Jordan Peterson : How to Stop being the Nice Guy

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 and to 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 and so even though on average men and women don't just don't aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group if you go out and you look at the extremes they're very different so all of the most agreeable people are women and all of the most disagreeable people are men and the thing is the extremes are often what matter rather

than what's in the middle and so one of the ways that's reflected in society by the way is there's way more men in prison and the best personality predictor of being imprisoned is to be low in agreeableness it makes you call us now you may think well what's the opposite of compassion and politeness and the answer to that is I think it's best sort of conceptualized as a as a trading game so let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games and if you're very agreeable then you're going to bargain harder on my behalf

than you're going to bargain on your own behalf whereas if you're very disagreeable you're going to do the reverse you're going to think I'm in this trading game for me and you're going to take care of your own interests where an agreeable person is going to say no no at best this is at worst this has to be 50 50 but I'd like to help you every way I can 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 they're 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 intensity 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 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 the advantage to having a well-socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way so if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized that person can be quite quite the creature you know

because they're very they're very forward moving in their nature and very difficult to stop but if you don't get them successfully domesticated tamed roughly speaking by the time they're four their peers reject them and that's a big problem because your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four like you gotta you want to burn that into your brain because people don't know that that's your job and here's here's why you think it's it's easy if you think about it carefully so you imagine you've got a you've got

a three-year-old child so sort of halfway through that initial period of socialization and you take that child out in public okay what do you want for the child who cares about you what do you want from the child for the child you want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her and so the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly and if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid

of disciplining them or you don't know how to do that properly then what they're going to do is they're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children and false smiles from other parents and adults and that's so then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying and that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the well-being of your child if your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior like don't interrupt adults when they're talking

too much and pay attention and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary then and you know and share and play properly then when they meet other kids the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them and that's going to go well and then they're going to go off and socialize each other for the rest of their lives because that's what happens is that from four years old onwards the Primary socialization with children takes place among other children and so

if the kids don't get in on that early they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind and you can imagine how terrible that is because a four-year-old will not play with another four-year-old who's two but a five-year-old certainly will not play with a five-year-old who's two right because the Gap is just starting to get unbelievably large and so the kids start out behind and then the peers leave them behind and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life those are the ones that grow

up to be long-term anti-social right they're already aggressive it doesn't dip down now what happens to normal boys roughly speaking imagine the aggressive two-year-old types they get socialized so their level of aggression goes down and then they hit puberty and testosterone kicks in and bang levels of aggression go back up and so that's why males are criminals between the ages roughly of 16 and about 25. so when it matches the creativity curve by the way it's so cool if you look at the spike of creativity among men 16 to 25 it starts to go down

criminality matches that absolutely perfectly so that's quite cool so and part of so the testosterone levels raise the average level of aggression among men it's more dominance than aggression actually and testosterone is by no means all bad and then it starts to decrease at about age 25 or 26 which is usually when men stop staying up late at night stop drinking as much develop a full-time career and take on burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family and so also that's that's the development of of what I what I

would call predatory aggression because I also think that the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression versus maternal sympathy it's something like that so if you look at other if you look at other mammals that are that are predators because we're Predators as well as prey animals if you look at other animals like bears the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants in fact the female Bears will keep the male the hell away because he's likely to kill the infants and maybe even to eat them so there's no

maternality at all in solitary male mammalian Predators it's really useful to investigate the viewpoints of people who have opposing views to yours because they'll tell you things not only will they tell you things you don't know they'll also tell you how to see the world in ways that you don't see it and they'll also have skills that you don't have that you could develop so for example if you're an introverted person it's very useful to watch an extroverted person because the extroverted person has ways of being in the social world that aren't natural to you

that you can use this to improve your toolkit and if you're disagreeable one of the best things to do with disagreeable people especially if that's alienating them from other people for example because it can you know people treat you like you're a selfish arrogant son of a maybe that's because you are it's like okay so what do you do about that one of the one of the most promising treatments let's say for that is get the person to do something for someone else once a day just as a practice and learn how to do it

maybe you can wake the circuit up you know if you think that it's lying dormant in you which is probably right you know I think we have a very wide range of propensities within us some are switched on genetic propensity some are switched on but I think that if you put yourself in the right situation or walk yourself through the right exercises you can switch some of these other things on as well but it takes work and and dedication and discipline I would say generally speaking if you want to adapt yourself properly to life you

should find a niche in the environment that corresponds with your temperament right you shouldn't work at Cross purposes to your temperament because it's just too damn difficult but having done that then you should work on developing the the skills and and viewpoints that exist in the space opposite to your personality because that's where you're fundamentally underdeveloped that way I think you could extend out your temperamental capability across a wider range and to me that's roughly equivalent as bringing a richer toolkit to each situation you know so if you're hyper extroverted you should probably learn to

shut up at parties now and then and listen just to see what's going on to see if you can manage it you know and if you're introverted well then you should learn how to speak in public and to and to learn how to go to parties without hiding in the corner and saying nothing to anyone you know and if you're agreeable then you need to learn how to be disagreeable so people can't push you around and if you're disagreeable you learn you need to learn how to be agreeable so that you're not an evil son

of a bill so and the same thing applies even in the conscientious domain it's like if you're too conscientious you need to learn to relax and let go a little bit and if you're unconscientious it's time like get out the Google Calendar Man and start scheduling your day right and beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick until you're disciplined enough so that you can actually stick to something for some length of time and not living an absolute squalor which is something that would characterize someone who's very disorderly for example because they

just they don't notice it doesn't bother them disorder it's like maybe they can see it but it doesn't have any emotional valence and so it doesn't have any motivational significance you know so the other thing you might want to think about too if you're choosing a partner is try not to choose someone who's too distant from you on the temperamental variables because you're going to have a hard time Bridging the Gap you know it's hard for an introverted person and an extroverted person to coexist and it's really hard for an orderly person and a disorderly

person to coexist because they will drive each other nuts why don't you pick up why are you so obsessed by it that's the basic argument so so it's useful to know about your temperament so that you can negotiate the space with your partner as well and I don't think you should try to find someone who's exactly the same as you because then you don't have the benefits of the alternative viewpoint but you got to watch it because you may hit irreconcilable differences of various sorts and I've seen that most particularly among couples who are high

and low in openness that's a rough one and also high and low and conscientiousness that's another rough one because they just cannot see how the other person sees the world at all