2014 Personality Lecture 14: Psychometrics (Biology and Traits)

The first thing I already explained to you is about the shift in our emphasis from here on in. I suppose in some ways we're switching from the part of the course that has to do with transformation into the part of the course that has to do with stability, at least relative stability. Now, the idea behind the work that we're going to talk about now is that personality has stable and identifiable features across time.

I suppose it's traits that you're referring to when you say to yourself or to someone else, "I know that person." When you say that you know that person, it seems to me that you're presuming that there's something stable and identifiable about them that you can track over time. You might consider that who they are. So trait theory is the study of who people are.

Now, if there are 177,000 trait descriptors in the English language, that suggests in some way that there are 17,000 ways that people can vary or be the same, you know, vary from each other and be the same across time. But 177,000 seems like an unmanageable number, and it's possible that a very large number of those words are variances; they're synonyms in some sense. Trait theory, in some ways, is an attempt to find the clumps of synonymous words that are encapsulated within language that apply to people.

The basic hypothesis is something like this: because tracking the behavior of other people is extremely important to us, and because we want to communicate about that tracking and because we're studying each other all the time, there's at least a reasonable probability that the fundamental dimensions of personality are going to be encapsulated within language. What that means, in some sense, is that you may be able to use the language as a tool if you use the appropriate statistical techniques in order to extract out the fundamental dimensions of personality.

So you could say those are the basic. Imagine there's five or six canonical words or ten canonical words within that collection of 177,000, and then all the others are slight variants of them or mixtures of them or something like that. Perhaps there's a simple structure underneath the apparent complexity.

Um, the first people who tried this, as I said, were Alport and Odbert, but they really didn't have the statistical techniques that were necessary to do a particularly good job. So, Alport and Odbert tried to reduce their 18,000 trait terms to 4,500 descriptors of what they figured were stable traits. Then Cattell came along in 1942, restricted those to 171 by judgment, and then further to 16 by factor analysis.

These are Cattell's 16 traits. The first three were the most important: you could be reserved versus outgoing, less or more intelligent, emotional versus stable, humble versus assertive, sober versus happy-go-lucky, expedient versus conscientious, shy versus venturesome, tough versus tender-minded, trusting versus suspicious, practical versus imaginative, forthright versus shrewd, placid versus apprehensive, conservative versus experimental, group-oriented versus self-sufficient, casual versus controlled, and relaxed versus tense.

Cattell's 16 personality theory dominated the field for quite a long time, really until the early 1960s. Um, now I'll go back and tell you a little bit about how these things are measured. So here's some definitions of what a trait might be. This is theoretical. These are theoretical propositions: the trait has more than a nominal existence.

What does that mean? Well, it refers to something that's outside its linguistic marker. So hypothetically, there's something about a trait that makes it real that might be physiological or biological or at least behavioral that can be examined outside mere subjective analysis. Although that's often proved more difficult than people originally expected, traits are more generalized than particular habits. Well, God only knows how many habits people have, you know, and you kind of maybe run into the same problem with habits as you do with 177,000 words.

There's so many of them that you know you can drown in the description, and again you have to look for something that's more fundamental. They're dynamic and determine behavior, so there's something about a trait that in some sense acts as a causal agent. Traits may be identified empirically, we covered that. Traits are relatively independent of other traits; they're not synonymous with moral or social judgments.

Acts and even habits that are inconsistent with a trait are not proof of the non-existence of that trait. And then the more complex one: traits may either be viewed idiographically in light of the personality that contains them or theoretically on the basis of their distribution in the population measurement techniques. So imagine that you collect your list of adjectives, and then you transform them into a very simple questionnaire.

The questionnaire would look like a list of adjectives down the left-hand side, and then on the right-hand side there'd be maybe a scale, that's yes or no, or maybe a scale from 1 to 7. So if the descriptor was intelligent, you could ask the person to apply that descriptor to yourself on a scale from 1 to 7, or you could ask the person to rate someone else and describe that person as intelligent on a scale of 1 to 7.

And then you can have, let's say, a large group of adjectives like that, three hundred or so, and then you can have a large number of people assess themselves with all those adjectives. You can apply statistical techniques that then allow you to determine how the data is patterned.

So for example, if two of the 400 words were intelligent and smart, then you might find that within the entire population of raters, if they were rating themselves and if they rated themselves as high on intelligence, they are also going to rate themselves as high on smart, and maybe high on quick, and maybe high on insightful. And then you may also find, for example, that if they rated themselves as nice highly, they might also rate themselves as kind highly or empathic highly.

So by analyzing the groups of words that clump together in the same direction across many, many people, you can start to, and you can do this statistically, you can start to infer what the fundamental dimensions of variation are. Now, it's taken a long time for people to get the fundamental dimensions of variation right, and part of the problem is, well, how do you reduce the pool of adjectives to begin with to something that's because you're not going to have, you know, a thousand people rate themselves on 177,000 adjectives.

That's just not going to go very well. So you have to reduce that in some way that's not exactly biased, and then you have to get enough people to fill it out, so that your sample is going to be reliable across time. Then you have to have statistical techniques that are powerful enough to handle those operations. That all really didn't come together until probably the early 1960s, something like that, when Cattell's 16 factors were finally reduced to something approximating five.

