2017/05/06: The Indiegogo campaign: last day
About a month ago, I had my funding for my ongoing research projects um refused by the federal government, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. And um, Ezra Lant from Rebel Media decided to host an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to replace it, which was very good of him. Um, so thank you to Ezra and also to Itan Gilbard who helped out a lot, and to Hannah Vandercoy for managing it; it was extraordinarily helpful.
Um, we raised about $80,000 the first day, and then since then, we've raised about $180,000 from 2,500 backers. The original grant proposal was for $300,000 across 5 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, um, 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 Broy, is working on political correctness and the relationship between personality and political belief, as well as on the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits. Um, she couldn't contribute to the video for various reasons this time around, although she did a lengthy interview with Rebel Media that you can catch on social justice issues and their basis in personality.
And so, uh, after this very brief introduction, I'm going to let the students speak for each for five minutes. They've prepared a video telling you what they're up to, so um, anyways thanks very much. We have one day left of the funding campaign; it 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 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 brain waves. 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 visualizers I developed or read about the principles behind them, you can check out my website at johnmtenant.com. 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 model of what kinds of personalities are attractive to whom.
On average, women tended to prefer men who were conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, emotionally stable, and open to experience. Higher IQ participants, however, rated the men as 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, which 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 target's personality, and we can build up a complete description from the multiple raters. 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, we'll 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 could be especially useful in the lab's 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 johnmtenant.com. I have demos and papers posted there. Thanks for watching.
My name is Victor Swift, and I am 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've been investigating how the Big Five traits can be detected without self-report. This effort has taken in 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 onto 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 when 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 onto 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 in 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, a 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 facilitate the development of new tools for measuring and accommodating personality.