2015 Personality Lecture 14: Existentialism: Solzhenitsyn / Intro to Biology & Psychometrics

I didn't quite get through what I wanted to in the last lecture, so I think I'm going to steal half an hour from this lecture and do that, and then we'll go to this lecture. Because I didn't get a chance to read you some of the things I wanted to read you. Um, and but they're really worth read, they're really worth hearing, so I think I'm going to do that.

One of the things that I've spent a very long time trying to figure out is what motivated people to do the terrible things that they did in the concentration camps, particularly in the 20th century. The Concentration Camp was a pretty widespread phenomena. I mean, it's still being used extensively in North Korea, for example, and most of the popular population there is starving. Um, so it's not like it's done with yet.

Anyways, the best authors that I've ever read with regards to insights about the kind of totalitarian possession that leads people to commit extraordinarily brutal atrocities in the service of their belief have been Solzhenitsyn, who is not normally considered a personality psychologist, but also Victor Frankl. The reason I have you read Solzhenitsyn is because I think Solzhenitsyn is a more—I mean, Frankl is an amazing thinker, but Solzhenitsyn is one of those geniuses that comes along about every 100 years. So I think Solzhenitsyn wrote the most pertinent analysis of the relationship between individual cowardice and the propensity to adopt totalitarian beliefs.

Then the propensity to commit acts of cruelty in the name of those beliefs. Now, it's a really tricky issue. I mean, it's commonly been assumed, for example, that people who are right-wing authoritarian are right-wing authoritarian because they're afraid of people who aren't like them, or they're afraid of ideas that aren't like their ideas or something like that. It's often a fear-based explanation, and it seems to me that there's something to that, you know? It's hard for me to imagine, you know, if your belief systems are disrupted by a piece of information that you don't particularly want to receive, it certainly does expose you to a tremendous amount of chaos.

So, you know, we've talked about situations, for example, where perhaps you receive the information that, you know, a loved one has been unfaithful to you, betrayed you. Now, part of what you're going to feel in relationship to that is anxiety, and it's because it destabilizes your past and all your memories, and it destabilizes your future and it destabilizes your present.

So that presents you with a whole bunch of uncertainty where at one point you had a pretty functional map and you knew how things related to one another and how you should act. It's reasonable to presuppose that that produces fear, especially because we know from work by someone like Jeffrey Gray, for example, who we're going to talk about in the next lecture. If you expose laboratory animals to novelty, which is certainly unexpected, something novel or something anomalous, they react. You can conceptualize the reaction roughly in two ways: you can say, well, they become afraid; they manifest anxiety, which you can dampen down with anti-anxiety drugs like Valium, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and alcohol.

Um, but they also manifest curiosity. But the anxiety usually supersedes the curiosity. So, the anxiety has to wear off before the curiosity will come forward, and that depends to some degree on the magnitude of the novel event. Calculating how large a novel event is turns out to be extraordinarily difficult, but we'll talk through that as well.

The anxiety models, so those would be things like terror management theory, for example, the anxiety models are pretty good, but they're missing things. They're missing things. So here's a couple of things that they might be missing. I've pursued the idea that, um, when you encounter a, um, a datum, we'll say, because it could be a stimulus or it could be an idea or it could be a person, but let's call it a piece of information that contradicts your axiomatic presupposition. So, your theory—then what might happen?

The hippocampus is a brain area that seems to do something like detect mismatches between what you expect or want to have happen and what actually happens. It seems to send a signal down to the reticular activating system, which is the part of your brain that actually governs consciousness. So, it's what wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night and also what makes you wake up very suddenly if you hear an unexpected noise at night.

It stops—you see, it releases the reticular activating system from inhibition. Basically, the hippocampus does something like tell your reticular activating system to take it easy as long as everything's going the way you want it to go. If it doesn't go the way you want it to go, then it releases the reticular activating system from inhibition.

What that seems to do is release a whole variety of underlying neurological circuits from inhibition. So then you become anxious, but you also become curious. But it's possible that you become a lot of other things too, and this is part of the generalized stress response as far as I can tell. What happens when you manifest the general stress response is that your body prepares for everything. Why? Well, because you don't know what to do when something you don't expect happens.

It's like the definition of not knowing what to do. So, because your body is pretty smart, it just ramps itself up in terms of its preparation, which is very stressful. Technically speaking, it's stressful because you're burning a lot of energy and resources that you could devote to other things, suppresses your immune system, and gets you ready, you know?

For any length of time, that can be fun in small doses. In fact, it is because people like novelty in small doses, but in large doses and chronically, it's like that's death itself, you know? So it seems that people really don't like to have their expectations dashed, or more accurately, they don't like it when what they want to have happen doesn't happen, which isn't exactly the same thing.

So the question is then, what does happen when what you want to doesn't happen? How exactly do you characterize it? One way of characterizing it is fear, and another way of characterizing it is something like generalized disinhibition of potential. That's another one, and I think that one's more accurate. I think it's more accurate because it's more comprehensive and deeper.

But then there's a third variable that we're going to talk about quite a bit that everybody's just sort of coming to terms with now, which is that it turns out that people who are tilted towards right-wing authoritarianism, first of all, they're high in conscientiousness, and they're low in openness. If you fractionate conscientiousness, which you can, you can break it into two things: you can break it into industriousness and orderliness.

Industriousness is a dead-on predictor of how well you guys do in university. It's damn near as powerful as intelligence; it's not as powerful, but we can't measure it as well either. So, that's industriousness. We don't know anything about industriousness, you know? We know how to measure it through self-report, and we know how to correlate those self-reports with life outcomes. We have no neuropsychological model for it; we have no conceptual model for it; we have no pharmacological model for it.

Uh, did I say animal model? We have no animal model for it. It's like we don't know anything about it except that it predicts long-term life success better than anything else except IQ in managerial, administrative, and academic positions, like grades.

But orderliness, that's a whole different story. Because it turns out that orderliness—we haven't published this yet—but orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust. And that's a weird thing because for a long time we thought that all the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism. So, this is Big Five speak fundamentally that, you know, pain and anger, frustration, disappointment, shame, guilt, anxiety, and fear—we all—if you were more likely to feel one, you're more likely to feel all of them, and all the negative emotions clump together.

And that's basically what neuroticism from a big five perspective is. But it turns out that disgust sensitivity loads on orderliness. Now, I tell you, man, that is one major finding. It's like, I think because we know a fair bit about disgust sensitivity now, give me one second. And that's mostly at least in part through the work of Jonathan Haidt, who's a very, very, very smart guy, and who started studying disgust before anybody else figured out that it was worthwhile to discuss or to investigate, roughly speaking, you know?

And he found that people who were disgust sensitive were very obsessed with moral purity. You know, it turned out to be the same thing. Bodily contamination and moral impurity are roughly the same phenomena. And then it turns out I really figured this out when I was reading Hitler's Table Talk, because Hitler's Table Talk, by the way, was a book that was put together of Hitler's spontaneous speeches, discussions while he was eating dinner for like three years.

