if you gave a thousand people a list of adjectives to describe themselves with and one of the adjectives was happy and another of the adjectives was social you'd find that those who rated themselves high on Happy would also rate themselves high on social and those who rated themselves low on Happy would also rate themselves low on social and by looking at those patterns of co-variation you can determine what the essential dimensions are of human personality one of the dimensions is roughly happiness that's extroversion another dimension is neuroticism it's a negative emotion Dimension so if you
ask someone if they're anxious and they score high say on a scale of one to seven they're also likely to score high on another item that says that they're sad and it turns out that negative emotions Clump together and so that people who experience more of one negative emotion have a propensity to experience more of all of them there's another dimension called agreeableness and agreeable people are self-sacrificing compassionate and polite if you're dealing with an agreeable person they don't like conflict they care for other people if you're dealing with an agreeable person they're likely to
put your concerns ahead of theirs they're non-competitive and Cooperative it's a dimension where women are women score more highly than men on agreeableness across cultures including those cultures where the largest steps have been taken towards producing an egalitarian social circumstance like Scandinavia actually the gender differences in personality there are larger than they are anywhere else um another trait is conscientiousness conscientiousness is an excellent trait if you want to do well in in school and in work especially if you're a manager and administrator I can't say we understand a lot about conscientiousness although it it reliably
emerges from Factor analytic studies of adjective groups across different countries conscientious people are diligent industrious and orderly their orderliness tilts them towards political conservatism by the way because it turns out that your inbuilt temperament your inbuilt personality which constitutes a set of filters through which you view the world also Alters the manner in which you process information and influences the way that you vote and so you might say and I do believe that this is true or we've been doing a lot of research on this as of late the more accurate a measure you take
of someone's political beliefs the more you find that personality is what's predicting them and I think that's a reasonable thing to think about because you know you have to you have to figure out ways of simplifying the world right because you just can't do everything and so people are specialized they have specialized niches that they occupy you can think about them as social niches like a niche is a place where your particular skills would serve to maintain you and so if you're extroverted you're going to look for a social Niche because you like to be
around people and if you're introverted you're going to spend much more time on your own and so if you're an introverted person for example you're going to want a job where you're not selling and where you're not surrounded by groups of people who are making social demands on you all the time because it'll wear you out whereas if you're extroverted that's just exactly what you want and so the extrovert sees the world as a place of social opportunity and the introvert sees the world as a place to retreat from and spend time alone and it
turns out that both of those modes of being are valid the issue at least to some degree is whether or not you're fortunate enough to match your temperament with the demands of the environment and I suppose also whether you're fortunate enough fortunate enough so that you're born in an era where there actually is a niche for your particular temperament because it isn't necessarily the case that that will be the case imagine that all of these temperamental Dimensions vary because of evolutionary pressure right so there's a distribution of extroversion a normal distribution most people are somewhere
in the middle and then as you go out towards the extremes there are fewer and fewer people and what that means is that on average across large spans of time there have been environments that match every single position on that distribution with most most of the environments matching the center because otherwise we wouldn't have evolved that way and so sometimes being really extroverted is going to work well for you in a minority of environments a minority of niches and sometimes it's just going to be a catastrophe I suspect for example that if you live in
a tyrannical Society where any sign of of of of of personally oriented activity is likely to get you in trouble that being extroverted and low in neuroticism wouldn't be a very good idea because you're going to be mouthy and happy and saying a lot of things unable to keep your thoughts to yourself and you're going to be relatively Fearless now I don't know that for sure because we haven't done the studies that precisely match temperamental proclivity to environmental demand but you get what I mean so conscientious people anyways conscientious people are industrious and orderly we
know a little bit about orderliness it seems to be Associated strangely enough with disgust sensitivity which I suppose isn't that surprising you know if you take an orderly person and you put them in a messy kitchen they respond with disgust and want nothing more than to straighten it all out and organize it and clean it and there's tremendous variability in orderliness um and as I said orderliness predicts political conservatism it's not the only thing but it's certainly one of the things um the correlation between conscientiousness and and grades is about 0.4 it's about 16 percent
of the variance it's it's the second best predictor of University grades after intelligence we'll talk about intelligence during this course too intelligence is actually a relatively straightforward concept I don't think I'll get into it today but conscientious people their industriousness and their orderliness makes them schedule their time so they make efficient use of their time they use schedules and that sort of thing we haven't been able to figure out anything about the underlying biology or psychology of industriousness we've tried really dozens and dozens of tests attempting to find a laboratory measure on which industrious people