Now I'm going to tell you a little bit about how you would go about making a questionnaire because that's part of what you need to know in order to do experimental psychology, especially social or personality psychology, and so we'll step into method a little bit before we return to the trait theories. So if you wanted to measure something, let's see someone think of a potential personality trait. Don't use the standard Big Five.

How about give me a word that you might use to describe someone? Fun? Okay, good. So now we have to figure out—so now we've got a problem. The problem is, well, you can use fun as a marker in a linguistic exchange. "Joe is a fun person to hang around with." Part of the meaning that you attribute to "fun" is a consequence of the words that you surround it with and then, of course, the context in which you utter the sentence and your determination of whether or not the person you're talking to knows who Joe is.

You're always providing the person that you're communicating with when you use a word like "fun" with a bunch of information that sort of surrounds the word so that they can infer what you mean. But if you're going to use that word and infer that it actually refers to something that's objective outside language, then you have to go about it in a different way. So the first thing you try to do is to figure out, "Okay, what do you mean by fun exactly?"

So let's have some characteristics of a person who's fun. What do they like? We can't use Big Five descriptors—that's okay, but that's right by the way. But I want to stay away from that just for fun. Okay, okay, so a funny, a fun person is funny. A funny person is someone who makes you laugh, I presume, and who's witty. So you could start generating associated words.

Okay, what else makes a person fun? Interesting? They're interesting? Okay, so they're funny and they're interesting. What else? Friendly? Friendly? Okay. Enthusiastic? Enthusiastic, talkative, light-hearted?

All right, you guys are really getting into this now. Okay, so you're starting to surround the word with a cloud of additional words that you believe, in some ways, have some important similarity with that underlying word, right? They seem to belong in the same category. Okay, what are some words that indicate that someone's not fun? Boring?

Okay, so they're boring. Miserable? Miserable. What's the difference between boring and miserable? That's a good one. Yeah, misery can be interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so other differences between boring and miserable—that's probably an open answer, by the way, just so you know.

Any other differences? Come on, you guys know the difference between boring and miserable, for God's sake. Yeah, miserable usually takes people down; boring just... Okay, so boring sounds like it's more neutral in some sense. Miserable, is that a positive thing or a negative thing? Negative.

Okay, so what sort of emotions might it be associated with? Depression? Sadness? Depression. What else? Anxiety? Hate? Hate, fear, cynicism? Cynicism. Okay. So now we've got the fun person sort of identified with regards to a positive pole and a negative pole, right? All right, so you can conduct a brief statistical investigation to determine whether or not your characterization of fun had any utility.

Was it valid in some sense, reliable and valid? So the first thing we might do is write down all those words on a little questionnaire. We probably generate about 20 of them, and then we might ask everyone to rate themselves according to that questionnaire. Then we might submit the data set to factor analysis, which is a complicated form of correlation analysis, and then we could find out what words clump together.

Now what we would find if we analyzed all the words that you guys generated is that we'd have one little clump that was associated with interesting, and we'd have another clump that was associated with negative emotion, and we'd have another clump that was associated with positive emotion. So you guys actually defined fun as a three-dimensional construct. Given what we know about personality, we know that there's a positive emotion dimension and a negative emotion dimension and then another dimension associated with creativity.

So from, at least in so far as you all characterized it, fun is not a unidimensional word; it crosses a variety of different domains. Now, if you're trying to get at how to measure fun, the first thing you have to do is define it, and that's what we were trying to do when we were collecting up all these words.

I'll show you how Cattell in 1965 characterized conscientiousness. He says, "Well, this thing exists, and in its existence it manifests these characteristics." Conscientiousness is that disposition governing persevering, unselfish behavior and impelling the individual to duty as conceived by his or her culture.

A conscientious person is honest, knows what is right, and generally does it even if no one is watching him or her. Does not tell lies or attempt to deceive others, respects others' property. An unconscientious person is somewhat unscrupulous, not too careful about standards of right and wrong where personal desires are concerned, tells lies, and is given to little deceits, and does not respect others' property.

So you could imagine how you could transform that definition into a questionnaire. You could use the adjectives that are in it and just have people rate themselves by the adjectives, or you could use little phrases like "Do you respect others' property?" 1 to 7. "Do you have a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong?" "If you know what's right, do you generally do it?" "Are you a persistent person?" "Are you unselfish?" So you can extract out individual items from your sort of global definition of what constitutes the hypothetical trait.

And here's some of the examples: "Do you usually keep emotions under control?" "Are you a person who is scrupulously correct in manners and social obligations and likes others to be the same?" "Are you cautious and considerate so that you do not hurt people's feelings by unconsidered conversational remarks?"

I like the adjective approach in some ways because you might notice that the last question there clumps a number of descriptors together, and it isn't absolutely certain that all those descriptors belong in the same question. I would say this was constructed quite a long time ago, and I would say if you're going to construct questions, you should try to answer—you should try to ask as close to one thing as possible because otherwise the question gets confusing.

So I would say the second question also has the same problem. All right, so if you're going to make your questionnaire and let's say you're trying to figure out how fun someone is and simultaneously figure out whether or not investigating fun is actually a reasonable thing to do—like, is it a scientifically valid category—then you might want to generate a whole bunch of items and also put some in there that don't obviously measure fun. So let's have some descriptors that don't seem to fall on the fun/non-fun dimension.

What's outside of that? Okay, which one? I would say "stoic." Okay, and define stoic.

Being quite careful with your words, not having an excess of emotion. Okay, so you think you can be fun and not have an excess of emotional response? I'm not trying to put you on the spot; I'm just wondering if that's what you're claiming.

