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Episode 7: Understanding Your Personality
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this week we are talking about the personality differences more specifically about what role they play in our different life circumstances so this is part of finding happiness it's understanding what your vulnerabilities are in your personality finding out what your strengths are in your personality for example if you ever had to hire an attorney to defend you my guess is you'd want them to be a generally argumentative person maybe not with you but I definitely want to have somebody like that on my side if I if I had to do that similarly if I had to hire an accountant I'd probably want them to be really detail-oriented so these are the kinds of things that we have all these different challenges that we meet all day long all of our lives and so we are going to be discussing all the different personality differences so you know over the years I've actually I've come across a whole host of explanations about about all kinds of personality differences I go on social media things like Facebook and Twitter all these quizzes like find out your personality type or are you this type of person are you that a person maybe a psychology textbook a little bit more formal and of course a newspaper astrology section and but my big question for you dr. Lyle is seems to be a really popular subject to many people just based on all the numbers of personalities scores and tests out there why do people find this so fascinating well they find it fascinating because what we're trying to do in this life is we're trying to find people to engage in relationships with and those relationships that we care about most are romance friendships business relationships and that also we are in family dynamics as well so those are really the four types of relationships that exist for people that they value there's some other relationships like the guy that's suing you your enemies you know all this sort of thing but the relationships that we seek we actually seek relationships with other people to to trade with to exchange with to romance with etc and so we're very concerned about the individual differences between these people so as a result what personality is is the study of individual differences in psychology you can sort of cleave psychology into two great questions the first great question is what is human nature how is it that humans are different from all of the other animals and how is it that there may be the same in some ways but essentially we're trying to figure out about human nature in general why do people do what they do why do they want what they want and why do they live the way they do the other question though is within that what is the nature of the individual differences between the people so this is the equivalent of in medicine a medical doctor studies Grey's Anatomy so he studies everything about human nature in the in its biological design and in one way all humans are the same in other words all women have one Anatomy and while men have another Anatomy and if you're a man or a woman you're your doctor has studied that Anatomy and that Anatomy is fairly good detail it's the same as every other man on earth a little little tendons are more or less in the same place they even have names for them they attach to certain muscles the bones in your foot etc every one of those individuals is different and so part of being a doctor is not only knowing you human nature in general from its anatomy and physiology but also learning about the individual differences between people with respect to that anatomy and physiology so when you become an expert in the kidney you don't just learn about the kidney you learn about the individual differences in the kidney human beings are experts in human personality that's because they're incredibly interested in the human personality because human individual differences are the stuff of which people are trying to discern to make sense of to predict the nature of the future of any relationships that they start so that's why people are endlessly fascinated with the question of individual differences and we are more expert about human personalities and Eskimos are about snow at your recommendation of a few years ago I read a book by Jeffrey Miller who's a promising I guess evolutionary psychologist and in his book he discusses psychology and personality differences and how they relate to consumer behavior and one of the sentences he starts out his book saying is you don't need to know much about psychology beyond what you already know about people and in fact he goes on is less you've been taught about traditional things like that the fewer misconceptions you'll have to overcome dr. Miller is not a promising evolutionary psychologist he's a brilliant evolutionary psychologist he was you say he was a stunning star coming out of Stanford in the late 90s and and or actually early 90s and then he was by the year 2000 I believe he had published an extraordinary book the mating mind was a tour de force it was a brilliant work and I actually wondered what on earth he could do to follow that up and many years later about ten years later he would follow it up with spent the the book that you that you're referring to which is the study of of a consumer behavior from the perspective of personality with great book with all the curiosity surrounding personality there's so many differences of personality systems and one of the most popular ones I think is astrology now I have to tell you my grandmother she's a die-hard astrology reader and she has books she's got charts she's got tables every time I'm talking about a girl that I'm dating she's asking me what her sign is and of course after she talks to the girl she then informs me that she doesn't have the correct sign that I would be compatible with obviously and that I'm not going to be could match no yeah yeah I have to say we all have eventually broken up me and these girls and so it she was at least right all right you don't say sure so what's your sign doctor well yeah actually I'll tell you story about that so I was I was explaining about why personality had absolutely nothing to do with the zodiac that's explaining the science behind