Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to another episode of the Human Potential Lab, where
I teach you the latest science of important psychological concepts
that are relevant to your daily life. Today, I'm going
to be teaching you about the intersection of personality, creativity,
and well being. These are all three things that are
very interesting to people, and when you look at the
(00:26):
integration of them, you can really get close to a
life well lived. So first off, I want to just
do a little primer on what is personality. A lot
of people think of personality as a thing that is
ingrained that doesn't change much throughout our lives. That you
are either an extrovert or you're an introvert. You are
either highly neurotic or you're not neurotic, and that's just
(00:47):
not the right way to think about personality in general.
It turns out that personality is actually something that is
quite fluid and can be context dependent. It's partly determined
by our genes, and it's also partly determined by the environment.
But when we talk about personality, we're just talking about
what psychologists called density distributions. So throughout the course of
your day, you tend to score more introverted, let's say,
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in most of your actions like a four or five
on a five point scale. But you may have your
moments where you're extremely extroverted. Maybe you get really inspired
to stand on a table and dance. Who knows, you
know what the context can bring out of a human
So I think it's important first of all to just
say that personality is not something set in stone and
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can change. With that said, there is some stability, some
very meaningful stability to our average patterns of thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, because that's what personality is at the end
of the day. It is our total pattern of thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors. Now, we can, through a lot of intense effort,
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try to change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and in
doing so, change important parts of our personality. But we
can also accept a lot of our patterns of thoughts, feelings,
behaviors and embrace our personality. So it's only up to
you to decide what you want to embrace and self
accept and what you want to change. And the good
news is that you can change your personality. So that
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out of the way, I'm going to talk about how
modern day psychologists conceptualize personality because they view it as
a hierarchy, and so I want you to take a
good look at this graph here and note that we
have various levels at which we can talk about human personality,
and at the very top level there's actually a big two.
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We call it the Big two of personality. So at
the highest level of description in the personality hierarchy, we
can note that humans differ in the extent to which
they feel stable in their lives. They feel emotionally stable,
they feel like they can reach their goals and move
towards their goals even with internal disruptions such as emotional upset,
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as well as external disruptions like a traumatic episode that happens.
So people do differ in their personality in terms of
how high they score in stability. But we also need
to acknowledge there's a second part of personality called plasticity,
which is the extent to which you're flexible and capable
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of adapting and changing. Both stability and plasticity are absolutely
essential to the healthy functioning of the whole person, or
more technically, to the efficient functioning of any cybernetic organism
which includes humans. All cybernetic organisms are goal directed organisms.
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That's all it means to be cybernetics. Some people might
think cybernetics and think like terminator or something like robots. Actually,
the science of cybernetics is actually the study of organic
goal directed systems, and that includes humans and also includes
other systems, other biological systems that are goal oriented like us.
But any goal directed organism must have a certain degree
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of stability as well as plasticity to fully thrive. Okay,
with that out of the way, let's go one step
lower in the personality hierarchy to the Big Five, which
is probably what most of you have heard of. When
you've heard of personality, you heard of if you took
like an intro to psychology class, you've heard of the
Big five personality traits. And that's really what I'm going
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to focus on a lot today, as well as the
main aspects of each of the Big five. So when
I say that there are main there are the main
aspects of each of the Big five. If you look
at this graph, you can see that the Big five
includes neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience or
openness slash intellect. But underneath each of those are two
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main aspects that really make up that Big five. You
could go even lower to the facet level and have
all sorts of facets. There could be an unlimited number
of facets associated with each aspect of the Big Five.
But just for our understanding in this lecture today, we're
going to focus on the aspects of each of the
Big five because I think it will really allow you
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to wrap your head around what really that personality trait
is and what its major most functional components are that
are relevant for your daily life. Let's start with extraversion introversion.
So that's the dimension the extraversion slash interversion dimension of personality.
Modern day personality psychologists view it as a single continuum.
