Ologies with Alie Ward - Personality Psychology (PERSONALITIES) with Simine Vazire

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

WHO ARE WE? Personality researcher & psychology professor Dr. Simine Vazire dishes about introverts, extroverts, self-esteem, sociopaths, neuroticism, conscientiousness, Buzzfeed quizzes, yearbook inscriptions, trusting people, screwing up your kids, acting like your parents, changing personality traits through therapy or medication and astrology being put to the test. Also, Alie finds out what kind of dog she is. Dr. Simine Vazire on TwitterThis week's donation was made to improvingpsych.orgSponsor links: TheGreatCourses.com/ologies, Takecareof.com (promo code: Ologies50), Handy.com/ologies (promo code: Ologies), and TimesuckPodcast.comMore links at alieward.com/ologies/personalitypsychologyDr. Vazire's podcast, The Black Goat Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's your old roommate, who always subscribed to magazines that you read but were too embarrassed to buy. Halliward, back with another episode, apologies. Okay, so please imagine me right now. I'm wearing a Sherlock Holmes flappy wool overcoat that smells like a wet dog in the rain. Also, I have a walrus mustache and a decorative pipe because we're about to investigate the mysteries of the psyche.

What makes you you? Who are you? Who am I? Why are we like this? Let's show some goddamn gratitude for one second and say thank you to everyone on Patreon who supports a show for a dollar or more a month. Also all the folks getting oligiesmerch at oligiesmerch.com and all the nice people who hit subscribe and who rate the show, who leave reviews like a friendliness fairy in

the night for me to read. For example, this week from Lala Juju who says, I love Halliward, thank you Lala Juju, I love you too. I also love science and learning. When I heard about this, it was better than I could have imagined. I can learn about different oligies while I'm at work or getting ready for work. Once my 11-year-old daughter got wind of this podcast from me, she started listening too. I never told her to.

She just listened on her own. So Lala Juju, thank you for sharing the gift of oligies with your 11-year-old. I'm very sorry that I am teaching you how to swear. Okay, onward Ward, personality psychology. I really wish that there was a weirder documented name for this ology and for a second, I thought the academic study of personality could apply. I was like, yes. But the guy who coined personality, Henry Murray, essentially peed on the word to make

it his forever. And he had a really heavy hand in founding the study of personality. That's great. But he's also noted as having done some hella sketchy and maybe damaging experiments on a young man named Ted Kaczynski, who later became a terrorist known as a unabomber. Dr. Murray also linked to government mind control experiments, MKUltra, not to be confused with Mycolaupultra. So my point is, personality was off the table for this episode title.

We had to go with the clunkier, well-respected and academically recognized personality psychology. So this ologist had been on my list for months. And one chilly December day, I made my way to UC Davis to meet her on a corner near campus. And I drove by one minute late and I screamed out the window, hold on, I have to park. Thinking it would take like one second to park. Because school wasn't even in session, it was December 26. But the city was under construction, so I had to circle the block maybe 52 times.

And then I was seven minutes late to the corner. I felt like a very bad, not conscientious person, but she was so cool about it. We walked to her office where she is a professor in the Department of Psychology. She's also been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. And her focus is on people's own awareness of their personalities and how personality and relationships influence your life and make it suck more or less. So she's co-authored papers with titles like Others Sometimes Know Us Better Than We Know

Ourselves. And this salty goodness, you probably think this paper is about you, narcissists' perception of their personality and reputation. She studies all the stuff that if you were sitting next to her on an airplane, you'd be like, tell me everything before this flight to Japan lands. So we chatted about first impressions, introverts, extroverts, amberverts, narcissists, psychopaths, whether or not psychology researchers believe self-reported data, how parenting affects personalities and if you're screwing your kids up, what personalities work best together.

If astrology is in any way on point, some textbooks you'd actually want to read, and I essentially ask her 10 different ways, why am I this? So get comfy and gaze into your brain. With someone I wish I could call a personologist, but that Murray dude made it awkward for everybody, so instead we'll just use the more common and scientifically acceptable personality psychologist, Dr. Simeen Fazir. I tell my students to call me by my first name, so anything is fine. Do you think they're, are they uncomfortable with it at first?

Like it's not reverent? Some of them are, yeah. But I find that, well, because of my personality, I think I have to worry more about not being approachable enough rather than being too casual or not having enough boundaries. So for different people, different things work, but for me asking, they don't have to call me by my first name, but telling them they can reduces that distance a little bit, which tends to be the bigger challenge for me. And you said because of your personality, which gets us right into your work, because

you study not only personality psychology, but also people's own awareness and knowledge of their own personality. So you seem to know yours pretty well. I know some aspects of mine. I'm sure they have blind spots too. Yeah, we have this expression in academia called me search, which is like you study what you're bad at. So I think I'm probably overall average on self knowledge, but I know I have some blind

spots for sure. What did you start to notice about your personality when you got into this work? I think I was really fascinated by the differences between how people see themselves and how others see them. And I think it's really rare that we find out how other people see us. I remember when I was in high school, at the end of high school, one of my friends wrote in my yearbook, I always admired you because you don't care what people think. And I was like, what do people think?

So I had no idea that I came across as not caring what people thought. And I was like, well, maybe I care less than other people. I experienced myself as caring a lot what other people think. But then I realized, well, I don't wear makeup. I don't put a lot of thought into my clothing. So if I really cared what people think, maybe I would have been doing those things. So then I was like, oh, maybe like relative to other people, I actually do care less what people think.

So it's like, but like your books are like one of the rare places where people sometimes tell you a little bit about what they think of you. I actually found a note. My best friend and I in high school used to write each other notes, you know, we shared a locker when we leave each other notes in our locker. And she wrote me a note sophomore year of high school. And it said, you asked me at the party on Saturday what I thought of your personality. And so I wanted to tell you what I think your personality and she was like, you're a nine

out of 10. But don't worry, like you wouldn't want to be a 10 out of 10 because those people are annoying. And it was just really funny that apparently when I was 14 or 15 years old, I was asking my best friend what she thought of my personality. It was crazy. You were doing personality research in your locker. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so funny. It was so funny when I found that. Did she say what that docked point was for? Does that? No, I don't know. I mean, so then she went on to tell me more specific things because like nine out of 10 doesn't really mean anything.

But I don't remember now. I took, I actually took a picture of it and have a PDF so that I don't ever lose it. It would be interesting to go back and look, but I don't remember what the specific criticisms were. There were some, they weren't mean or anything. Okay, side note. So I sent Simeone a note to ask if she ever found that PDF and she emailed me right back with the PDF itself.

What a time capsule of vulnerability. I love her. So of course I read it. So here are some of the things that her friend, Geraldine, hand wrote on a greeting card that was a 1995 dot matrix picture of a turkey. So an excerpt. I think you're very good at understanding people, but sometimes a little too harsh in your judgment.

You're spirited, it said. You motivate people and you're good sport about things. You're trustworthy and honest and one important quality, your morals are wonderful. Another great thing I like about you, you're always learning about yourself and growing. Your influence and friendship is part of what makes me me. And I have to thank you because I like myself and your friendship has meant a lot to me over the years. Oh, not only is this an honest and sweet ass letter from a best friend, but how precious

to see that personality psychology and how people see themselves is something that Simeone has been low key researching since the dot matrix days. Also, this prompted me to look back at some old school papers and I found an old year book of mine with inscriptions that were like, you're weird, but fun, I guess. And one from a guy named Eric in my science class who in the fashion of middle management inscribed, here's a piece of advice, try to calm down, you always seem to be going in fast forward. Okay, so nothing's changed.

Oh my God, I think that that's something that so many people want to know. How do others see them versus how they see themselves and did you grow up earlier than high school thinking about this or was it really when you started to get around peers and go through adolescence that you started thinking about it? Yeah, that's a good question. Thank you. I mean, I grew up pretty close to my brother. We were one year apart in school.

