Cassie Hayward: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people,
Cassie Hayward: the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay
Cassie Hayward: respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging.
Cassie Hayward: From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University
Cassie Hayward: of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.
Nick Haslam: Hello and thanks for joining us again on PsychTalks. We're
Nick Haslam: thrilled to be back unpacking the latest research in psychology
Nick Haslam: and neuroscience. I'm Professor Nick Haslam here with my wonderful co-host,
Nick Haslam: Associate Professor Cassie Hayward.
Cassie Hayward: Thanks, Nick. And I think what we are exploring today
Cassie Hayward: is really going to fascinate many of our listeners at home,
Cassie Hayward: particularly anyone who's ever completed an online personality test or
Cassie Hayward: done one in a doctor's office magazine.
Cassie Hayward: We're looking at what many psychologists in the field call
Cassie Hayward: prosocial personality. Our guest today is Professor Luke Smillie, who's
Cassie Hayward: a leading researcher in this area and whose work has
Cassie Hayward: been very diverse, ranging from understanding the structure of personality
Cassie Hayward: to its role in well-being and its neural underpinnings. So,
Cassie Hayward: let's dive in.
Nick Haslam: Welcome, Luke. So what do we mean by prosocial personality?
Luke Smillie: Well, prosocial personality is an umbrella term to capture a
Luke Smillie: range of individual differences in, in our personality traits or
Luke Smillie: psychological characteristics that are in some way other-regarding, so regarding others.
Luke Smillie: People vary in how other-regarding they are.
Luke Smillie: So some are more willing to help others or cooperate.
Luke Smillie: Uh, they're more moved to feel empathy for a person.
Luke Smillie: And these differences are relatively stable over time.
Luke Smillie: Um, for many people, prosocial personality is a bit of
Luke Smillie: an uncomfortable notion. We want to believe deep down that
Luke Smillie: all people, we're all the same and we're all fundamentally
Luke Smillie: good or decent.
Luke Smillie: And that may be true to some extent, but at
Luke Smillie: the same time, we recognise people aren't interchangeable. I find
Luke Smillie: it hard to imagine that anyone would struggle to identify
Luke Smillie: someone in their life who was exceptionally kind or helpful
Luke Smillie: or generous or empathic. And if we can single out
Luke Smillie: such individuals, then we acknowledge that people differ in their prosociality.
Nick Haslam: Cassie's like that. I'll just say, um, I'll single her
Nick Haslam: out here. But yeah, I mean, this idea that people
Nick Haslam: differ in their concern for others or in their, um,
Nick Haslam: moral goodness.
Nick Haslam: I, I think it is pretty intuitive for most of us,
Nick Haslam: but it's also been a controversial idea within our field, right? Um,
Nick Haslam: so you'll know the famous study by Hartshorne and May,
Nick Haslam: where they got a bunch of kids, um, almost a
Nick Haslam: century ago, uh, and found that those who are honest
Nick Haslam: in one context weren't necessarily honest in another.
Nick Haslam: And their work's been used to challenge the very idea
Nick Haslam: that there is such a thing as moral character. So
Nick Haslam: what's the evidence that we do have consistent differences in
Nick Haslam: how prosocial we behave?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, that's right, the results of the Hartshorne and May study, um,
Luke Smillie: prompted some debate that lasted well into the late 20th century.
Luke Smillie: But much of the debate over its implications really came
Luke Smillie: down to how that data could best be analysed and interpreted.
Luke Smillie: One issue was that they had analysed individual pairs of behaviours,
Luke Smillie: but we now know that we need to sample across
Luke Smillie: many instances of behaviour before you can estimate consistency very well.
Luke Smillie: And later studies that did this, including using Hartshorne and
Luke Smillie: May's data, found much stronger evidence for consistency.
Luke Smillie: The other issue was that psychologists had a pretty simplistic
Luke Smillie: understanding of the idea of consistency, and thought that anything
Luke Smillie: short of perfect stability implied no stability at all.
