Shadowing Practice: 2017 Personality 14: Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Intro Music So, I want to tell you,
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I'm going to make a little announcement first.
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I'm going to do a series of lectures, I think, starting in May, maybe at the Isabel Bader Theatre.
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We're trying to look into booking that.
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I'm going to do a psychological interpretation of the Bible from beginning to end.
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That's the plan anyway, so I'm going to do that once a week.
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So if you're interested in in that I would recommend that you men.
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Maybe you're not and that's fine obviously But if you go onto my Twitter account, you could just there's a place you can sign up It doesn't mean
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that you'll attend I'm just trying to see
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if there are people who are interested in I've been interested in doing
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that for a long time And so I think I'm going to try it.
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So anyways That's the announcement and then is that about it?
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I guess so okay, so look we're going to switch gears today
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The first half of this course as you've no doubt already
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gathered is
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Because it's grounded essentially in clinical theories of personality it tends more towards the philosophical
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and I told you that the reason for that was
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that I regard clinical psychology as a branch of engineering rather than a branch of science It's human engineering obviously
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and because of that it's an applied science and so that means it straddles the the ground between
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a science and a practice and it and
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because it's it involves human beings It necessarily involves value because we live inside value structures and so
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the logical consequence of that is that Investigation into the philosophy of value is necessary in order to understand clinical
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Psychological theories
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because really what you're trying to do as a clinician you
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could say you're trying to do two things One is to help people have less terrible lives, but you're also trying to help them have BETTER lives,
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and there's obviously a value structure that's inherent in that attempt
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because you're moving from something of less value to something of more value, and so.. and it's best to just,
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you know, face that and all the complexities that come along with that head on.
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Now, I think what you do as a clinician
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to overcome whatever tendency you might have to impose your value structure on someone is you do an awful lot of listening,
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and so my basic practice with people is to say to them Well, obviously you're here because you would like things to be better
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But that's okay We can use your definition of what constitutes better We can use your definition of what constitutes worse
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Or we can establish that through dialogue and negotiation What are you aiming at?
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How would you like things to be better a year from now, say If you could have what you wanted If your life was put together, what would that look like?
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And you can have a very straightforward discussion with people about
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that if you're not trying to cram the way that they're orienting the world into your particular perspective.
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Now, that's one of the dangers of being the adherent of a given psychological school.
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Now, having said that, it's also...
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There was research done many years ago showing that if you were an eclectic psychotherapist, which means that you sort of pick and chose from different psychotherapeutic schools,
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you tended to not be as effective as you were if you were the dedicated adherent of a given school.
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And I think the reason for that is that there's
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so many schools of psychological thought That if you say
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that you pick and choose from all of them What
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that really means is that you don't know anything about any of them And then there's also the additional Factor, maybe you might call it
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That if someone comes to you and they're very chaotic and confused
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Helping them impose any structure onto their life Is likely to be an improvement over no structure at all
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And you could think about that in a Piagetian sense is
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that you know you're going to be happier playing a game rather than no game
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and there's many games that you could play
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that are better than no game and so
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if you go to a therapist that has a particular viewpoint
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and they help you structure your understanding of the world within the confines of a given clinical model
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and you came in there very chaotic
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and uncertain then maybe that's going to be a lot better for you than just floundering
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and i and i think there's some real truth in that
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and I think that that's part
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and parcel of the same of another what you might call it reasonable observation about maturation is
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that it's very necessary for people at some point in their
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life to dedicate themselves to a single game of some sort
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which is kind of what you're doing in university you know
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you have to become one thing at some point in your life
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and the sacrifice of course is that you give up all the other things
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that you could become but the you don't really have a choice because if you don't decide voluntarily to become one thing,
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you know, to become a disciplined adherent of some specific practice or profession or viewpoint,
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then you risk just aging chaotically and You don't get away with not aging, so you might as well age into something that's actually something,
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rather than just remaining Or than just becoming an old child, which is really not a good thing It's not a good thing to see,
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especially by the time people hit about 40 It's not pretty for them or anyone else And even at 30,
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it's getting pretty old at that point 40, it's like it's almost irreparable at 40 And the reason for
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that is you start running out of opportunities When you're young and stupid, people don't care, because they think,
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well, you know, whatever, you've got decades of possibilities still ready to unfold in you,
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but if you're in the same unspecified position at 40, people are much less forgiving,
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especially because if they're going to hire someone who doesn't know what's going on, or employ them, or sorry, or engage them in some sort of productive activity,
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they might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential, rather than someone who doesn't know what's going on who's really lived more than half of their life already
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because of course you have by the time you're 40 okay, so, anyway, so that's with regards to putting the first half of the course to bed,
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so to speak the second half is more scientific
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and there's a bit of a gap, eh?
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and it's a gap I'm trying to resolve conceptually
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because now we move into more biological models and into models
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that are psychometric and psychometrics is the psychological study
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Or the study of psychological measurement and now
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if you're a scientist you're there's a couple of things
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that you're obliged to do If you're a scientist one is to utilize the scientific method.