So I think I always looked at differences between him and me and within our families we had kind of different roles and personalities. Now that we're adults, I see that we're actually really, really similar compared to the broader population. But yeah, it was always interesting to me. The things that he was scared of and I wasn't or vice versa. So I think it was on my radar earlier on, but I think it becomes really relevant when you have friend groups and who doesn't get invited to the party and why and what do people

think of you, what's your role in your friend group and all that. When did you start steering your career that way? I took a personality site class and had a really good teacher and a really good textbook. So I think it was that class in particular that got me into it. Did you ever take those personality quizzes and magazines? Yeah, definitely. Is there any merit to those at all? Probably not or if there is, it's probably by accident.

It's actually not that hard to write a valid personality quiz. So the ones that don't seem completely ridiculous probably actually do have merit. So if it's a test of your extroversion and it asks if you like to go to parties, if you like to hang out with people, that's probably pretty valid. But if it's a test of your extroversion and it asks you like Bernice Mountain Dogs or Chihuahuas, that's probably not a valid measure of your extroversion. That is what we call bullshit. PS, if you wanted to take a bullshit quiz, oh, oh, there's plenty waiting for you, such

as BuzzFeeds, what type of sandwich are you? Which 90s cartoon series are you? Which piece of Ikea furniture are you? Or living leaves? Your choice in late night snacks will reveal your dominant personality type. Or which Meghan Markle are you? Zimbia has a Are You Robin Williams Genie or Will Smith Genie? And finally BuzzFeeds, which BuzzFeed quiz are you?

So how does Samin's methodology differ from these insightful surveys? And so when you're doing research on personalities, what does that involve? Are you asking people about their own personalities? Or are you grabbing their best friend and asking what's their deal? How are you getting the data? Yeah, it's all of the above. So we try to get every measurement we can think of because none of them is a direct pipeline.

There's no pure measure of someone's personality. So we ask them what they're like, we give them a questionnaire with dozens or sometimes hundreds of questions about their personality. And then we give a similar questionnaire to their friends or family members, whoever they let us contact and ask those people to describe the person on the same kind of questionnaire. We also try to get something independent of both them and their friends or family so that we can try to gauge who's right or who's more accurate. And that's a challenge because those are the two easiest methods, right?

Asking people to fill out questionnaires is easier than almost anything else. So the challenge with getting, okay, a third measure, something other than self and friends, we try to get actual behavior. So we want to observe what people are like. But the trick with that is if you bring people into the lab and observe their behavior, that might not be what they're really like. I keep picturing myself, stiffly walking in, trying to conceal a mustard stain on my scarf, wearing an expression of desperation to blend in.

Hello, I am healthy and normal. So we try to do it in a naturalistic way, get people in their everyday lives. So we have this audio recorder that our participants agree to wear if they're willing to. And it's really just an iPod touch, but we program it so that the audio recording aspect of it comes on and off. And so they just clip it to the outside of their clothes or their bag and they wear it for, for example, a week and it comes on and off and they don't know exactly when it's on or off.

And then when they turn it in, we tell them, we're going to give you a disc with all the files. You can delete any files, you know, tell us which files to delete, you know, and actually people end up being fine with leaving all of them on. But we want to make sure that they're really okay with it. We give them a lot of opportunities. Okay. Side note, I had done some research of Samine's work ahead of time and I was so excited.

She brought this up right away. So these devices are called EARS, E-A-R, it stands for Electronically Activated Recorder, which is very cute. Technically, that's called a bacronym. When something that stands for something else is cute on purpose. So the most common capture pattern they do is recording for 30 seconds every 12 minutes. Then the volunteers fill out an hourly report of what they were up to. They also wear a button that says essentially, hey, someone might be recording this and listening

to this. That freaks you the fuck out or whatever. Also, this made me wonder, aren't our phones just always eavesdropping all the time anyway, just ready to sell us something we casually mentioned in a conversation? Well, a study from Northwestern University came out last year that tracked over 17,000 apps to see if they were recording our conversations about like vegan marshmallows and platform sneakers. And the researchers, well, they didn't say no, they just said that they couldn't find

evidence of the activities taking place. So it's not not listening to you. Anyway, some personality psychologists recording conversations to untangle the mysteries of the human mind. Pretty benign. It's not like the UC Davis research team includes old Zuckerberg at his laptop sending you coupons for off-brand Invisalign or geometric sloth necklaces, which is what my Instagram just tried to sell me, which was spot on though.

It's pretty good. Well played, big brother. So it's about 5% of the time that it's on. Just random snippets of your life. Yes. So 30 seconds turns out to be long enough that we can figure out, are you socializing or are you working or are you watching TV? And if you're socializing, is it a group of people or is it one-on-one, is it a deep conversation

or is it superficial? So we can tell a lot about what people are doing, both like just the behaviors and also the psychological context that they're in. So yeah, it turns out a 30 second clip gives you quite a bit of information about what people are up to without like violating their privacy too much. And then so you take all of those files and you figure out, okay, this is how often the person was around other people or talking to other people. This is how much they were alone.

This is how much they were using maybe violent or sexual language so you can kind of categorize and interpret the data that way. Yeah. So for example, from the questionnaires, if you said you're not very funny, but your friend said you're really funny, then we can listen to the sound files and have a group of coders who are relatively neutral and objective, who don't know you. They can rate how funny you were in your conversations and then we can say who's more accurate. You are your friends.

Wow. You're so funny. And now what are you studying when you're looking at this data? Do you do maybe one study on extroversion and one on narcissism or what are you looking at? Yeah, that's a really good question. So because it's so hard to collect these data, we measure everything we can think of. Okay.

A bunch of people, too many to name, asked what tests they use and boom, here it is in five, four, three, two, one. So we use a model called the big five, which is a model of personality that says there's five kind of broad dimensions along which people differ. So for example, one of them is extroversion. And in each of those five categories, there's specific traits like in the extroversion category, there's how sociable the person is, how talkative they are, how assertive they are. So there's like more specific personality traits in each of the five categories.

So it's not that there's only five personality traits, but there's five kind of clusters of personality traits. So we measure those and then we also throw in other things that we think aren't really well-captured by the big five. So narcissism is one example of something that we think doesn't quite fall neatly into those five categories. So we measure a handful of other traits beyond the big five as well. So real quick, what is the big five?

So it's a bunch of questions. It takes maybe eight minutes to complete. It measures essentially what your deal is. It's also called the very unspicy name, five factors model, or the exciting acronym, ocean, because these factors are measured. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and eroticism. So you can flip those words around and make it spell canoe if you're more of an inland lakes rather than an open sea kind of person.

So our research isn't really about one specific personality trait. What we really want to know is how accurate people are describing themselves in general. So we might, you know, look at how accurate they are about how funny they are, but actually we're interested in also how accurate are they about how extroverted they are and how narcissistic they are and everything else. What do you think is a trait that tends to get misreported the most? So I don't have a lot of evidence for this, but my intuition, my hunch, and we're starting to collect data on this and have some evidence for it, but it could be wrong.

But my hunch is that we're not very good at judging our own. What in personality psychology we call agreeableness, which is basically how like polite and kind and considerate you are. I'm so sorry. No, I'm sorry. And that all sounds like a good thing and everybody wants to be really agreeable, but actually it can be taken too far. So people who are too agreeable are kind of doormats.

They won't stick up for people they care about or things they believe in, things like that. So I don't want to paint it as only good things. It's like most personality traits, there's good and bad components to it or it can backfire in some situations. But I think it's a dimension that we're really bad at judging in ourselves, or at least that's my intuition. Do you think that we think we're more agreeable than we are? I think some people think they're more agreeable than they are, and some people think they're

less agreeable than they are, and it probably has a lot to do with self-esteem. With many personality traits, to the extent that we're biased, the direction of our bias reflects our self-esteem. So some people overestimate themselves, some people underestimate themselves, and that's going to predict the direction of their bias, whether we're talking about agreeableness or extroversion or intelligence or anything else. So yes, researchers can't always trust self-reporting because depending on how we feel about ourselves, we might be a little off.

And side note, I started to wonder, what is self-esteem? I never quite understood the line between confidence and arrogance. Where does that lie? So I did some digging and I happened upon an article by the psychiatrist and author Dr. Neil Burton, who broke it down as self-confidence comes from the root word for trust, and self-confidence means to trust yourself and to trust your abilities. But self-esteem is to understand your worth. So you can be confident that you can get shit done while still feeling unworthy.