Nick Haslam: Right, I hadn't realised there were so many criticisms. What
Nick Haslam: about the modern evidence then?
Luke Smillie: Well, the modern evidence comes from a variety of areas
Luke Smillie: within and beyond psychology. So beyond psychology, in economics, behavioural
Luke Smillie: economists have found stable and systematic differences in how people
Luke Smillie: behave towards others in controlled experiments of cooperation, generosity, sharing,
Luke Smillie: and so on.
Luke Smillie: In psychological science, essentially every model psychologists have put forward
Luke Smillie: of personality traits, uh, include one distinctly prosocial trait. People
Luke Smillie: are likely to be familiar with the Big Five. This
Luke Smillie: is really one of the success stories of 20th century
Luke Smillie: psychology in terms of robust and replicable findings. The Big
Luke Smillie: Five is a framework for organising the many, many, many
Luke Smillie: different ways that people differ from one another.
Luke Smillie: Um, you could think of it as like a latitude
Luke Smillie: and longitude of personality space, if you like. So whereas
Luke Smillie: latitude and longitude are just two dimensions, the Big Five
Luke Smillie: are 5 dimensions that try to capture all the important
Luke Smillie: psychological characteristics that vary between people. The Big Five includes
Luke Smillie: a trait called agreeableness, which essentially describes how cooperative and
Luke Smillie: compassionate and respectful a person generally is.
Luke Smillie: And in clinical psychology, psychologists have long recognised personality disorders
Luke Smillie: marked by antisocial tendencies, um, such as antisocial personality disorder
Luke Smillie: in the DSM and psychopathy, uh, which is assessed in
Luke Smillie: clinical but also forensic settings. These are traditionally studies as categories,
Luke Smillie: so you either have the disorder or not, uh, but
Luke Smillie: as you would know, Nick, uh, the field is moving
Luke Smillie: towards more dimensional models
Luke Smillie: based on the evidence that people don't really differ according
Luke Smillie: to these categories, we differ by degree.
Cassie Hayward: So Luke, with all of those examples, it's kind of
Cassie Hayward: looking at prosocial personality as if it's a single thing.
Cassie Hayward: Is it unitary or are there different ways of being prosocial?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, as I said at the beginning, prosociality, we could
Luke Smillie: think of it as a broad umbrella construct. And there's
Luke Smillie: many distinctions we could make within that broad space. So
Luke Smillie: if we take agreeableness that I just mentioned,
Luke Smillie: That can be divided into politeness and compassion. Um, and
Luke Smillie: there are some interesting distinctions between politeness and compassion. Often
Luke Smillie: people have assumed, uh, interpreted a finding in terms of compassion,
Luke Smillie: and it turns out to be driven by politeness. Um,
Luke Smillie: so one example from my own work concerns particular moral
Luke Smillie: judgments that people make about the, the wrongness of a,
Luke Smillie: of a moral action. There was a literature that suggested
Luke Smillie: that these were primarily driven by people's compassion.
Luke Smillie: That these situations are making judgments about triggered concern and empathy, uh,
Luke Smillie: but it turned out in our work at least that
Luke Smillie: they were driven primarily by politeness.
Luke Smillie: Which is more about a person's etiquette or respectfulness, the
Luke Smillie: degree to which they adhere to salient social rules and norms.
Cassie Hayward: So which is better? What should I teach my kids
Cassie Hayward: to do, have empathy or just have good manners?
Luke Smillie: That's a hard question and it seems unlikely that one
Luke Smillie: is better than the other in all ways. Also depends
Luke Smillie: on what you mean by better. Both have features and
Luke Smillie: consequences we might feel are good things. People intuitively probably
Luke Smillie: feel compassion is more desirable.