You know, it's a fascinating book because it really gives you some insight into how he thought, and he was a very peculiar person because he was very high in openness, which is a creativity dimension, and very high in orderliness. And people like that aren't very common. But anyways, his whole metaphor for the German—the Aryan race—the whole metaphor was bodies. It's like the Aryans were a pure body with pure blood, and they were under assault from parasites.

So it was a disgust metaphor, you know? It wasn't fear. You know, it kind of sounds like fear because you could say, well, Hitler was afraid of the gypsies, and he was afraid of the Jews, and, you know, he was afraid of non-Aryans. But, well, first of all, I don't think it's reasonable to say that the Nazis were precisely possessed by fear. That isn't exactly how they looked, and if you look at conservatives—I'm not calling conservatives Nazis, by the way—but, you know, the Nazi philosophy is an extension of political belief on the right, just like totalitarian communism is an extension of political belief on the left.

So you can fall all into a pit either way, you know? But the Nazis were, first of all, they were German, and the Germans are a conscientious people, so to speak, you know? They have a very advanced industrial society, their engineering is very precise. To what degree that's a national trait, God only knows, to what degree that's a consequence of, you know, sociological pressure.

We don't understand anything about those sorts of things, but, um, Hitler was absolutely obsessed with purity and with willpower, and those things go together. So orderly people seem to be very enamored of their own willpower, something like that. They sort of worship it as the top God, so to speak. And, like, anorexic people tend to be very orderly, and they get disgusted.

I think anorexia is a disorder of disgust. Anorexic girls, they get completely disgusted by their own bodies, you know? And that's a very, think about that—that's a very tight line because there's any number of disgusting things about bodies. And you have to attend to that because if you don't, then you end up contaminated in a variety of ways, you know? You can catch a sexual disease, for example, or you can just catch a disease, or you can develop an infection or any number of things that will take you down, you know?

So it's very difficult for human beings to get the calibration right with regards to, you know, their own bodies and their feeling about their bodies and the fact that you also have to keep the damn thing clean and organized and otherwise, you know, all hell breaks loose. And it's no joke when Hitler was—before Hitler, you know, started the concentration camps and went after things in a big way, he was very, very concerned with the hygiene of the German people, you know?

And he did things like, uh, his first—his first policy implementations were tuberculosis screening, and he had people go around in vans and x-ray everyone to try to get rid of tuberculosis. It's like, yeah, you know, let's get rid of tuberculosis. And then they started cleaning up the factories, so they'd, you know, get rid of the bugs and the rats and sweep them all out and plant flowers out front. It was like a beautification campaign, and they used Cyclon B to do that.

Cyclon B was the gas that was used in the concentration camps, so like, that's quite interesting—the movement from insects and rats to human beings. And there was an intermediary there, which seemed to be mental hospitals, because the next thing they did was go and clean up the—you know, the people that the Nazis, Hitler in particular, but the Nazis in general, felt were inferior or contempt or something like that.

And like contempt and disgust seem to go very tightly together, and contempt—that's a vicious emotion. So, like, if you're in a relationship with somebody, a close relationship, and they start to become contemptuous of you—and you can tell that because they roll their eyes—the probability that you're going to divorce them or separate from them is extraordinarily high. Contempt is a very corrosive emotion.

And anyway, so, you know, the transformation and purity campaign of Hitler just extended and extended and extended and extended, and, you know, God only knows where it would have ended. And I also think that's why he was a worshipper of fire, you know, because fire is a purifying substance. And the Nazis really used fire as a symbol of their movement because Hitler would have these massive nighttime political rallies, you know, with 150,000 people all put in perfect squares, you know, with this massive background of fire and light, you know?

It all seems to boil down to the fact that he was extraordinarily disgust-sensitive, and that became a cardinal element of his political platform. And then that was associated with orderliness, and you know, you can track it all the way down to the biology. There was a paper published in PLOS ONE, which I should really put on the website about a year ago; unfortunately, I don't remember who published it.

But they were looking at, you know, let's say I assessed your political attitudes. I could do that, say, with an authoritarian scale—authoritarian belief scale. See, authoritarianism has been studied quite a bit since the end of World War II. Nobody really knew what to do with it in relationship to personality. It doesn't matter; you can assess it, you know, to with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

And these people did two things: they did a cross-country survey, and then within-country surveys. So you imagine you could, if you were looking at a phenomenon, you could look at the country level, U.S. vs. Canada, or you could go into the U.S. and then you could look at a state level. It's nice to do the analysis at both levels to see if it replicates itself across the two different conceptual strata.

What they found is mind-boggling; it's Nobel Prize-winning stuff as far as I'm concerned. The correlation between the prevalence of infectious disease in a local and the degree to which authoritarian beliefs were held in that local was about 0.7. It's like you never see that in the social sciences. That's higher than the correlation between IQ and grades, which is about as good as we ever get in terms of prediction.

So it's like, really? It's that high? You know, and one of the things that that implies is that one of the ways to get rid of right-wing authoritarian attitudes, assuming that you want to get rid of such things, is through public health. You know, it could easily be that the reason that we're all tilted fairly hard to the center and even to the left is that everybody's clean, you know?

We've got functioning sanitation. It's like, oh, don't have to worry about that anymore. So, and believe it, like, people used to have to worry about that before antibiotics. It's like, you get an infection, man, you're dead. And that's on its way back, by the way, see? We keep using antibiotics for everything under the sun, which is very, very, very stupid.

Anyways, so I gave you all that background because, you know, it's a tangled mess—the authoritarian personality issue. There's a sociological element to it, which is the disease element, and then there's the existential element that we've talked about in detail where there seems to be also something about people's unwillingness to stand up for themselves and develop their own beliefs and adhere to the truth and to adopt authoritarian, you know, extremely rigid authoritarian belief systems, and then go persecute people for them.

We don't know how to separate all those things out, but I thought I would read you some things that were written both by Solzhenitsyn and by Frankl about the concentration camps in Germany. Because Frankl was a concentration camp survivor, and Solzhenitsyn was a concentration camp survivor as well.

So here is one of Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of one of his experiences, or that some firsthand observer told him because when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, he wrote a lot about his own experiences, but he also wrote a lot about the experiences that other people had related to him while he was in the camps.

So one of the people he met told how executions were carried out at Adek, which was a work camp, um, a destructive labor camp on the Pichura River. They would take the opposition members—so these were people who weren't communists. A lot of people who got thrown in the gag prisons in the Soviet Union were basically political prisoners, right? You didn't have—you weren't a staunch communist, or you've been turned in for political, uh, what would you call it? Um, treason, you know, by a neighbor who really wanted your apartment.

