2015 Personality Lecture 14: Existentialism: Solzhenitsyn / Intro to Biology & Psychometrics

I didn't quite get through what I wanted to in the last lecture so I think I'm going to steal half an hour from this lecture and do that and then we'll go to this lecture so because I didn't get a chance to read you some of the things I wanted to read you um and but they're really worth read they're really worth hearing so I think I'm going to do that so one of the things that I've spent a very long time trying to figure out is what motivated people to do the terrible things that

they did in the concentration camps particularly in the 20th century and the Concentration Camp was a pretty widespread phenomena I mean it's still being used extensively in North Korea for example and most of the popular population there is starving um so it's not like it's done with yet anyways the the best authors that I've ever read with regards to insights about the kind of totalitarian possession that leads people to commit EXT extraordinarily brutal atrocities in the service of their belief have been while Soul niten who is not normally considered a personality psychologist but also Victor

Frankle the reason I have you read Soulja niton is because I think Soulja niton is a more I mean Frankle is an amazing thinker but soliton is one of those Geniuses that comes along about every 100 years so and I think soliton wrote the most the most pertinent analysis of the relationship between individual cowardice and the propensity to adopt totalitarian beliefs and then the propensity to commit acts of Cruelty in the name of those beliefs now it's a really tricky issue I mean it's it's it's commonly being assumed for example that people who are right-wing

authoritarian people are right-wing authoritarian because they're afraid of people who aren't like them or they're afraid of ideas that aren't like their ideas is or something like that it's it's often a fear-based explanation and it seems to me that there's something to that you know it's it's hard for me to imagine you know if your if your belief systems are disrupted by a piece of information that you don't particularly want to receive it certainly does expose you to a tremendous amount of chaos and so you know we've talked about situations for example where perhaps you

receive the information that you know a loved one has been unfaithful to you betrayed you now part of what you're going to feel in relationship to that is anxiety and it's because it destabilizes your past and all your memories and it destabilizes your future and it destabilizes your your present and so that presents you with a whole bunch of uncertainty where at one point you had a pretty functional map and you knew how things related to one another and how you should act and so it's reasonable to presuppose that that produces fear especially because we

know from from work by someone people like Jeffrey gray for example who we're going to talk about in the next lecture that if you expose laboratory animals to novelty which is certainly an unex something unexpected is something novel or something anomalous is something novel that they react they you can you can conceptualize the reaction roughly in two ways and you can say well they become afraid they manifest anxiety which you can dampened down with anti-anxiety drugs like Valium benzodiazapines barbituates and alcohol um but they also manifest curiosity but the but the anxiety usually supersedes the

Curiosity so the anxiety has to wear off before the Curiosity will come forward and that depends to some degree on the magnitude of the novel event and calculating how large novel event is turns out to be extraordinarily difficult but we'll talk we'll talk through that as well and so the anxiety models and so those would be so things things like Terror management theory for example the anxiety models are pretty good but they're missing things they're missing things and there's a so here's a couple of things that they might be missing I've pursued the idea that

um when you encounter a um a datam we'll say because it could be a stimulus or it could be an idea or it could be a person but let's call it a piece of information that contradicts your axiomatic presupposition so your theory then what might happen the hippocampus is a brain area that seems to do something something like detect M mismatches between what you expect or want to have happen and what actually happens and it seems to send a signal down to the reticular activating system which is the part of your brain that actually governs

Consciousness so it's what wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night and also what makes you wake up very suddenly if you hear an unexpected noise at night it stops it stops it it releases the reticular activating system from inhibition and so it's basically the hippocampus does something like tell your reticular activating system to take it easy as long as everything's going the way you want it to go and if it doesn't go the way you want it to go then it releases the reticular activating system from inhibition and what

that seems to do is to release a whole variety of underlying neurological circuits from inhibition so then you become anxious but you also become curious but it's possible that you become a lot of other things too and this is this is part of the generalized stress response as far as I can tell and what happens when when you manifest the general stress response is that your body prepares for everything why well because you don't know what to do when something you don't expect happens it's like the definition of not want knowing what to do and

so because your body is pretty smart it just ramps itself up in terms of its preparation which is very stressful technically speaking it's stressful because you're burning a lot of energy and resources that you could devote to other things suppresses your immune system and gets you ready you know so and and at at you know for any length of time that can be fun in small doses in fact it is because people like novelty in small doses but in large doses and chronically it's like that's death itself you know so it seems that people really