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So to the extend to what you score higher on
the extraversion polls, the extend to which you're less of
an introvert. And then the more you score high to
the left of the on the poll to the introversion side,
the less you are an extrovert. And that's how modern
day personality psychologists tend to think of it. The two
main aspects of extraversion are enthusiasm and assertiveness. Let's look
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at some of the items and see how they're tested
to see maybe where you score on these two So
for the enthusiasm aspect, you have things like laugh a lot,
show my feelings when I'm happy, often get caught up
in the excitement. And then for the assertiveness aspect, you
of things like take charge, am the first to act,
don't hold back my opinions. So if you score really
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high in enthusiasm and assertiveness, you are essentially high in extroversion'
it's a continuum. There is no pure extrovert or pure introvert,
And in fact, most people score somewhere there in the
middle where they're kind of ambiverts. You know, they they're
not an extreme introvert or extrovert. And I think we
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all know who are the ones who are the extremes.
They're kind of obvious even through like five seconds of
talking to them. You can tell if someone's a really enthusiastic, weader,
assertive person, you know, who has to jump right in
and take charge and take over, they're an extrovert. And
we can also tell if they're an introverts. So they're
opposite in that where they prefer maybe they have a
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preference for solitude, maybe they have a preference for more quiet,
maybe they are not as expressive on their face when
you're talking to them. You know, there's some people who
are like golden retrievers, right like, and there are some
who just like to take a step back and process
things a little bit more deeply. And maybe you don't
know what there, You don't know how they are reacting
to what you're saying, but maybe they'll come back later
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with an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate response to what you've told them.
I find the latest neuroscience of the extraversion introversion dimension
really interesting because you see a lot of memes online
that like introverts, they get their batteries drained faster, their
social batteries they need to recharge. You know, you see
that meme over and over again, whereveras extroverts don't need
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to recharge their social battery as much. We can actually
put that within a modern day framework of dopamine. And
I find the link between dopamine and intro and the
introversion extraversion dimension really because through dopaminergic terms, it does
actually take introverts more work to get energized over what
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we call primal rewards, things like social status, power, social attention,
positive social attention, networking events, risky sex, those sorts of things,
we call them primal rewards. Introverts, with the way their
dopaminergic system functions, they tend to have to work a
little bit harder to get energized for those things, whereas
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extroverts tend to have this more naturally dopaminergic functioning to
those more primal reward centers of their brain, so it
naturally energizes them more and can show as enthusiasm for
those things. However, there are a lot of misconceptions about introverts,
and there are also a lot of misconceptions about extroverts,
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and I think that's really important to acknowledge. I wrote
this article in Scientific American summarizing some research, some very
interesting research showing that both introverts and extroverts get exhausted
from too much socializing. So even extroverts are human too,
believe it or not. Even the most extroverted, the extrovert,
while they're a threshold for getting tired from socializing, maybe
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higher than the introvert, they still too at a certain
point can get exhausted from too much socializing. So we're
just talking about thresholds here, and dopamine plays an important
role in that sense of whether or not you're feeling
energized and wanting to put in the work towards something.
That's really a big role of dopamine, and it's in
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the role it plays in the human motivational system. The
next personality trade I want to talk about is the
agreeableness slash disagreeableness spectrum. So what are you thinking right now?
How agreeable are you? How disagreeable are you? Let's look
at some items. The two main aspects of agreeableness are
politeness and compassion. So the kind of items. For point,
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it's our respect, authority, hate to seem pushy, avoid imposing
my will in others. And for compassions things like fuel
other's emotions, inquire about others' well being, take an interest
in other people's lives. Now, this is where it's interesting
to note that each of the aspects of each of
the Big five can actually pull part in various ways.
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So you can score really high in politeness but not compassion,
or really high in compassion and not politeness, and some
of these aspects can have unique correlations on things in
the world. We will revisit this later when we show
that maybe politeness is not as beneficial as compassion. Interests me.
