This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy, these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.
Welcome to the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And I am here with Dr. Brent Roberts. Brent is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. And he does a lot of work on personality. So I want to talk about personality with him. It's a topic that I don't really know that much about, you know, listener, and, you know, so, you know, you'll see me learning a lot, hopefully, and it's a topic that I've gotten really interested in. And I think it's important, and it's also one of those things that people talk about all the time. But hey, it turns out, there's a whole field of scientists of scholars who are actually researching, and so they actually know things besides just like, whatever they're, you know, they're bullshitting about at the moment. Candidly, right. So, Brent, you know, I just, you know, you're a professor, and so you know, all this stuff. So when you talk to, when you talk to your students, when you tell them about, you know, what you study in terms of personality? Like, what is what is personality? Like? What would you define it as? Like, like, your IQ is not your personality, right?
Well yeah, it is. Yeah, no, it totally is. I mean, yeah. First, let me just say, Thanks for the introduction Razib. It's great to be here. And I appreciate the invitation. It's nice to talk to you. It's nice put a face and a voice to a profile that I'm intimately familiar with, but nonetheless, had not seen the human connection to it. So it's good to see-
I am a human, I am not an artificial intelligence,
Brent: Not a bot?
Just putting that out there. You never know any more.
I'm sure if generative AI wanted to copy me at this point, they probably could. Not too hard of a test. Yeah, no, I back to your question. Of course, IQ is part of personality. You know, I like I have a certain particular definition of personality myself, and I tend to be very inclusive. You know, I see personality psychology as having a couple of responsibilities. The what question, what is personality? What are the things that we use to understand each other? And how do we differ is that the first basic descriptive question that we spend - I sometimes derogate our field by saying, we're kind of the accountants of psychology, we like the numbers. And we like to just look at the way people are different from each other. We don't do kind of mechanistic experimental stuff, we do a lot of descriptive stuff. And that's the what side of things, and what should we include there. The why side is, is possibly far more interesting. And it's, of course, how the field started with people like Freud, and Jung and those folks. It is also kind of the responsibility of our field. I'm less conversant with that, but I could I could do my best. But on the on the what side of things, you know, I see personality psychology is covering the major, big questions about how we are the same and differ from one another. And that and, you know, that gets to things like who's smart and who's not. And so, abilities, generally speaking, are one of the core dimensions of individual differences that are incredibly important for especially Western society, especially the United States, because we've used it to define and structure society for decades. And so to ignore it, or to say, you might not like it, you may question the validity of IQ test, whatever it might be, you can't question the fact that we use it to structure our society because we use it to select people into higher education. And we stratify our economy based on basically proxies for IQ. And you so you shouldn't, you should take it very seriously. So who's got those abilities and who doesn't, is a key defining characteristic of an individual. And it's something you want to know, as I said, we were talking beforehand, but one of the things we often find in our spouses because we end up finding people in the context of our development, like high schools and colleges, and if you marry people who you're around, which is what we do, you know, they tend to have the same general IQ that we have. And so these are really important qualities when it comes to major life decisions, like who you end up with. And I'm not saying it's important afterwards, IQ doesn't predict whether you get divorced or not. But hey, the people you end up with, it's going to be a key feature. So, so that's one area. So I was I give my students kind of a four item like, you know, basic personality inventories, like okay, how smart is somebody? That's one question. And then, you know, the next question is, what are they want to do? What are their desires? And so the next big domain and personality psychology or motivations, interests, aspirations, you can it's a relatively disorganized area of personality psychology is still kind of the Wild West, I personally find the most appealing set of dimensions and they're the vocational interests, like what kind of things you really like to do? Do you want to play with objects? Do you want to sell people goods? Do you want to lead individuals into battle? Do you want to create cultural icons through art and music? Those are fundamental questions that are also really important for the way we structure our lives. And it turns out just as important as some of the other domains, if not more important, for how things go for us, like who do we end up with how many kids we have, what kind of jobs we do, and what kind of life we have. Because I mean, the job that you take is often quite important for all those other questions about who you are, who you end up with, who you have as friends, hobbies, places that you live. So I really liked vocational interests as as the answer to that second question like, What do you want? You can of course, that's also partly the why question why we do the things we want to do. The other domain, and it's the one that that people are probably most familiar with, is what we call personality traits. And this is what does somebody typically do? What what is their default mode? That one is pretty easy. We've got it organized. So we've we've organized it into what's called the Big Five. One of the stereotypes of the field is that is the field of personality psychology, which I think is a mistake, because it doesn't include things like abilities and, and motivations. And that's a that is a mistake. But the the big five are, I think, really, really important and really fascinating, right? There's extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience, which sounds quick and easy, but they're, you know, their myriad of components underneath that, those five domains. And they really do define lots of ways that we interact with the world, right? Are you going to be a talkative person who's going to engage strangers with with alacrity? Are you going to be somebody who's going to keep quiet in every social setting that you go into? That's going to define a lot of the way your relationships go. Agreeableness, are you going to by default? Do you trust people? And do you think that they're good? My wife is wonderfully trusting. And we have completely different worldviews. You know, because I don't trust people quite as easily as well. She generates trust, because he trusts trust other people, I don't because I don't trust other people.