I think because just because you're in a social situation and not— Okay, okay, okay, so what other descriptors—look, fun can't mean everything, right? Because if it means everything, then it's not a useful word because a word has to mean some things and not other things.

That's convergent and divergent validity, in a sense. A word can't mean everything; it has to mean something specific. So what does—what's outside of the fun/non-fun domain? Intelligence?

Yeah, so you can be fun and stupid; the fact is that might even be easier. All right, so intelligence might be outside of that. What else might be?

And you could be envious and fun still. Seems least probable. How about mean? Can you be mean and fun?

Yeah, so that's kind of interesting. So, okay, okay, so now we're starting to get the idea that fun circumscribes one dimension, but there are other potential dimensions of variation outside of that that might be interesting to look at.

We've sort of thought about mean and we thought about intelligent. What else did we come up with? What else is sort of outside of the fun realm? Patient?

Okay, so you can be impatient fun or patient fun. All right, seems reasonable. Fashionable?

Yeah, okay. Is that—do you think that's a personality trait?

I think it means—yeah, okay. So you definitely do think it's a personality characteristic, and that's fine. It could well be, you know.

Is there a difference between a personality characteristic and an emotion? You think emotion is inside personality? So it's nested inside it? The personality is the larger category and emotion is the smaller category?

Yeah, it's a funny thing because there's lots of a priori suppositions in psychology that you have to watch out for, and one of them is that just because there's different words for different things, that doesn't mean those different things really exist separately, as separate things do in scientific terminology.

So, for example, the relationship between personality traits and emotions and values is relatively unclear. Whether those things belong in the same or different categories is, by no means, clear. People will claim that they do, but the overlap is substantial.

So, okay, yes, we also usually think of emotions as being more kind—like we all experience sadness at some point; that doesn't mean that that's a fundamental trait of our personality. It's like we're all able to experience it, but it doesn't usually—we are—unless we're… right?

And so, okay, and so that's part of the definition of a trait, as something that's enduring rather than transient. Okay, so you could say that's actually a hypothesis. Your hypothesis is that what we refer to as emotions are brief flareups of some of the phenomena that we would consider traits if they were enduring.

Yeah, and that's a reasonable hypothesis. Although, if you describe a person as sad, do you think you're describing their personality or their emotion?

It could be either. I would, yes.

Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, it's tricky business. Okay, so the reason I had you generate all these additional words is because you need to find out that your category "fun" has a bunch of things that it doesn't cover as well as a bunch of things that it does.

And so we've hypothesized a number of things that might constitute additional domains of variation, and so you might want to throw those in your questionnaire too. Okay, now you might say, "Well, what are you going to do with your scale?" So now you have a scale and you can give it to people, and you can tell the difference between the fun people and the not fun people.

What might be some practical purposes towards which you could put that knowledge? You don't have to be too serious about it. I mean, what are you going to do? You could invite all the non-fun people to a party. That would seem rather counterproductive.

Your hypothesis would be that maybe you'd have two parties; you'd have a party with all the fun people and you'd have another party with all the non-fun people. Then you could get the attendees to rate how fun the party was, and then that would help you determine whether or not your measurement of fun was actually practically useful for something that's called criterion-related validity, by the way.

Criterion-related validity—if a scale possesses criterion-related validity, you can identify something that it might predict that isn't like completely obviously associated with the initial measure. Although, you know, fun and fun at a party probably are, so that's a bad example.

But you can use it to predict something that might be of value. I can give an example of that: conscientiousness, for which is a trait, is frequently used to evaluate how good an employee might be if you hired them or even how good a student might be because conscientiousness turns out to be a pretty good predictor of academic achievement.

Okay, so if you want to make a questionnaire—and some of you do this when you do your honors thesis or if you're involved in research at all, and people tend to think about developing a questionnaire of something that's relatively straightforward—it’s not.

You need to figure out what it is that you're after, you know, what's your central construct of interest, and then you have to figure out, "Well, how do I generate a very large number of items that hypothetically measure this or its reverse or its opposite?" It doesn't really matter.

And then a bunch of items that don't measure it because, again, you have to show that it's good for something and not good for everything. Then you have to demonstrate statistically that your concept is coherent, and then you have to show that you can use it to predict something.

And it gets worse than that, actually; then you have to show that it predicts something better than some other thing that someone already invented. So, you know, if you came up with a fun scale, it's probably primarily extroversion, as you mentioned— that a scale like that would measure.

Although it would be a little complicated because generally fun people also have less negative emotions, so what you'd end up with— as we mentioned before, your fun scale would be a mangling up of a couple of different categories, and so it probably ends up not being a very good questionnaire at all.

So it's a tricky thing to make a questionnaire. It takes an awful lot of work, and you can't start with the assumption that just because you've been able to think up a concept that it actually constitutes a concept that meets the criteria for scientific evidence or for scientific category.

We should also talk maybe a little bit about some different kinds of categories because it's not all that obvious to people that there are different kinds of categories. So I can name three very rapidly; there are many others. The first category—and these are usually the categories that scientists do investigate—are technically called proper sets.

A proper set is like the set of all triangles, and triangles are clearly not squares; we’d all agree on that. So what makes a triangle different than a square?

Okay, I was trying to trip you up there. So, okay, so is that true of all triangles? Right, right. What about a triangle that, like, is open on one line? Does that qualify as a triangle?