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That's usually the experimental method where you take two groups
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randomly selected apply a Manipulation to one of them and not and an equivalent manipulation of a different sort to another
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Hypothesize about what the outcome is likely to be and then test it That's the technical experimental model, anyways, you're also obliged, as a scientist,
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to come up with a measurement of your...
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To come up with a measurement, let's just put it that way, that's reliable and valid.
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Okay, and what a reliable measure is one that measures the same way across multiple measurements.
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So, for example, you wouldn't want to take a ruler that's made out of flexible rubber to measure things with, because it wouldn't give you the same measurement if you put it in different situations.
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That's reliability, and it's a term you need to know.
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It means that the measurement tool produces stable results across different instances of the measurement.
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Without that, you don't have a measurement.
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The other critical factor with regards to a measurement is that it has to be valid,
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which means that it actually has to measure what it purports to measure,
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And it has to be usable for an array of different purposes as a consequence And so you might think,
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well, the purpose of scientific endeavor is to predict and to control You could say understand, predict, and control But understanding,
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prediction, and controls are all manifestations of the same underlying thoroughly designed comprehension Now,
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here's what's happened with the measurement of personality It's a funny story in some sense, a peculiar story,
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because in many ways what we've come to understand about personality from a scientific perspective developed in a very atheoretical manner.
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It's not very common in scientific endeavour that that occurs, is that what we know about personality emerged from,
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I would say, statistically rigorous observation without it being the consequence of any real model.
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So often what happens in scientific endeavor is that someone generates a model first, a theoretical understanding And then they generate measurement tools based on
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that theoretical understanding And then they test the measurement tools to see
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if the measurement tools perform properly And
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if they fail at least to invalidate the underlying theory That isn't what happened with psychometrics
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Except in a loose way So here's the loose theory
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And you've got to get this exactly right To understand this properly You've got to get it exactly right
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And it's really important
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Because insofar as you guys are interested in psychology Especially in the experimental end of psychology Measurement is everything
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And so much of what psychologists publish and write about is incorrect
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And the reason it's incorrect is because They do not have their measurements properly instantiated It's a massive problem, especially in social psychology In fact,
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it's probably a fatal problem In that most of the things that social psychologists measure don't exist.
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And social psychology has been rife with scandals for the last four or five years.
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And there's good reason for it.
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But a big part of the problem is that the measurement...
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that people are not stringent and careful enough about their measurements so we're gonna walk through this very, very carefully so I'm gonna set forward a set of propositions
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and you have to think about them because each of them are.. they're axiomatic
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so you sort of have to accept them before you go on to the next step
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and there's certainly room to question them
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but here's the bare bones of the psychometric model of personality
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so we'll call it roughly the Big Five model
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and the reason it's called the Big Five model is
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because the psychometric investigations have indicated that you can specify human personality along five basic dimensions.
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You might ask, well, what exactly is personality?
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And, well, that's partly what we've been trying to wrestle with the entire course so far.
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And I would say, or what exactly is a trait?
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Think of a trait as an element of personality.
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And I think the best way to think about a trait is as a sub -personality.
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So, you're made up of sub -personalities
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that are integrated into something vaguely resembling a unity
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but the unity is is diverse there are there are there are there are describable stable elements
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that characterize you that are elements of your being
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so for example here's here's some common ones i might say well are you social
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or or would you rather be alone
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so here's here's a good question for you to define decide whether you're extroverted
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or introverted it's pretty straightforward because that's that's the first major dimension basically if you take any set of questions about
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any set of questions that could be applied descriptively to a human being and
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you subject them to a Statistical process called factor analysis.
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You can determine how they group together.
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So what I would be interested in let's say I asked you a hundred questions
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Let's say I asked a hundred questions of you and a hundred other people
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What I would find was that reliably if some person answered question a say on a scale of one to seven
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6 or 7, there would be other questions in the set of questions that they also tended to answer
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on the upper end of the scale.
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Or, reliably, if they answered one question at the top of the scale, they'd answer another question at the bottom.
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That's a pattern of co -variation.
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So you're looking for how the questions co -vary across large numbers of people.
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So let's say, here's a stupid But it's really straightforward and easy to understand I might say, how often do you smile?
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One to seven How often are you happy?
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One to seven Well, what you'd find, obviously, is that people who tended to answer
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that they smiled a lot Would also tend to answer
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that they were happy a lot And so smiling
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and happy are not exactly the same thing
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Which is why we'd have two different phrases to describe them
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But they're close enough so that they seem to be reflective of some underlying structure
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And so that's what a factor analysis does.
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It allows you to take a large set of questions To administer it to a large number of people
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and then to statistically analyze it Looking how the questions relate to one another across the entire group
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so that you can infer What the underlying structure is
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and here here's the question in some sense
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if I ask you a hundred questions How many questions am I really asking you because you might say well are you?
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Do you smile a lot?
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Are you happy?
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Do you wake up eager to start the day?
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You say, well, is that one question?
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Ask three ways, or is it three separate questions?
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And the answer is, well, if the answers reliably co -vary, then it's reflection of an underlying single dimension.
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Now, obviously those questions are slightly different.
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Now, but they'll relate to one another stably, and so you can infer out the central stable factors.