You can rack up degrees and be able to buy a big house and have a ton of followers and money and be confident, but still feel like the world is at to get you and doesn't have your best interest in mind and you have no control and you suck. So arrogance steps in to fill in the gaps where there's not enough true self-esteem. And arrogance can be a symptom that someone is really thirsty for approval from the outside. So self-esteem, good. Where we get this? Well, Dr. Neil Burton wrote this passage about where self-esteem comes from, which, for a

Psychology Today blog post, was oddly profound and really beautiful. So I'm going to run some royalty-free relaxing music underneath and that way you can just feel free to replay this as many times as you need. It's no good trying to pump up the self-esteem of children and increasingly adults with empty and condescending praise. Whenever we live up to our dreams and promises, we can feel ourselves growing. Whenever we fail but know that we have given our best, we can feel ourselves growing. Whenever we stand up for our values and face the consequences, we can feel ourselves growing.

Whenever we come to terms with a difficult truth, we can feel ourselves growing. Whenever we bravely live up to our ideals, we can feel ourselves growing. That is what growth depends on. Growth depends on bravely living up to our ideals, not on the ideals of the bank that we work for, or our parents' praise, or our children's successes, or anything else that is not truly our own. So if you struggle with self-esteem, or maybe you feel like you have to puff things up and fake it, you're not alone.

A lot of people struggle with self-esteem, but self-esteem doesn't rely on perfection. It doesn't require anything outside of you, but simply an appreciation for the unique little monkey that you are trying its best. So holy shit, I think this episode already fixed my whole life. Okay, but let's backtrack to personality tests, since that was a question that I got so much. You mentioned the Big Five, and one question that I got the most, so much from patrons that it's too many to even ask, and it's such a big question, is what do you think

about personality evaluations like Briggs Meyers and Enneagrams and Big Five? What do you think is bullshit, what's not? There's a lot of really good, valid measures that are free. So probably if you're paying for something, you're getting screwed. That's my kind of general, I mean, I think there might be some context where it's worth paying for like a personality test that costs money, but there's so many good ones that are free that it's hard for me to imagine why somebody would charge you for a personality test when you could find a free good one online.

So if you Google like Big Five or Five Factor personality tests, you can find lots of free versions that will give you feedback. And those are pretty valid. I mean, I'm sure there's some that aren't, but there's plenty of really good, valid Big Five measures. Or there's another model of personality called the Hexico, which is a six factor model that's also quite scientifically valid. There's a little bit of a debate in academic psychology about five factors versus six factors,

but I think both of those are quite valid. Myers-Briggs, I mean, it doesn't have zero validity, but it's much, much worse than the Big Five and it costs money. So there's really no reason to ever use the Myers-Briggs and its validity is quite poor, I would say. Again, it's not zero. It's not complete bullshit, but it's almost complete bullshit. A bullshit adjacent.

Yes. Myers-Briggs, officially on blast. Enneagrams, by the way, outline nine personality types and NM means nine in Greek. This is not to be confused with banana grams, which is a word game like Scrabble, but you don't need a board and all the tiles come in a banana shaped pouch, which was invented by a 76 year old guy from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Anyway, Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram tests, not necessary when you had the Big Five. I don't judge people for finding those things fun or interesting, and I think we can learn

something even from bullshit tests. I think if I take a test about what dog breed would you be, I can sometimes, because of taking that test and reading the feedback, I'll end up reflecting and learning something about myself, not because the test is valid, but just because of the activity of reflecting on it. So I don't begrudge anyone for wanting to take those tests or enjoying them. I just think if you're spending money on it or you're putting a lot of weight on it or making important life decisions because you think it's scientifically valid, I wouldn't

do that. But if you find it useful and entertaining and maybe even that leads to self-reflection and self-insight, that's great. So side note, I did take a what breed of dog or you test. Thank you very much. And it said, Saint Bernard, because I'm hardworking and courageous. And then I was like, ooh, that went well. So I took another one.

And it said Chihuahua, which quote, has a lot of haters, but not to let it get me down. So then I stared at the distance in a trance of self-reflection and insight, which is exactly what the test was supposed to do. Have you gotten really good at being able to tell someone's big five just pretty quickly like at a cocktail party? I think we all are, actually. I think it's like a natural human tendency. So some of the big five are easier to tell than others.

Extraversion is really easy to tell. Actually, even from a still photograph of someone, you can judge better than chance. You could too. Yeah, it doesn't take any special skill. Like we looked at just, you know, undergraduates, we showed them photos of people whose extraversion level we knew from valid measured tests, and they were better than chance at judging extraversion. Actually, same with narcissism. From a still photo, you can judge narcissism better than chance, not perfectly, like far

from perfectly, but better than chance. So if you meet somebody within five minutes, you would know their extraversion level quite well. Really? And some other personality characteristics are relatively easy to judge, depending on the context. So if you see like their office or their home environment, you could judge their conscientiousness pretty well, because conscientiousness has a lot to do with how like tidy and organized

and orderly their life is. So like I'm an example of when one facet of the big five domain, so for conscientiousness, like one facet is neatness, and I'm really low on neatness, you might be able to tell my office is quite messy. No. Her office was fine. There were some papers, a few books on the desk, but it's a desk. A desk's job is to be a horizontal surface on which you pile your business shit.

But I'm high on most of the other facets of conscientiousness, so sometimes you might be misled if you just see one facet, or like someone might be really assertive, and so you think they're really extroverted, but actually whether you see them in a social situation, they're not that talkative and not that sociable, it's just the assertiveness that they're really high on. So sometimes you could be led astray by like one strong trait when actually they're pretty low on the other traits in that cluster. But yeah, you can judge conscientious pretty easily if you see how like organized and self-disciplined

and so on they are. But actually, agreeableness is one of the harder ones to judge because almost everybody tends to be pretty polite and kind when they're meeting someone new. It takes a while before the disagreeableness comes out and disagreeable people. So that one is a little bit harder to judge, and neuroticism is also harder to judge. So that's like their tendency to experience negative emotion. Most people don't wear that on their sleeve. You have to get to know them pretty well to know if they're the kind of person who gets

sad or angry or anxious, that kind of thing. So a lot of researchers have found that you can also detect neuroticism just by listening to a person's podcast and hearing them say neurotic things. And these are things that we can detect pretty quickly in meeting people. We just program to read behaviors and... Yeah, certainly extroversion, conscientiousness comes across pretty quickly. I think agreeableness and neuroticism, you can detect once you know someone for a few weeks, I would say, you probably have a decent idea.

And it depends how close you are to them. So neuroticism, romantic partners are really, really accurate because you see all the emotional ups and downs, but you could be acquaintances with someone for a long time and not know that they have a tendency towards depression or something like that. So some things could remain unknown for a long time, but many aspects of personality are actually quite easy to judge. And we're all experts at it by necessity. When we go through life, we're trying to judge, would this person make a good friend?

Would they make a good co-worker? Should I agree to go on a vacation with this person? All that requires trying to predict their personality and what they would be like in different situations and so on. So by necessity, we all develop the skill to do that. So if someone is swiping left and right, say, on a dating app, and they don't want to date an extrovert or a narcissist, can you tell because those people are in speedos? Like on a boat or something?

Yeah, so we actually did a study where we looked at what is it in the photo that correlates with narcissism? Speedos, boat. Speedos, boat. It's pretty obvious once you know. So for example, yeah, like wearing expensive clothes, fashionable clothes, for women wearing a lot of makeup, showing cleavage for men, being muscular, not wearing glasses. So generally, like being stylish and maybe a little vain would be correlated with narcissism.

An extroversion is part of narcissism. Narcissists tend to be very extroverted. So very expressive and charming and things like that. And there's good things, good aspects to that too, obviously. So they often are quite charming, especially in first impressions, they make really good first impressions. So it might actually be hard to avoid if you're on a dating app. They might be the more appealing people when you just have a photo and maybe a few words

about them. Samin notes that while she studies these personality traits, she doesn't do so at a clinical level. So she's talking about subclinical narcissism, which is just garden variety that dick at the office types. Now, is the aim of her work to help people avoid folks who might not be right for them or to help us all see ourselves in a way that might lead to healthier behaviors and relationships? So yeah, my interest is, yeah, it's like a lot of basic research. I don't exactly know how it's going to help people yet.