Luke Smillie: Um, but there's some really interesting ideas about how compassion
Luke Smillie: can be undesirable in unexpected ways. I'm thinking of work
Luke Smillie: by Paul Bloom, the American psychologist, who suggested that compassion
Luke Smillie: and empathy is something we often feel more readily for
Luke Smillie: any particular targets. It's easy to feel compassion for somebody
Luke Smillie: like your kids, but maybe a bit harder to feel
Luke Smillie: compassion for people very dissimilar to you. So Paul Bloom
Luke Smillie: argues that compassion can actually be,
Luke Smillie: somewhat parochial at times, um, and not always a good thing.
Nick Haslam: So can being prosocial be boiled down just to compassion
Nick Haslam: and politeness then, or is there more to it?
Luke Smillie: Uh, no, there are many more distinctions we could make. Um,
Luke Smillie: one that I'd highlight from a different personality model to
Luke Smillie: the Big Five, it's a trait called honesty-humility. Um, it's
Luke Smillie: got this kind of awkward hyphenated, double-barrelled name.
Luke Smillie: Um, Another simpler term for it is sometimes integrity. This
Luke Smillie: describes the degree to which a person is straightforward and non-manipulative,
Luke Smillie: not motivated to put themselves ahead of others, and that
Luke Smillie: predicts many outcomes that we care about, such as lower
Luke Smillie: likelihood of engaging in criminal behaviour or even infidelity, unethical
Luke Smillie: decision making, and a range of socially consequential outcomes. But
Luke Smillie: all of these constructs we're discussing are still relatively broad.
Luke Smillie: There are many more specific traits that we could zoom
Luke Smillie: in on like trust, modesty, perspective taking.
Luke Smillie: And interestingly, some traits that don't seem inherently concerned with
Luke Smillie: prosocial behaviour can have prosocial implications. So people might have
Luke Smillie: heard of a trait called openness to experience, which predicts
Luke Smillie: concern for animals and the environment, for example.
Cassie Hayward: And Luke, your work really has clarified those personality traits
Cassie Hayward: that underlie being prosocial, but it's also revealed how these
Cassie Hayward: prosocial traits are related to real world behaviour. Can you
Cassie Hayward: give us some more examples of that real world behaviour research?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, I mean, people have looked at a range of
Luke Smillie: outcomes that these traits might predict, including how much they
Luke Smillie: volunteer or donate to charity, um, decisions that they might
Luke Smillie: make in terms of, for example, whether they pursue a
Luke Smillie: career that enables them to do more good in the world, um,
Luke Smillie: what they want to happen after they die, uh, for example,
Luke Smillie: in the case of posthumous organ donation.
Luke Smillie: So one example from my own work, we recently published
Luke Smillie: a meta-analysis on personality predictors of philanthropic behaviour, looking at
Luke Smillie: charitable donations and volunteering. And we're really excited to get
Luke Smillie: this meta-analysis out there because the evidence with this kind
Luke Smillie: of often murky real world data was quite mixed, um,
Luke Smillie: but overall, what we found was that agreeableness is the
Luke Smillie: strongest trait predictor of real world charitable giving, more, more
Luke Smillie: agreeable people give more money to charities.
Luke Smillie: And interestingly, it was extroversion that predicted volunteering. This might
Luke Smillie: not necessarily suggest that extroversion is a particularly prosocial tendency,
Luke Smillie: maybe it says something a little bit more about the
Luke Smillie: kinds of situations in which volunteering occurs. It's often very,
Luke Smillie: a very social, um, outgoing activity to engage in. And
Luke Smillie: I'd say that these effects were fairly modest statistically, but
Luke Smillie: perhaps important in practical terms when you aggregate across uh
Luke Smillie: to the population level.
Luke Smillie: Another example is a recent study where we looked at
Luke Smillie: um factors that predict people's attitudes to social justice issues,
Luke Smillie: so things that are really topical at the moment, um,
Luke Smillie: attitudes towards diversity, inclusiveness, initiatives, attitudes towards gender diversity, things
Luke Smillie: like the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and
Luke Smillie: so on.