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Now, it might be the case that, so here's an example, because you might ask how many stable underlying dimensions are there in any set of questions.
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If I ask you questions that relate to your capacity to manipulate abstractions, I'll find that there's one factor.
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So, imagine you had an infinite library of problem -solving questions, doesn't matter what they are.
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Capital of Georgia, here's a sequence, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, what's the next number?
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Here's five patterns, and they transform predictably across the pattern array.
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Here's five alternatives that the next pattern might be.
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Pick that one.
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Here's ten words.
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Tell me what they mean.
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Anything like that.
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Here's a mathematical operation.
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Compute it.
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Anything like that.
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Imagine you had a very large library of questions like that.
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Okay, an infinite library.
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And you took random sets of a hundred questions from that library.
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And you gave those sets to a thousand people.
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What you'd find was that people who, and the score, say you gave them 100 questions, and then you summed across all the items to see how well they did.
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What you'd find was
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that people who did very well on one set of items would do very well on another set of items, and very well on another set of items.
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And that would be the same for people who did badly.
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If they did badly on any one of the sets of randomly chosen items of abstraction, they'd do badly on the rest.
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That's basically IQ.
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That's all there is to it.
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So, what IQ does is correct that for age.
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But other than that, that's all there is to it.
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And the thing that's interesting about those random sets of abstract problem -solving questions is there's one dimension.
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That's it.
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Intelligence has one dimension.
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And it's one of the most terrifying statistics that are known to social scientists.
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And IQ is an extraordinarily powerful predictor of long -term success, especially in complex jobs.
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And the reason for that, it's quite straightforward.
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Most complex jobs throw random sets of complex problems at you.
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That's their definition.
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So, for example, if you're working as a lawyer on complex court cases, you have to be able to read very quickly.
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You have to be able to abstract.
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You have to be able to problem solve you have to be able to formulate arguments, and you have to do that repeatedly in different ways across very large spans of time.
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And so the fact
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that your ability to solve any set of random problems is
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a really good predictor of your ability to solve any set of random legal problems, it's more or less self -evident that that would be the case.
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But the thing is, the thing that makes IQ so damn powerful, and it's one of the personality traits,
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roughly speaking, the thing that makes IQ so powerful is you can basically get a decent measure of it in 20 minutes.
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It's very terrifying.
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Anyways, we'll go into IQ in some depths as we progress through the course
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But you get one dimension out of out of a factor
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analysis of IQ now in the personality domain We're using descriptive items.
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You don't you get five dimensions and so So in you and what are these dimensions exactly?
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Well, you could think about them as I think of them as sub -personalities
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But here's some other ways of thinking about them
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because we want to flesh this out a little bit You could think of them as a frame of reference
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so that if you're an extrovert I was going to tell you the extroverted question.
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Does being around groups of people make you energetic, or does it exhaust you?
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And if you're the sort of person that, you know, will go to a party and interact with 20 people, then you have to go home and be by yourself for, like, two weeks, then you're introverted.
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Introverts are exhausted by social interactions.
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Extroverts are the opposite.
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They're energized by social interactions.
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And, you know, you might be in the middle, so that you can take it or leave it with regards to social interactions, but you're happy to go to them, and you're happy to spend time by yourself.
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But a real extrovert, there'll be some of you in here, how many of you can't stand spending time alone?
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Okay, so there's only two that will admit it.
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Extroverts are more likely to admit that sort of thing, too, by the way.
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But, and how many of you like to spend time alone, or would rather be alone?
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Okay, so there's a preponderance of introverts in this class, by all appearances.
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But that's a really that's a pretty canonical question for for extroversion versus introversion It's a very stable trait by the way.
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It's it manifests itself early in life, and it's it's stable across the age span not completely
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Introverts can learn to be extroverted the extroverts can learn to spend time on their own I think
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that actually your capacity to expand your ability past the initial
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constraints of your biological temperament is something like the development of character or wisdom You know, so if you're an introvert by nature
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and you learn how to be extroverted Then
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that expands your domain of competence and if you're extroverted
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and you learn to be introverted the same thing
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But it's almost like imagine a distribution of extrovert introversion here extroversion here a normal distribution You're set
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When you're young it's somewhere along that distribution with some range around it
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And I think what you do as you mature
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if you develop your skills as you expand that range
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But you're set the place at which you're set doesn't move that much, so okay, so there's
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So you can think about them as sub -personalities You can think about them as frames of reference
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So frame of reference would be something like well since you're extroverted you value being with people
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and so you're gonna look at the world For example
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if you're extroverted you come into a room like this you
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think oh look It's a whole field of opportunity for social interactions
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And if you're introverted you think well Maybe I'll go set up in the corner
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and hope everybody leaves me the hell alone But so
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so it's an a priori set of perceptual structures that you bring to bear on a whole sequence of
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Environment
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so for example, maybe you're high in openness versus low in openness That's the
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creativity dimension people who are high in openness tend to be artists
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and entrepreneurs and open people will look at other people as
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Opportunities to engage in interesting intellectual conversations And so you can tell
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when you're talking to someone's old someone open especially
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if they're very high in openness because they're going to want to talk to you about ideas or about aesthetics.
