such as conscientiousness which again represents a tendency to work hard and stay organized this disposition does not clearly map on to word choice so to test our hypothesis we generated a list of more than a thousand adjectives that are theoretically relevant to conscientious people these words included things such as methodical persistent and resourceful we then acquired a variety of writing samples from different groups of people these writing samples included recollections of positive memories negative memories ordinary experiences as well as stream of thought essays and even Facebook statuses across all of these samples we found highly conscientious people to use a disproportionate amount of conscientious related adjectives not only that but we also found that the use of these adjectives predicts the same outcomes as conscientiousness itself including increased income and increased passion for work thus we have demonstrated that it is possible to identify complex personality traits from many different language samples easily and reliably we started with conscientiousness alone because of its clear real-world applications many of our most valued social organizational and individual outcomes are determined by conscientiousness people who possess this trait enrich our communities by exercising social responsibility and relational fidelity as top performers at work and school conscientious people drive up the productivity of our organizations and the grades in our classrooms by demonstrating that conscientiousness can be detected through natural language use we have opened the door to a new approach for detecting a highly desirable personality trait the trait that many people lie about precisely due to its societal value in my coming years in the Peterson lab I plan to develop a personality measurement battery based on these natural language findings the development of this battery will require more research into the language production tendencies associated with conscientiousness as well as an extension of this methodology to other big five personality traits taken together with my research in attention and motivation this work will help solidify what the big five represents and will afford the development of new tools for measuring and accommodating personality