Luke Smillie: And we found that some of these same traits predicted
Luke Smillie: people's attitudes towards those social justice concerns, traits like agreeableness.
Cassie Hayward: Yeah, and some of those issues are very politicised, of course. Do,
Cassie Hayward: do the prosocial traits like agreeableness predict them over and
Cassie Hayward: above people's political orientations, or
Cassie Hayward: are some orientations just more agreeable on average?
Luke Smillie: No, we found for those highly politicised outcomes, um, it's
Luke Smillie: political attitudes that are usually, um, more important predictors, and
Luke Smillie: this makes sense. Political attitudes capture by definition, how one
Luke Smillie: thinks about political issues.
Luke Smillie: Whereas personality traits are these much broader descriptions of what
Luke Smillie: a person is like in general across many contexts. But
Luke Smillie: having said that, there's an interesting model that came out
Luke Smillie: of New Zealand that suggests that personality traits predict these
Luke Smillie: politically salient outcomes via our political attitudes. So the idea
Luke Smillie: is that someone, for example, who is more agreeable and
Luke Smillie: more open to experience, they might be more likely to
Luke Smillie: cultivate liberal or progressive political attitudes.
Luke Smillie: Which in turn are the um primary drivers or or
Luke Smillie: strong predictors I should say, of how they think about
Luke Smillie: politically salient issues like diversity and inclusiveness.
Nick Haslam: So one topic you've done some work on recently is
Nick Haslam: how prosocial personalities related to diet and especially vegetarian or
Nick Haslam: vegan diet.
Nick Haslam: Can you tell us about that work?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, so we've been interested in predicting adherence to specifically, uh, um,
Luke Smillie: ethical vegetarianism, um, so people who have decided to adopt
Luke Smillie: a vegetarian or vegan diet for ethical reasons, which we
Luke Smillie: think of as another kind of prosocial
Luke Smillie: behaviour. It's other-regarding, the others in this case are just
Luke Smillie: non-human animals. And again, this kind of real world data,
Luke Smillie: the findings have often been quite inconsistent and messy. But
Luke Smillie: we did some research recently where we combined multiple samples
Luke Smillie: across Australia, New Zealand and the US. We found that
Luke Smillie: agreeableness was a fairly consistent predictor of adherence to a
Luke Smillie: vegetarian or vegan diet.
Luke Smillie: But also that trait I mentioned before, openness to experience.
Cassie Hayward: So does that suggest that dialling up those traits can
Cassie Hayward: increase someone's propensity to take a vegetarian diet? Like a, a, a,
Cassie Hayward: you kind of hear people talk about personality being fixed,
Cassie Hayward: and we can't change it, but can you point to research
Cassie Hayward: that says you can kind of dial up and down
Cassie Hayward: those areas?
Luke Smillie: Yeah,
Luke Smillie: so some of these findings are definitely interesting for people
Luke Smillie: who study personality change, and it's, um, it is really
Luke Smillie: a persistent misconception that personality can't be changed, that it
Luke Smillie: is fixed in some way. When you think about it,
Luke Smillie: it would be quite mysterious if there was something that
Luke Smillie: was entirely fixed, you would then have to ask, well,
Luke Smillie: how is it fixed? Is it some mysterious essence within
Luke Smillie: the person?
Luke Smillie: Um, but these, uh, personality traits, these psychological characteristics, they
Luke Smillie: change and develop over time, they can be changed for intervention. Um,
Luke Smillie: they might change as a result of a significant life experience,
Luke Smillie: for example, a traumatic experience that, um, profoundly changes somebody.