I’m gonna jump in here I'm jumping in because I might not understand I have taken the tests. And just I think the listen just for the listener knows. I’m usually scoring very high on extraversion very high on openness, very low on the neuroticism, which I think is the emotional stability, around 50th percentile in the conscientiousness and very high on disagreeability. But I wouldn't say that I'm not a trusting person.
So there's different facets. And so that's why so I like to describe the Big Five as a family, loosely speaking. And so you've got things like nurturance, and agreeableness, trust, kindness, politeness, compliance, which are all different facets, within that family, they're all related. They're all positively correlated with one another, but they reflect different flavors of of the general domain that manifests differently. So please don't take my description as just the trust is the only thing there are other aspects to. And the same goes for conscientiousness. So you know, you sound like a classic academic, the high extraversion, high openness, middling conscientiousness, often because in that, that space, you've got the hard working component, that's one of the facets, but you also have the kind of conventional rule adhering component. And so typically, scientists and academics have a split on that really hard working really not conventional. And so we ended up being on the on the average, so to speak.
Yeah that's totally, totally descriptive, that's me to the T.
Yeah, and then emotional stability is, you know, anxiety, depression, panic, fear, you know, and it's a little more homogeneous than other domains. But as the core of most of the experiences, we have a psychopathology and with clinical psychology, it is the domain of choice there. And then Openness to Experience is the most heterogeneous, most broken apart. It has things like thinking your smart, being creative, being open to emotions, and stimulation, being imaginative are all facets of openness. So, so those are the big five. And then the final question is, what's your story? And, you know, each of us have a particular story that's generated by the place that we've grown up, the time that we've grown up in the concrete experiences that we live and and embody. I'm a professor, my white male, now old aged, you know, professor who lives in the Midwest who used to live in California grew up on the beaches in San Diego. You know, that's my story. And it gives you a sense for what my values are and what experiences I've had. And so it's important for personality psychologists to also include those aspects that sweeps in things like identity and, and the importance we give to certain aspects of our identity. I was a volleyball player, if I was four inches taller, I would have been a professional volleyball player instead of a professor, because I love that sport, you know. So, you, those types of things are not captured in the Big Five are not captured in ability tests and the like, but are still really important parts of people's personality. So those are the four big questions, you know, How smart are you? Why are you doing what you're doing? You know, what do you do, typically? And what's your story? And if you ask those four questions with somebody, you're gonna get a lot of information.
Yeah, that's a lot of dimensions. I have to ask you, Brent, how does the Big Five relate to the Myers Briggs, which is really used more in a corporate? I feel like corporate professional environments, people are always talking about the Myers Briggs. Can you talk about that a little? Yeah.
So I mean, you'll probably see, you see lots of folks arguing back and forth about the MBTI. About its validity, and its lack thereof, I have a more complex, nuanced take on on the MBTI. The MBTI was a brilliant marketing, stroke of marketing, by a couple of women who made up an interesting, fascinating test that captures four of the big five. And so the people who run around saying the MBTI is invalid, or also saying that the big five are invalid. So they shouldn't say that. Now, the way the MBTI is used has some issues, we could go into that if you're if you're interested. But the MBTI is introversion, extroversion, sensing, perceiving, judging, or judging, perceiving, sensing, intuition. And then one other dimension and I'm blanking on it at the moment, but they they cover for the big five that are not neuroticism. And they, you know, they did something very strategic, which is they took the negative components out of the low end of things like extraversion. So the low end of extraversion could be introversion, which is a relatively non neurotic disinterest in other humans, so to speak. Or at least like in getting around lots of people, you can also be really shy and really neurotic about your introversion, where you're scared of people. And that's a more negative take the MBTI authors took those negative components out. So when you take the MBTI, you get the happy version of high and low extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. And then they got rid of neuroticism altogether. And so it doesn't have any negative qualities to it. It's a brilliant marketing move. And so every piece of feedback you get from that test makes you feel validated and good. Because even if you're low on conscientiousness, you're described as spontaneous instead of irresponsible. And that was a pretty brilliant move on their part, which has made that test the most popular test in existence, because people like good news, and they get good news from that.
Ah, okay. Yeah. And just for the listener out there, I am ENTP So, - It's one of those. It's one of those things, they people ask you, what's your Myers Briggs is? And so you got to take a test at some point, you know, be able to, it's not quite, it's not quite like your astrological symbol, but it's of similar ubiquity.