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It's going to go right away.
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So that's how they view you as a source of that sort of conversation.
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That's how they view the landscape.
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Someone who's high in neuroticism, which is a negative emotion dimension, is more likely to view the world as a place of threats to be...
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to be protected against, because they're more anxious and more prone to emotional pain so anyway,
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so that's the frame of reference issue so there's something about your underlying fundamental psychological traits that determine,
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or influence at least, your value structures
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and they do it at the level of perception they also tend to set your goals so extroverted people have,
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as one goal, the opportunity to engage with other people So, extroverts love parties.
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They live for parties.
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They love to tell jokes as well.
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That's a very good behavioral marker of extroversion.
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And so, because they value those sorts of things, they set them as goals in their life.
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Or you could say the extroversion operating within them sets them as goals within their life, depending on how deterministic you want to be about it.
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So, their patterns of behavior.
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That's another, at a micro level.
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You know, I showed you that sort of hierarchy of
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Value slash frames of references that ranged from micro behaviors up to high -order abstractions.
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You can extract out
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personality
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From by looking at people's micro actions as well
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and one of the papers
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that I want you guys to read That's that's on the
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course website has to do with our investigation into behavioral markers of the big five traits.
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Yep Maybe.
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We don't know exactly.
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I'll get back to that.
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At the moment, that's kind of what it looks like, is that introversion is something like the absence of extroversion.
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But let me explain extroversion more particularly.
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It'll make more sense.
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Okay.
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Alright, so, you can think about them as stable motivations.
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So, for example, people who are high in agreeableness, I can generally tell people who are high in agreeableness
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when they come into my clinical practice
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and I start asking them about their biography because my experience has been
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that people who are agreeable will tell you their biography defined by relationships they've had over their life.
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So agreeable people are high in compassion and high in politeness.
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It looks like the maternal dimension.
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It looks like the pair bonding dimension, something like that.
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And so agreeable people tend to characterize their lives in terms of the intimate relationships they've had.
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And so those are also people who would value an intimate relationship over anything else
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If agreeableness is the uppermost trait that characterizes their personality Then
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Well systems of values we already talked about
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that a little bit the higher you are in a given trait The more you value certain opportunities
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that are associated with that trait and so I think it's worthwhile thinking about traits along
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Using all of those different conceptual schemes to understand what constitutes a trait, but
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what people are in some sense is a little melody of
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traits melody not m -a -l -a -d -y although some people are like
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that but melody like a song you know where different amounts of each of the canonical traits
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operate to a different degree at each person and the person
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that manifests themselves is the panoply of those traits as they manifest themselves in the world
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and so it's actually very useful to understand your big five traits as far as I'm concerned Actually, that's why I have you do that exercise
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that you're supposed to do for this class that helps you you identify your faults and virtues
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And I use big five terminology to help you do that. So
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Part of the reason it's useful to know what your traits are is
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because it can help you figure out how you should orient your life Like
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so for example if you're a high at extraversion, you know You've got a proclivity towards sales for example
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And you're gonna like you're gonna like occupations where you have a lot of opportunity for social interactions
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and social networking You're not going to be happy
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if your job requires you to sit alone for extended periods of time and work in the absence of social interaction.
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You're going to be one of those annoying people then in one of those offices
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that instead of sitting alone in their office is going from doorway to doorway, engaging everyone in conversation, right?
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So, and you want to be in a position
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that capitalizes on your traits because it's really difficult to work contrary to your traits.
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The other thing that's worth thinking about too, We're actually building a computer app for this, which is about, which has been about 80 % done for a whole year
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We've got a hypothesis
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that we're still working out that's supported to some degree by the relevant literature
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So imagine that you're looking for a stable partner, right?
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So you might think, well, what do you want in a stable partner?
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And at least in principle, one of the things you don't want is too much mismatch between you
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and that person on the five fundamental dimensions So for example, if you're really extroverted
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and you have a really introverted partner You're going to engage
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in continual conflict about how much social activity the two of you should Should be, should, should what?
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Subject yourself to And it's very, very difficult for people who broadly differ,
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widely differ on those Dimensions to come to consensus because it's not just a matter of opinion, right?
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It's really a matter of different And
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if you're looking at extremes of really different types of people and the thing about introverts is they just don't enjoy
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Large -scale social interaction that much one -on -one.
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They're often fine, but in a group They don't like that
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and they it tires them out whereas a real extrovert It's like you isolate them
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and and they just wither on the vine
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because a huge part of what actually motivates them in a positive way is tangled up with social interaction
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and so if you're an agreeable person
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and you have a particularly disagreeable partner you're also going to run into problems
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because the agreeable person will say whatever you want whenever
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and the agreeable disagreeable person will say well i'd like to know what the hell you want for a change
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and be much more harsh and much more demanding in the situation
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and the agreeable person is going to find the disagreeable person harsh
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and unpleasant and the disagreeable person is going to find the agreeable person wishy -washy
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and unable to stand up for themselves and again, that's actually one of the primary sources of tension between men
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and women because women tend to be higher in agreeableness than men it's about half a standard deviation
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which is quite a large difference by psychological standards and so,
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what that means I probably haven't got this statistic quite right
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But I think I've got it about right what
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that means fundamentally just so you have some sense of how large a
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An effect that is is that if you have a group of men and women
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and you pick out random pairs The woman is going to
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be more agreeable than the man 60 % of the time so that's not an overwhelming Proportion, but it's a reliable and it's quite it's quite large by psychological standards,
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so there's the problem with agreeableness with With conscientiousness, well, if you're conscientious, you're industrious and orderly.