don't like to have their their expectations dashed or or more accurately they don't like it when what they want to have happen doesn't happen which isn't exactly the same thing so the question is then what does happen when what you want to doesn't happen how exactly do you characterize it one way of characterizing it is fear and another way of characterizing it is something like generalized disinhibition of potential that's another one and I think that one's more accurate I think it's more accurate because it's more comprehensive and it's deeper but then there's a third variable

that we're going to talk about quite a bit that that everybody's just sort of coming to terms with now which is that it turns out that people who are tilted towards right-wing Authority arianism first of all they're high in conscientiousness and they're and they're low in openness and if you fractionate conscientiousness which you can you can break it into two things you can break it into industriousness and orderliness and industriousness is a bang dead on predictor of how well you guys do in University it's it's damn near as powerful as intelligence it's not as powerful

but we can't measure it as well either and and so that's industriousness we don't have we don't know anything about industriousness you know we know how to measure it through self-report and we know how to correlate those self-reports with life outcomes we have no neuros pychological model for it we have no conceptual model for it we have no pharmacological model for it uh did I say animal model we have no animal model for it it's like we don't know anything about it except that it predicts long-term life success better than anything else except IQ in

managerial administrative and academic positions like grades so but orderliness that's a whole different story because it turns out that orderliness we haven't published this yet but orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust and that's a weird thing because for a long time we thought that all the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism so this is Big Five speak fundamentally that you know pain and anger frustration disappointment shame guilt anxiety and fear we all if you were more likely to feel one you're more likely to feel all of them and all the negative emotions Clump together and

that's basically what neuroticism from a big five perspective but it turns out that disgusted sensitivity loads on orderliness now I tell you man that is one major finding it's like I think because we know we know a fair bit about discust sensitivity Now give me one second and that's mostly at least in part through the work of Jonathan ha who's a very very very smart guy and who started studying discussed before anybody else figured out that it was worthwhile to discuss or to to investigate roughly speaking you know and he he found that people who

were disgust sensitive were very obsessed with moral Purity you know it turned out to be the same thing so bodily contamination and moral impurity are roughly the same phenomena and then it turns out I I really figured this out when I was reading Hitler's table talk because Hitler's table talk by the way was a book that was put together of Hitler's spontaneous speeches discussion while he was eating dinner for like three years you know it's a fascinating book because it it really gives you some insight into how he thought and he was a very he's

a very peculiar person because he was very high in openness which is a creativity Dimension and very high in orderliness and people like that aren't very common but anyways his whole metaphor for for for German for the Aryan race the whole metaphor was body it's like the Aryans were a pure body with pure blood and they were under assault from parasites and so it was a disgust metaphor you know wasn't fear you know it kind of sounds like fear because you could say well Hitler was afraid of the gypsies and he was afraid of the

Jews and you know he was afraid of non- Arians but but well first of all I don't think it's reasonable to say that the Nazis were precisely possessed by fear that isn't exactly how they looked and if you look at conservatives I'm not calling conservatives Nazis by the way but they're you know the Nazi philosophy is an extension of political belief on the right just like totalitarian communism in his extension of political belief on the left so you can fall all into a pit either way you know but the Nazis were first of all they're

German and the Germans are a conscientious people so to speak you know they have a very Advanced industrial society their engineering is very precise to what degree that's a national trait God Only Knows to what and to what degree that's a consequence of of uh you know sociological pressure we don't understand anything about those sorts of things but um Hitler was absolutely obsessed with with Purity and with willpower and those things go together so orderly people seem to be very enamored of their own willpower something like that they sort of worship it as the top

God so to speak and like uh anorexic people tend to be very orderly and they get disgust I think anorexia is a disorder of disgust anorexic girls they get completely disgusted by their own bodies you know and that's a very think about that that's a very tight line because there's any number of disgusting things about bodies and you have to attend to that because if you don't then you end up contaminated in a variety of ways you know you can catch a sexual disease for example or you can just catch a disease or you can

be develop an infection or any number of things that will take you down you know so it's it's very difficult for human beings to get the calibration right with regards to you know their own bodies and their feeling about their bodies and the fact that you also have to keep the damn thing clean and organized and otherwise you know all hell breaks loose and it's it's no joke when Hitler was before Hitler you know started the concentration camps and and went after went went after things in a big way is very very concerned with the

hygiene of the German people you know and he did things like uh his first here his first uh policy implementations were tuberculosis screening and had people go around in Vans and x-ray everyone to try to get rid of tuberculosis it's like yeah you know let's get rid of tuberculosis and then they started cleaning up the Factory so they'd you know get rid of the bugs and the rats and sweep them all out and plant flowers out front it was like a beautification campaign and they used cyclon B to do that and cyclon B was the