No, it just looks like a triangle. It's like an impostor. So, okay, so a proper set has this interesting characteristic, which is it has absolutely clear inclusion and exclusion criteria, and there are no exceptions—or almost no exceptions.

So you might say, "Well, is the set of all helium atoms a proper set?" The answer to that fundamentally is yes. And is—and it's distinguishable, say, from the set of all hydrogen atoms or the set of all iron atoms. There are characteristics that you can define that precisely indicate the boundaries of the category, and those sorts of things are relatively easy to study scientifically because they tend to behave similarly in different circumstances.

So here’s another category; it's called a familial resemblance category. That's a little harder to understand, but a familial resemblance category is a category that—imagine that the prototypical example is the Smith Brothers. So the Smith Brothers—here’s some things that could characterize the Smith Brothers: large ears, large nose, floppy lips, glasses, mustache, beard, and bald.

So they're obviously not very attractive, these Smith Brothers. And then you can tell the Smith Brothers are related to each other because they all look like each other. Of course, they don't look exactly like each other.

So one Smith brother is bald with glasses and floppy lips, but he has little ears, and then another Smith brother has hair but he's got, you know, large glasses and large ears and floppy lips. And then there's another Smith brother that has a big nose and glasses but he has nice hair and no mustache but a beard, and you get the picture.

So what a familial resemblance category—how a familial resemblance category works is that there's a list of, say, 10 attributes, and in order to be a member of that class, you only have to have, say, four of the attributes—any four—or maybe five, whatever.

The weird thing about a familial resemblance category is that one person could have four of the attributes and another person could have four different attributes if there were 10 attributes in total, and they'd still be members of the same set even though they don't share any attributes in common.

What a familial resemblance category works because each of the members of the category are related to a central prototype, and the prototype has all the features. And the prototype might not even exist. So there could be a prototypical Smith brother who would have all the characteristics of the Smith brothers that I described, but he doesn't even exist.

He's like an amalgam of all the Smith brothers, and then each of the Smith brothers are related in some way to that central prototype so that you could tell that they belong in a family. That's not a proper set.

One of the things you might be asking, "Well, why should you know this?" One reason is it's useful to know that there are different forms of categories, but more particularly, for psychological purposes, psychiatric diagnostic categories are familial resemblance categories; they're not proper sets.

So if you go into the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual, which is the sort of APA (American Psychiatric Association) Bible for doing diagnosis, you'll see that if you list the symptoms of something like a personality disorder, there might be 10 symptoms, and in order to have that personality disorder, you only need four of them.

There can be wide variation within the category, and of course, then that begs the question of whether or not it's actually a category— certainly whether or not it's actually a scientific category.

A guy named Barcelo talked about a different kind of category. He called them ad hoc categories, and these are strange things, like here's an ad hoc category for you: things to take out of your apartment when it's on fire.

So what things would those be? Pictures? Pets? Yes, children—you forgot about that, okay. What else? What's that? Seniors? Yes, hopefully—oh, yeah, insurance ID maybe. What's that? Anything else?

Okay, now you might say, "Well, what do all those things have in common?" Since they're apparently a category, what are they? Things you care about? Yeah, yeah, so they're necessary or emotionally valuable, or, or what? Or valuable? Yeah, or irreplaceable in some ways.

Okay, so that's a funny category, and one of Barcelo's claims was that ad hoc categories can become automatic categories—perceptual categories—if you practice them enough. So Barcelo would say a fireman has a better ad hoc category of what to take out of an apartment during a fire than you do because he's practiced that using that category frequently.

So those are categories that sort of have pragmatic utility, and that's another kind of category. Okay, so I mentioned family resemblance, proper set, and ad hoc categories. That's all I can sort of spin off in real time here.

Generally, what you're trying to do when you extract a word out from the language, you have to demonstrate that it has the characteristics of a proper set before you can think of it as having some genuinely objective existence, and that turns out to be a very difficult thing to do.

It's one of the things that throws psychologists for a loop constantly because we make the presupposition that just because two different words exist for something, that signifies two different things or two things at all. And so it's difficult to disentangle your description of the world from the world itself.

Hypothetically, this construct validation process with regards to questionnaires is one of the ways that you can step forward towards doing that. I mentioned convergent and discriminant validity before. Once you get your scale established, you have to demonstrate, as I said, that it measures something that exists in some real way, and that it also has to be separable from measures of other things.

So for example, if you generated a scale that measured fun and you found out that it was highly correlated with other scales that measure anxiety, then that would cast some doubt on whether or not you had appropriately extracted out your scale for fun.

Other people would have been looking at similar things over the years, and hopefully, your scale would correlate positively with those similar things and negatively with the things that you assume to be different, and that's convergent and divergent validity.

Then the criterion-related validity we already talked about. Okay, so now I want to show you a different PowerPoint presentation just for the—yeah, so this you might think about this as the current, arguably standard model of human personality, and it's a model that this is only half of it, by the way; there's another slide that has the other half.

This shows the personality of a person laid out in hierarchy from most general to most specific. It's sort of analogous to that little drawing I showed you of behaviors at the bottom and then higher order descriptors at the top—although they don't map onto each other one to one, and that's actually one of the things I'm trying to figure out.