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And orderly people seem to be sensitive to disgust, which is something we'll talk about in detail later.
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We've had a hard time specifying exactly what makes industrious people industrious, because it's hard to come up with an animal model for that sort of thing, and there's no theoretical model.
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But our latest idea is that, it's not my idea, it's actually the idea of my graduate student,
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christine brophy um is that industrious people find it um unpleasant
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and unsettling to to not be doing something so it isn't
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so much that industriousness makes them happy or fills them with positive emotion
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that would be more extroversion right because extroversion is the positive emotion dimension it's
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that industrious people can't stand sitting around doing nothing
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and you know this is speculation but you know human beings are obviously always engaged in in the exchange of labor,
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especially the reciprocal exchange of labor and you can imagine
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that in a community where everyone knows everyone the people who
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work hard are going to be pretty irritated on a fairly chronic basis with the people who are completely unproductive
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and my suspicions are
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that plenty of people who were completely unproductive in the history
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of the evolution of our species were wiped out by people who were unhappy with their lack of productivity And so,
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I think, generally speaking, human beings have this sense of ethical obligation with regards to one another to share labor.
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And people who are conscientious really, really feel that.
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So they feel bad if they're not busily working on something that's productive all the time.
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And so, the advantage to being with someone conscientious is, well, they're going to work like mad.
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But the disadvantage is they're going to work like mad.
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So, you know, if you're looking for a partner that you want to relax with or have fun with, or who isn't uptight, then a conscientious person is probably not a very good choice.
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On the other hand, if you're a conscientious person and you're living with someone who's really unconscientious, that's good because they might be able to help you relax.
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But you're not going to be happy with them because they don't work nearly as hard as you do.
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But even worse, on the orderly dimension, you know, some of you have had roommates and maybe you're more orderly than your roommate.
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What does it mean?
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It means you're annoyed by mess before they are.
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And you don't have to be annoyed by mess much before
386
your less orderly roommate For you to be the one that's always running around picking things up
387
And so actually one of the things that's emerged from the psychometric analysis Is
388
that women are slightly more orderly than men And I suspect
389
that has something to do with the What would you call it?
390
Inequitable distribution of housework Because even if you're Imagine
391
that your proclivity is to be triggered by disorder 25 seconds before your partners Well, you're going to end up,
392
it doesn't take much difference for you to be the one that's always concerned about the mess first So, anyways, and so if you're a really orderly person and you live with a disorderly person Well,
393
good luck getting along with them They're going to regard you as, like, uptight and, and, uh, uh, over -concerned with details and,
394
and, uh, and, well, and unwilling to relax, that's for sure and they're going to regard you as Well, just a bloody mess.
395
And how can anyone possibly live with someone like you? And so, another reason why it's useful to understand your personality is
396
because I think it gives you a better crack at finding someone that you can actually live with over the long run.
397
And we don't know what the optimal...
398
I don't think you want to live with someone who's exactly like you
399
because then both of you have the same strengths and weaknesses.
400
And there's a bit of a problem there, right?
401
Because maybe an agreeable person can use a bit of a disagreeable person around them to balance each other out, and vice versa, right?
402
So, we don't understand the optimal balance for long -term thriving in a relationship.
403
But I think we do understand the fact that if you're too different in your traits,
404
where you're different is going to constitute a chronic source of conflict.
405
So, anyway, so you can think about that.
406
Alright, so how have psychologists studied personality?
407
Well, I'm going to talk most about the statistical psychometric approach to begin with
408
But there are other approaches that we will talk about as well So,
409
let me give you the background on the self -report methodology first
410
Because it's really formed the backbone of psychological research into personality So,
411
imagine that you took a comprehensive sample of all the descriptive adjectives in the English language.
412
Now, it's trickier than you think, because actually what constitutes an adjective isn't that easy to determine, because many words have forms that are adjective,
413
verb, and noun, depending on how the same word is written out.
414
So, distinguishing adjectives from verbs or adverbs turns out to be more difficult than you might think.