about how how you know there's the evidence has actually been gathered and computed so the just some scientists actually literally went to the trouble and the notion that the time of year that anybody was born that all these people that were born for example in June would be much more like each other than all the people that were born in July or August or September it's just totally ludicrous and of course there's zero validity to this so I explained all this in exquisite detail and the woman says to me you must be a Virgo which unbelievably turns out to be true and you know what thing is I'm a Virgo too so there must be something to that the bottom line is is that you know a broken clock right twice a day and and the issue is is that the zodiac has survived because of a phenomenon known as Barnum statements and this was well researched in in the mid twentieth century by forget who did the research but it was popularized by one of the most brilliant men in the history of psychology dr. Paul Neil at the University of Minnesota and he explained that when you do personality testing you can use a bunch of statements that look like that that look very discerning but they apply to everybody so they'll say things like yeah this person you know really is careful in their judgement there in a period of time right now where there's some big decisions to be made there's there's some conflict on the horizon with respect to their romantic prospects and and they need to be you know thinking deeply about their next move okay well that all sets just great but it applies to everybody and so astrology has survived in and is thrives as a result of the human susceptibility to Barnum statements and anyway I've pulled this many times as as a parlor trick on little groups of people just for fun to show them how this works and it always works he's always amazed at at the little profile but I've generated for them based on a few questions that I asked them and all it was was the same Barnum statements that their little neighbor right next to them got and this is this is how this works yeah astrology is utterly and totally worthless it's just but it tells us about an interesting susceptibility in human nature the model that jeffrey miller discussed and the one that that i've heard from from your different lectures and one that seems to make the most amount of sense to me at least as a non-professional as a laborer in this is what i've heard called the five factor model with the big five plus one yeah can you take us through a little bit about that and then and then kind of contrast that to some of the some of the prevailing theories that i may have learned during my general education college in high school yeah sure yeah we need to go a little broader first there's two questions about that personality that are important first of all what are what are the nature of the individual differences between people can we describe those reliably and are they true in other words is it true that some people are are more aggressive than other people or suggest that sometimes some people are in more provocative circumstances than other people so the or are there you know are there real-life differences between people are some people nicer than others are some people who truly smarter than others these are you know seems obvious to us that this is all correct but a good scientist actually begins at the beginning and tries to make sure that there are in fact these differences that that people think there are and then tries to organize them or categorize them to see if they can make sense out of it now the second question is where the differences come from and so this has been a great mystery in the history of the world and the the world has speculated about these for about the the individual differences in people and where they come from for thousands of years and it wasn't solved until 1985 at the University of Minnesota and so unbeknownst to almost anybody writing in your newspaper or even most psychologists that are lecturing it at many universities the truth of the matter is is that we've already solved the problem of where the vast majority of individual differences come from its genetic turns out that adoptive children children adopted into a home do not take on the personality characteristics of the people that dot them at all they do not if their father is very aggressive their adoptive father's aggressive they are no more likely to be aggressive than an average member of the population if their mother is brilliant they do not take on any characteristics it doesn't add any IQ points to their to their mental abilities they are no more likely to be above average than they are to be below average in other words the correlation or correspondence between what you see and what you react to around you has no influence or essentially no influence on your personality development this is incredible this seems completely counterintuitive to many people and that is why it was difficult to actually do the research end and demonstrate this in a way that was convincing however the research has been done it is overwhelmingly convincing and this we now know is the major source by far of the individual differences in the human personality so we will move on now to what these individual differences look like it turns out that these differences can be mapped in six dimensions there are basically six ideas or categories that help us understand human differences you might call them ingredients so everybody is walking around with these six ingredients and the six ingredients are called to just confuse everybody now they're called the five factor model and the reason is there's one additional factor which is intelligence that we do not fit into the five factor model for sort of interesting you know reasons and idiosyncratic reasons so we sort of we sort of call intelligence a personality factor but we sort of don't it's it's separate from the other five the other five share a great deal in common with each other in the sense that they tell us a lot about human preferences so intelligence does not tell us a lot about preferences it doesn't tell us you know whether you like math whether you like music whether you like spaceships whether you like baseball it does not tell you that you could