From a neuroscience perspective, those who score very high in
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politeness tend to show airrors of their brain having to
do with inhibitory control and the resistance of aggression, which
suggests that people who score high in politeness are not
necessarily compassionate people. They're actually just really good at inhibiting
their angry impulses. So that's interesting to note. Compassion seems
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to be associated with a separate neuroscientific foundation within the
agreeable disagreeableness do mean, I'm really interested in the dark
triad and its counterpart which my researchers and I came
up with. So the dark triad is a very well
studied set of antagonistic or disagreeable personality dimensions. We have narcissism, psychopathy,
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and machiavelianism. So narcissism is a very is a very
entitled self importance. Psychopathy has to do with with meanness, lying, deceit,
and Machiavelianism has to do with a very strategic, long
term manipulation of what you want to get out of others,
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being fine exploiting others for your own gain. These three
are correlated with each other. They also can come apart
in interesting ways, but for the most part they are
a correlated with each other, forming the Dark Triad. Now,
my colleagues and I were interested in why there was
so much research on the Dark Triad but nothing on
the Light Triad. So we created a Light Triad scale,
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which is not the exact opposite of the Dark Triad.
You can actually score high in the Dark Triad and
also score somewhat on the Light tride as well, or
all sorts of different combinations high on the Light Triade
and have a little Dark Triad. But we do see
it as a nice counterpart to the Dark Triad. So
the three main aspects of the Light Triad are continism,
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faith in humanity, and humanism. So contuinism is treating people's
ends into themselves, not mere means. Faith in humanity is
believing in the fundamental goodness of humans, and humanism is
valuing the dignity and worth of each individual. This is
an image that someone on the Internet came up with.
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It looks like with their name Rayley Lewis. Anyway, big
shout out to Rayley Lewis for coming up with this.
We think it's really neat. It shows the different items
associated with each of the three members of the light triad.
So let me just give you some examples from each
of these. So an example of humanism would be like
I tend to admire others. I tend to appaud the
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successes of other people. For contunism, we have prefer honesty
over charm. I like to be authentic, even if it
may damage my reputation. And for faith in humanity, I
tend to see the best in people, and I'm quick
to forgive people hurt me. In fact, forgiveness is a
big one, a big marker. The inability to forgive is
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a big marker of the dark triad, which is very interesting.
So we see great benefit to studying the Light triad
in addition to the Dark Triad. And we have to
understand that we're all a mix of all these things.
And we also context can bring out the worst in us.
As I mentioned earlier, context matters too for personality. It's
not all our innate dispositions, and the context can absolutely
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bring out the worst us, and it could also bring
out the best in us. Here's an interesting question. Are
most humans good? Well? And Frank seemed to think so.
And Frank was writing in her diary all the way
up to the moment where the Nazis were coming up
to find her to kill her. She wrote, I still
believe at the end of the day that most people
are good at heart. That's a rough paraphrasing what she said,
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but she clearly would score high in the light triad
and her faith in humanity. And what you do find
is that even though all of us are some mix
of light and dark traits, most people are tipped to
the light side. That's good news, but there's bad news too,
in the sense that if you see in this graph
a couple of those little dots, a lot of those
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little circles, which are people all the way to the
far right down dark tried extremely high almost pure dark triad.
There are examples of extreme malevolence, and unfortunately, all it
takes to a couple people to ruin it for the
rest of us. So personality matters, and the way we
show up in the world and our being in the
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world really matters. The next trait I want to talk
about is neuroticism. I like this meme that I saw
on the Internet, the top seven traits of neuroticism, because
I think it does nicely encapsulate some of the main
facets of neuroticism, things like negative emotions extreme worry or anxiety,
self consciousness, anger and irrability, jealousy and feelings of envy,
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substance abuse and self doubt and low self esteem. But
the two main aspects of neuroticism are volatility and withdrawal.
So some items that are good examples of volatility include
things like, I get angry easily, I change my mood
a lot, I get easily agitated. So you think about
the Incredible Hook, and then you think of the other one, withdrawal.
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I'm filled with doubts about things, I worry about things,
I've become overwhelmed by events. Actually the Incredible Holk. If
I had to identify the Incredible Hook's personality structure would
be high volatility plus high antagonism or aggression. So both
of those in combination. We're all a mix of personality traits,
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and I think that's really important to remember. And there's
lots of unique configuration and we're going to get to
one of my favorite unique configurations at the end of
this lecture, so stay tuned. The next personality trade I
want to cover is conscientiousness. Which is the trait most
central to the best selling book Grit by my friend
and colleague Angela Duckworth. There's actually two main aspects of conscientiousness, though.