I think that learning what the behavioral patterns are of people high and low and narcissism it could help us understand ourselves better, it could help us understand each other better. It could help us understand the underlying roots of narcissism. So for example, I have some research showing that narcissists tend to be quite impulsive, which I think speaks to a kind of paradox about narcissists. Why did they brag so much when that might undermine, you know, they're trying to make a good impression. They're trying to impress people and they're going around telling everyone things that

just make them look like arrogant jerks. And our research suggests, and my former graduate student Erica Carlson did some of this research too, that they kind of know that this is not the best strategy, but they can't help themselves. So it's not that they're dumb or that they think they're being like really strategic. They just are impulsive and they just can't, they need you to know that they got that perfect score on the SAT or whatever. And now I know that the big question in personalities is nature versus nurture.

What is DNA? What is ingrained in us? What is hereditary? And what is just a product of our environment? How much of personality is a result of too high of self-esteem or too low of self-esteem or the way we were raised? Where is it coming from? Who are we?

So the like way over simplified answer is that it's a lot of it is genetic and isn't how we were raised. Really? And much of it is we're born with. Now much is kind of a glass, half empty glass, half full. There's plenty that's not accounted for by genes. So there's a lot of room left over for other things to have influences, but we're having a really hard time pinning down what those other influences are.

We know that genes don't account for everything. We know that personality changes throughout the lifespan. It's not fixed 100% at birth or anything like that. There is a genetic component, but there's other influences too. It's just very hard to identify where they are. It doesn't seem to be straightforward. Like if you have an authoritative parent, you're going to grow up to be more organized or you know, there's nothing quite that simple, certainly not about parenting.

You have to have pretty extremely bad parenting to change your child's personality, it turns out. So childhood experiences probably do have an impact on personality, but not in a really straightforward way. Or we can say if you do this, your child will be more like that, which is probably disappointing for a lot of parents. But I know that Dan Angbur wrote a really interesting column in Slate about this, but how it could also be freeing, I think, for parents to realize like as long as you're

in the range of, you know, a decent parent, then like exactly when you potty train your kid or all of those decisions aren't going to shape their personality for the rest of their lives. I feel like more and more too with the internet, more parents are so worried like, I gave them blueberries before the age of three and now they're going to, you know, never do their homework or something. And how do you separate kind of afflictions like anxiety and depression and ADHD, pretty common psychological afflictions from personality?

Like I feel like my anxiety is who I am a lot, which is... Yeah, I'm not sure there is a clean separation. So I think if you are the kind of person who has a tendency towards anxiety or depression and it's always kind of there in the background or it's always could be there, that's part of your personality for sure. So I think we could talk about, and this is true even for extroversion. For example, we could talk about whether you have a general tendency to be extroverted or whether you were extroverted today or in the last hour, and we could talk about the

same thing with depression, right? You might not be depressed right now, but you might have a tendency or predisposition towards depression and you know it happens relatively frequently for you. So we call that the distinction between a trait and a state or kind of a longer term pattern versus a short term momentary experience. So some people might not have the long term pattern of anxiety, but have had one or two episodes of anxiety. They understand what it feels like, but it's not part of their personality.

And same, I'm that way, for example, with extroversion where I'm not an extrovert, I'm definitely introverted, but I have behaved like an extrovert sometimes. I know what that feels like, I can imagine it, but that doesn't make me an extrovert. It's like having had one episode of depression doesn't make you someone with a depressive personality, but so both can happen and you could have one without the other. Why do you think some people are extroverts and some people are introverts? And do you think people ever force themselves to be something they're not? I think we can force ourselves to be something we're not in the short term.

Like, you know, when I'm teaching, I try to amp up my extroversion. Interestingly, my students can still tell that I'm by nature an introvert. I can tell. Yeah, it's actually, I think it's really, really hard to hide. So I can quote unquote act like an extrovert, but I'm not fooling anybody. I'm just behaving in a way that's not consistent with my personality to fulfill a particular role or something like that. But everyone can still see that it's not my personality, it's just a behavior I'm doing.

So what are the signs of an extrovert? If you are, likes to communicate by talking, enjoys group work, likes to talk about thoughts and feelings and doesn't mind being at the center of attention. So I'm literally forcing her to do all of these things right now, which is very generous and wonderful of her to oblige. In terms of like whether we could actually change in a more long term way, not just for an hour or two or a day or a week, I'm pretty skeptical, but I'm kind of an outlier on this. I tend to think that people, that intentional change is really hard and that we're probably

better off trying to find ways to mitigate our personality or someone else's personality rather than try to change it. So if there's something you don't like about yourself or about your partner, I think trying to create an environment where that's not going to be as big of a problem is a more productive avenue than trying to change it. Changing personality is really hard. I have a lot of friends who've tried to teach me how to be more extroverted. Really?

Like in some cases, like really extensive because I wanted to learn that too. Like I just don't understand why it's so hard for me to talk to strangers, for example. So I remember at one year I was having lunch every day in the same cafeteria and the woman who was serving the food was really, really nice to me and I felt terrible that I could never think of questions to ask her. She would always ask me questions and I could never think of questions to ask her. So I would practice with my extroverted friends. I'd be like, what should I ask her?

I mean, they'd give me specific questions and I could repeat those, but I couldn't think of new ones. And we would try to come up with strategies of like, well, what would you say if it was someone you knew well or what would you say in a situation where you're not feeling shy or whatever, but I could never apply it in a consistent way. Like I might be able to one day, but not every day. I couldn't change my dynamic with her. I mean, that's just an anecdote, but I do think it's hard to change.

I think extroversion might be harder than some other traits to change. It's interesting too, because in children, if a child is shy, we have so much empathy for the child. But as an adult, if you're shy, it's like, where is that empathy like, oh, I'm just a shy, you know, just shy, like to have it for yourself, you know? And I don't know. It's interesting. I think I'm probably an extrovert, but there are definitely times where I feel like I'm

forcing myself to be an extrovert at a dinner party when I feel like the ball's going to drop and no one's going to drop, so I'm like, blah, blah, blah, you know? Yeah, that's funny. So it's, I don't know how much of it is adaptive and I don't know, but. Yeah. I mean, we all have to do things that don't feel like completely consistent with our personality sometimes. Yeah.

How do you think the best way to get objectivity on your own personality? Because I feel like there's so much, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of shame about our personality. Like maybe everyone else can see something we can't. You know, how do people get a grip on who they are? Who are we? Just a casual afternoon convo about how do we get a grip on who we are? Yeah, that's really hard.

There's not much research on this. So this is just kind of my guess, my intuition. I mean, one avenue, one possibility would be to ask people who you trust, but I don't think they're going to be honest with us and for good reason, right? Like our relationships kind of depend on not being super blunt with each other about our personalities. So you might have to read between the lines and I wouldn't, I would be careful about putting your friends or family members in that position of telling you something because

it might hurt and it might hurt your damage, your relationship with them. So I tend not to advocate doing that very much. I think trying to find opportunities to observe yourself. So recording yourself or watching videos or listening to audio recordings of yourself could be really useful, especially if they're in like very realistic context. So not just like your answering machine recording, but like if there if there was ever a conversation you had where you weren't self-conscious about being recorded, but it happened to be recorded listening to that.

So I did that, you know, because we use these recorders, I wore one for a few days and listening to myself as fascinating. Really? Well, what was fascinating was that there was nothing on the recording. So I would be in all these conversations where other people were talking and I would listen to them and I would remember what I was thinking and so I was like, oh, now I'm going to say this thing. And then I wouldn't say it.

And I remember that I thought it and I assumed that I conveyed it somehow, but not, not audibly. So it was really good for me because I had always, you know, people had told me that they felt like I didn't like them or they couldn't tell if I liked them. And so I knew on some level that I didn't convey when I liked people, but hearing it and hearing how silent I was, I think was really good for me to get a taste of my own medicine of like, why aren't I expressing this thing that I'm feeling? So that was really useful for me. So if screaming, who even am I into the wind isn't working?