be a you could be a brilliant human being and you really like baseball but you really don't like science you could be you could be not very smart that really love science and hate baseball so there's no intelligence doesn't tell you very much about people's preferences the other five to tell you all about people's preferences and how it is that they behave in their environments and so this is what they are I'll just keep talking is yeah this whole briefly go three days the first one is what we're going to call openness to experience this has to do with how many illegal drugs you want to try how many sex partners you want to have how many you know bungee jumping and incidents that you want to do if the answer is no illegal drugs one sex partner for my whole life I'll never bungee jump and you're not very open to experience if if that is if we are saying I can't get enough of all of those things then you're probably very open to experience so most people are somewhere in the middle between being very open and and being what we're going to call being very conventional now people like to say oh no I'm open but the truth of the matter is most people are not are not particularly open to experience and if they think that they are I can introduce them to some people that will make them seemed unbelievably came okay so so just just to clarify this is a continuum it's not like you're either open yet open-minded or close minded and this is kind of this kind of reminds me of the the back in the Stone Age the village they're kind of traveling trying to find new new land and new new food and they're you know some of them are gonna say well let's go over the next hill and risk not having somewhere to come home to and some of them are saying no we're going to stay and so the right move is to sometimes move off and sometimes kind of stay and then and that kind of sort yourself out over over time absolutely right so openness is a these things are all genetic and so we look to genetics and and the nature of our species to try to understand why there would be differences in openness and what those differences would serve and it's exactly as you say think of incidentally these these personality differences are also found in other animals and so these are this isn't just you know characteristics of people these are characteristics of DNA and so think of a rabbit where it lives in a land with it has a certain amount of foxes and a certain amount of carrots and they're distributed in a fashion where there's a an ideal distance the average rabbit should go from there rabbit hole in search of food and let's call that distance a hundred yards you can imagine that most of the rabbits in the environment would go about a hundred yards from the hole before they'd start to get anxious but that's just their genes their genes would say that's about as far as we should go we're getting a little too far from the rabbit hole now there would be a few of them that would be willing to go 150 yards and there'd be a fewer still that would be willing to go 200 yards see if you were to draw a bell curve and you would say rabbit and you put a hundred yards in the middle that most rabbits would go around a hundred yards but a few of them would be willing to go to 200 yards now the reason why the 200 yard rabbits are fewer than 100 yard rabbits is that it is say it is a too dangerous of a solution to the problem of how open to experience to be and so the genes that build that are less numerous in the gene pool because where those rabbits are getting eaten by predators on the other side you have some rabbits that are going only 50 yards from the rabbit hole and some rabbits that are only going 25 those are also less numerous and it makes up the bell curve on the other side of this dimension so think of this beautiful bell curve where the typical rabbit is at a hundred yards and then fewer on the left at 50 and then fewer still at 25 yards and then we go up to 150 yards into 200 yards so we get this beautiful curve which shows us the individual difference in rabbit openness this is precisely what you see in humans so there are humans that you know never want to leave you know Bakersfield they're gonna marry this the first girl they kiss and you know they're going to go to the City College and they're going to get become an electrician just like their dad and they're gonna go to work on their dad's business you know this is a very conventional person on the left side of this bell curve of not very open whereas somebody else you know has two two or the seven seas and tries to climb the Seven Summits and you know there's taken every crazy drug and justice and every wacky thing that you could think of it has seven tattoos and so this individual is on the far open side of this dimension and most people are in the middle and and so this is because the most effective genes are the ones that are optimized for the environment that we find ourselves in and that means somewhat open somewhat conventional and that's what you see in most human beings from crime and so that's one factor let's go over the next one right the next one is going to be conscientiousness by the way for anybody trying to learn this these five the five factor model spells ocean so it's going to be openness to experience conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism okay so those are the five and that can help people remember if they're trying to learn this model so the second consideration is conscientiousness so conscientiousness has to do with how meticulous and orderly and worried people are about getting things done properly and doing them right and so some people are extremely conscientious and detail-oriented those would be like your accountant that you were talking about on the other side you can have somebody that's a total flake that doesn't pay the rent couldn't care less has horrible credit rating so in the middle is most people most people turn in their homework on time as kids most of the time once a while not so much most of the people don't play hooky very much from school but they do once in a while those are all in the middle of the bell curve then there's people that just drop out of school and completely flake out those are on the left side of that bell curve flakes and then you have the