Luke Smillie: And there are research areas called personality change and personality
Luke Smillie: development that have been around for decades, so this persistent
Luke Smillie: idea that personality is fixed is,
Luke Smillie: a little puzzling to me sometimes. Having said all of that,
Luke Smillie: I don't want to give the impression that personality is
Luke Smillie: limitlessly malleable, that anyone can be whoever they wanna be,
Luke Smillie: provided they get the right nudge or they buy the
Luke Smillie: right app, for example. I think that's a common message
Luke Smillie: you see in the pop psych space, uh, but I
Luke Smillie: don't think it's very much in touch with the evidence. Um,
Luke Smillie: indeed my hunches of the prominence of that message in
Luke Smillie: that self-help space
Luke Smillie: might be a reflection of the fact that change is
Luke Smillie: not so easy.
Luke Smillie: The other thing I'd just add with applications is that
Luke Smillie: we should be careful to assume that psychological stability is
Luke Smillie: not practically useful to know about. So in many instances,
Luke Smillie: maybe the most helpful thing is for a person to
Luke Smillie: really understand the kind of person that they are and
Luke Smillie: learn how to, for example, regulate their behaviours or emotions
Luke Smillie: or identify more appropriate goals for them as an individual.
Luke Smillie: Rather than tackle the possibly more difficult task of trying
Luke Smillie: to change who they are. And that's the focus of
Luke Smillie: a fascinating area of research called self-knowledge, um, and in
Luke Smillie: this area, the, the goal is to study how well
Luke Smillie: people know themselves, um, learn whether we can improve our
Luke Smillie: self-knowledge and whether there are benefits of doing so.
Nick Haslam: Uh, I mean, Luke, is there any evidence that if
Nick Haslam: you just practise prosocial behaviour, it does change your personality?
Nick Haslam: Do you become more agreeable by practising compassion or practising um
Nick Haslam: adherence to social justice values?
Cassie Hayward: We hope so, because that's what we do with kids, right?
Luke Smillie: There's there's some evidence, not so much with these pro-social traits,
Luke Smillie: but there's some evidence that by
Luke Smillie: expressing high levels of a trait, uh, you often see
Luke Smillie: the consequences that are usually associated with that trait. So
Luke Smillie: the one that's best studied and that my colleagues and
Luke Smillie: I have done some work on as well concerns extroversion,
Luke Smillie: and extroversion is a trait that predicts, um,
Luke Smillie: many measures of well-being, and it turns out that if
Luke Smillie: you get people to enact prototypical expressions of extroversion, so
Luke Smillie: getting them to be more talkative, more social and outgoing,
Luke Smillie: they experience at least temporary increases in well-being. But the
Luke Smillie: question is whether by doing that you could affect longer
Luke Smillie: term sustained increases, um, that's, that's still probably an open question.
Nick Haslam: So Luke, being prosocial is obviously good for other people.
Nick Haslam: Is it also good for ourselves? Does it improve our
Nick Haslam: own wellbeing?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and literally just yesterday
Luke Smillie: I was reading about some work by a former University
Luke Smillie: of Melbourne student, Jessie Sun.
Luke Smillie: Ah, that suggests the answer to that is yes, um,
Luke Smillie: that people who are perceived by others as more, um,
Luke Smillie: morally good people, actually, more so than prosocial, they report
Luke Smillie: higher levels of well-being themselves. So it may be that being,
Luke Smillie: more other-regarding, uh, is also beneficial to the individual in
Luke Smillie: terms of their overall happiness and satisfaction in their lives.
Cassie Hayward: So Luke, what are some of the exciting applications of
Cassie Hayward: research into prosocial personality?
Luke Smillie: So there are a few that I think are are
Luke Smillie: really interesting. Um, one is the idea of targeted or
Luke Smillie: tailored interventions.