You can DIY this ear recorder. So I looked it up and the eye ear app they used to use isn't available in the app store anymore, but there is one made for Android. Just search electronically activated recorder, EAR for Android and let your personality exploration begin. Also wear a button that warns people and check your state laws about whether or not it's legal to record conversations. Okay, bye.

When it comes to different personalities, what do you think from an evolutionary standpoint is happening? You know, do we, because we work together in groups, do we need a certain balance? It could be. Yeah, I'm so, this is so far outside my area of expertise. My best understanding is that we don't have a good explanation that it's kind of a paradox of evolution. Like why haven't we all evolved to have a more, whatever is the optimal personality?

And one argument could be maybe the range of personalities that we see is actually a much narrower band than what we might have seen without natural selection. So we don't see a lot of psychopaths. We don't see a lot of people who are just always disagreeable all the time, right? Like I'm on the more disagreeable end of the spectrum and I would still like to think that most of the time I'm agreeable. What distinguishes me from a really agreeable person is that I'm willing to be disagreeable or I am disagreeable sometimes, but we don't, there aren't very many people who are just

always disagreeable and that might be the result of evolution and natural selection than those people just selected out. We just cast them away. Yeah, right. They don't reproduce. Banished. You're a dick. When she says that we don't see a lot of psychopaths, she's right, relatively speaking.

About 1% of people could clinically be considered psychopaths. Well, 4% are estimated to be sociopaths. We're going to get into more of this later, but back to her work on how we see ourselves. Do you think anyone ever has a big shift in personality after like getting medicated for depression or anxiety or ADHD, would you say? Or do you think it just uncovers their true personality to get properly medicated? That's a good question. There's some research on whether medication or therapy changes personality and it looks

like on average it does have a small effect. People do shift a little bit. Big shifts are really rare, but there are anecdotes or individual cases where you see big shifts after some kind of treatment or trauma or something like that. I think it's a really deep philosophical question whether that's their true personality coming out or their personality has actually changed. Was it always there and it just didn't come out before or did it really change? I think we should study that more often.

The rare cases of really dramatic sudden personality changes. I mean, they're hard to study because you don't know when they're going to happen, right? But it's a really fascinating question, yeah. Okay. So it is a fascinating question and I asked the internet and it turns out that yes, getting medicated can change your personality, so say some researchers. Dr. Brent Roberts, who's a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and his colleagues looked at 144 studies with over 15,000 people and they were using different kinds of interventions

from talk therapy and meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants and it turns out that without trying to change their personality traits, some changed anyway. In particular, patients with anxiety disorders who displayed a lot of neuroticism changed the most. Then in another study, the professor of psychology at Northwestern University, Dr. Tony Z. Tang, found that antidepressants like SSRIs can alter two really key personality traits linked to depression and that's neuroticism and extroversion. So compared to placebo drugs, just a sugar pill, participants showed a drop in neuroticism,

which is that tendency toward emotional instability and bad moods and then they had an increase in extroversion, which is a tendency to be more outgoing. In yet another study done by researcher Ali Ward, they looked at one participant taking an antidepressant for anxiety and found that 100% of the one participant, me, did feel less anxious and less neurotic after starting medication. So can I call myself a doctor or what? No? Okay.

I mean, and even the more subtle changes, like all of us change a little bit as we get older and have different experiences, there's some pretty good research that suggests that things like major role changes, like getting married or having kids or entering the workforce or becoming a caretaker or things like that really do have an impact on our personalities. It's not a dramatic shift overnight, but they do change our personalities a little bit. And it's an interesting question. Like if you reflect on something that's changed about yourself over a few decades, like were you a different person back then or were you always like that, but you had to grow into

it? Or, you know, I think it's a really interesting question, maybe not even a scientific one. Like I don't know that there's a scientific answer to that. There's so many cautionary tales of like never trust someone who's burned you, they're going to do it again. But do people change over time? You know, if you think about people, maybe who've been incarcerated, who come out of it the other end more conscientious because of discipline or remorse, do people change?

Yeah, absolutely. People do sometimes change. It's just not the norm, I would say. So then I think everyone has to make a decision for themselves about how willing they are to take a risk on someone who may have changed, but probably has a, you know, like the default is that people tend to be pretty similar over time. But it's too harsh to assume everyone always will be the same and no one ever changes. So you have to allow for some change.

And then I think it's a really, for me, that's a really interesting challenge in life is like how many second or third chances to give people and how open should we be to people who really want to change, even if we know it's unlikely they'll be able to, or how much should we try to change, even if we know it's going to be hard? And I think those are those are really personal questions that I think everyone has to decide for themselves. The evidence is relevant. The evidence suggests it's hard.

We shouldn't expect change to happen frequently or easily or quickly. So know that and then decide what what you want to do with that information. Do you think your work changes who you have close to you in your life or who you kind of give the boot? It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I think maybe I study personality because I've always been pretty picky about who I have close to me in my life. I think, you know, it's certainly if my if people close to me had one complaint about

me, I think it would be that I don't I'm not very optimistic about people changing. And so sometimes that can that can be hard on the people close to me. And also I'm pretty stubborn about not wanting to change myself. I can change and I will change. I think that I'd rather try to find different ways around problems than trying to change myself or trying to change someone else. And and I think that, yeah, I don't know if my work informs that or if I became a personalized psychologist because I've always been that way.

I don't know. But it is, I have a pretty, I think I'm trying to soften a little bit in that because I know I'm too extreme in my view about that in my personal life. You're like, I have the data. These are the receipts. No, but the data do show that people people change. Like, I mean, the maturation stuff, like if you enter a relationship or you become a parent or you gain responsibilities, you actually become more responsible and

more mature and the evidence is pretty clear. So that I think is something I'm trying to internalize more like my rational side, my academic side knows that's true, but in my personal life, I think I tend to be like, you're going to be the same way as you were 20 years ago. Um, so yeah, it's a case where maybe I'm actually, my personal views don't match up with evidence. Do you ever study a couple dynamics at all? Like what personalities fit better?

Like, and when you watch movies, does that ever freak you out? Like, that's not going to work. You're both extroverts. That's funny. Um, I don't study it much, but there's, there is research on that. And actually it turns out personality is not the most important determinant of whether couples are going to work. It's values matter a lot more.

Side note to anyone asking what values and partnerships are ones that my partner and I should value. I'll say them quickly, caring about others, avoiding harm to others, seeking pleasure, personal success in life, maturity, independence and thought in action and security. If you're like, I hate all those values, those values are for pansies. Then that's cool. Just find another similar asshole who feels the same way.

So being similar or different on personality doesn't really matter that much for, for whether the couple's likely to work out, but having similar values and things like that, that matters more with personality. It's more what we call a main effect. It's not the interaction between the two people. It's just the absolute level of personality traits that each person has. And it turns out that if the either or both of the partners are disagreeable or neurotic, that makes relationships harder.

Maybe they could be richer and more rewarding if they can work. I don't want to judge, but, but disagreeableness and neuroticism tend to predict more dissatisfaction and more breakup in relationships. Although I have one bone to pick with relationships research, which is they always define breaking up as a bad outcome. So when you look at like, well, they'll talk about like, this is a risk factor. It's a negative trait because it predicts breaking up. But to me, that's not clear.

That's always a bad outcome. Many people should break up. And for many people, it's a positive experience, and it leads to new experiences in the future that they wouldn't have had otherwise. So this assumption that the good relationship is the one that stays together is a weird assumption to me in relationships research. So I would take that, you know, just because disagreeable people tend to break up more doesn't necessarily mean they're making worse choices.

Right. For some people, breaking up might be the right choice. Yeah. And breakups can be the best period of growth and new haircuts and mixed-papes and journal entries that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Is there any flim flam that you would debunk, any myths about personality that really get your goat? I think there's a lot more mystery around personality than there needs to be.

And I don't know why. Like, I think that people think that you have to be an expert and you have to take this like really convoluted tests that will reveal your personality. But actually, you don't have to try that hard to reveal your personality. If you ask yourself some basic questions and think about your behavior and how other people see you and things like that, I think you would get pretty far. And indeed, I think it's what's really frustrating as an academic personality psychologist is that what gets popularized about personality is

completely different than what's scientifically valid. There's this huge gap between what the public reads about personality and what's actually scientifically valid. And in trying to understand why, I think it's because the scientifically valid stuff is actually quite boring. Boring. Like basically, like if you want to know, well, what do narcissists do differently than non-narcists, they brag more and they're more vain.

