Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain,
Speaker 1: behavior and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest
Speaker 1: who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater
Speaker 1: understanding of yourself, others and the world we live in.
Speaker 1: Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening and enjoy the podcast today. I'm really glad
Speaker 1: to have Brian Little on the show. Doctor Little is
Speaker 1: an internationally acclaimed scholar and speaker in the field of
Speaker 1: personality and motivational psychology. Professor Little is currently at Cambridge University,
Speaker 1: where his Fellow of the Wellbeing Institute and Director of
Speaker 1: the Social Ecology Research Group in the Department of Psychology.
Speaker 1: He is also affiliated with the Cambridge Judge Business School
Speaker 1: and the Psychometric Center at Cambridge. His latest book is Me,
Speaker 1: Myself and I No Just Kidding. His latest book is Me.
Speaker 1: His latest book is Me, Myself and Us The Science
Speaker 1: of Personality and the Art of well Being. Brian has
Speaker 1: been described as deeply informative, outrageously funny, and quote a
Speaker 1: cross between Robin Williams and Einstein. That what an awesome
Speaker 1: way to be described and very accurate in my opinion.
Speaker 1: Thank you Brian for being on the show. I'm delighted.
Speaker 1: Thank you Scott. What a wonderful introduction. I totally butchered
Speaker 1: it in me myself, and I indeed, yeah, that's totally
Speaker 1: not what your book is about. No, the US actually matters,
Speaker 1: doesn't it, that it all comes together? And that brilliant
Speaker 1: last paragraph in your book, Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: That's the one paragraph that I'd like people to read. Actually,
Speaker 1: they can skip the rest of the book. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: they don't even need to buy it, just going into
Speaker 1: the bookstore and read that last paragraph. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: this US part is a kind of a common theme
Speaker 1: through this book is that it's not just a personality,
Speaker 1: is not just something that comes from within, you know,
Speaker 1: context matters. And also in creativity, I really liked how
Speaker 1: you talked about, you know, what about all those people
Speaker 1: that like supported you know, those quote creative geniuses, you know,
Speaker 1: the control group, the mute, inglorious folks who were simply
Speaker 1: on the comparison group. I guess which mckennon's creative individuals
Speaker 1: seem to be so heroic, and that's something I think
Speaker 1: has been given relatively short shrift in the literature, and
Speaker 1: I'm very happy you picked up on that because to me,
Speaker 1: that the central issue, and I think what that does
Speaker 1: for those of us who study creativity is it deflects
Speaker 1: or attention away from the creative person to the creative project.
Speaker 1: And we often differentiate between the person, the process, and
Speaker 1: someone These are very frequently invoked concepts and creativity research.
Speaker 1: But the creative project itself is really interesting because I
Speaker 1: think that it is a sustainable pursuit of these core
Speaker 1: projects that matter in our lives. And the sustainability comes
Speaker 1: from motivation of the individual who's the creative one, but
Speaker 1: it also needs the touch of the less heroic one
Speaker 1: who tells the creative individual when things aren't going too well,
Speaker 1: or deals with the bank, or deals with the detail.