Luke Smillie: So if you think about that finding from the meta-analysis
Luke Smillie: I mentioned, uh, showing that agreeableness predicts higher levels of
Luke Smillie: charitable donations. So one possibility is that campaigns and messaging
Luke Smillie: that tries to increase, uh, to get people to donate
Luke Smillie: money to charitable causes is appealing primarily to people high
Luke Smillie: in agreeableness. So one possibility is that we're, we're kind
Luke Smillie: of missing a big sector of the population, and through
Luke Smillie: some kind of tailored, more precision, sometimes called intervention, we
Luke Smillie: could try to uh identify messaging that would be a
Luke Smillie: bit more effective for people lower in agreeableness.
Luke Smillie: An alternative approach would be to just double down on
Luke Smillie: the most receptive audience. So some of the work we've
Luke Smillie: done on this idea of ethical vegetarianism, we did a
Luke Smillie: recent study looking at how different people respond to persuasive
Luke Smillie: appeals to not eat animals. And there are some characteristics
Luke Smillie: that predict just really not being persuaded by any ethical
Luke Smillie: argument at all. Um, so those people may be unreachable through, uh,
Luke Smillie: an ethically framed appeal to adopt a plant-based diet.
Luke Smillie: So, animal advocacy groups might be more effective if rather
Luke Smillie: than sending messages that are gonna fall on deaf ears
Luke Smillie: to target the people who are going to be the
Luke Smillie: most receptive. And at a broader level, research into prosocial
Luke Smillie: personality could potentially help intervention designers think more carefully about
Luke Smillie: what the behaviour they're seeking to promote entails for an individual.
Luke Smillie: Um, people aren't these interchangeable data points waiting just dutifully
Luke Smillie: to receive whatever intervention we have in mind. Any intervention
Luke Smillie: is going to potentially cut with or against the grain
Luke Smillie: for different people.
Luke Smillie: This was the focus of some work I did with
Luke Smillie: a former student of mine, Reb Rebele, and Reb wanted
Luke Smillie: to get the message out there that that intervention design
Luke Smillie: tends to overlook the fact that an intervention is going
Luke Smillie: to entail different things for different people. So for a
Luke Smillie: highly prosocial person, the way to get them to engage
Luke Smillie: in prosocial behaviour might be relatively simple, a simple nudge
Luke Smillie: or reminder. But for a
Luke Smillie: less prosocial person, it's possibly going to need something more,
Luke Smillie: because what you're trying to do is potentially, you're potentially
Luke Smillie: trying to get them to act in a way that's
Luke Smillie: counter dispositional or at the very least, not as familiar
Luke Smillie: or routine. So these are really different cases and perhaps
Luke Smillie: the one size fits all approach we see in the
Luke Smillie: behaviour change literature, we often see in the behaviour change literature.
Luke Smillie: overlooks a fundamental fact about human beings, which is which
Luke Smillie: we differ.
Cassie Hayward: Just on that, Luke, with the increased ability to target
Cassie Hayward: people through online advertising, so these groups might be using,
Cassie Hayward: you know, different social networks to target different ads about
Cassie Hayward: becoming plant-based or whatever the, the information, the whatever the
Cassie Hayward: the campaign is.
Cassie Hayward: Do you think that they can get a read of
Cassie Hayward: someone's personality at this sort of level from their kind
Cassie Hayward: of online presence to be able to do that targeted messaging,
Cassie Hayward: that you're kind of outlining here?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, there there's been some really impressive demonstrations of that,
Luke Smillie: one primarily in the consumer marketing space actually, where essentially
Luke Smillie: an algorithm provides an estimate of personality traits based on
Luke Smillie: a digital footprint, uh, for example, Facebook Likes.
Luke Smillie: And that is then used to select different forms of
Luke Smillie: an advertisement for the same product. So, there's some research
Luke Smillie: by Matz and colleagues, uh, about 5 to 10 years ago,
Luke Smillie: I think, showing that by actually presenting different people, the
Luke Smillie: different forms of the same advert, uh, that translated into
Luke Smillie: much higher sales. So that's in a marketing context, um,
Luke Smillie: you could see that
Luke Smillie: Uh, same logic being applied in the case of trying
Luke Smillie: to promote prosocial behaviour.