gas that was used in the concentration camps so like that's quite interesting he that that movement from insects and rats to human beings and that there was an intermediary there which seemed to be Mental Hospitals because the next thing they did was go and clean up the you know the the people that the Nazis Hitler in particular but the Nazis and General felt were inferior or contempt or something like that and like contempt and disgust seem to go very tightly together and contempt that's a vicious emotion so like if you're in a relationship with somebody

a close relationship and they start to become contemptuous of you and you can tell that because they roll their eyes the probability that you're going to divorce them or separate from them is extraordinarily High contempt is a very corrosive emotion and anyway so you know that the the transformation and Purity campaign of Hitler just extended and extended and extended and extended and extended and you know God only knows where it would have ended and I also think that's why he was a worshipper of fire you know because fire is a purifying substance and the Nazis

really used fire as a symbol of their of their movement because Hitler would have these massive nighttime political rallies you know with 150,000 people all put in perfect squares you know with this massive background of fire and Light you know and it it all seems to boil down to the fact that he was extraordinarily disgust sensitive and that became a cardinal element of his political platform and then that was associated with orderliness and that you know you can track you can track it all the way down to the biology and there was a paper published

in plause one which I should really put on the website about a year ago unfortunately I don't remember who published it but they were looking at you know let's say I assessed your political attitudes I could do that say with an authoritarian scale authoritarian belief scale CU authoritarianism has been studied quite a bit since the end of World War II nobody really knew what to do with it in relationship to personality doesn't matter you can you can assess it you know to with a reasonable degree of accuracy and these people went to they did two

things they did a CrossCountry survey and then within country surveys so you imagine you could if you were looking at a phenomena you could look at the country level US versus Canada or you could go into the us and then you could look at a state level it's nice to do the analysis at both levels to see if it replicates itself across the two different conceptual you know two different conceptual strata and what they found is mindboggling it's Nobel prizewinning stuff as far as I'm concerned is that the correlation between the prevalence of infectious disease

in a local and the degree to which authoritarian beliefs were held in that local was about7 it's like you never see that in the social sciences that's higher than the correlation between IQ and grades which is about as good as we ever get in terms of prediction so it's like really it's that high you know and one of the things that that implies is that one of the ways to get rid of right-wing authoritarian attitudes assuming that you want to get rid of such things is to is through Public Health you know it could easily

be that the reason that we're all tilted fairly hard to the center and even to the left is that everybody's clean you know we've got s we've got functioning sanitation it's like oh don't have to worry about that anymore so and believe like people used to have to worry about that before they antibiotics it's like you get an infection man you're dead and that's on its way back by the way CU we keep using antibiotics for everything under the sun which is very very very stupid anyways so I I gave you all that background because

you know it's a tangled mess the the authoritarian personality issue there's a sociological element to it which is the disease element and then there's the E existential element that we've talked about in in detail where there seems to be also something about people's unwillingness to stand up for themselves and develop their own beliefs and adhere to the truth and to adopt authoritarian you know extremely rigid authoritarian belief systems and then go persecute people for them and we don't know how to separate all those things out but I thought I would read you some things that

were written both by Soulja niten and by Frankle about a the concentration camps in Germany cuz Frankl was a concentration camp survival Survivor and be the concentration camps in the Soviet Union because soljan ninen was a concentration camp Survivor he was a rather fortunate concentration camp inmate in so far as there is such a thing because he had he had some specialized knowledge that made him sufficiently valuable not to starve to death so so here is one of Sol nen's descriptions of one of his experiences or that some firsthand Observer told him because when he

wrote the gulag archipelago he he wrote a lot about his own experiences but he also wrote a lot about the experiences that other people had related to him while he was in the camps so one of the people he met told how executions were carried out at adak which was a which is a Work Camp um a destructive labor camp on the pachura river they would take the opposition members so these were people who weren't Communists a lot of people who got thrown in the gag prisons in the Soviet Union were basically political prisoners right

you didn't have you weren't a staunch communist or you've been turned in for for some you've been turned in for political uh what would you call it um treason you know by a neighbor who really wanted your apartment and so they' turn you in and You' get hauled off to concentration camp and then you know your neighbor would get your apartments very pretty arrangement for everyone concerned so the the gags were full of political prisoners they were also full of normal criminals murderers rapists thieves and those guys basically ran the camps and because the stalinists

thought that murderers rapists and thieves that they were um what would you call those you could rehabilitate them because they were actually victims of an unjust class structure so you know hypothetically you could save them whereas if you had Rich parents or maybe your parents owned farmland or maybe they just had a bloody house God Only Knows then you were a socially suspect element because you came from the Bourgeois and not the proletariat so you got thrown in jail alongside the murderers and the rapists and the thieves and you know they were regarded as morally