Speaker 1: So the administrative stuff that I'm thinking of the Creative
Speaker 1: Architects study. They hate details, they hate that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: but their creative project would flounder if they did not
Speaker 1: have the support cast members around. Yeah, you're referring to
Speaker 1: the famous Iparer study, And I didn't know that your
Speaker 1: office was down the hall from McKinnon's, who was the
Speaker 1: director of those of the stuff. I hadn't know that
Speaker 1: you knew him, that's amazing. Yes, it was his assistant
Speaker 1: for a short while on the IPAR studies. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was a teaching assistant for his course that he gave
Speaker 1: on creativity and the dynamics of behavior. Did you see
Speaker 1: Frank barn as well? Very little we crossed paths, but
Speaker 1: I had more contact with Don McKinnon. What legends, Well,
Speaker 1: you're a legends. It was an exciting it was a
Speaker 1: really exciting time to be there. But Scott, it was
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four and that was when the student member
Speaker 1: that Delli in the student the free speech movement started
Speaker 1: and there was this creative tension, as it were, between
Speaker 1: being so involved with what was happening on campus on
Speaker 1: the one hand and dealing with the academic side of
Speaker 1: things on the other. And McKinnon was quite a conservative fellow,
Speaker 1: and his course on the unconscious was fascinating because I
Speaker 1: wasn't sure that he was really processing what creativity was
Speaker 1: being unfurled on the campus in those days. So as
Speaker 1: as teaching assistant, I had all sorts of interesting discussions
Speaker 1: with the students about just what is happening on campus
Speaker 1: and how it challenges the Orthodoxy and how it tries
Speaker 1: to create a new regime in a conservative institution. Did
Speaker 1: your pass ever across with Abraham Maslow? No, I was
Speaker 1: very much at George Kelly student. And George Kelly visited
Speaker 1: Stanford when I was at Berkeley, and I went down
Speaker 1: to take his course, and he invited me to come
Speaker 1: to Brandize the next summer and to meet with him
Speaker 1: and Maslow, with whom he had some agreement, but not
Speaker 1: that much really. And that's a fun thing to get into,
Speaker 1: is where did Kelly differ from maslowsion? Well, the whole
Speaker 1: notion of whether it there's a self in you, and
Speaker 1: this is Rogerian as well, a whole self waiting to
Speaker 1: be discovered. George Kelly would have none of that. There's
Speaker 1: no enter you waiting to come out. You nact the you.
Speaker 1: You pursue it through the constructs you create to anticipate
Speaker 1: the future. And so I was very excited to go
Speaker 1: to Grandis that summer. I happened to be. I'd left
Speaker 1: Berkeley to go to Oxford, and I was all set
Speaker 1: to go back to Grande Ice and George Kelly died
Speaker 1: in the interim, and it really hit me because that
Speaker 1: would have been a wonderful opportunity to see if we
Speaker 1: could affect any Raproschmont between the Kelly and view and
Speaker 1: the Mesovian view. Unbelievable. That would have been just such
Speaker 1: a legendary meeting. Yeah, of three legends. So I mean
Speaker 1: this is I'm absolutely obsessed with this idea of the
Speaker 1: self as an illusion. And you know there's a modern
Speaker 1: neuroscience and Bruce Hood, you know, talks about how the
Speaker 1: self is an illusion, and you know there is a
Speaker 1: biogenic self as you talk about in the Yes there,
Speaker 1: thanks for using that term. It encapsulates forty other terms
Speaker 1: we have to use, like neuroandrochronology and so on. So
Speaker 1: biogenic works for me, and I'm delighted to use that.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I like it. I like all the little
Speaker 1: like words of you, like you, coin, like what you like, sake, sake,
Speaker 1: sphere of the I'm going to give you a new thing,
Speaker 1: you know, like Einstein and Robin Williams. I'll be like
Speaker 1: less your heart. Well yeah, so no, I like that.
Speaker 1: So there is something that it means to be you
Speaker 1: DNA wise, I mean, you would be Selen, you would
Speaker 1: literally be someone else if I had, you know, one
Speaker 1: hundred percent of your genes, Well maybe not not maybe not,
Speaker 1: because two identical twins who have one hundred of the
Speaker 1: same genes, they're still not the same person, right, that's right.
Speaker 1: And that's because of the imposition of what I call
Speaker 1: the other two natures, the sociogenic self, which is broadly
Speaker 1: used to refer to the impact of the environment and
Speaker 1: the cultural codes and norms that you are socialized into.
Speaker 1: And then what I regard is the emergent third nature,
Speaker 1: which is that which is driven by our aspirations, our goals,
Speaker 1: and particularly are personal projects, and they are what give
Speaker 1: meaning to us, and the self is often created through
Speaker 1: those projects. And that's where I think that I would
Speaker 1: I'm a little skeptical when I see the advertisements for
Speaker 1: the genetic whole genome analyzes that you can do commercially. Now,
Speaker 1: I'd love to do one that I left a subtle
Speaker 1: hint with my kids that i'd love one for Father's Day.
