If you ask a disagreeable person what he or she wants, they'll tell you right away. They know it's like, "This is what I want and this is how I'm going to get it. " But agreeable people, especially if they're really agreeable, are so agreeable that they often don't even know what they want because they're so accustomed to living for other people and to finding out what other people want and to trying to make them comfortable, and so forth, that it's harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life.
And that's not—look, there are situations where that's advantageous, but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to forge yourself a career. That just doesn't work at all. Even though, on average, men and women just aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group, if you go out and look at the extremes, they're very different.
All of the most agreeable people are women, and all of the most disagreeable people are men. The thing is, the extremes are often what matter rather than what's in the middle. One of the ways that's reflected in society, by the way, is there's way more men in prison, and the best personality predictor of being imprisoned is to be low in agreeableness.
It makes you callous. Now, you may think, "Well, what's the opposite of compassion and politeness? " The answer to that, I think, is best sort of conceptualized as a trading game.
Let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games. If you're very agreeable, then you're going to bargain harder on my behalf than you're going to bargain on your own behalf, whereas if you're very disagreeable, you're going to do the reverse. You're going to think, "I'm in this trading game for me," and you're going to take care of your own interests, where an agreeable person is going to say, "No, no, at best this is 50-50, but I'd like to help you every way I can.
" One of the things you have to be careful of if you're agreeable is not to be exploited, because you'll line up to be exploited. I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants, and so that just doesn't work so well in the actual world. One of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy, you know, people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons, but one of them is they often come because they're If you’re going to discipline them, or you don’t know how to do that properly, then what they’re going to do is experience nothing but rejection from other children and false smiles from other parents and adults.
So, you’re throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying, and that’s not something that’s going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or well-being of your child. If your child can learn a couple of simple rules of behavior—like don’t interrupt adults when they’re talking too much, pay attention, and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary, and you know, share and play properly—then, when they meet other kids, the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them, and that’s going to go well. And then they're going to go off and socialize each other for the rest of their lives.
Because what happens is that from four years old onwards, primary socialization with children takes place among other children. If the kids don’t get in on that early, they don’t move into that developmental spiral upwards, and they're left behind. You can imagine how terrible that is, because a four-year-old will not play with another four-year-old who is two, but a five-year-old certainly will not play with a five-year-old who is two, right?
Because the gap is just starting to get unbelievably large. So, the kids start out behind, and then the peers leave them behind, and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their lives. Those are the ones that grow up to be long-term antisocial, right?
They're already aggressive; it doesn’t dip down. Now, what happens to normal boys, roughly speaking? Imagine the aggressive two-year-old types.
They get socialized, so their level of aggression goes down, and then they hit puberty, and testosterone kicks in, and bang! Levels of aggression go back up. That’s why males are criminals between the ages, roughly, of 16 and about 25.
When it matches the creativity curve, by the way, it’s so cool! If you look at the spike of creativity among men 16 to 25, it starts to go down, and criminality matches that absolutely perfectly. So, that’s quite cool.
Part of the reason is that testosterone levels raise the average level of aggression among men; it’s more dominance than aggression, actually. Testosterone is by no means all bad, and then it starts to decrease at about age 25 or 26, which is usually when men stop staying up late at night, stop drinking as much, develop a full-time career, and take on burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family. So, that’s the development of what I would call predatory aggression because I also think that the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression versus maternal sympathy; it’s something like that.
If you look at other mammals that are predators—because we’re predators as well as prey animals—if you look at other animals, like bears, the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants. In fact, the female bears will keep the male the hell away because he’s likely to kill the infants and maybe even to eat them. So, there’s no maternality at all in solitary male mammalian predators.
It’s really useful to investigate the viewpoints of people who have opposing views to yours because they’ll tell you things. Not only will they tell you things you don’t know, but they’ll also tell you how to see the world in ways that you don’t see it, and they'll also have skills that you don’t have that you could develop. So, for example, if you're an introverted person, it's very useful to watch an extroverted person because the extroverted person has ways of being in the social world that aren’t natural to you that you can use to improve your toolkit.
And if you're disagreeable, one of the best things to do with disagreeable people—especially if that’s alienating them from other people, for example, because it can—you know, people treat you like you’re a selfish, arrogant son of a—maybe that’s because you are. It’s like, okay, so what do you do about that? One of the most promising treatments, let’s say for that, is to get the person to do something for someone else once a day just as a practice, and learn how to do it.
Maybe you can wake the circuit up—you know, if you think that it’s lying dormant in you, which is probably right. I think we have a very wide range of propensities within us; some are switched on by genetic propensity, and some are switched on, but I think that if you put yourself in the right situation or walk yourself through the right exercises, you can switch some of these other things on as well. But it takes work, dedication, and discipline.
I would say, generally speaking, if you want to adapt yourself properly to life, you should find a niche in the environment that corresponds with your temperament. You shouldn’t work at cross purposes to your temperament because it’s just too damn difficult. But having done that, then you should work on developing the skills and viewpoints that exist in the space opposite to your personality because that’s where you’re fundamentally underdeveloped.
That way, I think you could extend your temperamental capability across a wider range. To me, that’s roughly equivalent to bringing a richer toolkit to each situation. You know, so if you’re hyper-extroverted, you should probably learn to… Shut up at parties now and then, and listen just to see what's going on; to see if you can manage it, you know.
And if you're introverted, well then, you should learn how to speak in public and to learn how to go to parties without hiding in the corner and saying nothing to anyone. You know, if you're agreeable, then you need to learn how to be disagreeable so people can't push you around; and if you're disagreeable, you need to learn how to be agreeable so that you're not an evil son of a bill. The same thing applies even in the conscientious domain.
It's like if you're too conscientious, you need to learn to relax and let go a little bit; and if you're unconscientious, it's time to get out the Google Calendar, man! Start scheduling your day right and beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick until you're disciplined enough to stick to something for some length of time and not live in absolute squalor, which is something that would characterize someone who's very disorderly, for example, because they just don't notice it. It doesn't bother them.
Disorder—it's like maybe they can see it, but it doesn't have any emotional valence, and so it doesn't have any motivational significance, you know? So the other thing you might want to think about, too, if you're choosing a partner, is to try not to choose someone who's too distant from you on the temperamental variables, because you're going to have a hard time bridging the gap. You know, it's hard for an introverted person and an extroverted person to coexist, and it's really hard for an orderly person and a disorderly person to coexist because they will drive each other nuts.
Why don't you pick up? Why are you so obsessed by it? That's the basic argument.
So, it's useful to know about your temperament so that you can negotiate the space with your partner as well. I don't think you should try to find someone who's exactly the same as you, because then you don't have the benefits of the alternative viewpoint. But you've got to watch it, because you may hit irreconcilable differences of various sorts.
I've seen that most particularly among couples who are high and low in openness—that's a rough one—and also high and low in conscientiousness. That's another rough one, because they just cannot see how the other person sees the world at all.