Superior to you which is you know something that only bloody communist could think through and come to that conclusion you know it's mindboggling so anyways a lot of what happened in the camps was you know political murder essentially and so this is what Sol niton is talking about in this particular case so he says this is how executions were carried out at adak a camp on the pure River they would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp Compound on a prisoner transport at night and outside the compound stood the small house

of the third section The Condemned men were taken into a room one at a time and there the camp guards sprang on them their mouths were stuffed with something soft and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs then they were LED out into the courtyard where harness carts were waiting the bound prisoners were piled onto the carts from 5 to 7 at a time and driven off to the Gorka the camp cemetery on arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive not out of Brut ity no

it had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses the work went on for many nights at adak and this is how the moral political Unity of our party was achieved now you see what seems to be happening there is that the people who are engaged in these activities are classifying those who oppose their political beliefs as contempt and therefore worthy of Destruction and that that seems to be partly a fear response you know that which is not us but it's also it seems

very much also to partly to be tied very deeply into this disgust and contamination system about which we don't know much about the cognitive elements of that system although one of the things that's that's worth considering you know this has gone through my mind is that you know you might ask why the hell do human beings categorize things because other animals don't really do that the same way we really categorize things like mad and uh you think well we're all first of all we're omnivores right that's a kind of a weird problem because if you're

omnivores you can eat anything except the things you shouldn't eat you know and making a clear and that's a real problem if you're a koala bear and all you eat is eucalyptus leaves it's like poof problem solved unless the eucalyptus leaves aren't around and then you die but if you're an omnivore you have to run all over the place and you can eat damn near anything but you have to keep track of the things that will kill you and the things that are poisoned and the things that are contaminated and the things that are good

for you and it's it's not an easy thing to do that so it seems like part of our classification system the cognitive elements seem to actually have emerged out of out of contamination and disgust concerns and that seems to be grounded in some sense in what you know our our ability to make decisions about what we're going to put in our mouths and not you know like people don't like to put disgusting things in their mouths generally speaking you know you can overcome that so people will lead you know moldy cheese but you really have

to work to overcome that and you have to work to overcome your your disgust at eating bitter substances so you have to develop a taste for coffee and you have to develop a taste for olives because a lot of things that are bitter are actually poisonous so so the the idea that there are things that you can put in your mouth that are good for you and there are things that you can't put in your mouth because they're bad for you is rooted somehow very deeply in our in our ideas of categorization and also in

our ideas of moral morality right and you think of morality as a higher order cognitive function but think about you know modern people are as obsessed with food as the as the victorians were obsessed with sex and people are making divisions primary divisions of morality based on what each other eat all the time you know the vegetarianism movement or the vagan movement is a really good example of that I mean those sorts of concerns have been present throughout human history as far as I can tell because there's lots of ancient sects that don't that are

vegetarian there's lots of people in India who are vegetarian primarily and often for religious beliefs you know so it's a matter of and it it also seems that we divide we tend to divide people into groups even ethnic groups on the basis of what one group is allowed to eat and what another group will eat and so you know um Christians will eat will eat swine and that's something that uh you know more more conservative Jews and Muslims in general won't touch it's disgusting and it's contaminated you know and it isn't fear exactly it's something

other than fear it's more and the danger of conceptualizing it in terms of contaminated and disgusting and you see this a lot in the language that the say the owitz campg guards used with regards to the people that they were putting in the ovens for example they weren't people they were rats and insects that was the language it's not like people are afraid of rats and and insects you know I mean it's a rat that's not a big problem but you can easily hate it and it is something to be destroyed you know and so

we also don't know to what degree when you use the discust system to classify someone whether you're automatically putting them into the category of disgusting thing that should be destroyed and there there's a woman named Martha nasom who's a legal scholar and she suggested she's a liberal and she suggested that our legal decisions should never be based on discust you know but then I read nusom and I think well yeah it's easy to say that except the disgust system is what stops you from eating things that will kill you and you can't just shut the

damn thing off because you know it's a fundamental biological mechanism and it orients you in the world now and so we don't know how to control its spillover say into radical political belief but just saying don't do that or you know you know what I mean it's not wrestling with the problem because first of all you don't want to be not disgusted by things that's a really bad idea but by the same token you know if you get too radical about that you get tooo orderly then not you know if you're anorexic you can't even