Yeah everybody knows it. I mean, the problem with the test is largely the typing aspect, which is problematic. I mean, you're taking a continuous dimension, that's normally distributed, and you're slicing it in half at the high point of the distribution, which means that we can float back and forth between types, which is a silly thing to think of, right? We it's not a type, if that's, that could be the case. And so that's, that's the fundamental weakness of the of the way the test is used, the questions are fine. The scoring of generally speaking is fine typing that dimension is the problem. And always has been, and then when people criticize that, that's fine. So take, take your types with with a slight grain of salt, you can change if you don't watch out. And you should take the test again, just to see.
Yeah, and so I guess that's question that I have. You mentioned IQ as part of personality. And, you know, we all know that IQ, if you retest, there's some noise around it. I mean, probably like, you know, probably a normal standard deviation of the population. With personality tests, I mean, how good is the measurement?
Well, I mean, it's a different measurement, then then an IQ test, for example, it's not usually a test of maximal performance, which is what we're asking people when they're taking an ability test. You know, show me how smart you can be on this or show me how high you can jump. With a personality test. We're asking typicality as opposed to maximal performance. And so there's a little more noise in that than there is in the in the maximal performance tests at the same time, across time windows that are pretty significant, like a year to 10 years, you know, you're getting a tremendous amount of continuity in that space. And even if you're asking the question in a different way, and it might be a little more noisy because of that, what you say about yourself now is typically going to correlate quite highly with what you say about yourself in five years. I always like breaking this down and kind of odds for my students, basically, given the the modal level of correlation on self report on personality over seven years, you got to 75 to an 80% chance of seeing the same person in the mirror seven years from now. And that's for an undergraduate. For people our age, closer and middle age, it's actually higher, we're more we're more consistent than, than younger folks, especially. And so you have more like an 80-85 Chance 85% chance of seeing the same person in the mirror. And you know, that's not not trivial, to say the least. Now, if you go out over longer time windows, like 30-40 years, the correlation is a lot lower, and the probability of getting hits is more modest. 60 65%, whereas cognitive ability, you're still getting 75% over a lifetime. Because the stability for that's a little bit higher. So there's more room for change, at least in the way we measure personality than there is it seems in cognitive functioning.
Alright, so I guess a question that I have is that, you know, you're talking about change. I've had friends who've claimed that they've changed their personality, like gone from extremely introverted, to kind of in the middle, like normal functioning, I don't know. And then other friends who were, I don't know, not open and they became more open. So is that possible? Can you just go through therapy and change?
Well yeah, we know, we know the answer to that question now. Yes. So a lot of my research was dedicated to trying to figure out the naturalistic patterns of growth and continuity in personality. And the message we got from passive observational longitudinal studies, tracking people over decades, was that most of us actually do change with time very gradually, not dramatically in any given period of life. But you know, over the life course, a pretty large change in terms of things like emotional stability, we all get much less anxious as we age than we were when we are in our 20s, for example, which is a wonderful thing, right? I mean, it's good to know that you can get to look forward to that the change decade to decade is pretty modest, a quarter of a standard deviation, nothing too big. But it did invite the question of the obvious follow up question, well, if we are changing like that over a long period of time, then is it possible to do something about it. And so we started going down that rabbit hole about 15 years ago, and we looked over the shoulder of our colleagues in clinical psychology and a paper in 2017, where the clinicians had bothered to assess personality traits along with their other dimensions that they care about, and found that seeing a therapist resulted in about a half a standard deviation of change in neuroticism, over periods of weeks, and months, as opposed to years. So, you know, one way to look at that is to say that by seeing a therapist, you get about a half of a life of change on a personality trait, which is a lot. And that's about it, you know, half a standard deviation is very close to the way you describe it. Like if you're really, really, really low, you're going to come up, you know, you're not going to become an extrovert. But you're going to come up close to the middle of the range. And that's not insignificant for some of us who maybe were quiet when we were young and needed to be acquire some of those extraversion skills for the jobs we needed. And so that's been shown recently. And then we follow that up by doing studies with non clinical populations, because we didn't want the confound of people suffering and going to a therapist as as a as an issue. So we did intervention studies with people who weren't suffering from any form of psychopathology. And we found the same amount of change. So if somebody wants to change their agreeableness, and you give them the tools to do so, which are not too exotic, that you could base it off of most of the CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, models and clinical psychology, you can change agreeableness to the tune of a half a standard deviation also. And that's, we're finding really consistent effects. We don't know whether these stick or whether the change is functional in the sense that it might predict outcomes. We know it correlates with outcomes, we just don't know. You know, for example, one of the reasons I studied conscientiousness was because it predicts longevity, people who are conscientious live longer. I don't know if I increase your conscientious by a quarter of a standard deviation, whether I'm giving you six more months of life. And those are the types of things we're wanting to investigate now and trying to so So yeah, you can change your personality.