hyper conscientious people on the right-hand side that wind up with anorexia nervosa if they're women because they're just so uptight about gaining any fat or they wind up you know with straight A's and they have never missed a day of class kindergarten so this is uh this is the hyper conscientious on one side of the equation completely flaky on the other and the optimal place for a human being to be is somewhere in the middle between these two extremes on that dimension now this this reminds me growing up you know we every time there was some sort of either party to go to or family gathering or some some event and one of my parents would be stressing saying we're going to be late we're going to be like we're gonna be late and the other parent was saying don't worry we'll be just fine even if we come in thirty minutes an hour late nobody will care and it was that interesting tension between constantly you know that that you know we got to be on time and we have to be correct and versus the it's not such a big deal kind of idea absolutely you you you know we're witnessing that right between your two parents the the differences in their conscientiousness and of course when I come late to family gatherings and they they give me flak I just say hey don't worry it's genetic [Laughter] it's accurate the third dimension is going to be recall it extraversion in our ocean model but it means introversion extroversion all these things are are poles that was one one type of person is on one pole and other type or style is on the other pole and most people in the middle so introverts are are not necessarily shy they are simply they occur things to be quiet and they prefer to not have a lot of people around they may be perfectly a sir in social situations and actually reasonably relaxed they just prefer to not be there in order to be shy you have to add another dimension which is going to be neuroticism on the bottom of ocean and that's going to be a sort of excitable nervous system that gets actually a little bit agitated and nervous about things so if you add that to an introvert that is what a shy person is so we're going to find that combinations of these things will give rise to patterns behavior that you'll see and in the history of the world people have tried to come up with types of people like Carl Jung saying all introverts and extroverts but really this is an incorrect view of looking at people people are are basically like a cake or they're like a recipe and we have to use all six of these ingredients to come up with a profile that really fits them so you you have probably never met anybody in this world that has a profile very similar to yours you you have to look at if you if you were to use simply 3d mark ations on a bell curve low medium and high with respect to each of these six variables that that would give us 729 different combinations and so you may have met people that have some of these might have four of these pretty close but the other two are actually significantly different and they have some very significant differences in personality between you and them so anyway introversion extroversion the extroverts very outgoing very comfortable with a lot of people they like to be around a lot of people they just like a lot more social interaction and most people are somewhere in the middle now the next dimension is going to be how agreeable people are and so you were speaking earlier about a lawyer so yeah not good lawyers are generally not agreeable people so again we have a bell curve where most people are in the middle and then there's some people that are very disagreeable and then some people that are very agreeable and the world is is full of people seeking agreeable people because they're really nice to be around and if you ask them to do stuff they do it and these are very exploitable humans the disagreeable people sounds like I'm at the party yes exactly and so this is this is what's happening in human relations is that people are scanning each other for these characteristics and there are characteristics that are exploitable ie very attractive and there are characteristics that are less attractive and people make friends and seek mates and seek business relationships but that have certain of these characteristics that they need for whatever it is that they are trying to establish so agreeableness is a major is one of these major characteristics and agreeable personality characteristics are in fact the most single sought-after characteristic in men in men and women for romance worldwide and you can see why because if you're going to spend an awful lot of time with an individual you're going to want them to be reasonably Pleasant about conflicts between you and that's why agreeableness is such an attractive individual difference characteristic just just to clarify I've always assumed that agreeableness and disagreeableness because you know it's rare for me to have heard those words outside of this type of discussion but for me a disagreeable disagreeableness is propensity to disagree is that fairly accurate disagreeable is a jerk they're just they're disagreeing with people they're disagreeing with people a lot they tend to feel like they're being cheated they're being chiseled and they don't like the deal so they don't want to agree to it whereas the agreeable person is saying sure fine wherever whatever you want to do wherever you want to go whatever movie you want to see whatever you want to eat it's fine fine fine fine fine disagreeable person is putting up barriers to transactions because they're wanting to renegotiate and and so this is disagreeable people are fantastic when they're negotiating for union or when they are representing you as an attorney this is exactly what you want but they are they are problematic and difficult when it comes to human relations in general now in in in general human relations we want to feel like it's about even right it's about fair maybe about 50/50 even though it may not be 50/50 every single time we interact with each other we wanted to feel 50/50 whereas disagreeable people it doesn't feel 50/50 unless it's a 60/40 in their favor or 70/30 in their favor whereas variable people they don't feel like it's fair unless it's 40 60 in the other person's favor and so they were much more