Cassie Hayward: And I think in some of our other episodes we've
Cassie Hayward: seen how much those algorithms know about us, so it's
Cassie Hayward: not beyond the scope of their targeting to, to get
Cassie Hayward: us on personality.
Luke Smillie: There's definitely a scary side to
Luke Smillie: that work that um that yeah, we, we should also
Luke Smillie: keep in mind in terms of the ethicality of, of
Luke Smillie: using those algorithms.
Nick Haslam: But let's not close on a pessimistic note. Uh, I
Nick Haslam: think it's just uh such interesting work, Luke, and just
Nick Haslam: showing how taking human variation seriously.
Nick Haslam: Uh, really enlightens us about prosocial personality. So, can you
Nick Haslam: tell us where your work's going next?
Luke Smillie: One project that I'm working on at the moment that
Luke Smillie: ties in nicely with something we talked about earlier, that
Luke Smillie: Hartshorne and May study, which was about cheating and honesty
Luke Smillie: and children. Uh, so where my colleagues and I are
Luke Smillie: doing some studies on both the personality and situational predictors
Luke Smillie: of lying. We were actually trying to find
Luke Smillie: an interaction between the situational factors and the personality factors.
Luke Smillie: We don't find those interactions, but those studies are showing
Luke Smillie: us that honesty-humility that I mentioned before is a very
Luke Smillie: important predictor. And a range of situational factors such as
Luke Smillie: if you want somebody to behave more honestly in our studies, uh,
Luke Smillie: the best way to do so is to ask them
Luke Smillie: to take an oath or pledge to be honest.
Nick Haslam: Well, I said we'd end on an optimistic note, but
Nick Haslam: I'm now gonna prove myself a liar.
Nick Haslam: Um, little provocative question to close out our episode. So,
Nick Haslam: your work implies that people differ a lot and how
Nick Haslam: much they care about other people's welfare. So should the
Nick Haslam: more idealistic among us give up their belief that deep down,
Nick Haslam: everyone is good?
Luke Smillie: Yeah, it's funny to think how uncontroversial this question would
Luke Smillie: be if we swapped out prosocial or good for another
Luke Smillie: trait like extroversion, introversion.
Luke Smillie: I imagine few people out there ah have a firm
Luke Smillie: cherished belief that deep down everybody is extroverted, um, and
Luke Smillie: that's a bit of a joke, but if we put
Luke Smillie: aside some of those ambiguous and hard to define words
Luke Smillie: like fundamentally good.
Luke Smillie: Um, these value laden concepts. Um, I'm not sure we
Luke Smillie: can defend the idea that anyone is fundamentally good, let
Luke Smillie: alone all of us. Uh, that's just really difficult philosophical
Luke Smillie: territory for me. Rather than believe that everyone is fundamentally
Luke Smillie: good or equally nice, I think what I'd encourage is
Luke Smillie: a desire to find and bring out the best in others,
Luke Smillie: and that may take multiple forms like compassion or politeness
Luke Smillie: as we've talked about. But we should also recognise that
Luke Smillie: not everybody is gonna share our values or be the
Luke Smillie: person we can depend on.
Luke Smillie: And while it's uncomfortable, it's probably better for us to
Luke Smillie: recognise such differences than pretend they don't exist.
Cassie Hayward: Fascinating stuff, Luke. Thank you for your time today, and
Cassie Hayward: I'm going to go home and make my kids take
Cassie Hayward: a pledge of honesty and see if that works.
Luke Smillie: That sounds good.
Nick Haslam: Well, that brings us to the end of another edition
Nick Haslam: of PsychTalks and a huge thank you to our guest,
Nick Haslam: Professor Luke Smillie. This episode was produced by Carly Godden
Nick Haslam: with production support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound
Nick Haslam: engineering was by Jack Palmer. Bye for now.