And they, you know, that's like, you didn't need an expert to tell you that, right? Everybody could have guessed that. I mean, not to brag, but I could have guessed that. I'm pretty smart. So I think a lot of the, a lot of the more true things about personality are quite obvious and boring, partly because we're, we all have to be experts on personality, so it's not going to be these like super counterintuitive things. Cause we've already figured them out in the course of everyday life.

So I would just say personality is not that mysterious. It's not that hard to see in ourselves or in others. And if, if you're reading something that makes it sound like it is, like if to uncover something really, really deep to really know someone's personality, that's probably not true. That's deep. So the fact that it's this big, this big mystery, like we have a secret inside us, it's our personalities, probably not.

Right. For most of us, I think that's not true. There might be like a few people in the world who really have fooled everyone else and their true personality is really different than how they come across, but that's extremely rare. I think. What are their challenges do you have in studying this in terms of that gap between who we are and who we think we are? Um, I mean, the biggest challenge is that there's no absolute truth of the

matter, right? I can't just like, you know, draw blood from you and know that this is your personality. There's no like direct pipeline. So that's a big challenge. Another one I think that we struggle with as personalized psychologists is that to, to study it quantitatively, we have to put numbers on people, right? So we, one thing, one common misconception is that we put people into

categories. We actually don't. The, the best scientific evidence suggests that there's not categorical differences between people. It's all on a continuum. So it's not the case that there's extroverts and then it's introverts. It's basically a bell shaped curve and most people are somewhere in the middle. That's why things like ambivert is so popular.

Or like, I keep seeing different terms for like the extroverted introvert or the introverted extroverts. Like, yeah, it's called being in the middle on a normal, normal curve. So we don't categorize people because it turns out that's just not the shape of the distribution. It's not like two boxes. It's, it's a continuum, but we do put numbers on people. So we'll say like, you're in the 60th percentile on extroversion or whatever.

And of course that's, we can't actually know that so precisely. It's like, it's an estimate. There's some uncertainty around that, but it still, I think feels uncomfortable to people to put numbers on something as kind of rich as personality. Oh, that's rich. That's really rich. And to have, you know, five dimensions. And once we have these five numbers about you, we have, we've got you figured

out or whatever. And I think it's important to convey that I don't know any personalities, psychologists who actually thinks that you can describe someone in their full complexity with five numbers or even with 25 numbers or a hundred numbers. If we go into the finer grain traits and within the big five. But if we want to study it quantitatively, we have to end up, we don't just use five numbers. We often have many, many more numbers than that, but it's still numbers.

And I think that can feel very reductionistic and harsh, I think, to a lot of people, it's like, we can't completely capture someone's experience with numbers, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff we can study. I mean, I don't see any other way around it. Cause what are you going to do? Just, you can't just have a spreadsheet full of words. Right, right, right. You just have to translate them into something that you can compute.

Right. Right. Yeah. And is that part of the methodology of it? It's trying to really figure out. Yeah. So personally, I spend a lot of time developing questionnaires and fine tuning them and arguing about like, if I ask you on a scale from one to five, you

know, how often do you like to be around other people? And one is never in five as always, we will spend like hours at a conference. Are you about should it be a one to five scale or a one to seven scale? Or maybe you should be an even numbered scale. So there's no midpoint. Like you can have all kinds of academic debates about those things and we do. Yeah. What are those conferences like a more introverts?

More extroverts, more amber words, way more introverts. I think introverts are overrepresented, probably in academia in general, maybe not in psychology. Like I feel like the social sciences have a lot of extroverts, but then within psychology, personality is a very introverted group. Interestingly, at least I'm actually don't have any evidence for that, but I feel I would bet a lot of money on that. Very quiet cocktail hours.

Yeah. Yeah. We're not the like socializers of psychology. If you go, like if you go to a social psychology conference, there's way more talking and socializing and partying going on than at a personality psychology conference. We do have dance parties, but we're very, we like go somewhere secluded and isolated where no one can see us.

And then we do our nerdy dance parties. So can we pretend to be something we're not? This next revelation was such a surprise and a comfort to me. I maybe didn't realize that I had more introverted tendencies because I just was always stuffing them down. I was like, no, get out there and be social or else people are going to think that you don't like them, you know? Yeah.

And I think a lot of extroverts think that that makes them an ambivert or, you know, like introverted extrovert ever, but nobody's always extrovert. Nobody always feels like socializing. And this idea that you get energy from socializing, nobody gets energy from socializing. So it's one of the myths, one of the things that's wrong about the Myers Briggs is that it makes a lot of extroverts question whether they really are extroverts when they read that.

But no, you are an extrovert, even if you're tired at the end of a party or you don't always feel like talking or that's fine. Everybody feels that way. Sometimes it's just that introverts feel that way even more. Okay. That's a, yeah, that always, that always sparked my curiosity because I was like, who goes to a work party and is like, I'm ready to go. Let's do this again tomorrow.

I have so many questions from patrons. Can I ask you some? Yeah, okay. Okay. Before we get to questions from patrons, first, a few words from our sponsors of the show, you may hear a few ads in which I call patrons and one-on-one telemarket to them, which earnestly is a joy to do because we had a pangy on the phone for a while and then I just edited a bunch.

Also, another reason for doing ads is that a portion of the proceeds go to a cause that theologist chooses each week and Samine picked SIPS, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, which brings together scholars working to improve methods and practices in psychological science. Anyone interested in improving psychological research is welcome to join us regardless of experience. You can learn more at improvingpsych.org. So that is this week's donation and I'll put a link in the show notes.

Okey doke. All right, let's get to your questions. Obviously, this is something that everyone has some experience with, um, given that everyone probably has a personality. Everyone and their dog, literally. So many people. Tina, Radeo, Stephanie, Brotes, Adriana Torres, Bert Madison, Cody Albert, Tegan Moore, Kayla Brigham, and Alex Afas.

Everyone wanted to know about, um, psychopaths and sociopaths. What personality traits would a psychopath have? And is that a personality or is it a personality disorder? Um, I think you could think of it either way. So like narcissism, there's the disorder and then there's probably the like sub clinical version, the like everyday version. Um, I'm not an expert on this. So I think the common factor with psychopathy and, and some other kind of

disorders that are similar is a lack of compassion. It's a kind of very low agreeableness where people are not considerate or have. Maybe some people would describe it as like not having a conscience at the very extreme end, but callousness, I think is a really common characteristic of people who are high in psychopathy. I think that's kind of the defining feature. Okay. So yes, psychopathy talk again.

Samine says this isn't her field of expertise, but in looking for definitions, I'll give you a rough sketch, partly because this could be a whole episode in and of itself and the history of it is sticky. The diagnosis is sticky. Different editions of diagnostic manuals don't recognize psychopathy as a clinical diagnosis. It's traditionally thought of as a personality disorder, ASPD or antisocial personality disorder.

And sociopathy is somewhat of a less severe form. And one expert on the matter, a criminal psychologist, Dr. Robert Hare, describes sociopathy as only differing from the average person in the sense of right and wrong, but psychopathy is not having a sense of empathy or morality. Therefore, all psychopaths are sociopaths, but sociopaths are not necessarily psychopaths. It's the old all cacti or succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. So some traits of psychopathy are a lack of guilt or remorse, lack of empathy,

lack of deep emotional attachments, narcissism, superficial charm, dishonesty, manipulativeness, reckless risk taking. So there you go. What is the difference between a personality and a personality disorder? So that's a really good question. There's a lot of debate on that. My best understanding is that it, it's a matter of degree more than a matter of kind for most personality disorders.