Well, so you mentioned - you were mentioning, you know, therapy and stuff like that. What about medication? I know there's anxiety. medication and stuff like that.
Yeah, we looked at that in the 2017 paper, you know, the not too surprising finding there was that it didn't matter what form of therapy you went through, they all resulted in psychological change. This is the dodo bird effect that the clinical psychologist will talk about. And it's been one of their albatrosses. So those deeply held theoretical positions, you know, psychoanalytic or Rosarian, or whatever, it don't really matter when it comes to your patients, and change. And the same was true for personality. And the same was true for psychotropic type medications or pharmaceutical interventions. You know, the problem in that space, though, is is how many of those RCTs were not published? I don't know. But in that study in the published literature, the effect sizes for you know, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are the primary Med, were the same as any other therapy. And, yeah, I would like to know more, I don't I, I have to admit, I'm a skeptic. So I didn't, and still don't trust a lot of that science, some fundamental problems in RCTs of humans, it ends up being a study of the cooperative individuals who stay with you. And, and then, of course, given what we know about publication bias, and the fact that if you don't find an effect, you don't publish it, it makes you a bit cautious about what's out there. We did the meta analysis, we did all the adjustments, it's still it's still there, if you do the adjustments, but I'm skeptical, I don't trust.
Okay, we got it, we got that's part of your personality. So I guess a question that I have then is, in terms of personality, and changes, I have kind of a hypothesis, that what culture you grow up in affects kind of the distribution of personality. So like, if you go to Finland, people, they're extremely introverted. And if you go to Italy, people there are not that introverted. Now, I don't, I'm not like rejecting that there could be like, biological genetic differences, but it seems to me, what counts as extroverted and introverted in Italy, and Finland is very different. And you just express yourself kind of on a cultural distribution. Does that sound crazy to you?
No, not at all. I mean, and it's, it's a highly fraught area of research, because nobody's funding that, and it is very hard for us to do really good studies, you really need some objective indices of personality or, you know, like, like the cognitive ability test, some maximal performance test, we don't have those yet. And so it's been very difficult for us to understand and calibrate the measures across cultures. In fact, I would say at this stage, I wouldn't trust any of the comparisons of people across cultures in terms of means. You know, I always talk about this in relationship to crosscultural findings, we call it the Japan problem. Japan, score is the lowest on almost every subjective rating scale ever done by the OECD and the PIAAC, or the the PISA study. And it's not because they are actually that bad. It's just they're very modest when it comes to saying anything good about themselves. And so they don't score high on conscientiousness, to actually actually score below Western societies that the group that scores the highest are people from the Middle East. I have no idea why that is. But it could be cultural norms. It could be cultural expectations, who knows? We don't have the data to be able to say objectively Yeah, people in Finland or in Sweden, are shyer and less likely to talk. They might be. But we haven't done the right science to be able to justify that I don't doubt that those things occur. And if they exist, having travelled the globe myself, I've seen it also. But I don't think the science is there yet. When it comes to being able to successfully compare these people at the mean level when it comes to like the meaning of these dimensions. You know, we just got done with a study. It's under review, looking at conscientiousness predicting achievement across all of the OECD countries, 64 different countries, it correlates the same across almost every - 61 Out of the 64 countries, including Japan, where they don't say they're conscientious but within Japan, the dimension of conscientiousness predicts achievement as it would anywhere else. So there's there is information you can glean about personality across the globe, but those mean level comparisons beyond our anecdotes or anec data. We are science hasn't caught up with that and we need better tools of measurement wise to be able to make any any concrete conclusions.
So I guess I do have a question relating to outcome. It makes sense that or not makes sense. I've read I've heard conscientiousness obviously correlates with things like income employment
No, actually not income. Employment education, job performance, better relationship outcomes, health
Razib: But not income, okay.
Income is surprisingly difficult to predict. It's better predicted by things like vocational interests, if you're interested in going into enterprising jobs or you know, business and finance, you earn more money, no big surprise there. And those are not as strongly predicted by things like the Big Five, as you might expect, and conscientiousness, not so much. And a lot of really hard working people are very conventional, and they go into jobs that don't make them a lot of money. You know, if you're a farmer, you're working harder than most of us. And you're not rich.
That's fair. That's fair. So I mean, I guess the question that I had for the Big Five, though, in terms of so I've heard that, or I've read, the extroverts tend to, I don't know, like in the job in the workplace, they tend to stand out because they tend to praise themselves, maybe I don't know. I'm extroverted myself, so I'm not trying to like hate, but you know, what I'm saying? So how does that shake out personality versus the other dimensions?
You mean, in terms of their function in society? And how people do?
Yeah, just like, what's your employment rate? And, you know, I’m assuming if you're like, you know, if you're a very, if you're a very introverted person, you're probably more likely to be an accountant than a salesperson. Okay?