Speaker 1: But when the advertise it is get to know the
Speaker 1: real you, well, not really in the sense of who
Speaker 1: am I really? Well, you're somebody that can detect whether
Speaker 1: you've eaten artichokes or whatever. It is the night before
Speaker 1: because you have that gene. And I think the real
Speaker 1: concept of self comes through how you identify with and
Speaker 1: explore your values and enact your values through the projects
Speaker 1: that you take on during your life at different stages
Speaker 1: of the life cycle. Yeah, you use the phrase to
Speaker 1: do so. I like that phrase is like we can
Speaker 1: create new selves we never had before the engagement in
Speaker 1: new projects. Yes, so you know, there is this big
Speaker 1: theme in this book of the flexibility of personality, and
Speaker 1: I really like the idea of what the self is
Speaker 1: is this bundle of values and goals and these kinds
Speaker 1: of things versus what we focus on an education, like
Speaker 1: standardized test performance and IT and intelligence And even you don't,
Speaker 1: I know, you don't equate the Big five personality traits
Speaker 1: with who you are. But that's interesting because the whole
Speaker 1: intro revolution there seems to be one particular dimension of
Speaker 1: the Big five where a whole bunch of people have
Speaker 1: made that a huge part of their identity. Absolutely fasting phenomena.
Speaker 1: And I get it in a lot of ways as
Speaker 1: a biogenic introvert myself, Like, I appreciate wanting to own
Speaker 1: who you are, but doesn't it also lead to potential
Speaker 1: and flexibility. Oh boy, have you got seven hours now?
Speaker 1: I thought you had described yourself in a wonderful piece,
Speaker 1: wrote it as an Eurotic extrovert. So that gets into
Speaker 1: some really And now this is not an interview about you,
Speaker 1: but if we were back in Philadelphia and I had
Speaker 1: a beer in front of us, I'd be talking to
Speaker 1: you about whether you are a biogenic introvert or more
Speaker 1: a biogenic extrovert. Yeah. So I think that these things
Speaker 1: are tricky, like introversion has become something beyond you know,
Speaker 1: when people say I'm an introvert and that's their identity,
Speaker 1: they're not referring to the technical definition of the Big Five.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. I really have to tell you about something.
Speaker 1: For now forty years I've been lecturing on the interversion
Speaker 1: extraversion to mention to large audiences in a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different guilds teachers, physicians, corporate groups, and so on.
Speaker 1: And this really began in the seventies, and it was
Speaker 1: before the Big Five had really been articulated, of course,
Speaker 1: as you know, and the dominant model of extraversion was
Speaker 1: I thinking. I had great discussions at Oxford with Jeffrey Gray,
Speaker 1: not the Jeremy Gray who you've worked with, and every
Speaker 1: Gray wrote the best book ever on consciousness, by the
Speaker 1: Way and the Hard Problems. Yeah, he was a truly
Speaker 1: brilliant scholar. And I used to after my talks on
Speaker 1: how extroverts and introverts differ in terms of the impact
Speaker 1: they have on their success, and that introverts tend to
Speaker 1: do better in school, they are more careful, they have
Speaker 1: a tendency to do detail work better than next. So
Speaker 1: I would draw the picture of them as being estimable creatures.
Speaker 1: And people come up and say, I've never thought of
Speaker 1: myself that way. It's really amazing that there's something about
Speaker 1: us that you think is admirable. And I say, of
Speaker 1: course there is. And so that became, I guess, in
Speaker 1: a way, my shick when I was talking to groups
Speaker 1: over the years, and then many many many years later,
Speaker 1: Susan Kine contented me writing a book about this, and
Speaker 1: you know, we chatted a lot about it, and she
Speaker 1: drew on some of my research in her book. And
Speaker 1: now it has become a social movement, and as we
Speaker 1: both know, because we're affiliated with the Quiet Group, that
Speaker 1: it has taken on a considerably lively force in social life. However,
Speaker 1: that said, and this goes right back to your initial
Speaker 1: question about identity. I'm seeing pushback, and the pushback's coming
Speaker 1: from the extroverts are saying, hey enough about these one sensitive,
Speaker 1: thoughtful Elene Aaron would have some concerns about this, but
Speaker 1: that depiction of introversion because they're not totally overlapping, but
Speaker 1: there is this tendency for them to be pushing back.