415
But let's just say for the sake of argument
416
that you could collect all of the descriptive adjectives in the English language
417
And that then perhaps you decided
418
because you don't want to use all of them You decided
419
that you were going to use the most common thousand of them
420
And there are tables that enable you to look up the frequency of words
421
And it turns out that in common parlance
422
It's like 5 % of the vocabulary of English language accounts
423
for 95 % of the usage It's an example of this phenomena called the Pareto distribution
424
which we will talk about later
425
So in fact most discourse is done with 500 words You can get about 80 % something like
426
that of speech in terms of single word comprehension with 500 words
427
So let's say you took the thousand you took all the descriptive adjectives
428
And then you took the ones that were the most common thousand
429
And so here's the hypothesis part And this is a critical thing to know
430
This is called the linguistic hypothesis The linguistic hypothesis is that
431
Variation in personality among human beings Is of sufficient import So that it's become accurately coded in the lexicon
432
So what that means is that Roughly speaking Is
433
that over the course of the evolution of any language We'll use English as the example here
434
Descriptive terms have been generated that actually do cover the variation in personality And that essentially cover them without bias Now,
435
that's a hypothesis, actually it's an axiom It's because the hypothesis in some sense isn't, it's not exactly testable We'll leave that aside for now,
436
it's testable a little bit, but not easily So that's the first thing you have to accept You have to accept
437
that it's possible to extract out what constitutes personality by looking
438
at the linguistic representation of descriptors insofar as they're encapsulated in language.
439
Okay, so when people talk about trait models like the Big Five being comprehensive representations of personality,
440
that isn't exactly what they mean.
441
And you need to know this.
442
What they mean is that it's a comprehensive representation of personality insofar as personality has been encapsulated in language.
443
There may be elements of personality that we haven't been able to talk about
444
or we don't know how to talk about that are of crucial importance.
445
And there may not be, but the big five theorists assume that there aren't.
446
All right, so that's a limitation of the theory.
447
But if you accept that, then you say, well, the first thing you want to do is take a relatively random cross -section of the descriptive terms
448
because then you don't introduce bias into the initial stages of the inquiry.
449
So, Matt, I'll tell you something that we did recently, and you can tell me what you think about it.
450
It's analogous.
451
We were trying to study political correctness.
452
And so, the first thing we were trying to figure out was, is there even such a thing?
453
Because if you look at the political dialogue, what you find is
454
that people on the side of the political spectrum who have been defined as politically correct tend to say
455
that it doesn't exist and that that category is just a pejorative term
456
that was invented by people who hold alternative political opinions.
457
And so the first question is, well, what do you mean does it exist?
458
What do you mean by exist?
459
How do you tell if a psychological concept is real?
460
Like, is anger something that exists objectively?
461
Is it an objective phenomena?
462
Well, it's not that easy to determine.
463
You say, well, we act like it is, and we understand what anger means.
464
But no one goes around in the world and says anger, you know, without saying anything else, or you'd run away from them, you know.
465
What they do is they place the word anger into a sentence, and place the sentence within a conversation.
466
And they enable you to infer exactly what they mean by the word anger by listening to the surrounding context, right?
467
And if you're going to turn that into something like an objective term, what you do is you pull out the term anger
468
And then you make the hypothesis that it represents something real in the objective world
469
But it's not that easy to determine if something does exist, especially if it's a psychological phenomenon, in the real world What do you mean by exist?
470
That's the problem of construct validation, okay?
471
So that's another term you really need to know if you're interested in experimental psychology, especially on the personality end.
472
A construct is a representation of something psychological that hypothetically exists objectively.
473
How do you establish its existence objectively?
474
Well, does fear exist?
475
No, you have the problem with all the emotional terms.
476
Does joy exist?
477
Does surprise exist?
478
Does embarrassment exist?
479
Does guilt exist?
480
Shame, how are they related to one another?
481
Guilt and shame, for example, seem quite similar to one another, right?
482
And pain and fear and anger all seem to share the attribute of unpleasant and negative emotions.
483
And so how similar, how something, if something exists, it should be the same as some things and different from other things.
484
And that's part of construct validation as well, to specify how the construct is the same as some things and different from others.
485
Anger should be reliably distinguishable from joy, for example, because otherwise they're not different And anger
486
and fear should be somewhat the same if they're both negative emotions
487
So it's extraordinarily complex to validate a construct And
488
so here's what we did with political correctness The reason I'm using the political examples is
489
because that's an obvious place where self -serving bias can enter the scientific arena, right? So,
490
if I wanted to make a point about political correctness or
491
if I wanted to make a point about right -wing fascism
492
I could build my biases into the measurement instruments accidentally
493
And then they would produce as output what I put into them as input
494
And I want to protect myself against that
495
if I actually want to do the scientific investigation properly
496
So what we did when we started to construct our measures of political correctness was
497
employ a number of people
498
to go through as many news sources as they could get their hands on to identify any attitude or behavior,
499
roughly that, that had been described by anyone at all as potentially politically correct.
500
So it was kind of agnostic.
501
And we were trying to do it as randomly as possible, you know, to get as many news sources as we possibly could so that we were sampling across the environment without bias.
502
Okay, so then we came up with, I don't remember how many,
503
couple hundred, maybe more, couple hundred items that were roughly indicative of what you might describe as political correctness.
504
But that's not good enough, right?
505
Because you have this random assemblage of items, doesn't indicate at all that they're all measuring something that was similar.
506
That's just implicit, they're all called political correctness, but you don't know if those attitudes co -vary.
507
And what that means is, if you held one attitude of that list, were you more likely to hold another or multiple others, right?
508
So does the conditional probability of holding multiple items,
509
is there a high probability of holding true multiple items simultaneously?
510
Well, you figure that out with factor analysis.