likely to give more than they take is that yes that is very accurate and so occasionally in long-term relationships this is sort of the seeds of the old saying that opposites attract this is the only time this is the only dimension upon which you will see this that in anything else in for example in romance you will never see highly intelligent people attracted to stupid people you will never see this doesn't happen okay the they seek people that are similar to themselves people that are highly open to experience do not seek people who are very conventional and neither do people that are very conventional seek people that are highly open people actually seek similarity across these characteristics the only place where this is different is in the agreeable disagreeable dimension where highly agreeable excuse me highly disagreeable people will seek highly agreeable people and that is that these are the only people that that make sense to them the disagreeable people who are looking at the world essentially from the eyes of when it's 8020 their way it feels fair the only people that they can find to agree with them are the people that are 20 80 traders that are basically saying gosh I agree with you it's perfectly fair and so you will find these strange-looking relationships where the woman is just like this incredible wench and just is just very difficult to deal with but she's got this docile plugs and husband and they've been together for 25 years on the other hand the guy could be just this terror you know tyrant and just wants things his way and he's got this sweet wife he just lets lets him walk all over her those relationships can can be in an equilibrium to the point where they are stable because those two individuals actually can agree whereas at 8020 trader will not be in a relationship very long with a 50/50 trader because the 50/50 trader will quickly feel like the 8020 trader is constantly trying to exploit them and the 8020 trader will feel like they are being cheated 50/50 trader wants things in a way that to them feel unfair so this in their one dimension where alpha says is wrecked and so there's nothing that somebody who was born in 80/20 or 2080 can really do about it they just have to seek out the ones well I guess if you're if you're a twenty eighty meaning you're more agreeable than if you find out who's also twenty eighty that's just a beautiful relationship where you're both these people are just walking hand in hand down the beach they haven't had a they haven't had as much as three arguments in 27 years yeah these people are just so sweet you just can't even stand it okay so yes these people exist and in in chemistry we would say that these are you know these are like carbon atoms the agreeable people though it's they're just so they can hook up with anything if you're if you're a twenty eighty trader fifty fifty people love you and it's all good it's all pleasant because the fifty-fifty person is you know easily getting more than they think it's fair all they have to do is push a little bit and they're getting 60/40 but the twenty eighty trader on the other side getting forty percent of a deal feels like they're getting over rewarded so yeah the highly agreeable people are very attractive and usually plucked up and put into relationships pretty quickly incidentally a lot of people think they're highly agreeable but they're not so our last dimension is what we call neuroticism or how agitated or sort of agitatedly upset people can get or how excitable they are so people that are extremely emotionally stable it's hard to get them excited about anything those would be a very stable dimension or non neurotic people that are very agitated and easily agitated about things that upset or including very excited those people are or what we call we could call them neurotic but I would just call them excitable and so this dimension of excitement in the nervous system again you can think about the genes trying to solve the problem of how much energy to put out to a given opportunity and so if you let suppose you came up with the idea for a new play that you want to put on Broadway and it really was quite ingenious if you talked to your stable friend you're stable friend says no I don't think so I don't think it's worth the trouble you know I'm saying you know the thing about a bunch of people dressed up like cats singing that sounds kind of silly and just forget the whole thing okay the whereas if you talk to your wacky friend who's very very excitable they're going to be all over it yeah they're gonna be very excited about this and in fact that is who it is that you're going to see that usually goes in big on any kind of a process is going to be your very excitable kind of people so Steve Jobs just to help people map this out if you were to look at Steve Jobs you find an extraordinary personality that then gives rise to an extraordinary career so he was extremely bright he was extremely open to experience he was extremely conscientious he was actually very outgoing and extroverted he was extremely disagreeable and he was extremely neurotic so literally Steve Jobs had not a single personality characteristics that was in anywhere near the middle of middle of the target and as a result we wind up with a brilliant open you know just tyrannical fanatical highly conscientious you know business genius that that creates the most valuable company on earth from starting starting with you know 28 years old or whatever it was that's incredible that but what someone like that could accomplish but it did not happen by accident I had Steve Jobs been even anywhere near the middle of the bell curve on any single one of those six characteristics and Apple Computer would not have happened and so are there are their personality characteristics that are more likely to show up in certain professions than others oh no question so attorneys are much more likely to be argumentative there's no question about that the I mean that that just immediately leaps to mind that's also true police officers you know anybody in law enforcement where there's there's contentious problems being dealt with so if you're you've got to have some serious disagreeable to you to want to stop people and pull them over and tell them you're going to write them a ticket