Speaker 1: That isn't as much of a concern as it is
Speaker 1: for me that some introverts are simply seeing them as
Speaker 1: themselves as not but introverts. They're ignoring the other four
Speaker 1: of Big five dimensions. And once you start going through
Speaker 1: the Big five to glom onto one identity associated with
Speaker 1: one poll of the Big five, as you point out,
Speaker 1: and you're absolutely right. First of all, it's intriguing why
Speaker 1: that has happened, but yeah, it really is. And the
Speaker 1: second thing is that I think it is dangerous because
Speaker 1: it decreases our degrees of freedom to enact our lives
Speaker 1: and craft our lives in a way that we'll rere
Speaker 1: down to our values and to the things that really
Speaker 1: matter to us. And it can also serve as a
Speaker 1: pretext for not engaging with the world. And so as
Speaker 1: we increase the degrees of the freedom. And it's a
Speaker 1: phrase I like to use a lot when I'm discussing
Speaker 1: personality by recognizing the strengths of introverts, the quiet strengths
Speaker 1: of introverts is Susan so beautifully portrayed in her book.
Speaker 1: I worry that we not say that's all you are.
Speaker 1: For example, you may say I don't want to go
Speaker 1: to the party, and now I am encouraged to speak
Speaker 1: on and say, hey, I'm okay. I just would rather
Speaker 1: curl up with a nice book tonight. That's great. But
Speaker 1: there's some recent research I don't know whether you're familiar
Speaker 1: with this, out of John Zelenski's lab at Carlton. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's has shown that introverts who It goes to Dan
Speaker 1: Golbert's work on being able to anticipate your future happiness.
Speaker 1: When introverts are asked to imagine what it would be
Speaker 1: like to go to a social event, they rate it
Speaker 1: is quite low. But when they actually go and experience it,
Speaker 1: they rate it much higher. And so acting extrovert extrovertedly
Speaker 1: for an introvert may actually have a sally toary effect
Speaker 1: upon their well being. If they identified strongly as an
Speaker 1: introvert and only assimilated that notion of this is who
Speaker 1: I am instead of accommodating to the possibilities of getting engaged.
Speaker 1: Then I think they should change themselves. No, absolutely, there's
Speaker 1: so many things to unpacked there. But I think a
Speaker 1: big you know, the question about like what am I?
Speaker 1: When I said I was a neurotic extrovert and I
Speaker 1: wrote that article I was, that was my attempt to
Speaker 1: like gently introduce the idea of multidimensionality to the public,
Speaker 1: you know, in my own you know, quirky fashion. So
Speaker 1: that was like an exercise as a professor to people
Speaker 1: about how look on both these independent they're independent dimensions.
Speaker 1: But you know, the thing that's tricky is that like
Speaker 1: when I and I, you know, I think Susan's great,
Speaker 1: great person, and I really really like her, and her
Speaker 1: heart's in a great place and she they're doing a
Speaker 1: lot to help people. So but I feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: when I put my scientists hat on, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm an extrovert on the big five
Speaker 1: because when it comes to positive emotions, I have lots
Speaker 1: of positive emotions, and the other dimension is assertiveness. And
Speaker 1: you know, I, you know, love asserting my wants and needs.
Speaker 1: But then I say, I look at I read Susan
Speaker 1: Kane's books, and I said, I'm an introvert. So it
Speaker 1: created Yeah, I'm a Susan Kane introvert and a Big
Speaker 1: five extrovert. I have the same concern and that mean
Speaker 1: what I mean, So you know, yeah, I do completely.
Speaker 1: I have aired I think on the side of invoking
Speaker 1: rather too much of of the Isinkian model of neocordical
Speaker 1: arousal and so on. I find it it's a model
Speaker 1: that works for certain areas such as a pharmacological effects
Speaker 1: stimulant drugs and and sedative drugs and their impact on
Speaker 1: performance and so on. I find it's more helpful to
Speaker 1: look at that from an arousal point of view than
Speaker 1: from a dopaminergic system engagement a point of view, which
Speaker 1: is how speak five researchers are strictly looking at it
Speaker 1: now as dopamine they are. Yeah, and I think that's fine.
Speaker 1: But there's all also a domain of performance that I
Speaker 1: think aligns better with the modified I sink in view.
Speaker 1: And when I said, over the many, many decades, I
Speaker 1: am an introvert I'm referring to neocortical arousal because I
Speaker 1: can't have caffeine after four o'clock at night and expected
Speaker 1: sleep when I'm have a lot of people talking to me.