So they turned you in, and you got hauled off to the concentration camp, and then your neighbor would get your apartment. Very pretty arrangement for everyone concerned, so the gags were full of political prisoners. They were also full of normal criminals—murderers, rapists, thieves—and those guys basically ran the camps because the Stalinists thought that murderers, rapists, and thieves were, um, what would you call those? You could rehabilitate them because they were actually victims of an unjust class structure.

So, you know, hypothetically, you could save them, whereas if you had rich parents or maybe your parents owned farmland, or maybe they just had a bloody house, God only knows, then you were a socially suspect element because you came from the bourgeois and not the proletariat. So you got thrown in jail alongside the murderers and the rapists and the thieves, and, you know, they were regarded as morally superior to you, which is, you know, something that only bloody communists could think through and come to that conclusion. You know, it's mind-boggling.

So, anyways, a lot of what happened in the camps was, you know, political murder, essentially. And so this is what Solzhenitsyn is talking about in this particular case. So he says: this is how executions were carried out at Adek, a camp on the Pichura River. They would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp compound at night. And outside the compound stood the small house of the third section.

The condemned men were taken into a room one at a time, and there the camp guards sprang on them. Their mouths were stuffed with something soft, and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were led out into the courtyard where harness carts were waiting. The bound prisoners were piled onto the carts from 5 to 7 at a time and driven off to the Gorka, the camp cemetery. Upon arrival, they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive. Not out of brutality—no, it had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them, it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses.

The work went on for many nights at Adek, and this is how the moral political unity of our party was achieved. Now you see what seems to be happening there is that the people who are engaged in these activities are classifying those who oppose their political beliefs as contempt and, therefore, worthy of destruction. And that seems to be partly a fear response, you know? That which is not us.

But it also seems very much also to partly be tied very deeply into this disgust and contamination system about which we don't know much about the cognitive elements of that system. Although, one of the things that's worth considering, you know, this has gone through my mind, is that, you know, you might ask, why the hell do human beings categorize things?

Because other animals don't really do that the same way. We really categorize things like mad, and you think, well, we're all, first of all, we're omnivores, right? That's a kind of a weird problem because if you're an omnivore, you can eat anything except the things you shouldn't eat, you know? And making a clear categorization—that's a real problem. If you're a koala bear and all you eat is eucalyptus leaves, it's like, poof, problem solved unless the eucalyptus leaves aren't around, and then you die. But if you're an omnivore, you have to run all over the place, and you can eat damn near anything, but you have to keep track of the things that will kill you and the things that are poisoned and the things that are contaminated and the things that are good for you.

And it's not an easy thing to do that. So, it seems like part of our classification system, the cognitive elements seem to actually have emerged out of contamination and disgust concerns, and that seems to be grounded, in some sense, in what, you know, our ability to make decisions about what we're going to put in our mouths and not, you know?

Like, people don't like to put disgusting things in their mouths, generally speaking. You know, you can overcome that, so people will eat, you know, moldy cheese, but you really have to work to overcome that. And you have to work to overcome your disgust at eating bitter substances. So, you have to develop a taste for coffee, and you have to develop a taste for olives because a lot of things that are bitter are actually poisonous.

So, the idea that there are things that you can put in your mouth that are good for you and there are things that you can't put in your mouth because they're bad for you is rooted somehow very deeply in our ideas of categorization, and also in our ideas of morality. Right? And you think of morality as a higher-order cognitive function, but think about, you know, modern people are as obsessed with food as the Victorians were obsessed with sex.

And people are making divisions, primary divisions of morality based on what each other eat all the time. You know, the vegetarianism movement or the vegan movement is a really good example of that. I mean, those sorts of concerns have been present throughout human history, as far as I can tell, because there's lots of ancient sects that are vegetarian. There are lots of people in India who are vegetarian primarily and often for religious beliefs, you know?

So it's a matter of—and it also seems that we divide—we tend to divide people into groups, even ethnic groups, on the basis of what one group is allowed to eat and what another group will eat. And so, you know, Christians will eat swine, and that's something that, you know, more conservative Jews and Muslims, in general, won't touch. It's disgusting, and it's contaminated, you know?

And it isn't fear exactly; it's something other than fear; it's more. And the danger of conceptualizing it in terms of contaminated and disgusting—and you see this a lot in the language that the, say, the Auschwitz camp guards used with regards to the people that they were putting in the ovens, for example. They weren't people; they were rats and insects—that was the language.

It's not like people are afraid of rats and insects, you know? I mean, it's a rat; that's not a big problem. But you can easily hate it, and it is something to be destroyed, you know? And so, we also don't know to what degree when you use the disgust system to classify someone, whether you're automatically putting them into the category of disgusting things that should be destroyed.

And there's a woman named Martha Nussbaum who's a legal scholar, and she suggested—she's a liberal—and she suggested that our legal decisions should never be based on disgust. You know? But then I read Nussbaum, and I think, well, yeah, it's easy to say that, except the disgust system is what stops you from eating things that will kill you. And you can't just shut the damn thing off because, you know, it's a fundamental biological mechanism, and it orients you in the world now.

And so we don't know how to control its spillover, say, into radical political belief, but just saying don't do that or, you know—you know what I mean—it's not wrestling with the problem because, first of all, you don't want to be not disgusted by things. That's a really bad idea.

But by the same token, you know, if you get too radical about that, you get too orderly, then not, you know, if you're anorexic, you can't even stand your own body. That's really not a good thing, you know? Because the anorexic I've worked with, they often talk about their fantasies, and they look at their body, and what they see is like corruptible flesh, basically. And they have fantasies about purity, and the purity is they want to reduce themselves to bone, you know?

Because bone is white and it's pure, and it doesn't have this sort of corruptible flesh hanging off it. And, you know, that seems to go along with fairly severe perceptual aberration. So, because anorexics don't really seem to be able to look at their body as a whole, what they seem to do is focus obsessively on parts, and they can never really get the parts together.

So, you know, and I don't exactly know how that's associated with disgust either, except that that hyper— you know, that hyper-alertness and hyper-concentration could easily be associated with analysis of things that might be disgusting and dangerous.

Anyways, Frankl—the most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of camp life was the awakening, when at a still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams. We then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen with edema.

And there were the usual moans and groans about petty troubles such as the snapping of wires that replaced shoelaces. One morning I heard someone whom I knew to be brave and dignified cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear.

In these ghastly moments, I found a little bit of comfort, a small piece of bread, which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight. A lot of what happened in the gag camps was that, you know, these people that were put in the camps were put into work brigades.

You know, so there was a huge canal that was dug in the Soviet Union, I believe it was in the 30s, and, um, I believe—I don't remember the canal's name at the moment—unfortunately, but they killed 300,000 people in three months building it. And because they were pickaxing dirt in the brutal cold to build this canal, you know, because it had to be done now, and, you know, according to Solzhenitsyn's description, by the time they finished the canal, well, 300,000 people had died, but it was too shallow to be useful for the purpose they wanted to put it to.