I'm not saying these people are highly disagreeable naturally but they are more disagreeable than average the if you're an artist you are overwhelmingly likely to be open to experience that's just how it is doesn't matter what kind of art we're talking about whether you're a painter or sculptor or you're a musician or you are a an actor those people the the openness is part of the creative process and so we're gonna find that there we're not going to find very much open to experience and accountants they are they are going to tend to not be that way they're just going to be far more conventional in their psychology so if we just sort of look our way through what we're likely to see we're it's all going to make quite a bit of sense a psychologist in general are going to tend to be agreeable they're going to tend to be people who are comfortable listening to people talk about their issues and trying to stay quiet and trying to be sympathetic not that I haven't met some real disagreeable psychologist I have but you will tend to see agreeable people in something like psychology we walk around and we see all kinds of different people and we are simply advertising our personality characteristics to each other either by the way we dress ie the businessman who has a perfectly tucked and suit shirt and a perfectly centered belt and a tie and a jacket and perfectly pressed and cleaned trying to advertise that he's both intelligent and conscientious and by unstable and so we're just advertising those things right and left whether it's through through physical through clothes or through conversation or through mannerisms if there's any listeners that are if there's any listeners that are calling and want to call in our number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one again number six five seven three eight three zero seven five one so it's it's really quite fascinating that we are actually displaying these and and we can figure this out with we can figure it out just by talking to somebody if we were aware of this type of model how do we figure out our own personality well the truth of the matter is is that most people know their own personalities pretty well I would say the exception is going to be you know moderately disagreeable people tend to think that they're more agreeable than they are they've got a blind spot there but people are usually not that blind when it comes to these other things and so if you go online you take a Big Five personality test you can fill it out there's a whole bunch of them that are all public domain and now they're all about the same and they come up with very similar scores because it's pretty simple you just think yourself okay well let's let's begin with intelligence so guy thinks he's a genius but he you know he was a B student in high school and he he kind of flunked out of the JC well I think we're pretty sure he's not a genius so think of the bell curve as running from somebody who is at the a one out of a hundred in terms of he's been stupidest guy out of a hundred versus somebody that's dead average in the middle at fifty and then somebody who's number 100 at the top so we think of it as percentiles in terms of a bell curve most people know more or less where they are in terms of percentile so if you're if you're pretty smart went to college graduated in your in your four years or so and you've got a moderately difficult degree you're probably and you did quite well but did not super well you're probably somewhere in the 80th to 90th percentile range if you went to a fancy school and did quite well did decently at a really higher end school then you're going to be in the top five percentile without any problem the if you are if you're a person who graduated from high school and really you know just did so-so in high school and either didn't really feel like going to college because it was just too tough you're somewhere in the middle of the bell curve somewhere around the fiftieth percentile so people know and they can tell the individual differences in human intelligence usually within less than a minute of conversation you can tell it's from Menace amount about some of these intelligence now it may take a little while longer listen to them a little longer and have a little more conversation but we know we can tell and and so that that's not a difficult thing for people to answer the openness is also not that difficult so people don't want to hear that they're not open because that doesn't sound good but the truth is is that open people do crazy wacky things they're there they're sniffing mushrooms and they're there jumping into the water with sharks they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff out there at the farm the bell curve if you are you know spiritual and go to seances but you haven't done anything really crazy then we know you're on the upper end of that bell curve but you are but you are not really wacky okay so if you are more conventional and you don't really want to do anything that's too strange you like to go to you know the Giants game and you know you like to play catch with your kid and you know etc but and the thing the most exciting thing you ever did was do a wheelie on your ten-speed for when you were a teenager this is you're in the middle of a bell curve somewhere and and then if you're if you are Barry you don't even like to hear music that isn't out of a certain genre and really normal like you just like your country music and that's all you like you're probably not very open to experience so people can consents this if they just use a little bit of insight and compare themselves to other people on these dimensions and they can figure it out if you think you're real conscientious but you know you've got you've quit some jobs I mean little flaky with your payments and and you were sort of a so-so stood in school and didn't turn in your homework on time you know you're not in the upper 10 percentile for conscientiousness those people are the guy that has his tie centered and tied perfectly and his suit is cut just right my daddy used to have a saying he said it's good to have an open mind but not so open that your brain falls out yeah there you go the thing that is interesting about personality is we've all met people who are in denial and you kind of