Speaker 1: Let's say, halfway through a lecture, you've got a ten
Speaker 1: minute break. I get so over aroused. And it's not
Speaker 1: autonomic arousal. It's neocortical arousal that I'm flooding. I can't
Speaker 1: really process information. But then that can kick into autonomic
Speaker 1: arousal as well. And it's that biogenic introversion that I
Speaker 1: think can lead people like us. Both of us are
Speaker 1: highly agreeable, right, so we when we're on with our students,
Speaker 1: we love them to bits. But I and I don't
Speaker 1: know about you, but I overload with that and I
Speaker 1: need to get away and an escape at the break.
Speaker 1: If I'm going to give a lucid lecture. When I
Speaker 1: come back, if the lecture's over and I don't need
Speaker 1: to give a lecture, I don't need to perform at all,
Speaker 1: then I'm happy to have five fives and a lot
Speaker 1: of excitement with my students. Well, this gets to the
Speaker 1: essence of the introverse extrovers dimensions, because Big five researchers
Speaker 1: would listen to this conversation right now and they'd say,
Speaker 1: you're just describing neuroticism like you're just describing like the
Speaker 1: neocortical like arousal stimulation that's within the neuroticism demean And
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel quite you know when I read these descriptions,
Speaker 1: You know, Susan is describing a phenotype that might actually
Speaker 1: be a blend of things, but it's still in itself
Speaker 1: a phenotype that a large swaths of people identity. Even
Speaker 1: if it is a blend of Big five traits, it's
Speaker 1: still a particular blend that a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: are resonating with, including me. Yeah, which creates you know
Speaker 1: contract when I because I like, you know, you call
Speaker 1: yourself a passionate introvert, So passion is like one of
Speaker 1: the facets of extroversion on the Big five enthusiasm, you know, Scott,
Speaker 1: Here is where we need to bring in what I
Speaker 1: call idiogenic nature, the part of human nature that derives
Speaker 1: from our core projects in our lives. And irrespective of
Speaker 1: my neocortical arousability, I have a passionate project and that
Speaker 1: is to excite my students, and that means that I
Speaker 1: have to act out of character. Why because if you
Speaker 1: give a highly introvertent circumspect lecture at eight in the morning,
Speaker 1: you're going to lose them. And so I've learned over
Speaker 1: the years to, as it were, act out of character.
Speaker 1: But and now it's so wonderful to time somebody really
Speaker 1: understands the psychophysiology of this. When I say that I'm
Speaker 1: talking about acting away from my natural biogenic orientation, it
Speaker 1: may be linked to Indeed, I'm sure they're is some
Speaker 1: link with the dopaminergic system and I'm more than willing
Speaker 1: to concede that. And I'm a big fan of Colin
Speaker 1: de Young's and his colleagues Aspects Model, and you've been
Speaker 1: involved in that work as well, one of my closest collaborators. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And Colin is working with me incidentally, we're working right
Speaker 1: now on He's looking at the Big five Traits and
Speaker 1: personal projects in a no way, Yeah, which is so exciting.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to see what comes out of that.
Speaker 1: And that's funded by the Templeton Foundation. Wonderful. So we're
Speaker 1: getting these links finally building up so that we can
Speaker 1: create an integrated picture of the person's guy I love
Speaker 1: this idea, the integrate picture of the person. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about authenticity for a second. I mean, we know
Speaker 1: that as a explanatory variable, authenticity is a predictor of
Speaker 1: well being. And you wrote this brilliant paper on personal
Speaker 1: projects in nineteen ninety eight where you distinguish between happiness
Speaker 1: and meaning. And that's with Ian McGregor. Ian McGregor and
Speaker 1: I in the book. I noticed you didn't get into
Speaker 1: the nitty gritty details of that study, but in your
Speaker 1: book you didn't. But I want to discuss this paper
Speaker 1: because I blew my mind. So you found that integrity.
Speaker 1: To me, integrity is an important part of authenticity, right, yes,
Speaker 1: so some people use the phrases synonymously. Integrity in your projects,
Speaker 1: your personal projects was correlated with meaning but not happiness, however,
Speaker 1: and this is what blew my mind. Acting out of
Speaker 1: character in a sense was correlated with happiness but not meaning.