There might be some exceptions, but most personality disorders, it's not the case that if you meet the threshold for disorder, you're qualitatively different than someone who's close to the threshold, but doesn't cross it. So for example, in the case of narcissism, you know, there are people who have diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder, and then there's people who are just really arrogant and exaggerate a lot and are condescending to others. And if they do that all the time in many contexts and are persistently that way over time, they might not quite reach the threshold of a personality disorder,

but it is the same spectrum. They're just not as far out on the spectrum. So there's a lot more bell shaped curves than boxes. Yeah, for sure. Personalities. Amber Willis had a good question. Um, what about the birth order between siblings in relation to certain personality tests?

Is it just a myth? It's just a myth, yeah. Really? Yeah. So there's really good research on this. There might be tiny, tiny effects, but nothing that would be practically meaningful or detectable to us in our everyday lives. So if you think you see a pattern, it's just random fluctuations.

Oh, that's such a surprise. At least on personality. There might be birth order effects on other things, but on personality, there's no consistent differences. I read this great book, like it was a theory about why there should be birth order differences called born to rebel. There's really fascinating theoretical account. It just turns out not to be true.

But yeah, like you could imagine why first borns might have different personalities than later borns. Yeah. And middle, middle kids always seem the most stable hats off to all the Jan Brady's of the world and the Malcolm's in the middle or my sister, Janelle, who always seemed to have it together more than all of us combined. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I had the same intuition, but yeah, I, the evidence suggests there's nothing there. Um, Madeleine Rogers asked, how did the astrological signs become tied with particular character and personality traits? Is it accurate at all? Asking as a Pisces, who is afraid of water? Interesting. I'm a Pisces too.

Are you afraid of water? I'm not afraid of water. I'm afraid of deep water, but I like water. Um, but it's funny. I was, once I was at a party and this guy came to me and he was trying to hit on me and he was like, you know, what's your sign? I can tell you about your personality. And I was like, yeah, I don't, like you're talking to the wrong person.

And then he was like, what's your sign? And I was like, Pisces, he's like, you're stubborn. And I was like, okay, you, but you got lucky on that one. Um, yeah. No, there's no validity to the astrological sign connection to personality. I don't know where the idea came from. That's a good question. Historically.

PS, a little bit of digging revealed that a Japanese study found that people born December through February have lower agreeableness, i.e. kind of jerks, or at least charmingly assertive. And then another study reported that summer-born males were less conscientious, but, but, but in the 1980s, a very badass, curious dude named Dr. Sean Carlson wondered about the efficacy of astrology and conducted a double blind experiment where he gave 24 respected astrologers, a hundred personality profiles and, and, and the study found that astrologers were unable to match

natal charts to their corresponding personality tests better than chance. Carlson was like, hey, astrology, y'all flim flams. Now I know this and I believe in science, but does this stop me from reading Susan Miller's astrology zone and screencapping it to send it to friends sometimes? No, it does not. It's free. It's fun.

Let me live. If Dr. Caleb Finch can enjoy Benjamin Button, then we can be entertained by a horoscope if we want, but just remember, neither are nonfiction. Isabel Hopper asked, how can a dramatic event or the loss of someone close to you influence your personality or can it? It can. Again, I think most of the changes are not dramatic.

So I think, you know, life events have small impacts on a personality and they add up. So if you have a lot of, you know, negative events or a lot of positive events, I think that can add up to a pretty big change, but usually one event, even if it's pretty dramatic, won't have a huge impact on your personality. Again, there are exceptions. We can all think of people who did change quite dramatically in a short period of time, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

So in a way, it's nice because we're more resilient than I think we might be afraid of, um, but, and certainly like major negative events will have an impact for a while. Um, and some will have an impact forever. Like unemployment can have a pretty long-term impact, at least on people's happiness and wellbeing, which you could construe as an aspect of personality. Unfortunately, positive events tend to have a shorter lasting impact than negative events.

But yeah, they tend not to have a really dramatic effects. That's interesting. Sarah Nichelle wants to know, why does abuse make some people kinder and then others act like they're abusers? So how much, why do people sway after, after? I mean, some of that might just be their genetic predisposition or their preexisting personality before the abuse. It could be that, you know, if you were already a very considerate and kind

person, that abuse might accentuate that and you, that might be your coping mechanism is to just be extra kind to everybody. And if you were someone who tended to be the opposite, then an abuse might exaggerate that. I don't have, I don't know if that's empirically true, but that would explain why people react differently. If they're different to begin with, often, um, your baseline kind of personality will predict how you react to an event or a situation and it could exaggerate

the differences between people. I thought these are such great questions. So many people. Um, Danny Q, uh, Maya Webill, Carrie, Kelly Windsor, Daniel Vaughn, all kind of asked a little bit about how contagious is personality? Like if you spend an excessive amount of time around another person, how much does it shape your personality? Is there an alpha effect, like where there's dominance and status that

changes who you are? I think in the short term, there are complementarity effects on like dominance. So if I'm interacting with someone who's much more dominant than me, I'm going to take a more submissive role in, in that interaction. And then for other personality or behavior, kind of patterns, there might be the opposite effect where you become more similar to your interaction partner. So I think on like warmth, if you're interacting with someone who's really warm, you're going to match their warmth.

Um, so it's interesting that on some things you, you, it pulls for the opposite of what your interaction partner is like, it's on dominance and on other things that pulls for similarity, but those are short term effects. So it's like in their interaction, we're going to become more similar on warmth and more opposite on dominance while we're interacting. Um, but longterm, like if you live with somebody, I think the research suggests there isn't any longterm like contagion of personality. You don't become more like your roommates or your partners.

So not for the longterm, although research shows that in the short term, you reframing things for a bummed out friend can help them, but it might leave you feeling a little exhausted and worse about yourself. So if you're everyone's cheerleader, way to go, but psychologists recommend taking care of yourself, setting aside a few extra moments in the day to think positive thoughts about your own circumstances. I'm a badass who helps their friends. I am a beacon of light in the darkness.

I make pretty good lasagna. My hair looks so good today. Shaya Gaudard asked if you believe in the type A and type B personality traits. Um, there's some truth to that, but I think it's oversimplified. So, um, yeah, I think that like the big five is a better model of differences between people, type A and type B kind of pushes people into, we talked, like we talked about boxes instead of a continuum. And some other people had some questions, you know, going back to narcissism.

Um, Teresa Bossanova had a great question in the age of social media, how do you best deal with narcissistic friends? And also just in general, like in, in our culture now, are we trending toward that because of circumstance? I think the best evidence suggests there is no difference between now and previous generations in terms of narcissism or the effect of social media on narcissism. It's very easy to see, like you can, you can remember specific cases of people being really narcissistic and social media exaggerating that, but I actually

think that that's not, there's no long-term trend in that direction. Or at least the evidence isn't very clear that there is. Um, but there's controversy around that. I mean, you could see it as a way that makes it really easy to know who to avoid because the narcissists out themselves on social media. Like if it wasn't for social media, it might take a year of knowing somebody before you could really see how narcissistic they are, you know, maybe in some cases, although usually it comes out faster than that, but social

media just speeds it up, right? Like you can tell more easily. I think the more avenues you have for someone to express themselves, the more quickly you can judge their personality more accurately. Yeah. I guess it's like having access to someone's journal pretty much, you know, like straight shot into their, what they want to project. And when they're going through, what about public figures?

I'm a very stable genius. I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. That's another thing we debate within our field is like, is it irresponsible for us to make a professional judgment on like a famous person's personality without ever having met them? And certainly for clinicians, I think it's considered bad and professional practice, but as like just not clinical, but just describing their personality from a scientific standpoint, I'm kind of neutral on that.

I think obviously we can tell, I don't think personality experts have much to add to what's already obvious to everyone. Lauren Chiota wants to know, are there any personality types that should be red flags? It depends on your preferences. Yeah. So like even, you know, we talked about narcissism. So first I would change the word type to trait just to go back to the whole categorical versus continuous thing.

So if everything's on a continuum, you know, you might like narcissistic people because they're really charming and funny and they're a life of the party and they keep things interesting. So some people are fine with being in a relationship or living with someone who's high on narcissism. That's fine. I think you have to figure out what you're okay with. Some people couldn't ever be in a relationship with someone really introverted.

That would be to drive them nuts. So, you know, different people have different preferences. Maybe you couldn't love someone who loves himself a whole bunch. Or maybe people who seem like they really love themselves are the ones who don't really deeply love themselves enough, which is all the more reason to show them love. I don't know. Just everybody be nice to each other. Okay.