Right. So extraversion does relate to the enterprising jobs. And so you're more likely to go into things like sales, you do emerge as a leader and you get chosen as a leader. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily evidence that you're a good leader. It obviously depends on what kind of leadership role you're in, if you're in one that that requires inspiration. And, you know, that kind of oratory that an extrovert might be able to do a little bit better than yes, but if the a lot of leadership positions, as you know, and especially in management tends to be transactional, and you need to structure people's lives, you don't need to be extroverted for that kind of role. So it really does depend on what form of leadership, we do know that the extroverts you know, they get picked up by by society and social engagements more, they suffer a little bit, they tend to be a little bit impulsive. So there's a facet of extraversion called sensation seeking. So they're going to take some more risks, and they're going to suffer some of the consequences. They don't study as well as other students, for example, they're out having fun, which might end up getting them a really good job because of the social connections they make. But they'll have a slightly lower GPA. And they're also happier, there's a robust strong correlation between extraversion and happiness, there's a little construct overlap there that the which is a confound. Back to the income issue. Nice guys earn less money. And so you see a pretty good robust effect there. It's not so much for women. But for men, if you're nice, you tend not to earn as much money. And it turns out, it's not because you don't ask for it or because you don't go in the right job. It's because you just you're not very materialistic. And so you don't value money as much as other people so you don't pursue it. Which is, which is interesting. Obviously, agreeableness is related to lots of positive outcomes and interpersonal settings. We'd like our supervisors to be agreeable, we rate them higher if they are and their job performance because we like them and they like us. So it definitely results in lots of positive things in interpersonal settings. conscientiousness as I said, you know, relationship outcomes, work outcomes, educational outcomes, health outcomes. Longevity is kind of one of one of the the big pillars of personality for when it comes to predicting important things. neuroticism, emotional stability is your primary domain for emotional health, and psychopathology. So, that's the big to conscientiousness, and neuroticism for a lot of things. And then openness, of course, is the font of creativity. It's where we find innovation and, and, you know, the Silicon Valley folks who want us to find the next startup are desperately searching for the innovators, the innovators are high on, on openness to experience. And you know, that it plays a significant role especially in in creative occupations and things like scientific creativity.
Yeah, so just, you know, being a little narcissistic or self absorbed, a friend of mine said that, you know, one of my - I think the characteristics that are unique about me is I am extremely open, extremely extroverted, but I'm also not stupid there's a lot of open extroverted people they have not read a book in many years. — it's not that their IQs are low. It's just like, they prioritize, you know, shooting the shit, you know,
Or going to Crystal shops and you know, me healing themselves in creative, interesting ways.
Yeah, yeah. I -
Think ceremonies, and you know, there's lots of different ways you can manifest openness, high openness, high extraversion. Not just Intellectual, so that's why you need to know about their IQ, too.
Yeah. So I'm in the startup world. And I will say, you know, stylized fact, you know, you know, I'm in tech, and so there's usually a CTO, CEO. And then sometimes you have a COO, or like, if you're a science company, a CSO. And it's like, you know, you go out on pitches together, if you're the founding team and the CTO, it's just a lot of times, candidly, it's just understood, CTO is not going to talk, just quiet, nerdy engineer, they're just going to be there to answer like, technical questions, the CEO is going to be kind of a voluble bullshitter. You know. So I was just, I just think it's funny, because if it's not to type, so for example, I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna say because, like,
Brent: you were going to say something regrettable?
No, not regrettable, but I have some friends who are prominent Tech people. And it's a situation where the CEO is very, very, I won't say retiring, but quiet and is a good listener. And that's great as a CEO, but it can be a little weird sometimes when they have to go on, I don't know, Joe Rogan, to talk about the company, because there's another person on the team who, honestly, they probably should be going on Rogan, but they're not the CEO. So I don't know. It's just, you know,
Right, you know, back to the leadership - you can get leadership through competence or, you know, force and, and people choose different strategies, and you put different people in those those roles, and they'll adopt different strategies. So, now narcissism as you know, the big five parlance is high extraversion, low agreeableness, a little bit of high openness, no neuroticism. So,
Okay stop talking about me, man.
Am I @ing you? Are you feeling self conscious?
No, I just like because I am like, not very agreeable. I am pretty open and I am very extroverted.
Yeah, well, let's just say you would have the vulnerability for the syndrome.
You're not - Yeah, you can't diagnose me, right. You're not a you're not an MD. So I have a question. We are talking a little bit, we're talking about, you know, plasticity and variation. But let's talk about heritability. What's the heritability of these constructs? We're talking big five in particular, since we've been talking about that, you know, I mean, like IQ, for example, like .5 is a rule of thumb, some people might be a little higher, a little lower. What's up? What's going on with personality?