Speaker 1: We're complex little creatures, Scott, aren't. We sure are, and
Speaker 1: that's part of the delight of studying human personality. I
Speaker 1: had some development in my ideas about authenticity recently. Our
Speaker 1: mutual friend Adam Grant has written in recent I don't
Speaker 1: call it a screed, but a recent article on how
Speaker 1: perhaps we are overemphasizing authenticity. It's an inverted to your
Speaker 1: shaped curve. At least he evoked that in there. But
Speaker 1: basically he's making an argument very similar to other arguments
Speaker 1: that have been preferred in recent years, that authenticity may
Speaker 1: have a limiting influence upon us. And I broach that topic,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to do it more in a new
Speaker 1: book I have coming out in the next few months,
Speaker 1: which is a ten book, and there's a chapter on
Speaker 1: authenticity in it. And here's my most recent thinking on
Speaker 1: it that I think that there are three kinds of authenticity. Now,
Speaker 1: I like to use the word fidelity. You can show
Speaker 1: fidelity to your biogenic nature. That is, you can do
Speaker 1: what feels right, and this is the hedonic notion of
Speaker 1: I am what I really want and need. The deep
Speaker 1: me is my biogenic me in our terms. Another way
Speaker 1: you can show fidelity and show authenticity and the sense
Speaker 1: of fidelity is to be authentic to your cultural norms.
Speaker 1: And you are a member a particular ethnic group, or
Speaker 1: you are a student of particular school, or you were
Speaker 1: from a neighborhood in a city, and that is me.
Speaker 1: That's a corny you prick me, and I bleed Philly
Speaker 1: or Yale in your or your ethnicity, and Philly a
Speaker 1: lot more than Yale, trust me. Well see, we've learned
Speaker 1: something already and that has a claim on us, and
Speaker 1: sometimes in some cultures it has an incredible claim on us.
Speaker 1: So that I studied it at at Berkeley, also with
Speaker 1: Ted Sarmon the role theorist who used to let us
Speaker 1: know just how vital cultural scripts were. Literally, individuals can
Speaker 1: die from subscribing to a social role. If they are shamed,
Speaker 1: it may shut down their psychophysiology. Now, the skeptical and
Speaker 1: we would want to see more evidence on that the
Speaker 1: claim is a fair one that our culture can give
Speaker 1: us the signature of who we are in a way
Speaker 1: that can be really quite indelible. That's the old biogenic sociogenetic,
Speaker 1: the old nature nurture dialectic playing out. If when we
Speaker 1: discuss these two to me, and now we're going to
Speaker 1: get to integrity, the idiogenic self, the third nature as
Speaker 1: a source of fidelity and a source of authenticity is
Speaker 1: the one that I think is really most important, because
Speaker 1: it is the self that I am not because of
Speaker 1: my biology or my cultural and trainment, but the self
Speaker 1: I am because of what I have chosen to be
Speaker 1: and the projects to which I commit in my life.
Speaker 1: You sound very Sautra esque here for a second. Well,
Speaker 1: this is like really an interesting conversation because you know,
Speaker 1: the existential philosophers you don't really believe he would would
Speaker 1: love you what you just said, you know, but you
Speaker 1: know Maslow, you know, would disagree. A lot of the
Speaker 1: humanistic psychologists were like, no, they're actually they got it wrong.
Speaker 1: The exerten of philosophers. We actually there is an essence
Speaker 1: to who we are that is influenced by our genes
Speaker 1: and that we can grow our potentialities, but we, you know,
Speaker 1: don't completely create our potentialities. I would agree with that,
Speaker 1: and I do both perspective. I don't think they're incompatible there.
Speaker 1: We do have a biogenic nature and like he was
Speaker 1: an agreeable person. I want everybody to be happy together, right.
Speaker 1: This has been one of the common themes in my
Speaker 1: work is you know, can't we actually get the bio
Speaker 1: genetically oriented individuals and the social constructivists together? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: love integration, I love well. I written a couple of
Speaker 1: articles which has been distinguished by the lack of citations
Speaker 1: to them about the need for integration and personality psychologists.