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One is industriousness, which really is very strongly tied to
the concept of grit, things like I carry out my plans,
I finish what I start, I'm not easily distracted. And
another aspect is orderliness, things like I like order, I
keep things tidy, I see that rules are observed. So
both of those are the main aspects of conscientiousness. But
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as I've already noted, these different aspects can come apart
in very important ways. It's possible to have an awful
lot of grit but not be terribly orderly. It's also
possible to be a very orderly person but not really
get a lot of your most important goals completed. Ever,
and we're going to revisit the distinction between industriousness and
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orderliness later when we talk about well being. Okay, and
now for the final personality trait that we're just going
to cover at a very high level, openness to experience,
or as my colleagues and I like to call it,
cognitive exploration. I think I make it pretty clear to
anyone who knows me that the openness to experience is
my favorite personality trait. This is the one where I
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come most alive. So the two main aspects of cognitive
exploration are intellect and openness. These are important distinctions. So
the kind of items for intellect are things like I'm
quick to understand things, I like to solve complex problems,
I engage with difficult reading mater And things like openness
are things like I believe in the importance of art,
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I love to reflect on things, and I need a
creative outlet. Now they are correlated with each other, but
as my PhD dissertation showed, they can really come part
in important ways when we're trying to predict creativity, when
we're trying to predict well being, they're not always correlated.
And also when we think about intelligence, I think it's
important to think about intelligence as more than just intellect.
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I think that including some of the kind of things
in the openness aspect are important when we conceptualize human intelligence.
More on that in a second, But this is the
paper that was the primary outgrowth of my PhD dissertation,
where I tried to open up openness isn't that clever title?
A four factor model in relations to creative achievement in
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the arts and sciences? Isn't that a nerdy subtitle? So
in this work I showed that the openness to experience
aspect is really comprised by two main facets under it,
affective engagement and esthetic or imagination engagement. So under the
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openness to experience part, you can be really open to
engaging in the full breadth and depth of your emotions,
and you can also really be interested in creativity, aesthetics
and the imagination. And then on the intellect side, we
can have just pure raw IQ or what I called
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explicit cognitive ability, because I was trying to contrast it
from more intuitive intelligence or implicit learning as well as
intellectual engagement. So I want to be very clear, it's
important to distinguish the extent to which you enjoy intellectual
pursuits and like engaging intellectual pursuits and your role IQ
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or explicit cognive ability. Your cognitive ability could be very high,
but you might not be a very intellectually curious person. Also,
maybe your IQ is not sky, but you still are
incredibly intellectually curious. And I think we need to really
leave room open for that to appreciate in our society.
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And I put a lot of these these these this
research and passion that I have for UH for intelligence,
human intelligence, and the openness domain. In my book Ungifted
Intelligence redefined the truth about talent, practice, creativity in the
many past to greatness. In this book, I put forward
a theory of self actualizing intelligence, or at the time
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I called it the theory of personal intelligence, but now
I call it the theory of self actualizing intelligence, where
I defined as the dynamic interplay of engagement and ability
in pursuit of personal goals. And so I think that
personality matters a lot, but and I and I think
that intelligence matters a lot. But I think the key
there is what is the dynamic interplay of our abilities
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and personality inclinations and the engagement that we have and
the ways that are just positions our personality dispositions are
causing us to want to engage in certain areas of life.
And how is all of that in the service of
us reaching our personal goals, our dreams in our life.
So I think this is a broader view of intelligence
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than just the traditional IQ model of intelligence. So let's
now talk about the link between personality and creativity. I
love this connection. By far the most relevant personality demean
for the understanding of creativity's openness to experience. Surprise, surprise
that this demean of personality would be most relevant for creativity.
One of my favorite studies ever was the Epoll Toran
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studies in the fifties where Epaul Tarans looked at a
group of elementary school kids. Actually there are three elementary schools,
and he looked to see what'd happen if we followed
these kids up throughout their lives, who would end up
being the most creative people. He found that a certain
list of what he called the beyonder characteristics were really important,
things like love of work, persistence, feeling a sense of
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purpose and life. Yet even some elementary school students showed
the seeds of this being deep thinkers, not necessarily fast thinkers,
but deep thinkers, having tolerance of mistakes, being openness to change,
having a sense of risk taking, and feeling comfortable is
a minority of one. I really like this one. I
wonder where would you score on this? So, if you're
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in a situation where no one agrees with you on anything.