So, basically, it was built but never used. And so then you think, well, what was the purpose of the canal if it was never used? And the answer to that is the purpose of the canal was to kill 300,000 people while they were working on it, you know? And if you think that people can't have such purposes, then you're not thinking very hard because they certainly can, and Stalin certainly did.

Here's Solzhenitsyn's comments about work camps during the winter. And this is Russia, right? It's like Russia has winters cold lower than 60 degrees below zero. Workdays were written off. In other words, on such days, the record showed that the workers had not gone out to work, but they chased them out anyway.

And whatever they squeezed out of them on those days was added to the other days, thereby raising the percentages. And the servile medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis. The ones who were left, who could no longer walk and were straining every sinew to crawl along on all fours on the way back to camp, the convoy simply shot so that they wouldn't escape before they could come back to get them.

When I was studying this material, I was also looking at poetic representations of contamination and corruption and evil, and so I'm going to read you a poem from William Blake that seems to sum up the attitude that's necessary to harbor before you would be capable of doing such things. This is from the complete works of William Blake:

Oh Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm hath found out thy bed of crimson joy, and his dark secret love does thy life destroy.

This is something I took out of the Gulag Archipelago, the volume two of the Gulag Archipelago, which is an amazing book. The Gulag Archipelago itself is an unbelievable work of literature. It's phenomenal. It's an immense book; I think it's 2700 pages long, and it's written in little tiny type, so it's 2700 dense pages.

And it records Solzhenitsyn's experiences of the concentration camp and the concentration camps and the stories that he gathered, the individual stories that he gathered that describe it qualitatively. But Solzhenitsyn also made an attempt to put the camps to write a history of the camps and also a history of the political and social institutions that gave rise to them, but at the same time, a psychological analysis of the conditions that made these camps possible and probable.

And he identified the fundamental problem in the Soviet Union as the willingness of the Soviet citizens to lie to themselves and to each other on a constant and ongoing basis. So, to some degree, it's a reflection of the idea that I told you about before of the instrumental use of language. Language was something to hide your true self behind, not something to communicate about, and people were very unwilling to discuss anything that might be considered a shortcoming of the system in any way possible, no matter how bad the system got and no matter how bad they were suffering because, by definition, the system was always already perfect, right?

Utopia had already come, and what that meant was that if you were suffering, and it was utopia, there obviously was something seriously wrong with you. And the best thing to do with a creature that was as seriously gone astray as you was to get rid of them, and often in the most brutal way that could possibly be imagined. And so that happened to lots of people. You know, in East Germany, they estimated that one out of every three people was a government informer.

So the lie—this is Solzhenitsyn's analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union. He didn't believe that any of that could happen unless the entire citizenry had made an unspoken pact that they were never, ever going to say anything that was true to each other or to themselves under any circumstances whatsoever.

And he believed that that was the precondition, you know? I've already mentioned these sorts of phenomena are very complicated, but he believed that that was the precondition for the absolute corruption of the state. And that's really worth thinking about, you know?

And Solzhenitsyn also said, I think this was in his Nobel Prize speech, but it might have been his Harvard address because he was invited to speak at a graduation at Harvard, and the newspapers ripped him apart, by the way, because he was quite critical of Western society despite the fact that he had been granted asylum in Vermont, you know?

And it was so interesting to read the criticism because, you know, people—smart people—were very irritated at Solzhenitsyn for daring to say that there was anything wrong with the West given that he had been granted asylum, you know, by the Americans in Vermont. I personally thought they were lucky to get him, you know, and I think that's the right attitude towards someone like him.

But, um, anyway, so the book itself, the Gulag Archipelago, the second volume is mostly personal experiences of one form or another, and it's, you know, enough to—well, you've read some of it hypothetically, you know? It's an unbelievably brilliant book. But the three volumes together, you know, 2700 pages, they're almost unbearable because they're written by someone who's basically screaming at the top of his lungs for like 2700 pages.

That's pretty impressive, you know. I read this study once about rats. If you put rats in a normal environment—not like your single-aged rat, but your family-loving, hierarchy-inhabiting, exploring sort of rat—if you make a natural habitat for them, maybe you put all the family things at one end so the rats can hang out with all their kith and kin, and then at the other end you place a place where they can go explore, and maybe that's where you feed them.

So, they get used to that, and that's home. And then you put a cat in out there where they're feeding, and, you know, a rat goes out there, and he sees the cat, and like, that's hell for rats, man. He's back in his rat burrow, and like now and then what he does is he peaks his head out of the burrow and he screams, you know? Rat! Rat!

Screams, ultrasonic screams for the equivalent of three weeks in human hours. It's like that rat—that's one freaked-out rat. And none of the other rats go anywhere when that rat is screaming. And that's really, I think of that as the equivalent of Solzhenitsyn's book. It's like, it's a hair-raising endeavor to plow your way through that book, but it's an indictment of 20th-century morality and a very clear indication of what happens at a sociopolitical and economic level if people abandon their claim to existential Truth at an individual level.

And that's something really worth thinking about because one of the things I derived from this was that if you want to protect yourself against the possibility that you would become as corrupt politically or sociologically as the Nazis, for example, or maybe the Soviet Communists, or maybe the Maoists, or we could go on and on. You might ask, well, you know, if you're smart enough to assume that you're not already protected because you're not—

You know, one of the things that's really worth thinking about is there does seem to be a direct causal relationship between people's willingness to falsify their own personal experience and the spread of unbelievable political and economic corruption. And one of the things we do know is that if you want to make a country rich, the one thing you absolutely have to do is make sure that the people will in fact trade honestly with one another.

So, unless the default presupposition between people is trust, which is a damn hard thing to implement, you know? And I don't even understand how any country's ever managed it, but if the default presupposition is that if we trade, you won't screw me over, we can get rich. But if the default assumption is God only knows what's up with you, it's like, forget it, man. I don't care how many natural resources we've got, we're going to stay poor.

So there's something that's incredibly—like, true truth, I think, is, truth might be the only true natural resource. You know, the Japanese are a good example because their culture, their trading culture, is fundamentally honest. They don't have any bloody natural resources at all, but they're rich, you know? Explain that. It's not an easy thing to do.

But, anyhow, another story from Solzhenitsyn:

Fire. Fire! The branches crackle in the night. Wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark. I'm alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenter shavings. The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom.

This is an island of paradise, this is the Marfino Sharka, a scientific institute staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to his cell, chasing me away from the bonfire. Even then, it's chilly in the penetrating wind, but she, who's already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb, and still, and then again she begs piously,

"Citizen Chief, please forgive me, I won't do it again." The wind carries her moans to me just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The Citizen Chief, at the gatehouse, fires up his stove, does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building.