It's very difficult to map the trait theories directly onto the narrative and the clinical theories. All right, so at the highest level of resolution, here's how people can differ from one another: they can be industrious or orderly, and those two aspects are quite highly intercorrelated but sufficiently differentiable so that the differences are interesting.

Industriousness and orderliness seem to predict different things. So for example, industriousness seems to be a better predictor of academic achievement than orderliness does, even though they both clump under conscientiousness.

Then there's volatility and withdrawal for emotional stability or neuroticism—it's described in different ways. If you're neurotic, if you feel a lot of negative emotion, and you're emotionally stable if you don't, the negative emotions that are associated with neuroticism.

We thought for a long time it was all negative emotions that were associated with neuroticism, but it seems to be more like pain and anxiety. Pain is somewhat equivalent to the emotion you feel if you're frustrated, or disappointed, or grieving, and anxiety seems to be the emotion you feel when you're subject to uncontrollable or unexpected circumstances or when you're subject to cues of frustration, disappointment, or grief.

So volatile people don't really seem to avoid because of their negative emotion, although their emotions— their emotions bounce a lot, especially their negative emotions. If you're associated with someone who's volatile, what you would observe is that they seem to overreact to things. They get more irritated than the circumstance might seem to indicate, and their emotional response to things is on the negative end is relatively unpredictable day to day.

So there's a lot of variability and a lower threshold for the experience. People who withdraw are people who appear to be stopped by their experience of negative emotion. If they're afraid of something, they won't do it, whereas the volatile person, they might do it but they'll complain a lot while they're doing it.

You know, so we don't know a lot about the difference between volatility and withdrawal yet because those have been recently extracted out using statistical means, and they seem stable, but exactly what they predict yet—apart from the few things that I've tentatively suggested to you—isn't yet clear. Agreeableness sounds like a positive thing. Politeness and compassion—we know that liberals are more compassionate and conservatives more polite, but we don't know a lot more about the distinction between politeness and compassion.

We also know, by the way, that conservatives are more orderly; they're less open as well, which is the dimension we'll talk about in a moment. Those three—those are three of the five Big Five traits: conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness. They clump together to make a super factor called stability, and stability looks like it might be associated with higher levels of serotonin.

So serotonin is a major brain neurotransmitter that seems to regulate, broadly speaking, emotion and motivation, and if your serotonin levels, so to speak, are relatively high, then you're a relatively stable person. If your serotonin levels are low, then you tend to be impulsive and prone to negative emotion.

Now, one of the things that's quite interesting about serotonin is that it tracks your position in the dominance hierarchy as well. So the higher you are up in a given dominance hierarchy, the more serotonin your brain produces, and that makes you more confident and less unstable.

The lower you are in the hierarchy, the lower your brain serotonin levels. The reason for that seems to be that if you're low in the dominance hierarchy, well, you should be afraid because almost anything can knock you into oblivion. If you're right at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, you're barely hanging on, and you just can't tolerate any more threat.

Conversely, it might also be appropriate for you if someone dangles a reward in front of you for you to grab it because it's not exactly clear it's going to be there the next day. Whereas if you're up high in the dominance hierarchy, it's like you can take a lot of blows, and you're so well-situated socially that it's probably not going to overwhelm you that much.

You don't have to be impulsive because the microenvironment that you inhabit is very stable. So the negative emotion dimension of emotional stability is particularly associated with serotonergic function, but we think that the whole super factor of stability is associated with serotonergic tone.

So some of this, like I mentioned already, all of these different aspects, traits, and super factors were all derived statistically, but evidence has continued to accumulate over the last 20 years with regards to the biological substrate of the traits.

As we progress through them one by one, we'll also talk about hypothetically what constitutes the underlying biology. Agreeable people—um, I think the easiest way to conceptualize agreeableness is as a negotiating strategy in some sense. So, you know, you're always attempting to divide up resources between you and other people, and a disagreeable person will make a pretty damn strong case that the resources should go to them.

Whereas an agreeable person will be much more likely to underrepresent their own interests and overrepresent the interests of others. In some ways, people like that are very pleasant to be around, you know, because they're always doing things for other people. Unfortunately, they’re often not doing enough for themselves.

In my clinical practice, I can always tell who the agreeable people are because when they come and see me, they bring me coffee. The disagreeable people bring themselves coffee. So, yeah, pretty sad animation.

The aspects here—so openness—remember you guys hypothesized that intelligence was unrelated to fun? Well, fun is pretty much an extroversion sub-element, and intelligence is associated with openness, and it roughly breaks down like this: IQ is probably a better measure of the aspect intellect.

Like IQ tests are a better measure of the subscale intellect than personality measures are, so what it means is that for intellect or for intelligence we have a measure that isn't merely self-report; it’s a good measure, and we'll talk a lot about intelligence. It's actually a very easy, it's a simple thing to conceptualize.

So, um, it's a more difficult thing to try to explain, but conceptually it's fairly straightforward. The other aspect of openness is openness proper. I put creativity here, and what that seems to be associated with is the degree to which someone—there's a variety of things—but one of them seems to be the degree to which a given idea, if you throw someone an idea or you offer someone an idea, there's some probability that that's going to make them think of other things.

The more open someone is, the more likely it is that any given idea is going to make them think of more things. And also, the open person has a more diverse range of things that that idea might bring about.

So often the speaking style of someone who's open is characterized by relatively loose associations—like my lectures, for example. So it's a measure of creativity, but it’s also a measure, in some sense, of lack of constraint on the propagation of ideas through the idea network.