do better and we failed completely and there's no animal models of industriousness either and so I would say it's a great mystery that remains at the heart of trade psychology um and maybe it's a human specific category you know I mean you can think of sled dogs maybe of being industrious and maybe and maybe Sheepdogs and animals that work like that but of course they've been trained by human beings so but it isn't obvious that animals are industrious the same way we are I mean industriousness involves sacrificing the present for the future something like that
and you it seems like you have to be able to conceptualize time in order to sacrifice the present for the future one of the things that I would recommend that you do as students in this course and maybe in every course speaking of industriousness is come up with a plan of attack for the course and use a scheduler you know if you treat your University career like a full-time job you're much more likely to succeed and if you keep up on the readings and you keep up on the on the essays and all of that
then you're much like less likely as well to fall into despair when you get too far behind using a Google Calendar or something like that to organize a schedule for the entire semester at the beginning of the semester can be invaluable especially if you're not very industriousness very industrious because it can keep you on track and one of the things we know about industrious people is that they are very good at using schedules and at planning the use of their time and so I would like to say that you should all be smarter but I
don't know how you could be smarter we don't know anything about how to improve intelligence and I suppose we don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either but I can tell you that people who are industrious come up with a strategy for solving the problem that's ahead of them and then they do whatever they can to stick to the strategy and so for example if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of hours three hours and you filled in a Google Calendar whatever you happen to use with a a strategy for
studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and all of that and when you're going to sit down and study then you won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right before you know an important exam it's also a very ineffective way of studying by the way I mean first of all people who cram for 10 hours say they're studying for 10 hours but they rarely are because well I can't study for 10 hours I don't have the power of concentration that would enable me
to do that for that prolonged period of time I can manage about three hours of intense intellectual activity before I'm pretty done and it's also the case that if you study and then sleep and then study and then sleep and then study and then sleep you space it out then you're much more likely to remember it's also much more likely that you're you're much more likely to remember if you try to recall the material and so highlighting in that sort of thing isn't very useful but reading closing the book summarizing what you've read without opening
the damn book that's useful and the reason for that is that you're practicing remembering and that's what you have to practice if you're practicing memorization you have to practice remembering you don't just go over the thing over and over that'll help you with recognition memory but some but it won't help you with recall memory anyways the last trade is openness openness is a creativity trait it's also associated with intelligence in that intelligent people and I'm speaking technically of IQ tend to be higher in tend to be more creative which is hardly surprising creative people are
more likely to be liberal politically by the way they like novelty they like Aesthetics they like fiction they like movies they like art they like poetry there's something about them that grants them an aesthetic sensitivity and and that's a that's an inbuilt trait and um it's not the case by the way that everyone's creative in fact far from it we've used the creative achievement questionnaire too to measure people's creativity I'll talk to you about that later in the class and the creative achievement questionnaire takes 13 dimensions of creativity so you know writing dancing acting scientific
investigation entrepreneurial activity architectural activity uh cooking um there's a there's a handful of others singing Etc you know the sorts of things that you would assume that people could be creative about and then it asks people to rate themselves on a scale from one to ten on their level of achievement with regards to all those creative domains with zero being I have no training or Proficiency in this area and 70 percent of people score zero across the entire creative achievement questionnaire a tiny proportion of people are outliers way out and they're creative in many dimensions
simultaneously and exceptionally creative it turns out as you'll find out that that pattern which is called a Pareto distribution where most people stack up at zero and a few people are way out on the creative end characterizes all sorts of distributions like the distribution of money for example which is why one percent of the people have the overwhelming majority of the money it's a different one percent across time it like it churns and you're much more likely to be in the one percent if you're older logically enough because one of the things you do as
you age is you trade youth for money if you're fortunate I don't think the trade is really worth it but that's the best you've got so anyways those particular traits you can think of those as ways that you simplify the world right there's lots of different places that you can act in the world and there's lots of different ways you can look at it and survive that's why you can be a plumber and a lawyer and an engineer and those all work right even though they're very different modes of being and you can have different
personalities and survive as long as you're capable of finding the place where your particular filters and behavioral proclivities match the demand of the environment and a huge part I would say of successful adaptation is precisely that