Everyone in the room has a dissenting view, but you
would like to stick to your guns, are you okay?
Being a minority of one, he found that those who
scored higher in these beyond your characteristics tended to grow
up being more creative in their lives. But he found
the biggest predictor of life along creativity was none of
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the things on this list. It was the extent to
which people fell in love with a future image of themselves.
I love this quote from Tarns. Life's most energizing and
exciting moments occur in those split seconds when are struggling
and searching suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the
profoundly new and image of the future. One of the
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most powerful wealth springs of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment and
self fulfillment, seems to be falling in love with something,
your dream, your image of the future. Well of that quote.
More modern day research by my colleagues and I have
found that this imagination aspect that comes from openness to
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experience and the intellectual curiosity part they offer valuable information
in predicting lifelong creativity above and beyond just raw IQ.
This paper called Openness to experience and intellect differentially predict
creative achievement in the arts and sciences found that when
predicting lifelong creative achievement, intellectual engagement does a better job
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of predicting it than IQ, although IQ is also an
independent predictor. And then in these sciences, when we talk
with thes is like music, visual arts, creative writing, we
talked about the various aspects of the arts. We found
that i Q actually was not correlated with creative achievement
in the arts. But what was correlated the creative achievement
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of the arts above all everything else was openness to experience,
which really, as I've noted, involves a deep, rich imagination
as well as an openness to engaging in the full
depth and breadth of your emotions. In this other paper,
my colleagues and I looked at the extent to which
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grit is important for creative achievement. And remember earlier I
said that the various aspects of the personality domans can
come apart in very important ways. We found that the
consistency part of grit was not as good a predictor
of creativity as the ability to persevere, to really be
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committed to something in the long term and to show
a deep perseverance toward it. But being consistent in your
goals is not necessarily is not necessarily the most predictive
thing of creativity because creativity often involves a lot of
trial and error. Creativity often involves having to shift goals,
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having to be flexible. Remember talking about the stability personality
trait at the beginning. If you score very low in
the stability personality train and you're just stable, that's not
the optimal functioning of any cybernetic system. So it's very
important to recognize that we found that curiosity was a
much better predictor of creativity. In fact, curiosity and persistence
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as a combo or a much better predictor of life
on creativity than just being consistent. Neurologically speaking, intellect and
openness to experience are associated with different areas of the brain,
So intellect or IQ and intellectual engagement tend to activate
more of what's called the executive control network, areas of
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our brain that are really important for concentration, for working memory,
being able to hold multiple bits of information in our
heads at one time, and being able to really focus
and synthesize the information in consciousness, whereas openness, the openness
aspect of the openness slash intellect personality to mein tends
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to activate more of what I call the imagination brain network,
or other scientists call it the default mode brain network.
But I did not feel as though that was as
sexy as the imagination network. And the imagination brain network
tends to involve a number of brain areas that work
together to help us imagine our personal futures, to take
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the perspective of another person, to remember our most poignant
and emotional memories. In a lot of ways, I see
the imagination brain network as the source of human experience.