Cross from me beyond the artfully intertwined many-stranded barbed wire barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her gray work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory.

And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vadino Highway and escaped. The guard had bungled, and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her, and they raised the alarm.

A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for a whole month because of her escape. And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes, "Oh, I hope they catch her! I hope they take scissors and clip, clip, clip, take off all her hair in front of the lineup!" This wasn't something she had thought of herself. This was the way they punished women in the gags.

But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead, "At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us." The jailer overheard what she said, and now she was being punished. Everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6:00 p.m., and it was now 11:00 p.m.

She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted, "Stand at attention, or else it will be worse for you." And now she was not moving, only weeping, "Forgive me, Citizen Chief. You let me into the camp; I won't do it anymore." But even in the camp, no one was about to say to her, "All right, idiot, come on in." The reason they were keeping her out there for so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work.

Such a straw-blonde, naive, uneducated slip of a girl. She'd been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister. They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life.

Fire, fire! We fought the war, and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire to that flame in you, girl. I promise the whole wide world will read about you.

This is from Milton, Paradise Lost. Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, was trying—you could think in some sense—that a huge part of the mythological, religious, and philosophical enterprise of the human race over the last five or six thousand years, and perhaps long before that, has been an attempt to segregate out what is the good way of existing and what the evil way of existing is.

Now, why we're obsessed with good and evil is a very difficult thing to understand. I think it has something to do with our self-consciousness. I don't really—if you're an animal, you can be a predator, but if you're a human being, you can take it past that. Because if you're self-conscious, you can understand your own vulnerability. You know what will hurt you.

As soon as you know what can hurt you, you know what can hurt other people. And as soon as you know what can hurt you and what can hurt other people, then you can make a choice between good and evil because you can start to hurt other people just for the sake of hurting them, you know? And that's as close to evil as I think it gets.

People have been trying to conceptualize that for—and because they're trying to conceptualize as well how it is that human affairs can go dreadfully wrong in so far as that can be laid at human feet. You know, sometimes it's earthquakes, and sometimes it's floods, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's people causing trouble for the sake of trouble.

And the human race has been trying to understand the personality characteristics of that mode of action for thousands of years. A lot of that's emerged up in mythology and stories and—and more than in philosophy. It's like the bad guy in a movie, it's like, uh, Loki, you know?

That's a good example of that sort of thing popping up in relatively modern culture, you know? What's the embodiment of evil? And that's what Milton was trying to figure out when he wrote Paradise Lost, you know?

And he was taking all these stories about satanic forces and hell that had collected in human culture for thousands and thousands of years and trying to sort them out and make some sense out of them, some narrative sense, you know? And he believed that the fundamentally evil impulse, the most evil impulse, which you could characterize evil as a meta-personality that exists across people—because if you do something evil, and you do something evil, and you do something evil, it's like there's some commonality across that.

You can extract out the commonalities and say, well, that's what this personality is like. But then you can also say, well, that's a very powerful—it's a meta-personality. It's something that will never die, and it's something that can actually possess people, you know?

If you don't think that—that that's possible, then, you know, you probably don't know that serial killers tend to compete with one another. You know, these sorts of things, they're not fictions. And the people who shoot up high schools, they're pretty damn informed about the last person who did the same thing, and generally, they're trying to do a better job.

So, you know, this is serious. This is serious matters, and Milton's analysis, you know, he wrote what was considered the greatest poem in the English language, which roughly speaking is Paradise Lost.

What Milton concluded, and this is like a phenomenological statement, you know? When we talked about the phenomenologist, we talked about them trying to wrestle with the question of what constituted being, you know, and human being—what's the nature of your experience? And then, what's your relationship to that experience?

You know, and the phenomenologists and the existentialists claimed that the proper relationship was one of truth fundamentally. Milton basically conceptualized Satan, now that's his personification of evil, as the either the embodiment of or the force behind—you can read it either way—of the mind that has made its decision that being itself is evil and should be eradicated.

If you read the Columbine killers, the literary one, if you read his writings, it's exactly what he concluded. He concluded that being as such was flawed, you know? People were contemptible; being itself was unsupportable ethically because there was too much suffering. It was too flawed, and the best thing to do would be to eradicate it.

And so Milton conceptualized evil as resentment against being. Now, in Milton's language, that was resentment against God, but it boils down to exactly the same thing, you know? You can see— you'll see in your life that resentment will emerge. Like, it'll emerge anytime something you regard as unfair happens specifically to you, you know?

And if it's bad enough, you'll not only be irritated and angry and hostile and self-pitying and destructive and looking for revenge because of it, all those things that will happen, and it's almost inevitable. But, um, if you take that far enough, then you get to the bottom of that, and the bottom of it is that it would be just as well in your estimation if everything that lived ceased to exist.

It's interesting because not only did Milton come to that conclusion, the great German philosopher and author and poet Goethe came to exactly the same conclusion. He believed when he wrote Faust and Mephistopheles, among others, that Mephistopheles was an avatar of evil. Fundamentally, his basic creed was that existence itself is so terrible in its fundamental nature, so tragic and flawed, that we'd be better if we just brought the whole thing to an end.

Now, you think that's a pretty damn powerful philosophy, actually, and believe me, there'll be times in your life where you'll think that, especially when something really terrible happens to someone really close to you in some arbitrary way, you know? Maybe you'll have a child that becomes extremely ill in some painful manner, you know?

And that'll be enough to make you shake your fist at heaven. The problem with that attitude, as far as I can tell—because I've traced it—I’ve tried to understand what are the logical conclusions to adopting that attitude, and the logical conclusion is that you take a bad situation and you make it worse. And that, to me, that means it's logically incoherent.

If the problem you're trying to solve is the fact that being is flawed in a deep way and it's tragic and that people suffer and that they suffer unjustly, you're making the presupposition that that's wrong, that it shouldn't happen. The fact that it's happening is what undoes the whole project of being, so to speak.

And so what that means is that if you actually believe that and you're acting in accordance with that, then the one thing you should not do is make it worse. And I can tell you the one thing that will make it worse is if you adopt that attitude. It will get worse. It'll get worse, and at some point, you'll be happy that it's getting worse.

And at some point after that, not only will you be happy that it's getting worse, but you'll be doing everything that your imagination allows you to conceive to make it worse and worse and worse faster and faster. You know, and there's a mythological conception of hell, and one of the elements of that mythological conception is that it's a bottomless pit.

And the reason for that, I believe, is that there is nothing that is so awful that you can't make it worse if you just try. So, and I've seen situations like that a lot. I've seen, you know, families locked in absolutely homicidal, unconscious battles where every single person in the family was doing absolutely everything they could to make sure that no one was going to escape from that and that it was going to get a hell of a lot worse.

So, Milton wrote: "Whence but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice to confound the race of mankind in one root and earth with hell to mingle and involve, done all to spite the great Creator?"