Speaker 1: But I think that it's entirely possible. Unlike an existentialist
Speaker 1: or Asocram, I think it's entirely possible to give credence
Speaker 1: to the biogenic aspects of our nature and the sociogenic
Speaker 1: and yet still have degrees of freedom left. But those
Speaker 1: degrees of freedom to enact the projects that matter to us,
Speaker 1: projects like take care of my mum because their cognitive
Speaker 1: declineate is getting alarming, or the project of be there
Speaker 1: for my daughter during this trying time, or the project
Speaker 1: is enjoy myself with Dave because I love them more
Speaker 1: than anyone else in the world. These are the stuff
Speaker 1: of daily lives. They're not biochemical reactions, they're not social codes.
Speaker 1: They're the way we makes sense of our lives. And
Speaker 1: I think that therein lies the groundwork for both identity
Speaker 1: and a sense of integrity, a sense of value exploration
Speaker 1: and a sense of true authenticity. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: It absolutely does. But then so that explains your meaning finding.
Speaker 1: But then explain to me why acting in like doing
Speaker 1: things that it might be like complimentary or like, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe fulfill a hole in who we are actually can
Speaker 1: make us happier. That's how I interpreted your findings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the best answer to that is that I found it
Speaker 1: really hard to explain that, and I thought Ian McGregor,
Speaker 1: who is a senior author on this and a really
Speaker 1: fine scholar who's now at University of Waterloo, I think
Speaker 1: he did a great job in explaining it. I'm still
Speaker 1: puzzled by that finding. All I can say is that
Speaker 1: I invoke often, and I do in the book, the
Speaker 1: notion that it's not the pursuit of happiness, but the
Speaker 1: happiness of pursuit. And there can be happiness that emerges
Speaker 1: as a consequence of inacting challenging roles or projects that
Speaker 1: ask us to act out of character and we say, wow,
Speaker 1: look at I'm I'm standing in front of four hundred
Speaker 1: students and they're loving it. Or I'm running for public office.
Speaker 1: I've never done that before, but I'm yeah, I'm happy
Speaker 1: on doing it. Oh, I'm just loving this conversation. And
Speaker 1: I just have a million questions I want to ask you.
Speaker 1: Can I think we began this in Philadelphia a year ago,
Speaker 1: this conversation. I miss you. I'm like, you're not not
Speaker 1: in feeling anymore. So we you know, there's this constant
Speaker 1: tension between our drive for self understanding and authenticity and
Speaker 1: our drive for personal growth, and they are, you know,
Speaker 1: they're compatible with each other. Carl Rogers often talked about
Speaker 1: how once you know self exit, once we accept ourselves,
Speaker 1: then we can truly only then can we truly grow,
Speaker 1: and he talked about that a lot of ways. But
Speaker 1: there's a balancing act. What is the right optional balance
Speaker 1: there between like eventually just like wanting what you have
Speaker 1: or having what you want. So there's actually some interesting
Speaker 1: research kind of distinguishing between those things, and ultimately they
Speaker 1: say that the greatest predictor of happiness. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you saw this paper. They found the greatest predictor
Speaker 1: of happiness was being okay with like wanting what you have,
Speaker 1: like who you are, and growing along those lines, as
Speaker 1: opposed to having an idealized self that really is so
Speaker 1: far away from who you are that you're not happy
Speaker 1: with you who you are. That makes any sense absolutely.