Whereas the executive control network is certainly very important for
processing things coming outside of us, the imagination network is
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very important for our inner stream of consciousness. My colleagues
and I have been really interested in the relationship between
various brain activations and personality. In this paper from twenty
fifteen in the journal Human Brain Mapping, we found for
the first time that individual differences in intellect, openness to
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experience are associated with the efficiency of the imagination and
brain network. We think this is super interesting. So the
extent to which various areas of the defaultle network are
connected and communicating with each other, are associated with the
extent to which you self report on a personality scale
where you score on the intellect openness to experience dimension
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of personality. So these personality traits really can be linked
to various consistent activations of the brain, further showing that
personality is not purely contextual. There is a very important
core part of the way our brains function that is
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correlated with our patterns of thinking, behaving, and feeling in
the world. In this other paper, we linked creativity to
brain functioning and found that in the earliest stages of
creativity or what researchers called divergent thinking, your ability to
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come up with as many different uses for something. We
found that deactivation of the executive control network is actually
quite conducive to divergent thinking or creative thinking, whereas kind
of swimming in the sea of the default mode network
or the imagination network can be more beneficial. And that
makes a lot of sense. You know, when you're doing
a creative task, you want your self critical thinking consciousness
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to cannot get in the way of brainstorming or coming
up with lots of ideas, whereas during the later stages
when you want to evaluate your ideas or evaluate the
quality of your ideas a little bit more, then the
executive control network comes online. More So, this shows this
graph here, it just shows the time course of divergent
thinking ability and which brain networks come online and offline
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during that time course. And more recently, the work I've
done at the Imagination Institute at Penn where we looked
at some of the most imaginative people from all over
the world, from all different domains, from least ten domeins
we looked at. We found that the most imaginative people
really have this higher level of resting state connectivity in
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that default wile network or that imagination network. So you
really can see that difference when you look at the
brains of eminent thinkers and non eminent thinkers. So we
found that at various levels. I won't get too much
in the technical details, but there's various levels at which
you can look at a neuroscientific finding. One involves just
a resting state where they just at rest, where's their
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brain tend to go by default. You can also look
in terms of brain activity patterns, and we found very
similar thing there. We found a very similar thing there
with activation of the imagination brain network differences when doing
a creative idea generation task. And then you can also
look at brain morphometry where you can actually look at
structural differences between eminent thinkers and non eminent thinkers, and
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there are some significant structural differences associated with extraordinary creativity.
You know, they saved Einstein's brain right because they tried
to look to see is there something different with Einstein's
brain than other people's brains. But that really was not
a good scientific analysis. The brain deteriorate in lots of ways.
I think they cut it up in various ways. They
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never were really able to do a really good analysis
of that. But my colleagues and I have been trying
to look at that among some of the most creative
people alive today, and we do see that some areas
of the default ble network are a little thicker, and
there are other nuances that if you really are dying
to nerd out about this, you can download any of
(31:20):
these papers from my website Scott Barry Kauffman dot com
under the research section and you can dive in, get
your popcorn out, and study all you want about the
morpholometry of creative eminent thinkers. I also want to discuss
a personality trait and kind of place it within the
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Big five because you hear about it a lot, and
that's the highly sensitive person What exactly is the highly
sensitive personality? Leade Aaron has done a lot for the
field in initiating our understanding, awareness, and appreciation of the
highly sensitive personality. One of her books is called The
Highly Sensitive Child Wild helping our children thrive when the
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world overwhelms them. Within a Big five framework, the HSP
personality really is just a blend of neuroticism and openness
to experience. So if you look at the kind of
items on the HSP scale, you can see that they're
really just items referring to either neuroticism or openness to experience,
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things like I am easily overwhelmed by strong sensory input.
I seem to be aware of subtleties in my environment.
Other people's moods affect me. I tend to be very
sensitive to pain, and a lot of those have to
do with neuroticism. But then there are things like associated
with openness to experience, like I have a rich complex
inner life. I am deeply moved by the arts or music.
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So those things as well indicate that the highly sensitive
person really is this blend of neuroticism and openness to experience.
A lot of people claim to be HSPs, including assholes.
So here's then answerting question. Is Kanye West and hsp Well.
In one of the interviews, Connie West said, I think
that I am people. I think I'm misunderstood. I'm really
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just a sensitive introvert. And I want to make clear
that you can score high in that highly sensitive personality
and still be disagreeable. You know, in the agreeable disagreeable
dimension is really a separate dimension in the highly sensitive
personality dimension. And I covered these nuances in this article
or for Scientific American in twenty thirteen that went viral.
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I called it twenty three science. You're secretly a narcissist
masquerading as a sensitive introvert. And I wanted to talk
about the latest science of vulnerable narcissism and the science
of being a highly sensitive person and show that, look,
there's actually different ways you can be sensitive in this world.