511
So what we did is we turned that into a questionnaire using different question types, and we administered it to several hundred people.
512
And we did a factor analysis and we found actually
513
that there was such a thing as political correctness
514
because the questions clumped together People would reliably answer them in a patterned manner, but that there were actually two dimensions that were quite separate
515
So there isn't one political correctness There seems to be two
516
and then we looked at the personality predictors and the IQ predictors
517
and a variety of other predictors That would enable us to come to some understanding of the temperamental
518
Proclivity towards those political attitudes, if any We knew already that
519
political conservatives tended to be low in trade openness that's the creativity dimension
520
and high in trade conscientiousness whereas political liberals tended to be high in trade openness
521
and low in conscientiousness and
522
so one of the things that's extraordinarily interesting to know from the Big Five perspective is
523
that your political proclivities are very powerfully influenced by your temperament and
524
so one of the things you can think about with regards to ongoing political discussions in the real world is
525
that those discussions are actually attempts by people of different temperaments one, to impose their temperamental viewpoints on the world and two,
526
to engage in a dialogue with people who are actually quite different than they are so like conscientious people, they value hard work, rules,
527
order, reliability, integrity, and structure And so they're dutiful.
528
We analyzed what predicted military performance, for example, in the U .S.
529
Army.
530
Overwhelmingly conscientiousness.
531
It's not surprising, right?
532
Because it's a very structured, rule -ordered, top -down, follow -procedure sort of endeavor.
533
Now, the armed forces had problems with that to some degree
534
because they were also simultaneously looking for people who could think independently on their feet.
535
Because if you're in a battlefield, for example, Especially if you're isolated from your command structure, there's going to be times when you have to make extraordinarily difficult decisions on your own.
536
But if you're selected primarily for conscientiousness, that's not going to be your forte.
537
Because if you're a conscientious person, what happens is that you enter into a contract with someone, even yourself, and then you carry it out.
538
So now, we've also spent a lot of time selecting entrepreneurs.
539
I work with this company in California
540
that has started schools for entrepreneurs in a hundred
541
and now I think a hundred
542
and sixty different countries all over the world This the guy who started this whose name is Adeo Resi.
543
He's a real.
544
He's an absolute monster The guy started well all he started all those schools in five years
545
165 schools in all across the world eight different languages
546
and we've been screening people for entrepreneurial ability and
547
if you're going to be an entrepreneur you almost have the
548
opposite profile as a soldier you're very high in openness
549
and you're lower in conscientiousness or at least conscientiousness is irrelevant
550
and the reason for that seems to be that like
551
if you're an orderly person and you'd like to follow procedures
552
and rules it's kind of hard for you to start a company
553
because when you first start a company or engage in any other creative process
554
because entrepreneurs turn out to be the same as artists you
555
kind of have to You're not operating within a rule -governed structure. In fact,
556
there may be many times where you have to break a small rule to move properly at a higher level of analysis.
557
There's no algorithmic way of generating a new company, right?
558
Obviously.
559
And so it's people who are very high in openness who happen to be good entrepreneurs.
560
And so this is something I thought was extraordinarily cool because we'd also already known what predicts managerial,
561
administrative, and academic ability And IQ is crucial for any complex job, so we'll just leave that behind, but what predicts academic ability,
562
for example, at the University of Toronto, is intelligence, obviously, but also conscientiousness.
563
The correlation between creativity and grades at the U of T is zero.
564
Zero.
565
Right.
566
But it's not surprising.
567
The thing is, you know, it's easy to be cynical about that, But one of the things you have to understand about creative people is
568
that they continually step outside of the domain of evaluation structures Right
569
because if you're going to say you're going to evaluate The performance of a hundred professors on their lecturing ability Well, you kind of have to measure what's common across all the
570
professors in order to come up with the standards for evaluation Well, that means you're not going to be able to use
571
that structure to evaluate a particularly creative professor Because he
572
or she is going to do something in a way that's
573
so different that it won't show up on the evaluation measure And of course that's what happens in universities, you know Somebody sent me, a couple of days ago,
574
somebody sent me an essay that they had written for their master's thesis
575
That was wildly creative and they were basically told to leave the program And that they couldn't continue, not in a mean way What happened was
576
that what they were thinking was so outside of the conventions in the discipline is
577
that no one had any idea what to do with the essay.
578
So, and that's really the lot of creative people, right?
579
They're always stepping outside of evaluation structures.
580
And so, it's not that surprising that the relationship between creativity and grades at the U of T is zero.
581
We found out as well, by looking at graduate student performance across multiple institutions, that there was a negative correlation between creativity and graduate school performance.
582
It wasn't even zero, it was worse than negative.
583
Being creative was negative.
584
And you think, well, that could make you cynical as well, but you can't be cynical in that way because one of the things
585
that happens in science is that science tends to progress incrementally rather than in great leaps.
586
Now and then someone comes along who blows the structure out of a science and advances it ridiculously like Einstein.
587
But like most people aren't Einstein, and maybe thank God for that.
588
Most of the time, you're in a discipline, you understand the discipline and then once you've developed understanding of the discipline,
589
you know what the next micro question is that should be answered.