Same thing. But like every other construct in psychology, they are heritable to the tune of about 50%, on average, and it is equally meaningless. In the sense that you can't really infer much, if anything from that number, or that estimate, estimates are predominantly from twin studies of adult twins. And so that heritability estimate is embedded with a tremendous amount of developmental context that is unknown and unknowable. And so it's not, you know, this kind of, there's a very easy association to make, once you hear heritability, oh, what you get at conception is going to drive what your personality is. Well, you know, there's some some wrinkles in the data that are really awkward for people who want to make that inference, like the correlation between your temperament when you're an infant, and a toddler is almost zero with what you're like as an adult. So if there's some heritability great, there's a genetic signal, but it's a really complex genetic signal that's going to be played out because of developmental context. And we don't have any clue at this point, what those developmental contexts are, or those genes are that go into that, you know, from the GWAS type studies. You know, it's it's a, any Big Five trait, or trait domain is over determined by 1000s and 1000s of genetic variants that are particular to different populations and different, you know, historical epics. So it's, you know, yeah, it's heritable. The twin folks, for various reasons, haven't done the work to say whether the heritability is at all correlated with immutability, which is, in my mind, the fundamental question, the question really isn't, whether it's something we're looking at as heritable or not, it's whether it's changeable. And whether it's changeable in a way that's functional for society and for the individual. And so, you know, and I don't, I've never seen any study, to date, I'm sure it could be done. That would show that there is an upper or lower limit on changeability dictated by genetics. They just, they can't do the study because it's politically unfeasible. But it's also hard to do. And there's very little motivation, and this is there's a tendency to make a quick and easy leap from the heritability estimates. Oh, you're stuck with yourself. And that's not what we're seeing. Well, I say we're seeing a more complex picture and the developmental and the intervention literature. The idea that personality is ever immutable. And there is a camp of people out there who will say that is a fiction. It's, it's, I call it hopium. It's what people want to hear is that their personality isn't going to cause them problems. And that's a false statement. And there are a lot of social scientists who would like to invoke hopium in order to get clicks on on social media or get on Joe Rogan
Razib: or grant funding.
Grant funding is not insignificant or foundation funding, you know, if you go into education spheres, and you say to foundations, oh, I'm going to change the lives of 5000 students by giving them a 15 minute, you know, affirmation intervention. You know, the tech folks that you work with seem to be free, free and easy with their money for very little data. And they're highly they're, they're easily convinced by hopium, that they should relinquish their hard earned money for - I don’t know if it's hard earned or not. They're voluminous money to these situations. And what we see in the data is a tweener. It's an in between thing, right? We don't see this kind of fixedness that you get from the heritability kind of essentialism perspective, you don't get the ever fluid changeability from the hopium folks. You get this in between picture where there's a tremendous amount of continuity and who we are, you're not going to be different tomorrow. But there's development then, which shows that humans as a species have to be sensitive to their conditions, but in a slow way. You know, we're not transformed overnight, by our experiences. When we go through a trauma or we go through a major life change, we're still the same person on the other side. Changes might occur. And they might accumulate with time. But they're more subtle. And so it's a story that nobody likes, that I’ve been telling for about 30 years now. Because it doesn't, you know, it disabuses the essentialist of the idea that everything is just genetic, and we don't have to worry about it. And it doesn't conform to the hopium seller who's saying that I can change people in a heartbeat. And but that's the empirical truth that we see. So I always harp - Sorry, I'm pontificating, but when it comes to heritability, these are the issues that come up. And I think the real issue is not heritability, it’s changeability. How much do people change how much they can be changed? The rest is gravy. I mean, I don't want to I don't want to stop the careers of my friends in genetics, who want to do this research. It’s cool, basic research and everything. But it's not from my perspective, Foundational or fundamental to the question, at least the human question, the human question is all can I change you? And how much can I change you?
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's interesting. Um, quick question, does the heritability increase with age like with IQ?
No, not with personality traits, the big mystery on on the personality side of things, but they think it's just a question of power is the missing heritability between the twin estimates and the GWAS estimates, the initial GWAS estimates for personality were a lot lower than we expected, on the GWAS side of things. So with IQ and education, you know, it’s low but was like, Okay, we could see that the signal was there. And if they cranked up the quality or the numbers, they would get to something like height where you can, you can reproduce most of the variance. That hasn't come as easily for personality. My friends who are experts in that space, tell me that it's just a question of numbers, once they get up to the million people that's required to do a good GWAS test of something, you'll see the same kind of picture. But it doesn't seem to change with age. So, which is an interesting thing, it's something we see, if you look at the life course patterns, personality traits change more in adulthood than the change in childhood IQ changes more in childhood than it does in adulthood. And, and that's where you might get that heritability change, or shift for IQ. As people are getting into their adult roles, you know, and you get into your job and your career. And that's pretty much going to dictate your cognitive stimulation. Personality on the other hand, you know, those jobs come with different expectations at different times, you could have different relationships at different times. You have kids, you have, you know, different roles you play, you go into leadership positions, so you have more, you know, external conditions on your personality traits that will drive changes that happen at different times over a life course. So we're not seeing that very simple, you know, higher or change or increase in heritability as people get older.
