The Science Of Personality Change - Christian Jarrett

They calculated, like, in terms of happiness, if you can help people achieve a fairly modest reduction in their trait neuroticism, then in terms of happiness, it's equivalent of an increase in your income to over $300,000 a year. If you can achieve these real, genuine shifts in some of your trait scores, it's gonna make a difference to your life.

(wind blows) The topic that I know you came to talk about is post-ejaculatory adaptations to self-semen displacement, a study that I recently read. And I've found (laughs) in this, "Contrary to the prevailing view, male sexual jealousy accounts for more cases of family violence, e.g. spouse and child abuse, than social class, poverty, alcohol, or drug addiction combined." This was shared by Rob Henderson the other day. High level-

(laughs)

... what are your, what are your thoughts on post-ejaculatory adaptations to self-semen displacement?

Wowsers. (laughs)

(laughs)

(laughs) That's, yeah, that, that's the most, uh, left field question I've had, uh, I would say. Um, oh, yeah, well, you know what men are like. Yeah, jealousy probably accounts for a lot of, um, bad personality change, I would say.

Absolutely.

(laughs)

Well, I think as well, like, one of the things that men are pretty hard-wired to avoid is being cooked, right, you know, to raise somebody else's child.

Yeah, yeah.

So I guess that the jealousy must be tuned up a little bit more in that regard for men.

Yeah, I mean, more seriously, I guess there is an e- an evolutionary thread that runs through, you know, a lot of the personality research. And, um, these kind of, you know, you get There are sex, important sex differences in personality and that kind of thing, you know, to do with the average gender differences in some of the traits, and yeah, the kind of thing you're talking about, you know, aggressiveness and competitiveness and, and so on. So it does tie in, uh, loosely i- in some ways.

We've looped it back around. All right, so what do you mean when you talk about personality?

Well, uh, the way I, uh, approach it is the, the way it, it is covered in personality, uh, in, in psychological science by personality researchers. So that, like the formal a- approach, which is, so personality is our, it's a combination of our habits of thought, uh, feeling, the way we relate to other people. And you can measure these, these tendencies with the big five model of personality. So that, that's kind of, basically, that's what I mean by it in, in this book that I wrote. Um, I took the scientific route. You know, there are other models like the Myers-Briggs, that kind of thing. There are some of these, uh, and even more wa- you know, wackier ones than that, that are less scientific. Uh, but what I mean by it is those ingrained behavioral tendencies. And, um, like a, a favorite way that personality researchers have of describing it is that, uh, you can tell what's your personality 'cause it's how you behave without putting any effort into it. You know, so if, if an extrovert, a strong extrovert walks into a room, uh, they don't think to themselves, "Right, I better make an effort to start chatting to the people in the room," that kind of thing. It's, it's, it's just how they act 'cause it's how, it's how they are.