This is Richard III from Shakespeare: "I shall despair. There is no creature loves me, and if I die, no soul will pity me. Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?"

This is Solzhenitsyn's description of the staunch party members, see? I guess part of the contamination issue is something like this. Is that, you know, you might say that one of the preconditions for existing as a human being is the ability to tolerate contamination and anxiety and imperfection, you know?

That certainly, something Jung would say—he believed that in some sense you had to make a pact with that in order to tolerate existing. You had to come to terms with that. But you can fly from that in some sense, you know? And then there's nothing about you that's contaminated or strange or disgusting; that's all out there, it's all somewhere else, it's not you, you know?

And then you build a wall between you and that, and then, because that doesn't work—at least in part, there's no way of getting rid of the contamination—that the wall gets higher and higher, and more and more people are on the outside, and fewer and fewer of you are on the inside.

And, you know, the impulse is to burn up everything that's contaminated, you know? And part of the problem with that—and I think that this is why you can't just conceptualize it as disgust, you know, because you can think of that as a natural territoriality; you can think of it as natural, and disgust you can think of as natural.

But there's something about people that takes just that step further, and I think that's the intermingling of the contamination, disgust, and fear response with revenge and resentment and the desire to hurt. And if you get those things going together, especially if you also add in the propensity to lie, man, if things are going to get really, really ugly, they're going to get really bad.

And so, you know, you have to come to terms with the fact that you carry the contamination around in you, so to speak, everywhere you go. And that that's an ineradicable part of limited being, and then you can't be resentful about that or hateful about it because if you are, then you act in a manner that will definitely make it worse.

So, these are Solzhenitsyn's stories about Communist Party loyalists who were arrested by the Gulag system and thrown into prison. It happened to them all the time because, no, it wasn't like the system was playing by any real rules, you know? In fact, it was probably even better as far as the fundamental motives of the system were concerned that you were innocent when you got arrested because that made it even more miserable.

And it would be even funnier if you were arrested for supporting the system that was going to arrest you. It's like that was the perfect form of vicious irony, and so that happened a lot. To say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such a downfall, and from their own people too, from their own dear party and from all appearances for nothing at all.

After all, they had been guilty of nothing, as far as the party was concerned. Nothing at all. It was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them, uncomradely, to ask, "What were you imprisoned for?" The only screamish generation of prisoners—the rest of us with tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met and to the whole cell as if it were an anecdote.

Here's the sort of people they were: Olga Slosberg's husband had already been arrested, and they—which was usually the KGB and usually in the middle of the night—and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too. The search lasted four hours, and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress of Stanit of the Brushel and Brish Wh and Brush industry of which she had been the secretary until the previous day. The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children, who she was now leaving forever.

Even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her, "Come on now, say goodbye to your children." Here's the sort of people they were: a letter from her 15-year-old daughter came to Iveta Tetova in the Kadan prison for long-term prisoners.

"Mom, tell me, why write to me? Are you guilty or not? I hope you weren't guilty because then I won't join the Commo,"—so that was a Soviet youth group, sort of like the Boy Scouts or the Brownies, except it was the communist version—"because then I won't join the Commo, and I won't forgive them because of you. But if you are guilty, then I won't write you anymore and I will hate you."

And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp, grave-like cell with its dim little lamp. How could her daughter live without the Commo? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better that she should hate me. And so she wrote, "I am guilty, enter the Commo."

How could it be anything but hard? It was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the beloved axe and then to have to justify its wisdom. But that's the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma. Even today, any Orthodox communist will affirm that Setkova acted correctly.

Even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely the perversion of small forces, that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul. Here's the sort of people they are. They were yielding sincere testimony against her husband—anything to aid the party. Oh, how one could pity them!

If at least now they had come to comprehend their former wretchedness—the whole chapter, this whole chapter could have been written quite differently if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views. But it happened the way Maria Daniel had dreamed it would: "If I leave here someday, I'm going to live as if nothing happened." Loyalty, in our view, is just plain pigheadedness.

These devotees to the theory of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation of any personal development whatsoever. As Nikolai Adamovich Vilanov said after serving 17 years, "We believed in the party, and we were not mistaken." Is this loyalty or pigheadedness? No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government's actions.

They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness; otherwise, insanity was not far off. You know, people build memorials now. They build Holocaust memorials.

There's a Holocaust Memorial in Washington, and there's a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and you know the motif or the slogan of those memorials is, "We shall never forget." And I think, you can't remember something you don't understand. You can say you're not going to forget all you want, but unless you understand what happened, you can't remember it, and we don't understand what happened, you know?

As far as I can tell, you know, the most important thing that happened in the entire 20th century with regards to evidence for, you know, absolute existential catastrophes that threaten the human race at the individual level and at the state level and at the international level—it's all whatever it was that produced the Nazis and that produced the Soviets and that produced the Maoists and that hasn't gone away.

And that's partly because we don't understand it, you know? And from what I've been able to tell, and this is partly why I teach you guys about the existentialists and the phenomenologists because they're not covered very often in personality classes anymore—it's because I do believe, I do believe it was demonstrated by those who thought it through most carefully that there is a direct causal relationship between individual ethical corruption.

And I can define that the corruption is when the individual does something that they know themselves by their own standards to be wrong. It's not a relativistic claim at all, and it doesn't really have much to do with the truth. It has to do with falsehood because I don't think people can identify the truth, but I know they can identify falsehood.

So, and I think that people become corrupt when they act out actions that they know by their own moral standards to be wrong. And they do the same thing in a pedian sense when they refuse to accommodate to what they've assimilated. So, if I pick up a piece of information and it contradicts a dearly cherished belief, and then I refuse to take that piece of information and transform my perceptual and belief structures to account for it, then I'm doing the same thing.

That's willful blindness, and that makes you smaller and smaller, and the world more and more out of your control, and you weaker and weaker, and more likely to be paranoid and angry and hurt. And I also don't think that the connections between people and the society are as abstract and distant as we think because you might think, well, what the hell difference could it possibly make, you know, the way I behave?

It's like, well, you're a node in a network, you're not an individual connected by a linear line to another individual connected to a linear line by another individual in a line that's 7 billion people long that make you nothing. You just pull you out, and you know, the line would reclose, and that would be the end of that. You're a node in the network, and the network's communicating.

And we know, for example, that you're roughly going to interact with, in some serious way, a thousand people in your lifetime. That's a minimum estimate, you know? So, and all those people know a thousand people, so that's a million people that are one person away from you, and two people away from you is a billion people. And, you know, as soon as you get to three, well, that's far more people than there are.

So, you know, you're only three or four or five connections away from everyone, and so it's very, very difficult to know exactly how your behaviors and misbehaviors echo and ripple, you know? We know that people can be tremendous forces for good. We know that because we do see people like that from time to time, and we certainly know plenty about the reverse.