When we talk about the highly sensitive personality, we're usually
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talking about Eleine Aaron's definition, which is a blend of
neuroticism and openness to experience. But I'm going to go
through each of the personality traits and show you that
actually each form of personality, each dimension of personality is
associated with its own unique form of sensitivity. All personality
traits have inherent sensitivity to something, And I think it's
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a really important point to make. Care So, for instance,
people high an extra version are sensitive to competitive rewards,
or these primal rewards I was talking about earlier, like
social status or social attention, or risky sex or money power.
It just so happens throughout the course of evolutionary history
that the most primal rewards tend to be social in nature,
because that tends to get us these other things. But
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people high an extra version tend to be very sensitive
to the reward value of competitive rewards. People high in
agreeableness are sensitive to other people's needs, goals, concerns, and feelings.
People high in conscientiousness are sensitive to abstract or distant goals.
People high in neuroticism are sensitive to threat. People high
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in openness to experience are sensitive to the value of
information for its own sake. People high in vulnerable narcissism
are hyper sensitive to criticism and evaluation, and people high
in grandiose narcissism are hyper sensitive to cues of praise
and acclaim. So just saying I misunderstood, I'm not really
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a jerk, I'm just highly sensitive. Well, actually, you can
be a jerk and be highly sensitive. You know, there's
not mutually exclusive categories, And it depends what are you
sensitive to. You know, what is the sensitivity are you?
Are you sensitivity? Are you highly sensitive to the pain
and suffering of others? Or are you highly sensitive to
criticism and to people not worshiping you all the time?
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These are different forms of sensitivity, and I often don't
see these distinctions made in the psychological literature or in
general pop discussions of sensitivity. In the gifted community, there's
a lot of talk about Dobrowski's over excitabilities, such as
having a psychomotor over excitability, having a sensual over excited ability,
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being intellectually over excitable, having an imaginational overexcitability, or being
emotionally over excitable. I really like this paper by Barbara
Kerr and her colleagues which show that we can map
these over excitabilities onto a modern day personality framework. I'm
just going to show you right here how they can
be mapped on. So, openness to fantasy is a facet
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of the intellect slash openness to experience demean and we
can map that onto the imaginational overexcitability component of Dobrowski's framework.
Things like having a rich fantasy life and proneness to
vivid daydreaming. Openness to aesthetics can be mapped onto sensual overexcitability,
enjoyment and absorption and beating the arts. Openness to feelings
can be mapped onto emotional overexcitability. Openness to a full
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range of feelings, both variety and intensity. Openness to ideas
can be mapped onto intellectual overexcitability, having a ravenous curiosity,
passion for learning, and need to understand ideas and the
reasoning behind arguments. This is very much tied to the
nerdy dopamine pathway as I call it. That's where you
get this nerdy dopamine excitement, this dopamine coursing through your
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system at the possibility of learning something new and complex,
and then openness to actions can be mapped onto a
psychomode or overexcitability. A love of novelty and getting out
of one's comfort zone. And I think that we can
link each of these to giftedness and creative giftedness. I
think a lot of creative people throughout the course of
human history have scored quite high in these over excitabilities,
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or we can just say high in these facets of
openness to experience. I'm not a big fan of the
phrase overexcitability. It sounds like you're too much, like you're
over but I think that there's no too much if
you're going to fundamentally change the world and with your creativity.
So now, lastly, for this lecture, I want to cover
the link between personality and well being, and I think
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it's very important when we do this to recognize that
well being is composed of various facets in and of itself.
What do we mean when we say well being? You know,
so it's important to recognize there's this. For this year
of this graph Air, we can talk about cole Riff's model.
We can have and Coro rift distinction between personal growth,
self esteem, autonomy, environmental mastery, positive relationships, and filling a
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life purpose. I think is a pretty decent model of
the different facets of well being. My colleagues and I,
in this study was led by Jesse Sun, looked at
the unique associations between Big five personality aspects and multiple
dimensions of well being. And what my colleagues and I
found are a couple of key findings which I think
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you'll find really interesting when your interest when you're thinking
about the link between well being and personality. So we
found that the biggest unique predictors of well being overall
are enthusiasm, well withdrawal, industriousness, compassion, and intellect. But we
can even have a much more wh wants to look
and show that enthusiasm and will withdrawal were the strongest
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unique predictors of high life satisfaction and positive emotions. So
it depends on what form of well being are we
talking about. Assertiveness strongly predicted greater autonomy in life, that
makes sense. Industriousness was uniquely associated with environmental mastery, purpose
in life, meaning, and accomplishment, whereas orderliness was not correlated
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with these dimensions and even predicted lower levels of personal growth.
