Jordan Peterson: The Mind of Highly (Dis-)Agreeable People

so let's assume that the reason that women are higher in sensitivity to negative emotion is because the world is actually more dangerous to women right because that would be the most logical reason why there would be a sex difference in a sex difference in it something like fear or sensitivity to punishment well first there's the danger of physical altercation second there's the sexual danger so women become sexually vulnerable at puberty and why do I say vulnerable well it's straightforward it's because the cost of sex for women is way higher than it is for men or

it certainly has been throughout our evolutionary history because if a man has an unwanted sexual encounter well then he walks away and maybe he's persecuted by the state or prosecuted by the state for it but if a woman has an unwanted unwarranted or incautious sexual encounter and she ends up pregnant then well in traditional societies that's you're just done and even in modern societies that are rich like ours you're it's it's a I don't have to go into that it's big trouble no matter what you do about it it's big trouble so being being more

nervous about that makes perfect sense but then here's the last thing and I think that woman's nervous systems are not adapted to women I think woman's nervous systems are adapted to the mother-infant dyad and because you are not the same creature when you have an infant not at all you're way more vulnerable and it's partly because you have to express their vulnerability of the infant and you also have to care for it right so you think about an infant especially under nine months so let's say how are you going to be wired up if you're

going to optimally care for an infant under nine months and I'm saying under nine months because women generally do the bulk of childcare for infants who were under nine months old and part of the reason for that there's a whole host of reasons but part of the reasons for that obviously is that they breastfeed but imagine what you need to be wired up biologically in order to care for an infant first of all they're very demanding right because they're completely helpless and they're demanding 24 hours a day and it's quite it's quite it's quite an

emotional load and an infant under nine months is never wrong right what you do to an nine months is when they're in distress you always respond you never tell the infant get your act together and stop whining right which you can do say to an into a child that's 18 months old you can start having that sort of conversation but under nine months it's like nothing is the infant's fault it's surrounded in an extraordinarily threatening world and you have to be responsive to what it needs regardless of what you want and you have to be

very sensitive to the threats that emerge in the environment and so I think the price that women pay for that ability to have an intimate relationship with infants in the very earliest stages of development is that their nervous systems are actually wired so that they can perform that role optimally and the disadvantage to that is that having a temperament like that doesn't work that well when you're dealing with adult man especially when you're dealing with them and in a business environment because it's not the same thing not at all it's a competitive environment so okay

so agreeable people are compassionate and polite what are disagreeable people like they're tough minded they're blunt they're competitive and they won't do a damn thing they don't want to do so it isn't exactly that they're aggressive although they will push you the hell out of their way if you're in the way they're not they're not like volatile like you are if you're high in in neuroticism it isn't defensive aggression it's more like predatory aggression its dominance behavior and so for someone who's high who's high highly disagreeable they look at the world as a place in

which they can compete and win and I'll tell you a story I have a friend I gave him my personality test the big five aspect scale that Colin DeYoung developed huh in my lab and I knew he is a disagreeable guy and by interacting with I mean he's even rude to people sort of spontaneously on the street I actually like him quite a bit he's very very funny he's also very conscientious so you can trust him but it's disagreeable as hell and so I gave him this test because I thought it would be funny and

he came out as the most disagreeable person in 10,000 so reasonably reasonable in compassion about 30th percentile but like point zero zero one in politeness so he's extraordinarily blunt and he'll just say absolutely any no matter how horrible it is and he was often brought in to corporations to sort of clean them up so if a corporation was tilting and not doing well they'd bring him in to find out who the useless people were and fire them and I talked to him about that because I've had the missed opportunity to have to not have graduate

students in my lab for example that weren't performing well and I'd find it very very difficult to you know dress someone down and certainly difficult to fire them I just hate it because I'm actually quite an agreeable person much to my chagrin and I asked him about that and I said well what do you do you have to fire people all the time how do you handle that he says handle it I enjoy it and I thought wow that's so interesting that someone would have that response I said well what do you mean you enjoy

it he said look I go into these companies and I analyze the performance of groups of people right and there's in those groups there are people who are really striving really trying hard and working themselves really hard and being productive and then there's these people that are just doing nothing they're completely in the way they don't carry their weight at all they take advantage every chance they get and they're always whining about why they can't work it's like I find out who they are I call them into my office and I tell them exactly what

they've been doing it's like hit the road buddy you've had your you've had your run of it and I thought oh yeah ok fair enough you know well I can tell you you know I've had situations in my lab where I had underperforming graduate students and one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really hard on the high performing graduate students you know because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing you know

and that's exactly right and so this is also why there's there's a conscientiousness trait and an agreeable this trait cuz conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments right they don't give a damn about your feelings not a bit it's like are you doing the work or not whereas agreeable people think well you know your mother's sick and you know you've you've got a bunch of family problems and and we all have to take care of each other and it's no wonder that you're having a rough time and like you can't say that one of those

attitudes is correct and the other isn't correct you can't say that there wouldn't be those two dimensions if there wasn't something correct about both of them but you can certainly point out that often they conflict you know and so the demand for for inclusiveness and unity and care and the demand for high-level performance in a hierarchical structure there are very different orientations in the world and so it's complicated for people who are agreeable and conscientious and actually I think often that large corporations and large large institutions of any sort run on the unheralded labor of

people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness and they're disproportionately women and my experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately no not appropriately if you want to hire someone to exploit productively you hire middle-aged women who are hyper conscientious and who are agreeable because they'll do everything they won't take credit for it and they won't complain and that's nasty and I think that happens all the time and so one of the things you have to be careful of if you're agreeable is not to be

exploited because you'll line up to be exploited and I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants and so that just doesn't work so well in that actual world and one of the things one of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy you know people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons but one of them is they often come because they're too agreeable and so what they get is so-called assertiveness training although it's not exactly assertiveness that's being trained what it is is the ability to learn how to negotiate

on your own behalf and one of the things I tell agreeable people especially if their conscientious is say what you think tell the truth about what you think there's going to be things you think that you think are nasty and harsh and they probably are nasty and harsh but they're also probably true and you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message and it's not straightforward at all because agreeable people do not like conflict not at all they smooth the water you know when you can see you can see why that

is in accordance with the hypothesis that I've been putting forward you don't want conflict around infants it's too damn dangerous you don't want fights to break out you don't want anything to disturb the the relative peace you know and if you're also more prone to being hurt physically and perhaps emotionally you also may be loath to engage in the kind of high intense a conflict that will solve problems in the short term because a lot of conflict it takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term and you know if that can

spiral up to where it's dangerous which it can if it gets uncontrolled it might be safer in the short term to keep the water is smooth and to not delve into those situations where conflict emerges the problem with that is it's not a very good medium to long term strategy right because lots lots of times there are things you have to talk about because they're not going to go away and so partly what you do with agreeable people is you get them to figure out and they have a hard time with this too if you

ask a disagreeable person what what he wants say or she wants they'll tell you right away they know it's like this is what I want and this is how I'm going to get it but agreeable people especially if they're really agreeable are so agreeable that they often don't even know what they want because they're so accustomed to living for other people and to finding out what other people want into trying to make them comfortable and so forth that it's harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life and

that's not look there's situations where that's advantageous but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to forge yourself a career that just doesn't work at all so