Speaker 1: I think that when I talk about free trades, and
Speaker 1: the example I've used is introverts such as myself acting
Speaker 1: as pseudo extroverts. We talk about the downside of this,
Speaker 1: that it can lead to burnout and so on. But
Speaker 1: one thing that is really crucial that you raise is
Speaker 1: that it is a chance to expand yourself. And there's
Speaker 1: increasing evidence, as you know, because you're on top of
Speaker 1: the literature thoroughly, that there is increasing evidence that you
Speaker 1: can actually change gnomic structures by social processes and the
Speaker 1: projects you engage in if you are chronically lonely, that
Speaker 1: has an impact upon your biogenic self. When I begin genetics,
Speaker 1: was that is that epigenetics? It's similar to epigenetics. Indeed,
Speaker 1: and ten years ago even I would have thought this
Speaker 1: was really it sounds like Lamarckian, and I would have
Speaker 1: thought that it was highly implausible. But increasingly there's evidence
Speaker 1: of the interdigitation of the sociogenic and the biogenic. And
Speaker 1: I think part of what brings that interplay into effect
Speaker 1: is human action, the things you commit to, the projects
Speaker 1: you pursue in which you have an interplay of your
Speaker 1: genetic propensity the affordances provided by your environment, and there
Speaker 1: are consequences both downstream to your well being and backstream
Speaker 1: to your relatively fixed traits. That is really exciting. That
Speaker 1: goes way beyond my competency to speculate on how that
Speaker 1: research might develop. But I know what's going on and
Speaker 1: and these you know, you say, relatively fixed traits. But
Speaker 1: I really like the Fleecin model of density distributions so
Speaker 1: pity so that we all act out of character a
Speaker 1: lot throughout our day in the sense that we all
Speaker 1: are all through all five levels of extroverts, introvers all
Speaker 1: of those things all throughout our day. So it kind
Speaker 1: of confirms a lot of your a lot of your
Speaker 1: research that he just found that with experienced sampling, I
Speaker 1: guess exactly. And you know, some of the time we'll
Speaker 1: have a conversation about the difference between experienced sampling and
Speaker 1: personal projects, because projects are subsume the kind of data
Speaker 1: that comes with experienced sampling. But let me say a
Speaker 1: little bit about will Fleeson and his work. I think
Speaker 1: it's terrific, and I'm very much in agreement with Willsworth.
Speaker 1: I came at it from a slightly different perspective, but
Speaker 1: I've never really developed this thoroughly. I wrote about it
Speaker 1: in the Handbook of Environmental Psychology or was it the
Speaker 1: Handbook of Personality Psychology Burdon's volume, the second edition of it.
Speaker 1: Somewhere I talked about Bust and Craig's model of the
Speaker 1: act frequency approach to dispositions, where they talked about dispositions
Speaker 1: as being the relative frequency of being engaged in acts
Speaker 1: that are prototypical in a Russian sense of each of
Speaker 1: the big five traits. For example, so during the day,
Speaker 1: you may engage in sixteen acts that are quintessentially or
Speaker 1: prototypically extroverted and four that are introverted. And you look
Speaker 1: at and I thought that act frequency, which is not
Speaker 1: unrelated at all to Willsworth, was really quite brilliant. Jack
Speaker 1: Blot attacked it. Part of his attack was, I think,
Speaker 1: bang on but on this history because it wasn't crucial
Speaker 1: to what David and Bus and kin Creek were arguing.
Speaker 1: But I took a slightly different view, and this is
Speaker 1: where my George Kelly approach comes in. I developed what
Speaker 1: I called an ax saliency view. It's not the acts
Speaker 1: that you engage in in terms of their frequency, but
Speaker 1: what you think you're doing that is really pivotal to
Speaker 1: understanding your personality. The example I gave it was an
Speaker 1: environmental handbook chapter. The example I gave is that you
Speaker 1: may see a fellow who spend all summer and deep
Speaker 1: into the autumn, in camping gear, going out to the lake,
Speaker 1: casting his fishing rod, chomming down trees, and generally acting
Speaker 1: in such a way as that we would call him
Speaker 1: a rustic warrior. And I actually pointed to some environmental
Speaker 1: disposition characteristics and he would be very high on. But
Speaker 1: we may be sadly mistaken. The reason he is engaged
Speaker 1: in those prototypical acts of the outdoorsmen isn't because he's out.
Speaker 1: It's not that he has a stable drade. It's that
Speaker 1: his wife is dying and he loves her deeply, and
Speaker 1: she loves going into the woods. This is their last
Speaker 1: chance to do that. Scott, this is to me what
Speaker 1: the human condition is about. You can't just look at
Speaker 1: the at the prototypical acts, at the density distributions and
Speaker 1: expect to engage fully with what a human being is.
Speaker 1: It offers us a terrific inroad, and it's necessary, but
Speaker 1: it's not sufficient for understanding what I think human personality
Speaker 1: is all about. I actually want to stop right there
Speaker 1: because I thought there's there's nothing I could possibly say
Speaker 1: I would be more profound than that. Thank you, thank
Speaker 1: you so much, so much for this chat. Bryan and
Speaker 1: everything wonderful questions. Thanks so much, Jures. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I
Speaker 1: hope you found this episode just as thought provoking and
Speaker 1: interesting as I. If you'd like to read the show
Speaker 1: notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can
Speaker 1: visit the Psychology Podcast dot com