Remember earlier I said I was going to get back
to the orderliness thing. Well, it turns out that orderliness
is not necessarily that good for well being. It's okay
to not feel the need to control everything and for
everything have everything be put in place. With that said,
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I'm not talking about OCD because I recently had an
episode with Michael Alsey showing there some great creative things
that can be correlated with OCD. I'm just talking about
the personality aspect of orderliness. And then passion was uniquely
associated with greater levels of personal growth, meaning and purpose
in life. And earlier I said, you know, these things
had come apart, and I think that it's important to
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distinguish between compassion and politeness because we found that politeness
was the only aspect of personality to have no significant
independent association with any other well being dimensions. So maybe
politeness is overrated. Now you don't want to be completely impolite,
but maybe a certain level and then compassion takes over
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is more important. And then finally, as a key finding,
we found that both intellect and openness were independently associated
with personal growth and autonomy. We feel like these findings
qualify earlier research because a lot of earlier research on
happiness really have made the case that only extraversion and
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neuroticism are relevant to happiness. We found there's a lot
more nuance there. When you expand your aspects of personality
that you study, and you also expand the facets of
well being that you study. We say, quote well being
is indeed higher for the extroverted and non Eurotic, but
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only to the extent that they possess the enthusiastic, non
withdrawal aspects of these traits. Further, when well being is
conceptualized in terms of multiple end states, there's more than
one personality profile that predicts greater well being. So now
I want to return to the introvert. So what are
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we saying here? Are we saying that introverts can't be happy? No,
there's this article I wrote with the title can Introverts
be happy in a world that can't stop talking? And
I reviewed research suggesting that happy introverts can exist. I
really like this paper quiet Flourishing. The authenticity and well
being of trait introverts living in the West depends on
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extroversion deficient beliefs. Basically, what the research found is the
extent to which you were a happy introvert is the
extent to which you self reported as an introvert, and
you also were okay with it, you accepted yourself as
Rodney Blahan and his colleagues note quote, Introverts who can
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learn to be more comfortable with their place on the introversion,
extrovert and continuum, for example, better thrive in our schools, universities,
and workplaces, despite the fact that in the West these
institutions are often geared toward extroverted behavior. We speculate that
introverts might learn to become more comfortable with their own
introversion in these environments by focusing on you demonic concepts
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such as maintaining a positive attitude towards oneself and cultivating
good character and practicing more self acceptance and developing their
signature strengths. Look, the more you judge yourself, the worse
you're gonna feel. This doesn't just operate within the introversion demain.
It operates with basically any any of the personality domains,
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and it also operates within the depression and anxiety does
to mean this study here, this paper here, The title
perfectly explains it. The more you judge, the worse you feel.
A judgmental attitude toward once inner experience predicts depression and anxiety.
So I want to just end this lecture and say, well,
there's so many different ways that personality can combine to
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create the unique configuration that is you. It's possible to
be a neuroted extrovert, and it's also possible to score
high in introversion as well as openness to experience a
unique configuration I call the wild introvert. Are you a
wild introvert? Are you an introvert where you don't get
so dopaminergically energized by networking events, social attention, social status, power, money,
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risky sex, but your nerdy dopamine pathway is highly active,
so you get very turned on by learning new information
and going on adventures in your head. Maybe you're a
wild introvert. Whatever you are, I highly suggest that you
consider do you want to accept it? Do you want
to change? And there are some aspects that maybe it's
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time to just accept who you are and embrace it
and channel it into your creativity. I guarantee you that
if you accept certain aspects of your personality and channel
it into your creativity, it'll be much more likely to
be happy, to be fulfilled, and to live and live
a life of full meaning. I want to thank you
all for listening to this lecture today. I hope it
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was educational, but I also hope it inspires you to
embrace who you are, change what you want to change,
and live a life full of creativity and well being.
Thank you, and stay tuned for the next episode of
The Human Potential Lab.