590
And part of the reason that science is so powerful is
591
because it allows people who aren't genius level creatives to make real advances in the generation of knowledge.
592
One tiny micro step at a time.
593
Doesn't matter if there's a hundred thousand people doing it and each of them is making a micro step, man.
594
And we're zipping along as fast as we possibly want to zip along.
595
And so it turns out to be conscientiousness that's the excellent predictor of graduate student performance.
596
That's the best predictor for law.
597
It's the best predictor for managerial positions.
598
It's the best predictor for administrative positions.
599
Anything that has a structure of rules that needs to be applied, conscientiousness is a great predictor.
600
But it's not good for predicting artistic ability or entrepreneurial ability.
601
And that's also really important because one of the things, this is partly why bureaucracies stultify.
602
Right?
603
Because what happens is, as they develop, they get chock full of conscientious people with a few psychopaths thrown in there just for good measure.
604
They get chock full of conscientious people busily zooming efficiently down a single track and then all of a sudden,
605
the landscape shifts and they're going very, very efficiently in exactly the wrong direction.
606
And then the whole bloody thing falls apart.
607
So you need to have some creative wing nuts in your organization to come up with completely absurd ideas
608
that might just on the off chance be true.
609
And so creativity is strange in that manner too because it's a high risk, high return game.
610
You're a lot safer in your life to find a functioning entity and to operate as a cog within it.
611
As long as the entity keeps functioning.
612
Because if you're creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability
613
that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time
614
And you're going to become hyper successful as a consequence
615
But there's much more probability
616
that Even though some of your ideas might be highly valuable The probability
617
that this is the right time and place for them Is extraordinarily low
618
So to produce a successful creative product For example in the marketplace You need a ridiculous combination of creativity
619
So that you keep generating ideas
620
And then a network around you of people who have skills that you don't and then the production of a product, let's say, whatever that happens to be,
621
that's actually in demand by the marketplace at exactly that moment and that someone else hasn't already done better.
622
So the sensible thing to tell anybody who wants to be creative is, that's stupid.
623
You shouldn't do it.
624
Your probability of success is so low that it's better just to do something sensible.
625
But the problem with that is that creative people can't do that because they're creative.
626
And if they shut down their creativity, it's like an extrovert who's gone to live in an isolated cell.
627
A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die.
628
So they're stuck with it.
629
But it is a high -risk, high -return strategy.
630
So probably better if you want to be creative, or if you are, and you should take this advice to heart because I've been watching people for a long time.
631
If you want to engage in a creative pursuit, You should find something stable to do that will generate you an income
632
And you should pursue the thing that you're creative about on the side because
633
Monetizing creative production is so bloody difficult
634
that especially now like especially in like artistic domains Generation of music and
635
that sort of thing is like you just have no idea How many million songs there are on the internet
636
and the vast majority of them commercially available get downloaded Zero
637
times like 80 per I think there's 80 million songs
638
or something like that on the net
639
And I believe it's something in the neighborhood of 70 million get downloaded to zero times
640
And then there's a hundred that can get downloaded like 350 million times
641
and so those people are wildly successful and everyone else collapses in failure.
642
Yep No We'll talk about that more okay,
643
so that's not a bad overview for for initial foray into Psychometrics.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 643 sentences and 8766 words to shadow. The speech runs for 49:30. The speaker talks at a natural 177 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| trait noun | /tɹeɪt/ | An identifying characteristic, habit or trend. |
| dimension noun | /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/ | A single aspect of a given thing. |
| measurement noun | /ˈmɛʒ.ə.mənt/ | The act of measuring. |
| psychological adjective | /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/ | Of or pertaining to psychology. |
| stable noun | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | A building, wing or dependency set apart and adapted for lodging and feeding (and training) ungulates, especially horses. |
| anger noun | /ˈæŋɡə/ | A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm… |
| interaction noun | /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/ | The situation or occurrence in which two or more things act upon one another to produce an effect; the effect resulting from such a situation or occurrence. |
| creativity noun | /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/ | The ability to use imagination to produce a novel idea or product. |
| engage verb | /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/ | To engross or hold the attention of; to keep busy or occupied. |
| underlying adjective | Lying underneath. | |
| hypothesis noun | /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/ | A tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem and that can be tested by further observation, investigation, or… |
| psychology noun | /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/ | The study of the human mind. |
| probability noun | /ˌpɹɑ.bəˈbɪl.ə.ti/ | The state of being probable. |
| construct verb | /ˈkɑn.stɹʌkt/ | To build or form (something) by assembling parts. |
| microwave noun | /ˈmaɪkɹoʊˌweɪv/ | An electromagnetic wave with wavelength between that of infrared light and radio waves. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| come along verb | To accompany. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| get away with verb | To get away, or escape, taking (something) with one. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you're an orderly person and you'd like |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been trying · we've been screening · I've been watching |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've been · we've come · has been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was put · are integrated · could be applied |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 229 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, they're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: dimension /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/, measurement /ˈmɛʒ.ə.mənt/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, evaluation /ɪˌvæljuˈeɪʃn̩/
- Long words — get the stress right: psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, creativity /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like trait, dimension, measurement.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.