And so God only knows what role you play in determining, you know, whether the part and the whole of mankind goes seriously wrong or seriously right. But I wouldn't dismiss it as a fantasy from everything I've seen. You know what you do definitely affects your family. What your family does definitely affects the community, and what the community does definitely affects the state.

Like, it doesn't take much rippling for these things to start to have effect, you know? It doesn't—for example, it doesn't take that many people in a country to cheat on their income tax before the whole damn economy falls apart. I doubt if it's more than 10%, you know? And it's pretty—it's a miraculous that there are countries where that doesn't happen, but there are, and God only knows why.

So anyways, it's worth thinking about, you know? Because people ask questions like, well, what—you know? Does life have any meaning? I can tell you one meaning that it has. Like, it's perfectly reasonable for you to devote yourself to not producing any more suffering than is absolutely necessary because I don't care what you think about meaning and the absence of positive meaning; it's pretty damn hard to deny pain.

And, you know, you could at minimum live in such a way that you're least likely to create mayhem and misery. So, you know, maybe that's not enough, but at least it's a start, and I certainly know that if you don't decide to live that way, the probability that you can cause serious trouble is extraordinarily high.

So, you got to ask yourself, is that what you want? You know? 'Cause it is sometimes what people want. So I think it's an abdication of responsibility, and I think it's resentful and weak to do that. So I think there's nothing in it but misery and weakness.

Okay, so that ends the philosophical part of the course, you know? Speaking because you can't separate philosophy from anything because philosophy is about what things mean, and even though we're going to go into psychometrics now and we're going to go into biology, it's all building the same edifice.

So I'm going to start to talk to you a little bit today about psychometrics. Now, I doubt very much that any of you decided to go into psychology because of psychometrics. Like, that's the theory of measurement, basically. It's, you know, it's kind of dry—the theory of measurement. It certainly wasn't something I was enamored of when I was an undergraduate or a graduate student, you know?

But then, as I started to dig into things and started to try to really understand them, and, you know, “understand” means that you can use the knowledge that you have to do something valuable with. That's sort of what understanding seems to me to be. The thing I kept running into was the fact that measurement is everything in psychology as a science.

It's everything, because if you don't know what you're measuring, you have no idea what you're up to. And then it gets worse because it turns out that measuring things, especially psychological things, is really, really, really hard. And so psychologists do it badly all the time, and sometimes it's because they just don't know what the hell they're doing, and sometimes it's willful blindness. And sometimes it's blind careerism, and it's those two things a lot.

And so, one of the things I want to do with you and for you for the remainder of the course is to well teach you some biology, you know, some neurobiology, because actually there have been some real biological psychology geniuses, and they've outlined, you know, the schema of brain function quite nicely and in a way that I think is really interesting to know about, and that's important and useful.

But also to familiarize you with the basic concepts of psychometrics because you'll be armed against stupidity that way. And it's really useful to be armed against stupidity, and that's especially the case if any of you are interested in science or if you're interested in psychology as a science.

Now, how many of you are interested in psychology as a science? Okay, so there's a substantial number of you, and I presume that some of you are interested because maybe you hope to make a career of it, or you know, or at least to finish your degree as a, you know, a psychologist with a biological orientation.

So either way, you need to know what we're going to learn in the next couple of weeks. And the first thing you have to really come to terms with is how the hell do you know something is real? That's a measurement problem, you know? Now, the people that we've been talking about have been concerned about that too, and they argue about it because some of them are more like objective materialist scientists, and some of them are more like phenomenologists.

So everybody's sort of concerned with, well, what's the nature of the real? But scientists have an additional concern, which is, well, how do you measure it? And it's not a secondary concern; the measurement is everything. It's everything—you can't get anywhere without the measurement.

So then you think, well, what are people like? You know, what are people like? Do they have beliefs? Do they have attitudes? Do they have values? Do they have personalities? Do they have emotions? Do they have motivations? Do they have cognitions? Do they have behaviors? How do you separate those from one another?

It's like, good luck with that. And then, like, how do you assess them at micro and macro levels? How do you conceptualize them? Like, what's a unit of behavior? That's a really difficult thing to figure out. Or what's a value? And is what you value independent of your personality? Well, what's your personality? Or what's a trait? You know?

And it's a complete mess. It's something that's chasing its own tail constantly. It's been very difficult for psychologists to come to terms about this. Now, so I can tell you something about measurement theory first.

So one thing you might ask yourself is, like, how is it that you determine what's real in the world? Okay? So the first thing you might think of is, well, this is an empirical idea. You have senses, and so a radical empiricist would say you get all the information about the world from your senses, so it's sense data.

Okay? So, so then you might notice—and you might think, well, okay, let's say sense data provides you with a picture of the world, and let's even go one step further, and let's say, well, it provides you with a picture of the reality of the world. Then you might say, well, how many senses do you need, and is one eye enough?

Well, we have two eyes, so one eye doesn't seem to have been enough for people, and then, okay, it's two eyes. And then, but it's not just two eyes; it's two eyes in hearing. And then it's not just two eyes and hearing; it's two eyes, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

Okay, so that's interesting. So what that means is evolution has calculated that for a beast like you, you need five dimensions of evaluation before you can be certain that something is real. You can't rely on one, you know? You can't rely on two.

Now, if you can see something and hear it, it's much more likely to be real than if you can just see it or just hear it. But if you can see it and hear it and touch it, it's like at that point, it takes a pretty damn sneaky thing to fool you. And then if you add taste and smell to that, it's like we figured out—if you could, if you get those five things working, you probably won't die, and that's a good measurement of whether that's sufficiently real.

Okay, so that's interesting. So, your sensory apparatus are measurement devices, but you don't just need one; you need five. And then you think, well, are those five the same or different? Now it turns out that's a complicated question because although this may not seem obvious, two things can be the same and different in an infinite number of ways.

So one of the things you might say is, well, what makes—why do you put two things in the same category? And you'll say, well, because they're similar. It's like, well, actually that turns out not to be why, because they're similar and different in an infinite number of ways. And so you can't use that as a basis for categorization. Plus, it's just circular.

You put similar things in a category because categories contain similar things—it's not helpful, it's not helpful. So when you're trying to zero in on something, not only do you need to sense it, but you need to use senses that, in some sense, are qualitatively different from one another.

So you might almost think about them as uncorrelated—it's not exactly the right phrase, but they're different methodological techniques. So for example, your eyes rely on light waves, right? And then your ears rely on sound waves, and those are quite different. They don't even interfere with each other to any real degree, and so that means what you're getting is information from two independent sources, so that's helpful.

But then if you smell something, or more accurately, if you taste something—I don't know if you know this, but it seems to be the case that taste is a molecular phenomenon. That, you know, that when you taste something, you're actually assessing it at a molecular level, and there might be as many tastes in some sense, or at least as many smells, because you're sensing that at a molecular level.