I don't know exactly what that means neurologically. I do know that you can be relatively high in intelligence and relatively low in openness or creativity, but the two things do tend to co-vary.

So for example, it's very rare for people to make any major contribution to a creative sphere unless they have an IQ of over at least over 120. So it's a pretty—you know, it’s pretty selective, one in 120. That's about the 90th or 91st or 92nd percentile, so it's pretty high.

So openness is creativity and intelligence. It's a bit broader than that too, though, because open people are also more capable of aesthetic experience. So it's not only that they are more creative, but they also enjoy the products of creative endeavor more than non-open people.

So open people are going to be interested in dance and music and poetry and philosophy. Um, they're characterized by the capacity for aesthetic experiences. You know, some people can listen to music and the hair on the back of their neck will stand up, or maybe they get the same sensation when they're watching someone dance or so.

Um, just out of curiosity, if you're inclined to answer, how many of you have had the experience of—it's called piloerection, actually— because sometimes the hairs on your arms will stand up too as a consequence of watching something that's aesthetic, a movie, or how many? Quite a lot of you. How many haven’t? Okay, okay, so—

Well, there's a lot of you know. By that measure, anyway, there's an awful lot of open people in this class. So, um, by the way, that sense of having the hairs on the back of your neck stand up—that's sort of a remnant of the piloerection reflex. You know, let's say you're watching a cat, and the cat comes around a corner, and all of a sudden there's a dog there.

What happens? The cat goes, right? It puffs right up even if it's startled. Now, its tail is about this big around, right? And I mean, it's startled, but it puffs right out, and it's like that's an automatic reflex on the part of the cat. Now it's trying to look like it's big, you know. Of course, the dog will do the same thing. So it's a bit counterproductive, but whatever, the cat's trying to look like it occupies a lot more space than it actually looks like, but there's also, at least in principle, an emotion associated with that, which is sort of a combination of terror and awe.

Maybe that's what the cat feels, but that's what our experience of awe, even filtered down, is still associated with that, you know, experience of piloerection. So that's pretty interesting. So extroverted people—or at least, I think it's pretty interesting—extroverted people are assertive and enthusiastic.

So the enthusiasm dimension seems to be associated with a lot of overt positive emotion, and so extroverts, in many ways, are more fun. They laugh more; they talk more— that is not necessarily more fun. They're very gregarious; they like to hang out at parties; they plan parties; they tell jokes.

In fact, telling a joke is actually a real marker of extraversion. So how many of you here tell jokes? Yeah? How many don’t? Okay, okay. So, um, how many of you tell good jokes anyway?

So, yeah, also one of the behavioral markers we found for extroversion was that extroverted people also tell dirty jokes. So how many of you are capable of that particular act?

Yeah, so you, in particular—you all right, so yeah. So the assertiveness element of extroversion—that's, I guess sometimes that's the part of extroversion that maybe isn't so much fun because extroverts can be very verbally dominant.

One of the things I do in my fourth-year undergraduate personality seminar is I split the group into introverts and extroverts because I often have the class do debates. If you put an extrovert in with a bunch of introverts and there's a debate—so there's one extrovert here and three introverts and one extrovert here and three introverts—then the two extroverts have the debate, and the introverts don't say anything.

Introverts are interesting because it's not like they don't have anything to say. Because if you point at an introvert and say, "Do you have something to say?" then they'll say something that they're thinking. But they'll very rarely—especially if they're very introverted—they'll very rarely offer it spontaneously.

If I found that, if I divide the class into two groups of introverts and two groups of extroverts, and then I have them do like a four-way debate, the introverts will talk like mad in their own group, you know, because they're not being overpowered by an extrovert.

The extroverts seem to have a much lower threshold for speaking. It doesn’t take much of a stimulus to get them talking, or they have a real impulse to talk. Like my daughter is super introverted or extroverted; it's impossible for her to think something without saying it.

You know, which is not always to her benefit. But I—extroverts have a real impulse to speech, you know, and whereas introverts, they have to be sort of prodded into it. Extroverts also seem to be sort of—what would you call it? Energized by social interactions.

You know, they'll go to a party, and they get more and more energy, whereas an introvert will go to a party, and they'll be there for an hour, and then they've had enough people and they want to go home and sit in the room and recharge.

And it isn't exactly—we really don't have any idea why that is, but it seems to be a pretty reliable marker of the difference between the two groups. Here's some—what? Um, let’s see.

Yeah, here's some items so you guys can do a quick Big Five on yourselves, and I'll tell you the upside and downside of it. So if you're orderly, you follow a schedule—how many of you follow a schedule?

Okay, how many of you don't? Okay, so one thing I would recommend is that you do, and I'll tell you why. Intelligence is a very good predictor of academic performance, and there's not a lot you can do about your intelligence.

I mean, you can squander it, but it’s very difficult to improve it. Conscientiousness, well, it's a trait too, so it’s hard to work on, but we know that conscientious people get better grades, and it's reliable, and it's a powerful effect.

So if your time use is organized, then the probability that you're going to be successful is very high. So one of the things you might think about is making friends with a calendar, like Google Calendar or something.

And I can tell you some tricks about that because really it is important, like—and I'm not kidding around about this— if you're low in conscientiousness, it's really going to trip you up as you walk through life. There's not very many advantages to it that I've been able to see, and I'm not assuming that just because you don't follow a schedule you're low in conscientiousness, but it is one of the items that mark it.