stand your own body that's really not a good thing you know because the anorexic I've worked with they often talk about their fantasies and they look at their body and what they see is like corruptible flesh basically and they have fantasies about purity and the Purity is they want to reduce themselves to Bone you know because bone is white and it's pure and it doesn't have this sort of corruptible flesh hanging off it and you know that go that's seems to go along with fairly severe perceptual aberration so because anorexics don't really see seem to

be able to look at their body as a whole what they seem to do is focus obsessively on parts and they can never really get the parts together so you know and I don't exactly know how that's associated with disgust either except that that hyper you know that hyper alertness and hyperconcentration could easily be associated with analysis of things that that might be disgusting in dangerous anyways Franco the most G this is from the Nazi concentration camps the no most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of Camp life was The Awakening when at a still

nocturnal hour the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams we then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely Force our feet which were sore and swollen with edema and there were the usual moans and groans about Petty troubles such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces one morning I heard someone whom I knew to be brave and dignified cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet as

his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear and these ghastly moments I found a little bit of comfort a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed Delight a lot of what happened in the gag camps was that you know these people that were put in the camps were were put into work brigades and you know so there was a huge Canal that was dug in the Soviet Union I believe it was in the 30s and un I believe I I don't remember the Canal's name at the

moment unfortunately but they killed 300,000 people in 3 months building it and because they were pickaxing dirt in the in the brutal cold to build this canal you know because it had to be done now and you know according to Soulja nen's description by the time they finished the canal well 300,000 people had died but it was too shallow to be useful for the for the purpose they wanted to put it to and so basically it was built but never used and so then you think well what was the purpose of the canal if it

was never used and the answer to that is the purpose of the canal was to kill 300,000 people while they were working on it you know and if you think that people can't have such purposes then you're not thinking very hard because they certainly can't and stellin certainly did here's Soul shit's comments about about work camps during the winter and this is Russia right it's like Russia has Winters in cold lower than 60° below zero work days were written off in other words on such days the record showed that the workers had not gone out

to work but they chased them out anyway and whatever they squeezed out of them on on those days was added to the other days thereby raising the percentages and the servile medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis and the ones who were left who could no longer walk and were straining every senu to crawl Along on all fours on the way back to Camp the Convoy simply shot so that they wouldn't Escape before they could go come back to get them when I was studying this

material I was also looking at poetic representations of contamination and Corruption and evil and so I'm going to read you a poem from William Blake that seems to sum up the attitude that's necessary to Harbor before you would be capable of doing such things this is from the complete works of William Blake oh Rose Thou Art sick the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm hath found out thy bed of crimson joy and His Dark Secret Love does thy life destroy this is something I took out of the gulag archipelago the

volume two of the gulag archipelago which is an amazing book the gulag archipelago itself is an unbelievable work of literature it's it's it's it's phenomenal it's it's an immense book I think it's 2700 pages long and it's written in little little tiny type so it's it's 2700 dense pages and it records soulj nen's uh experiences of the concentration camp and the concentration camps and the stories that he gathered the individual stories that he gathered that describe it qualitatively but Solja niton also made an attempt to put the the camps to write a history of the

camps and also a history of the political and social institutions that gave rise to them but at the same time a psychological analysis of the conditions that made these camps possible and probable and he identified the fundamental problem in the Soviet Union as the willingness of the Soviet citizens to lie to themselves and to each other on a constant and ongoing basis so to some degree it's a reflection of the idea that I told you about before of the instrumental use of language language was something to hide your true self behind not something to communicate

about and people were very unwilling to discuss anything that might be considered a shortcoming of the system in any way possible no matter how bad the system got and no matter how bad they were suffering because by definition the system was always already Perfect Right Utopia had already come and what that meant was that if you were suffering and and it was Utopia there obviously was something seriously wrong with you and the best thing to do with a creature that was as seriously gone astray as you was to get rid of them and often in

the most brutal way that could possibly Be Imagined and so that happened to lots of people you know in East Germany they estimated that one out of every three people was a government Informer so the LIE this is soljan nen's analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union he didn't believe that any of that could happen unless the entire citizenry had made an unspoken pack that they were never ever going to say anything that was true to each other or to themselves under any circumstances whatsoever and he believed that that was the precondition you know