Okay, okay, that's good to know. Just real quickly, um, do you know, do you know about, like, you know, the number of children or something that someone has, is there any relationship to personality?
Yeah, there's some studies along those lines that are relatively small effects. But there are some, in some of the evolutionary folks want to make the argument that, you know, that might be one of the ways in which personality is transmitted. Now, the heritability belies something that also doesn't turn out to be true, which is personality doesn't breed true. There's a tremendous amount of dominance heritability in personality more so than something like IQ. And so the the modal correlation between parents and kids is pretty low. It's more in the range of .15 And so we're not seeing a lot of breeding true, so to speak, as they use in the genetics literature when it comes to personality, which is fascinating. I personally think that's, you know, one of the coolest findings, I always hoist that on my undergraduates. Because if you think about it, it answers a lot of fundamental questions about family dynamics, you know, you're thrown into a family, and you're forced to be together for your entire life. And the probability is that you're not like each other personality wise, despite the fact that you share the same parents, and half your genes. And that's because the heritability is not there, in the sense of breeding true, there's a lot of dominance heritability, which means you have unique variants from genes that you couldn't predict from either parent. And that just makes for all those wonderful Thanksgiving dinners, which we're just about to have, where people have, you know, qualitatively different personalities and views of life coming together because they're forced to. Makes for interesting-
That's interested. So the genetic architecture is different, because you know, as you said, with IQ or height, it's additive. So you just kind of do a linear, it's just a linear model, you do the averages, you regress to the mean. And then when you have dominance or gene gene interactions, who knows what's going on? It's harder to do that, like straight line prediction, you get this like, so what is dominant to what like, you know, because it's traits that are dominant, like, are extroverts dominant to Introverts are like, What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean, just in terms of the heritability estimates, the correlations amongst the MZ twins are a little too high. Comparatively speaking.
So heritability in the narrow sense versus heritability in the broad sense.
Yeah broad sense. We don't, we don't have we don't have as much access to the broad sense heritability with the GWASs, eventually, I think we could get there.
Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes a link to what we mean by that. It's not mysterious, but I don't really want to get into it.
It’s the weeds I understand.
It’s all good. But I do have a question, though, related to evolution, because that's where I was, you know, you're starting with the heritability and I was asked you about fitness. You know, we we have variation on personality, like, we have variation in height, and like, we have variation in intelligence, you know, and, like, why do we vary? Like, you know, so let me be concrete about it. It seems to me, you can make a plausible evolutionary narrative, that a group where everybody is introverted, or a group where everybody is extroverted might not be the optimal group for functioning.
Right. Right. Yeah. And, you know, it is this is a timeless question that evolutionary folks have invested a lot of energy in, and I'm very sympathetic to their challenge, in this case. Now, I mean, fundamental to heritability is variability. So one of my favorite theories about why that personality exists is because you know, it's attached to the pinky gene, or, and is entirely inconsequential. And you just vary, because that's the way the genetic system works is it creates variability. Beautiful study, recently of one of our biology students looking at fish clones, clonal fish, and individual differences and how they they actually emerged at birth and spread, despite the fact that they were clones, and that they were raised in the same environments and everything. So, I mean, there's, there's lots of really good evidence that the variability is there from the get go. So you could be crass and some of the Tooby and Cosmides put this forward, which was one of my favorite ironic ideas, personality is just simply attach to your appendix. And it's not really consequential and there's variability but it just because that's what happens. I don't think that's the case. But then you then ask a bunch of really interesting kind of societal, evolutionary questions, which are, do we find any societies like you just described are there places where people don't speak, or they're not social, or they're not nice or not nice to each other, or they're not hard working versus something else. And, you know, so far, we haven't found societies where one of the domains of the Big Five, can't be found, right? We get arguments over what would be reliable and the like. But when you look at the variability in the way people talk about themselves and talk about others, you see variability in the Big Five in every country that we've ever examined. Now, there are places where it breaks down, but this might just be psychometrics. Like we go to the continent of Africa, things don't work very well. But also you have populations that are not used to rating themselves on five point Likert scales, which for some reason we're really good at which is perverse. So we don't know why if you go into a specific, you know, subgroup in Sub Saharan Africa, you don't get the big five, but you also see these variabilities and can observe them. So they exist everywhere. That then really does beg the question, why high and low? And they're they've got lots of, you know, lots of theories, you know, balancing selection, you know, as you said, like, maybe In a certain period, extroverts get you know, deselected for whatever reason, but then you know, a generation later it reverses. And then you get that kind of variability, that basic, easy balancing selection. There's frequency dependent stories that people tell, you know, the existence of cheaters in any society, which by our definition, are low in conscientiousness, and low and agreeableness. These are the people who don't care about others or care about consequences of their actions for others. And, you know, one way they get they survive is by taking advantage of the fact that the majority of people are trusting and are willing to work together and to cooperate and to do things to survive as a group. And then they get to exploit us because we don't ask questions of their behavior. And they do things like steal our money, and take our credit card numbers and do all the different things that they do. And they, they thrive. And by doing so they pass their genes on. So those are some of the stories that are told in the evolutionary ranks about why we maintain these individual differences. As you know, these are all cool stories that we have very thin data to support, but we do tell the stories.