The only advantage I've seen so far to being unconscientious is that if you become unemployed, it doesn't bother you as much. I mean that—it actually turns out to matter in some situations.

So like, you know, if a big company has to shed 50% of its employees, it's the conscientious people who are going to suffer themselves to death for it, and the unconscientious people, they're not going to care anyway, because they weren’t working anyway, so it doesn't matter if they have a job or not.

Here's one way of thinking about making use of a schedule. Often, people are afraid of schedules because they think of them as a trap. You know, you make a schedule, and it's like this little prison that you have to live inside.

You know, all doing in your schedule is putting down things you have to do or should do, and so, you know, there's not a lot of fun in that. Not only is it a trap or a prison, but it's kind of an unpleasant one.

A way to work with the schedule in a lot more sophisticated way is to think, "Well, I'm going to plan the next week," say, because you plan it day by day, but we'll take the week as the unit level of analysis and think, "Well, I'd like to plan a week. I'd like to have..."

And then your schedule all of a sudden becomes a tool for increasing the quality of your life, and that's a whole different issue, you know, because you might think, "What's the emotion that you suffer—assuming you suffer one of these emotions—if you have an essay that's due and you're not doing it?"

Like, would you regard that as a pleasant emotion or unpleasant emotion? Unpleasant.

Okay, so is there anybody who is disagreeing with a statement that having an essay due or overdue that you're not doing is unpleasant? Everyone agrees with that.

Do you think you can characterize the unpleasantness? Like what kind of emotion is it? Guilt? It's guilt.

Okay, anything else? Frustration? Frustration? Frustration with what?

You feel like failure; like you're unable to—yeah, so you're sort of frustrated with yourself. Yeah, yeah, you need a slap, right?

You think I need a slap? And so, okay, so guilt—anything else? Anxiety? Restlessness?

So that's kind of an agitation. Yeah, it's because your body knows you should be doing something, but you know, you're not pointing it in the right direction. So it's anxiety.

You're going to fail? Yeah, shame—is that reasonable? So, okay, so the reason I was asking you about that is because most of the negative emotions are associated with neuroticism, but some of them seem to be associated with conscientiousness, and the conscientious negative emotions seem to be guilt and shame fundamentally.

Recent research—and really recent; I only got this paper like a week ago, I think it's about four months old—seem to indicate that conscientious people feel less guilt, but they're more guilt-prone.

If they don't do something that makes them guilty, but they organize their time so they are doing the things they're supposed to do, then they don't feel guilty.

So anyways, back to the schedule. So all right, you think about your week, and you think about your day, and you think, "Well, how would you improve the quality of a given day or a given week?"

Well, one of the ways of improving it is to not put yourself into the situation where there are things hanging over your head that you have to feel guilty and ashamed about, because that's a very unpleasant way of being.

You know, if you have an essay that's due in a week and you're procrastinating, then the fact that you have to do that essay can ruin the whole week. Even when you're doing something that's positive, hypothetically, it's kind of that horrible kind of positive that you experience when you know that you should be doing something else.

That's when you end up watching YouTube videos about, like, dancing cats or something like that, you know, and it's at best a guilty pleasure; it's not a pleasure at all.

You think, "What the hell am I doing watching videos of dancing cats?" You know, but then you know that you're procrastinating, and that's low quality—very low quality existence.

So if you use your schedule, you can think, "Okay, well, here's some times that I'm going to do this work," and then you can also sort of ask yourself about that when you're designing your schedule. Because you don't want to design a schedule like you're Adolf Hitler telling yourself what to do, you know, because you're not going to comply with it.

Then what you have to do if you're going to design a schedule is you have to ask yourself, "All right, I'm going to set aside some time to study over the next week or to do this essay or whatever it is—how much time would I actually spend studying?"

And you know, "I'm going to go to the library for four hours a day." It's like how many of you go to the library for four hours a day?

You do? How much work do you do during those four hours? You do?

That's very impressive. Is it more than four hours? So what proportion of the time you’re spending there do you think is actually efficient?

H? That's good, that's good. My suspicions are that you're conscientious, so that's exceptional.

I mean, people usually don't manage that, so but you know, an hour or two a day might be a worthwhile thing to schedule in, and I would say—won't schedule in more than that to begin with because then you'll fail, and then you'll stop using the schedule.

The other thing you want to do is you want to schedule in things that you want to do. And then you want to look at the day or the week, and you want to think, "Hey, that's a week I'd like to have. If I had a week like that, it would be good. You know, I'd be caught up, so none of that negative emotion doesn't have to accrue, and I want to have done a bunch of things that I'm interested in doing."

At the end of the week, I'd be in better shape than I was at the beginning. If you treat a schedule like that, so what you're using it is to design the days and weeks that you want to have instead of using it as this little, you know, jail that you have to put yourself in that you're not going to do anyway—then you can learn to use them, and that's one thing you can do to make yourself more industrious or more conscientious: follow a schedule.

Am I not bothered by disorder? So how many of you people are not bothered by disorder?

Okay, okay, and how many of you are bothered by disorder? Yes.

So some of those of you who are bothered by disorder probably have an eating disorder; that would be my guess. I'm not going to ask, but that would be my guess because one of the things that does characterize people who have eating disorders is they tend to be very orderly.