I've already mentioned these sorts of phenomena are very complicated but he believed that that was the precondition for the absolute Corruption of the state and that's really worth thinking about you know and soja niten also said I think this was in his in his Nobel Prize speech but it might have been his Harvard address because he was invited to speak at U graduation at Harvard and the newspapers ripped him apart by the way because he was quite critical of of Western Society despite the fact that he had been granted asylum in in Vermont you know

and it was so interesting to read the criticism because you know people Bas even people who should have known a hell of a lot better you know like smart people were very irritated at Soul nit and for daring to say that there was anything wrong with the West given that he had been granted Asylum you know by the Americans in Vermont I personally thought they were lucky to get him you know and I think that's the right attitude towards someone like him but um anyway so the the book itself the gulag archipelago the second volume

is most mostly personal experiences of one form or another and it's you know enough to well you've read some of it hypothetically you know it's an unbelievably brilliant book but the three volumes together you know 2700 Pages it's they're they're almost unbearable because they they're written by someone who's basically screaming at the top of his lungs for like 2700 Pages that's pretty impressive you know I read this study once about rats so if you put rats in a in a normal environment not not like your single aged rat but your family loving hierarchy inhabiting exploring

sort of rat if you make a natural habitat for them maybe you put all the family things at one end so the rats can hang out with all their kith and kin and then at the other end you you place a place where they can go explore and maybe that's where you feed them hey so so they get used to that and that's home and then you put a cat in out there where they're feeding and you know a rat goes out there and he sees the cat and like that's hell for rats man he's

back in his rat burrow and like now and then what he does is he Peaks his head out of the burrow and he screams you know rat rat screams ultrasonic screams for the equivalent of three weeks in human hours it's like that rat that's one freaked out rat and none of the other rats go anywhere when that rat is screaming and that's really like I think of that as the equivalent of Soul nen's book it's like it's it's a hair raising uh Endeavor to plow your way through that book but it's it's an indictment of

of of 20th century morality and a and a very clear indication of what happens at a sociopolitical and economic level if people abandon their claim to existential Truth at an individual level and that's something really worth thinking about because one of the things I derived from this was that if you want to protect yourself against the possibility that you would become as corrupt politically or sociologically as the Nazis for examples or maybe the Soviet Communists or maybe the maist communist or we could or the North Koreans I mean we could go on and on you

might ask well you know if you're smart enough to assume that you're not already protected because you're not you know one of the things that's really worth thinking about is there does seem to be a direct causal relationship between people's willing to willingness to falsify their own personal experience and the spread of unbelievable political and economic corruption and one of the things we do know is that if you want to make a country Rich the one thing you absolutely have to do is make sure that the people will in fact trade honestly with one another

so unless the default presupposition between people is trust which is a damn hard thing to implement you know and I don't even understand how any country's ever Managed IT ever if the default presupposition is that if we trade you won't screw me over we can get rich but if the default assumption is God only knows what's up for with you it's like forget it man I don't care how many natural resources we've got we're going to stay poor so there's something that's incredibly like true truth I think is truth might be the only true natural

resource you know the Japanese are a good example because their culture their trading culture is fundamentally honest they don't have any bloody natural resources at all but they're rich you know explain that it's not an easy thing to do but anyhow another story from Soul niton fire fire the branches crackle in the night wind of late Autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth the compound is dark I'm alone at the bonfire and I can bring it still some more Carpenter shavings the compound here is a privileged one so privileged that it is

almost as if I were out in Freedom this is an island of paradise this is the marfino sharka a scientific Institute staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period no one is overseeing me calling me to his cell chasing me away from the bonfire even then it's chilly in the penetrating wind but she who's already been standing in the wind for hours her arms straight down her head drooping weeping then growing numb and still and then again she begs piously Citizen Chief please forgive me I won't do it again the wind carries her moans to

me just as if she were moaning next to my ear The Citizen Chief at the gate house fires up his stove does not answer this was the Gat House of the camp next door to us from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building cross from me beyond the artfully intertwined many stranded barbed wire barar barricade and two steps away from the Gat house beneath a bright Lantern stood the punished girl head hanging the wind tugging at her gray work skirt her feet growing numb from

the cold a thin scarf over her head it had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory and another girl slipping down into a ravine had crawled her way to the vadino highway and escaped the guard had bungled and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway when they caught on it was too late to catch her and they raised the alarm a mean dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl the entire Camp would be deprived of visits and Parcels for a whole

month because of her escape and the women brigadiers went into a rage and they were all shouting one of them in particular who kept viciously rolling her eyes oh I hope they catch her the I hope they take scissors and clip clip clip take off all her hair in front of the lineup this wasn't something she had thought of herself this was the way they punished women in the gag but the girl who was now standing outside the gate house in the cold had sighed and said Instead at least she can have a good time