touch on it with the agreeable and disagree ability can you and I band a little bit more about how someone might think that they're what a certain way but they're not really fooling anybody except for themselves yes there are characteristics that are more esteemed than others so intelligence is esteemed so people people will try to sell that they are a little more intelligent than they are openness is esteemed so people will try to sell that they're a little bit more open than they are and conscientiousness is also esteemed and extraversion is esteemed and agreeableness is esteemed and so is stability so it's going to turn out that these things actually have a valence of value there there's going to be what I call an esteem dynamic between two people that's it and looking at each other across these six dimensions so the esteem dynamic goes that if you are the more intelligent of two the esteem is flowing from them to you okay that is the dynamic if they are reasonably close to you then the esteem will can flow back because if let's suppose one person is extremely bright in the the person is pretty bright let's suppose it's a college student it was a pretty good student asking a really smart professor a question or we're expressing their admiration thinking that the professor can enjoy the fact that they are highly esteemed by this individual who is reasonably worthy the and they will so as a result the student is esteemed more by the professor because the because the student is seems to the professor so this is a circle of a steam process that's going on now let's suppose that the student is very not very bright at all not doing well in the class at all and they they express their esteem for the professor the professor does not esteem that student because they are frustrated and they feel like that student really doesn't have anything to contribute and so is why you will not see very bright people and not in low ability people hanging out together is because they cannot generate an esteem dynamic between them and you will not find this in Romans so people have to be reasonably similar to have this sort of circular dynamic that goes on between them the same thing is true with openness so a person who is very open and a person who is moderately open can have an esteem dynamic the moderately open person esteems the open person's greater life experience and adventurousness and they they admire it they consider it courageous and fascinating and that is because the person is more open has literally covered more of life's territory per unit of life they have experimented more and managed to survive and so they actually have more information in their head in various domains than the person who is less adventurous and so that makes them valuable you can mine that information but you're only interested in that information if you're sufficiently open that you might consider what doing what they did if if they're at the 95th percentile for openness and they've been to Katmandu and they've hiked up to the base camp of Everest but you're somebody that never wanted to lead Bakersfield and you do not esteem the fact that they went to the Katmandu and you are not interested in their stories because you're never going to go and so as a result you cannot have an esteemed dynamic between the highly open and the highly conventional it doesn't work so this is for friendships this is for romance it does not work the same in business relationships because in business relationships you know I don't really care if I have a surgeon that's putting my leg back together I really couldn't care less how how open to experience or anything else he is I just need him to do this very very narrow technical problem and I need him to do it like okay so that's all I'm interested in I'm interested in his conscientiousness and his intelligence I'm not I couldn't care less about how introverted or extroverted this guy is but on all these other dimensions I mean all these other human relationships these dimensions have to work within what I call an esteem dynamic range and that's how that's how human relationships work well let's say you got an arranged marriage you know 80 years ago or whatever I was yeah where there was a village pressure where you just couldn't break up is there a way you can change your personality fit more within the group no no you cannot and so this is why arranged marriages are a disaster and this is why the worldwide evidence on arranged marriage just indicates how miserable people are in them you can't change your personality you cannot force yourself to esteem characteristics about an individual that is outside of your strength esteem trading range just can't be done there's certain people that have the genes where they really like cilantro and then there's people that can't stand it I was reading match dog match.com profile you know ten years ago and she said by the way I cannot understand why anyone would ever willingly eat cilantro and I thought fantastic there's my girl because I don't understand it either so this is uh nobody is going to teach me to like cilantro that will never happen nobody's ever going to teach me to esteem for exam somebody who's low in conscientiousness just never gonna happen I can't even tolerate someone who is average and conscientiousness that is not possible I'm sitting somewhere in the 80th to 90th percentile and conscientiousness and somebody that's 50th percentile is just below the bar when it comes to either friendship or romance I can't tolerate it and this is not this is not unique to me this is this is the this is a mapping of the mystery of human relationships is to understand how personality is configured and how the esteem processes work with respect to these individual differences can they cost benefits Q sufficiently to say make you eat cilantro for an extended period of time for example let's say Heidi Klum comes in and says hey Doug you know if you eat some cilantro with me for about three months and maybe we can start dating and or maybe we'll date cilantro we may start to pretend that you like cilantro for a little bit no of course if she made if she made a nice Mexican dish and was serving it and had cilantro all over it I would sing its praises okay so of course that's true so you can act differently