Ordered people tend to be quite sensitive to disgust, and disgust seems to be the driving factor behind eating disorders because people who have body dysmorphia or eating disorders tend to be relatively disgusted by what they see as inadequacies in their own body.

Orderliness can get out of hand a lot. We have some suspicions that it may be also associated with authoritarianism in political viewpoints because conservatives are more conscientious than liberals, but specifically, they tend to be more orderly.

That doesn't mean orderliness is a bad thing; it just means— and this is something to think about with regards to all the traits—that any trait exaggerated too far starts to become negative.

The Big Five traits, at least in principle, don't have any what would you call it? Intrinsic moral value. And that's partly because too much of a good thing seems to turn very rapidly into a really bad thing.

So having a healthy personality seems to be more like something like the balance between the different traits, and maybe also something like your ability to increase the breadth of your traits.

You know, so maybe if you're hyper-orderly, one of the things that would be good for you to learn is to not be hyper-orderly in every situation all the time; it's too rigid.

So, okay, so orderly people are bothered by disorder, and they follow a schedule. And so, industrious people do not waste their time, and they know what they're doing.

So how many of you people don't waste your time? So two people?

Okay, have I played? How much time do you waste when you go before? I have.

Okay, that's too bad because I love torturing undergraduates with that game. Okay, so that's another advantage to a schedule, you know, because it can really help you with time-wasting, and that's something that'll kill you over time.

How many of you have good goals, and you know what you're doing? Yeah, so that's better.

How many of you don't? How many of you don't know really what you're doing or where you're going?

Okay, okay, so, okay, so that's conscientiousness. This is neuroticism: volatile people get angry easily, and they don't keep their emotions under control.

That should have been reversed, by the way. Um, withdrawal: seldom feel blue is the opposite, and filled with or—sorry—seldom feel blue is the opposite and filled with doubts about things.

That seems like more of a depression trait—withdrawal. So that's a negative emotion dimension, so people reliably differ on the degree to which they experience negative emotion and the degree to which they experience positive emotion.

Those two things are actually different because the circuitry that operates positive emotion is a particular circuit, and the circuits that operate negative emotion are specific circuits, and they're not merely opposites.

So you can be highly neurotic and very extroverted, and so that means you're always at parties, but you're continually worrying what people are thinking of you.

So it's—people like that are actually quite complicated, you know, so it's a complicated combination of traits. Agreeableness—polite people respect authority and they do not believe that they're better than others, and compassionate people are interested in other people's problems and take time for other people.

So I’ll tell you this after we do it: extraversion, open people—we talked about this already—if you're creative, you believe in the importance of art, you love to reflect on things. If you're smart, which is sort of the intellect category, you're quick to understand things and can handle a lot of information.

If you're extroverted, people are assertive; they take charge, they're able to influence people, so they're kind of charismatic. And if they're enthusiastic, they make friends easily and are easy to get to know.

It might be of some interest to you that disagreeable people who are extroverted are narcissistic. Because a disagreeable person isn't particularly polite, they don't really care about your feelings, and they're very dominant.

So, if you're like that, it would be useful to learn when to be quieter in social situations and how to attend more to other people. One of the things that seems quite useful for people who are disagreeable and narcissistic, for that matter, is to try consciously on a regular basis to do something for someone else.

It also actually seems to make people who are narcissistic happier to do that, interestingly enough. Okay, so I'll just briefly also talk about general cognitive ability. This is sort of an overview of where we're going to head over the next few courses.

This is a Ravens Progressive Matrices test. I don't think this one is very difficult, although I'm going to look at it before I certainly tell you that because I don’t want you to feel bad.

Oh, and the answer is there anyway, so it actually turns out to be extremely easy. So why is seven the right answer?

Okay, say that again—it has to be the lowest. Why?

Why does it have to be the lowest? The circle is at the top right, so there has to be—there has to be an item at the bottom, at the bottom.

Okay, and be a little circle, and it has to be a triangle.

Why does it have to be a triangle? Because it's the only thing missing.

Right? Because every other row has a triangle. So you inferred all that by analyzing the 3x3 matrix.

Okay, the faster you can do that. It's an interaction between speed and complexity. You can make these questions much more complex than this one. This one's, you know, reasonably complex, but they can get really vicious because maybe there's, what, two dimensions of variation here, whether or not it's an oval, a triangle, or a rectangle.

Then where the thing is—that’s it. But you could imagine you could make a matrix with like four dimensions of variability, and so these tests turn out to be the most accurate tests of general cognitive ability: Ravens Progressive Matrices. That's not verbal intelligence; it's non-verbal intelligence.

I can tell you why it is that these tests turned out to be that way later, and I will. General cognitive ability is a very good predictor of life success.

It seems to be—very much biological—what would you say? Biological factors play a large role, especially in modern society, in determining relative levels of intelligence, which is a relatively rough fact.

Okay, so we'll sum up briefly. It looks like there are five basic dimensions of variability that characterize the human personality: conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, openness, and extroversion.

What we'll do as we progress through the rest of—or at least the next roughly little more than a third of the classes—we'll delineate each of these variables, try to understand precisely what they mean, see if we can analyze their effect on society, and maybe also provide you with the opportunity to get some more insight into the personality traits that you have.

The exercise, the personality self-analysis—the adjectives that were in there were taken from the Big Five models, and so, you know, that sort of gave you an opportunity to assess yourself roughly on the Big Five dimensions and see what you could do to improve.

So, we'll see you on Thursday.