And smell is more complex as there are substances. Now, people aren't quite sure about that, but it's, you know, it’s pretty—it differentiates a lot. And so you're detecting molecular signatures with your nose, and then with your hands, you're detecting the electron shells on the outside of your fingertips, are pushing against the electron shells of solid surfaces, and they can't push through. And so that's basically what you're detecting.

You're detecting the surface of electrons, more or less, and you can't push through it. And so that's a different way of—that's a different way of determining whether or not something is real. And so the reason I'm telling you this is because there was a famous set of papers published in the 1950s by a researcher named Cronbach and another researcher named Mehl.

And they were trying to figure out how in the world should psychologists figure out what a phenomenon is real. You know, it's the same question in some sense that the chemists had to sort out. But they sorted that out; they got the periodic table of the elements and that was the end of that— that was a big step forward because they got their basic—they got their idea about what the world was made of nailed down pretty damn tight and then they could move from that.

But in psychology, it's like we have this problem: what are the basic phenomena? Okay, so what Mehl and Cronbach were trying to figure out is not so much what the basic phenomena were, but how it would be that you could go about figuring out what they were if they existed.

And they basically came up with a strategy that's very similar to the sense strategy. So their hypothesis was you can't really tell if something is real unless you can measure it using a variety of different methods and get the same answer.

Now, the first thing you should remember is that every psychologist knows this unless they've been trained extraordinarily badly because this is a key paper. Okay? It's the key paper of what's called construct validation, and a construct is a measurement, you know? And so the issue with construct measurement is how do you construct your measures so that you know they’re measuring something real?

It's not something peripheral. You got to get this right, and the rule from Cronbach and Mehl was multi-method, multi-method. Now, there's a bit of a problem there because it's not exactly clear when you're using the same method and when you're using a different method. You know, like if I say I filled out a questionnaire about your personality and then you filled out a questionnaire about your personality, is that the same method or a different method?

Well, there's some similarities and some differences. Maybe if I had you fill out a questionnaire, you know, maybe I gave you an electric shock and I had you fill out a questionnaire about how you felt about that, and at the same time, I measured changes in your skin conductance because those occur because you sweat a bit if you've been stressed, maybe I measure your heart rate acceleration, you know, I might notice that when you report being unhappy or miserable or angry or frustrated or disappointed or stressed, you also show a skin conductance increase.

CU, you're sweating a little bit, and your heart rate goes up, and then I think, well, I've kind of triangulated on the phenomenon. We don't know what the phenomenon is, but at least we can measure it three different ways. It turns out that with heart rate, for example, it's been damn tricky.

You know, because you might think, well, heart rate's an objective measure, so you could get at what it indexes quite easily. So, you know, if you get afraid, your heart rate will go up, but if you get excited, your heart rate will go up. It'll go up if you take cocaine, and it'll go up if you run. It's like, so it's not exactly clear what heart rate indexing is.

It turns out that from the psychological perspective, the theory has developed to the point where we assume that when I measure your heart rate increase to a phenomenon that isn't associated with exercise, say, that what I'm actually assessing is your body's—the intensity of your body's preparation to do something. What makes sense, right?

Why does your heart rate go up? To get more blood to your muscles. Why? So that you can go and do something. So if your heart rate goes up, it's because you're preparing to do something. What? Well, it depends on the situation, so it's not that fine grain of a tool, you know?

So that's a measurement problem. So you want to measure the thing multiple ways, and you want to hope that you get the right answer. Now, that's what a real scientist does. A real scientist looks to see that they've got the damn thing they want to measure, they've identified it, and that it will manifest itself across multiple levels of measurement.

Then they can sort of be clear that it's there.

Now, this guy Jeffrey Gray, who you're going to read about for the next lecture, he's a brilliant scientist, and Gray—I love Gray because when Gray uses a word, you know exactly what it means. And he's a behaviorist, and those people are known for precision, you know? The philosophers that we've been talking about and the clinical psychologists, they take a broad overview of the world, and that can be really useful—you know, but Gray is a master of the reverse, which is zeroing in on what something means.

So when he says anxiety, he usually talks about animals. He means something specific about it. He means that there's a particular biological circuit that gets activated. You can measure that a variety of different ways, and it will respond to the administration of barbiturates, benzodiazepines, or alcohol because those are primary anxiolytics, and that there will be certain behavioral concomitants that are associated with that.

So the theory has to work across multiple levels of analysis—pharmacological, physiological, psychological, behavioral—and then he thinks, okay, we've kind of zeroed in on this. Maybe we can cautiously move forward. It's a beautiful, beautiful way to proceed, and you get results that way.

I mean, he wrote a book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety in 1982, and he updated it in 1999, and you know, that thing stood the test of time because he was absolutely rigorous in his definitions, and the behaviorists were very good at that. When they measured something and defined it, you knew what it was, very good.

Now, now it turns out that for a lot of the things that psychologists study, it's not so straightforward. You know, you can't get multiple measures of the same thing. And so, often, you have to proceed forward with what you've got in the hope that you can accrue additional evidence later. And I'm going to talk to you in detail about one such approach, and that's been the psychometric approach with the establishment of the basic personality traits.

So, what happened with the statistical approach—because that's primarily what we're going to talk about—is that the initial discovery of the basic traits was done only at a statistical level. And then what happened was that as the traits were established statistically, and people got more comfortable with the idea that they might be real, then the way they manifested themselves across different levels of analysis started to become understood.

So, for example, once I knew that there was such a thing as extraversion, I could start to associate certain kinds of behaviors and certain emotions with it, and then I could start to document what the neurological systems were that underpinned it, and then I could start to understand the neuropharmacology, and all that stuff started to stack up. And that's sort of where we are with psychometric personality theory.

And the first element of psychometric personality theory is a hypothesis. And here, here you think about this hypothesis through. So, imagine that one of the things that human beings communicate about with their language is personality. I'm really interested in describing what you're like to someone else, and you're interested in describing what I'm like to someone else. It helps us keep track of everyone's relationships and reputations, but it also helps us understand their behavior.

And we're obsessively curious about each other, and it's no wonder because, you know, we're weird and unpredictable things, but we're kind of useful too. The linguistic hypothesis—and this is what started the psychometric movement forward in the domain of personality.

There's a linguistic hypothesis, and the linguistic hypothesis is the important variation in human personality will be captured by the language. Okay? So that's like a hypothesis that the language is a good measurement device. We're trying to use the language to assess and communicate about each other, and roughly we've nailed the structure within that language if we could figure out how to extract it.

Now, people debate that because it's not self-evident that we would have captured all the important variation in personality in our language. But it's not a bad hypothesis, and you can test it. And the way you test it is by deriving personality-based descriptions from an analysis of natural language and then seeing how those derived descriptions do in the real world. Do they predict things? Do they correlate with