Well, so you brought up you brought up cheaters. So I want to ask as we're closing out psychopaths, you know, this is super popular topic, and people talk about it all the time. Are they a real thing? And what's their personality profile? Like? I assume they're disagreeable?
Yeah, I mean, you've got garden variety, sociopaths, which tend to be more on the the delinquency side of things in the clinical sense. They tend to be low conscientiousness, more, they're gonna they might actually be suffering. So they're going to be a little bit higher in neuroticism. But that's somebody who's like screwed up their life in the adolescents by committing a crime and getting thrown in jail and going down the wrong path. Psychopaths, you know, you've got the florid kind and the less florid kind, the less florid, kind are really low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, people like Don Lyneham over at Purdue, who studies these issues really says it's just low agreeableness, it's antagonism, it's your lack of emotional, and let's say cultural connection to the well being of other people. You don't care about other people, you don't care what you do to them. And that makes you willing to exploit them and not feel any guilt or shame some of those interpersonal feelings in relationship to their suffering. That's all agreeableness and conscientiousness, then you've got the type that are florid or let's say charismatic psychopaths, you know, obviously, those people have other flavors of the Big Five, like a charismatic psychopath, or sociopath is going to be high on extraversion. And so, you know, the core seems to be this antipathy towards the well being of others and rules. And then you get different styles depending upon what other ways they score on other dimensions of personality. So your your tech folks who could be a psychopath by being extroverted and open, really low on agreeableness, and conscientiousness. And then, you know, they look really quite compelling and dynamic and tell a good story might be seen as innovators, but then they exploit the bejesus out of other people. So, so yeah.
Wow, Yeah, have -
I put chances in there so that I wasn't @ing you completely. So
Yeah, I mean, narcissistic, psychopathic, like, this is
Well psychopaths and narcissists are side by side so that there's there Yeah, in the clinical literature, those domains are not really that categorical thing that the clinicians and the psychiatrists do is totally like the MBTI a nonstarter that those don't exist. And when we look at the dimensional systems, what classically are called sociopaths and psychopaths are sitting right next to narcissists. And they do share a lot of qualities so -
Well, okay, so, I guess the question that I want to ask you, as we're closing out, is, what's up with ? Like, what in psychology in personality psychology, do you wish people would know? You know, that they don't know.
I think that story about changeability. You know, because a lot, you know, in the public discourse, we have, we do a lot of decision making based on models of human nature, right? Like, you know, how should we intervene for these kids who are stealing things from retail operations? Oh, throw them at a bootcamp or how should we, you know, how should we help students who need social emotional skills training, to do a two week boot camp, you know, the hopium side of things, we let that idea guide a lot of what we do, and it runs completely contrary to the what we know about human nature. Same thing with the you know, ah, you're born to a couple of psychopaths, we're going to lock you up and throw away the key and not think about rehabilitation. It's a silly idea, and it's not, you know, it's not pragmatic and it cost us a lot of money. And there are other options. You know, you could ask questions like, you know, what can I do with this person? How much can I do? What will it take, you might not be willing as a society to pay the money or the cost, you know, the bill for that. But either of those opposing positions which seem to dominate public discourse when it comes to how we function as a society. Just don't conform to what we see in the data, the data are that that tweener picture that you know, yeah, we have a lot of continuity in who we are, but we do change and then the question really becomes how much can we change and to what purpose and having that conversation with society would be a lot more productive if people understood that?
Well, Brett, it was great talking to you. You know, I did pepper you with a lot of questions. I feel like you know, you kind of like the Encyclopedia of personality psychology.
I was teaching - I'm teaching personality psychology right now. I've got my undergraduate lecture hat on. I’ve been doing this for 12 weeks straight so it's a good time to catch me
Great conversation, I learned a lot I'm assuming the listeners did learn a lot. I will say your personality you're very congenial
It is a high stakes situation I'm I'm talking to strangers and and trying to be compelling so I tried to put on a good act.
1000s and 1000s of strangers no pressure.
So self presentation is a real thing.
All right. It was great talking to you Brent.
Good talking to you too.
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcast.