than the truth and you can be deceptive about what it is that your real personality is and in order to try to be you know be more attractive for some situation so the classic of this is the interview question in business that says you well okay we've heard about your strengths what about your weaknesses well you know I'm just I sometimes I just so I get so absorbed that I just don't pay attention at the time and I I'm just such a perfectionist you know like that that's the story nobody ever says actually sometimes I just feel like calling up and I just call up and I said you know I'm sick you know just because I don't feel like coming in that's just sometimes I feel like that and that's what I do like nobody says this okay so people people will will be as deceptive as they can in situations where there is benefit on the table for being differently than you are in in early romance there is a in understanding that people part of demonstrating emotional stability conscientiousness and agreeableness is to actually be somewhat different than you are in other words show extra levels of consideration show extra levels of of interest in empathy these are these are ways that people demonstrate essentially where it is that they are likely to be on the bell curve a woman knows that a man is not going to be as intentive and is careful about everything in the early going in a dating relationship as he's going to be you know three months later so she knows she's getting her his best foot forward but that is to be expected in that situation and so she's discounting what it is that she's sing but she's also comparing it to other people and how it is that they behaved in a similar situation and so if you are the most conscientious guy in the first hour of a date that she's seen in a couple of years she knows what that means you won't always behave this way but she knows you are likely to be a very high conscientious person are there any examples of some some ways that people fall into some traps due to certain personality vulnerabilities how they can beat their genes in essence yes one of the great disasters in human life is the people that are particularly people that are conscientious and agreeable and if you add intelligence to that it's a disaster so if you are intelligent conscientious and agreeable this is what I call the sucker triad you are a very attractive person to other people your intelligence is useful for solving problems your conscientiousness is useful because if you begin something you're going to do a very good job of it and you're agreeableness is useful because I might be able to talk you into it so if I could talk you into it and you'll agree to do it you will do it and you'll do it well that makes you a very valuable commodity in the world these people conscientious intelligent agreeable z' these people wind up getting exploited these are the people that that the burdens of the world fall on their shoulders and they wind up spending you know basically their lives running around worrying about everybody else's problems that they've been burdened with this is a big problem you know for beat the djinns and so what we what these people need to do is they need to be instructed as to what these personality characteristics are that they have and they need to be shown how it is to get out of things okay so they need to this is what I call how to get out of it you got a-you there are set of techniques on my website at seam dynamics org that sort of tells this story I tell the story in a video that I have posted bail called success forces and if you watch this video it tells the story of pushy people and the sucker and if you are a conscientious agreeable kind of person no matter how smart you are if you're both if you tend to be highly conscientious and quite agreeable and you're getting pushed around and exploited and you're always getting burdened you could use what's on the website on those on that video to tell you the story of how to push back for the the pushy people they're just kind of gonna be pushy and they'll get their way and that's that's just going to be how it is that's how it's gonna be there's gonna they're going to get their way a lot so the disagreeable never feel like they've got enough but they're getting more than their share routinely mm-hmm that's out the very disagreeable ones are the ones who stand in a line and then they say well why should I stand in a line I've got stuff to do at home or stuff to do that were literally just gonna push through the line and cut through the line yes yes a good friend of mine went to went to Disneyland as a child with a friend of his whose mother was extremely pushy and she looked at the long line like of the Matterhorn and she marched those boys up to the head of the line and she said these boys can't wait and put them right in there and my friend never forgot that and he looked at that situation and just said oh my god this is gonna work and it did that the people around were sufficiently agreeable and that that's what happened so so that's happening all over the place in this scenario the child who sees this and says this could work were they already agree well well no I think what or theirs yeah and my friend my friend turns out that he's somewhat describable but the thing is is that it was instructive for him it was a little it was a little moment in life where he realized just how useful it was to be pushy mm-hmm and he had not ever considered to have the audacity to be that pushy and so you know you're not going to talk anybody into doing that that's an agreeable person I'm never going to do it but a person that's already disagreeable to sees that they very well might imitate that a whole bunch of times and just see what comes of it so I believe he has you're getting my game strategy wheels turning now thank you very much dr. Lisle for coming on dr. Lisle your website again is esteem dynamics org is that correct that is correct you can schedule consultations with dr. Lisle if you need to and and there's even that the video of the perfect personality where he goes over in detail again about the the different personality characteristics very good thank you very much for coming on it's a pleasure thanks for having me Nate
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