out in Freedom for all of us the Jailer overheard what she said and now she was being punished everyone else had been taken off to the camp but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gate house this had been at 6:00 p.m. and it was now 11:00 p.m. she tried to shift from one foot to another but the guard stuck out his head and shouted stand at attention or else it will be worse for you and now she was not moving only weeping forgive me Citizen Chief you let

me into the camp I won't do it anymore but even in the camp no one was about to say to her all right idiot come on in the reason they were keeping her out there for so long was that the next day was Sunday and she would not be needed for work such a straw blonde naive uneducated slip of a girl she'd been imprisoned for some spool of thread what a dangerous thought you expressed there little sister they want to teach you a lesson for the the rest of your life fire fire we fought the

War and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of Victory it would be the wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire to that flame in you girl I promise the whole wide world will read about you this is from Milton Paradise Lost Milton when he wrote Paradise Lost he was trying he was trying to you could say you could think in some sense that that a huge part of the mythological religious and philosophical Enterprise of the human race over the last five or 6 thousand years and perhaps long before that has been

an attempt to segregate out what is the good the good way of existing and what the evil way of existing now why we're obsessed with good and evil is a very difficult thing to understand I think it has something to do with our self-consciousness um I think that because I don't really if you're an animal you can be a predator but if you're a human being you can take it past that because if you're self-conscious you can understand your own vulnerability you know what will hurt you as soon as you know what can hurt you

you know what can hurt other people and as soon as you know what can hurt you and what can hurt other people then you can make a choice between good and evil because because you can start to hurt other people just for the sake of hurting them you know and that's as close to evil as I think it gets and people have been trying to conceptualize that for and because they are trying to conceptualize as well how it is that human Affairs can go dreadfully wrong in so far as that can be laid at human

feet you know sometimes it's earthquakes and sometimes it's floods but sometimes it's not sometimes it's people causing trouble for the sake of trouble and the the human race has been trying to understand the personality characteristics of that mode of action for thousands of years and a lot of that's emerged up in mythology and stories and and more than in philosophy it's it's it's like the bad guy in in in a movie it's like uh Loki you know that's a good example that's a good example of that sort of thing popping up in in relatively modern

culture you know what's the what's the embodiment of evil and that's what Milton was trying to figure out when he wrote Paradise Lost you know and he was taking all these stories about satanic forces and hell that had collected in in human culture for thousands and thousands of years and trying to sort them out and make some sense out of them some narrative sense you know and he uh he believed that the the fundamentally evil impulse the most evil impulse which you could characterize evil as a meta personality that exists across people because if you

do something evil and you do something evil and you do something evil it's like there's some commonality across that you can extract out the commonalities and you can say well that's what this personality is like but then you can also say well that's a very powerful it's a metap personality it's something that will never die and it's something that can actually possess people you know and if you don't think that you know that that's possible then you know you probably don't know that serial killers tend to compete with one another you know these sorts of

things they're not they're not U they're not fictions and the people who shoot up high schools they're pretty damn informed about the last person who did did the same thing and generally they're trying to do a better job so you know this is serious this is serious matters and Milton's analysis you know he wrote what was considered the greatest poem in the English language which roughly speaking is Paradise Lost and what what what Milton what Milton concluded and this is like a phenomenological statement you know when we talked about the phenomenologist we talked about them

trying to wrestle with the with the question of what constituted being you know and human being what's the nature of your experience and when then what's your relationship to that experience you know and the phenomenologists and the existentialists claimed that the proper relationship was one of Truth fundamentally Milton basically conceptualized Satan now that's his personification of evil as the either the embodiment of or the force behind you can read it either way of the the mind that has made its decision that being itself is evil and should be eradicated if you read the Coline Killers

the literary one if you read his his writings it's exactly what he concluded he concluded that being as such was flawed you know people were contemptible being itself was unsupportable ethically because there was too much suffering it was too flawed and the best thing to do would was to eradicate it and so Milton conceptual IED evil as resentment against being now in Milton's language that was resentment against God but it boils down to exactly the same thing you know and you can you can understand this so that would be like the archetypal roots of resentment

that's the way a union would look at it and you know you can see you'll see in your life that resentment will emerge like it'll emerge anytime something you regard as unfair happens specifically to you you know and if it's bad enough you'll not only be irritated and angry and hostile and self-pitying and destructive um and looking for Revenge because of it all those things that will will happen and it's almost inevitable but um if you take that far enough then you get to the bottom of that and the bottom of it is that it