Thank you. Eluisa Frose wants to know, are there any personality traits associated with high performance or success, the same way that it seems to have a biological correlation to high levels of testosterone and low cortisol levels like with CEOs and other leadership folks? Yeah. So there are personality predictors of success. It's kind of almost circular because basically, so if you're conscientious,

which includes being like self disciplined and responsible and organized and on time, you're going to have more professional success. That's a pretty strong predictor of professional success. Pretty much across no matter what career you're in, conscientiousness is going to be a predictor of success. So side note, if you're like, what does conscientiousness really mean? Some personality psychologists had the same question. They set out to define it more concretely with a study that looked at how much certain

people engaged in 11 behavioral factors such as avoiding work, organization, impulsivity, antisocial behaviors, cleanliness, industriousness, laziness, appearance, punctuality, formality, and responsibility. The study was called, what do conscientious people do? I'm guessing because the board rejected the title, who has their fucking shit together? And then depending on your career, other traits might or might not predict it. So if you're like in a sales job, then extroversion is an asset. Same with teaching, extroverts get better teaching evaluations.

If you're in a creative job, then being high on the openness to experience factor is going to be an asset. You're going to have more success. But again, it's almost circular. Part of being high on openness to experience is being curious and creative and open-minded. And so that just is part of the job description for a creative job. So yeah, different jobs will suit different personality traits better, but conscientiousness is the main factor that predicts success in general.

She gestured again to her office, which I'm telling you was not that messy. Just some stacks of paper, some books from the way she describes it. You think there was a month old cheeseburger on the windowsill? There was not. But if someone figures out the neatness, I would love to know because I can't for the life of me be neat. There are like no plates of food in here that are like pieces. I'm not dirty.

I'm just not organized. No, that's fine. I'm sure you know. If you had to find a piece of paper, you'd know which stack I was in exactly. So that's organization. Any movies about personalities that annoy you or you think are good at exploring it? That's a good question. So one movie that stuck with me, I don't remember.

I don't know if I want to endorse it as being accurate or anything like that, but it was fascinating to me because it's about self-knowledge is I Heart Huckabees. And he hires an existential detective to follow him around. So you asked earlier about how should we learn about ourselves? What should we do if we want to know what our personality is like? And I said, maybe don't ask your friends. But if there was such a thing as an existential detective that you could hire to become an expert on you and then give you feedback, that would be fascinating.

I remember when I watched that movie, I was like, if that job existed, that would be my dream job. Just like become like follow someone around and take notes and then tell them this is what you're like. What kind of investigation? Existential. You'll spy on me. Will you be spying on me in the bathroom? Yes.

I think one thing that people don't spend enough time thinking about is, okay, if I can't change this aspect of my personality, what could I do so that it doesn't have a negative impact on my life or on other people? So, you know, like when I figured out that people can't tell when I like them, I learned I have to like explicitly tell people I had a really good time last night. You know, I enjoyed it and I like you or I'd like to hang out again or whatever, because I'm not that expressive and so it won't come across. I'm not, I haven't necessarily gotten a lot better at that, but I think that's a more

viable way to change than actually becoming more expressive, for example. So, a few days after this interview, I got an email from Samine just saying, it was great talking with you last week. I hope the rest of your visit was good. Thanks again for inviting me onto your podcast, which was so sweet. I was so touched. So, just change some of your behaviors instead of your core identity. Yeah, or like find out what the negative consequences are of your personality traits

and then try to like ward off those consequences instead of changing your personality trait. This seems a little bit more realistic to me than changing your personality. And what is the thing that is the most irritating thing about your job, or that's the part that you hate the most? Anything from parking to something existential? Parking so far was the only downside I could do at all, because I could. It's good that you can't think of anything. It's not easy.

I'm trying to think how into the weeds to get about what an academic job is like. I mean, honestly, the most annoying part of my job is having to apply for grants. That's not fun. And part of the reason, I mean, just having to ask for money is annoying. And you constantly have to. Even if you get a grant within a year, it's going to run out soon. You have to start thinking about applying for grants again. So that's annoying.

But also because it's kind of this like weird marketing thing where you have to sell yourself and talk about why your ideas are transformative and they're going to change the world. So then you have to figure out how to sell your work. I don't like that aspect of it. What is the thing that you love about your job or your work the most? I love the freedom to change my mind about things or change directions. So I could like have been studying something for five years and then decide, oh, actually, I don't think that's true anymore.

And I'm going to like try to find the opposite or I'm going to just go in a different direction. And I love that I have the freedom to do that, that I have job stability. So I can say my work from five years ago is wrong and there's no consequences or not a lot of consequences. And so yeah, it's fun because it gives you the freedom to play with ideas and kind of argue both sides and figure out. With self-knowledge, I get this a lot. Like I'll sometimes say people are pretty good at knowing this about themselves.

And then another paper, I'll say people have this blind spot and then people are like, you need to choose a side. Are you for self-knowledge or against self-knowledge? And I'm like, no, I don't have to choose a side and that's the beauty of it. Are there any books on personality psychology that she recommends? She glanced over to bookshelf and very quickly settled on a favorite. If they're interested in learning about personality, it's a textbook. So it's a weird recommendation, but it's such a readable textbook.

The personality puzzle by David Funder in the show Felicity, she was carrying it around. Was she really? Yeah. Dear Felicity, here it goes. I've watched you for four years. Always wondered what you were like. It's just, it's so much better than what you imagine when you think of a textbook. It's not dry.

It has a really nice narrative voice. The author David Funder is really, really good at that. And it'll teach you like the basics of like the big five and other. He's actually not a huge fan of the big five. So it's a nice balanced kind of perspective on it. It won't feel like drinking Kool-Aid as much as maybe my interview has sounded like it. I wasn't sure if you would, if you would have faith in any of the tests. So it's really interesting to hear from your perspective, like this one is,

this one's worth it. I thought you'd maybe say that they're all garbage. So I wasn't sure. No, no, there are good tests out there. Yeah. So go forth, whether you start recording life snippets or dive into a psychology textbook or take a quiz to figure out which planet you are. And yes, that quiz exists.

Or maybe just ask a close confidant to draft you an honest letter on Turkey Stationary. Thank you so much. No, it's great. I'm glad to be on the show. Oh, yeah. I hope I didn't ask you too many questions. No, not at all. So remember to ask smart people stupid questions because chances are

everyone's wondering the same thing you are, especially if the question is, what am I? What am I doing here? Am I a good person? What's happening? The answer is yes. You're just a little monkey. You're doing your best.

Now, for more of Dr. Vizier's work, you can check out The Black Goat. That's a podcast she hosts with two other psychologists, Sanjay Sirvastava and Alexa Telet. And they have an episode called Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3, all about personality tests that they love and hate. So get all up on that. That's called The Black Goat podcast. She's also Samine Vizier on Twitter, and I'll put a link in the show notes to all this.

We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. Come say hi. For more links to personality tests and other stuff that we talked about, see aliward.com. And there's also a link there to buy merch if you want to rep oligies. I'm not saying you have to. Also, thank you to Shannon Beltis and Bonnie Dutch for managing that.

Find them on Instagram and follow them because they are wonderful. Thank you to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group, which is as amazing as they both are. Interns are Caleb Patton and Harry Kim. And the theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. Additional editing and research and amazing cheerleading was done by Jarrett Sleeper of Mind Jam Media. You can holler at them if you need podcast editing done.

And of course, lead editor, always high in agreeableness and conscientiousness, Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the Percast and See Jurassic Right. Two great podcasts about cats and dinos. I'll let you guess which is which. Okay, at the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. I'm going to give you two today. Okay, I think that thing about self-esteem was truly a revelation. And I hope this fix in my brain and outlook about self-compassion last because it's dope.

Also, I'm starting to like vegan cheese more than regular cheese. And I think that the melty texture is less greasy and more stretchy. This is a statement. It's not an invitation for debate. Thank you. Good day. Hearts and hugs, old dad ward, Von podcast saying over and out. Bye bye.

What's emoji are you? The laughing emoji. The happy emoji. I'm so happy.