would be just as well in your estimation if everything that lived ceased to exist it's interesting because not only did Milton come to that conclusion um the great German philosopher and author and poet girtha came to exactly the same conclusion he believed when he when he wrote fa and F starred mephistophiles among others so mephistophiles was a an avatar of evil fundamentally his basic Creed was that existence itself is so terrible in its fundamental nature so tragic and flawed that we'd be better if we just brought the whole thing to an end now you think

that's a pretty damn powerful philosophy actually and believe me there'll be times in your life where think that especially when something really terrible happens to someone really close to you in some arbitrary way you know maybe you'll have a child that becomes extremely ill in some painful manner you know and that'll be enough to make you sh shake your fist at Heaven the problem with that attitude as far as I can tell because I've traced it I've tried to understand what are The Logical conclusions to adopting that attitude and The Logical conclusion is that you

take a bad situation and you make it worse and that to me that means it's logically incoherent if the problem you're trying to solve is the fact that being is flawed in a deep way and it's tragic and that people suffer and that they suffer unjustly you're making the presupposition that that's wrong that it shouldn't happen the fact that it's happening is what it what undo the whole project of being so to speak and so what that means is that if you actually believe that and you're acting in accordance with that then the one thing

you should not do is make it worse and I can tell you the one thing that will make it worse is that is if you adopt that attitude it will get worse it'll get worse and at some point you'll be happy that it's getting worse and at some point after that not only will you be happy that it's getting worse but you'll be doing everything that your imagination allows you to conceive to make it worse and worse and worse faster and faster you know and there's a mythological conception of hell and one of the elements

of that mythological conception is that it's a bottomless pit and the reason for that I believe is that there is nothing that is so awful that you can't make it worse if you just try so and I've seen situations like that a lot I've seen you know families locked in absolutely homicidal unconscious battles where every single person in the family was doing absolutely everything they could to make sure that no one was going to escape from that and that it was going to get a hell of a lot worse so Milton wrote for whence but

from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice to confound the race of mankind in one root and Earth with hell to mingle and involve done all to spite the great Creator this is Richard III from Shakespeare I shall despair there is no creature loves me and if I die no soul will Pity Me Nay wherefore should they since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself this is SOL SOL nen's description of the staunch party members see I guess part of the contamination issue is something like this is that

you know you might say that one of the preconditions for existing as a human being is the ability to tolerate contamination and anxiety and imperfection you know that certainly something Yung would say he believed that in some sense you had to make a PCT with that in order to tolerate existing you had to come to terms with that but you can fly from that in some sense you know and then then there's nothing about you that's contaminated or strange or disgusting that's all out there it's all somewhere else it's not you you know and then

you build a wall between you and that and then because that doesn't work at least in part there's no way of getting rid of the contamination that the wall gets higher and higher and more and more people are on the outside and fewer and fewer of you on the inside and you know the impulse is to burn up everything that's contaminated you know and and part of the problem with that and I think that this is why you can't just conceptualize it as disgust you know because you can think of that as a natural territoriality

you can think of as natural and disgust you can think of as natural but there's something about people that takes just that step further and I think that's the intermingling of the of the contamination disgust and fear response with revenge and resentment and the desire to hurt and if you get those things going together especially if you also add in the propensity to lie man lie if things are going to get really really ugly they're going to get really bad and so you know you have to come to terms with the fact that you carry

the contamination around in you to so to speak everywhere you go and that that's an ineradicable part of of limited being and then you can't be resentful about that or hateful about it because if you are then you act in a manner that will definitely make it worse so these this is soci n stories about Communist Party loyalists who were arrested by the goolag system and thrown into prison not happened to them all the time because no it wasn't like the system was playing by any real rules you know in fact it was probably even

better as far as the fundamental motives of the system were concerned that you were innocent when you get arrested because that made it even more miserable and it would be even funnier if you were arrested for supporting the system that was going to arrest you it's like that was the perfect form of vicious irony and so that happened a lot to say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing they were incapable of assimilating such a blow such a downfall and from their own people too from their own dear party and from

all appearances for nothing at all after all they had been guilty of nothing as far as the party was concerned nothing at all it was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them uncom radly to ask what were you imprisoned for the only screamish generation of prisoners the rest of us with tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met and to the whole cell as if it were an anecdote here's the sort of people they were Olga slosberg husband had already been arrested

and they which was usually the KGB and usually in the middle of the night and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too the search lasted 4 hours and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress of stanit of the brushel and brish wh bristle and brush industry of which she had been the secretary until the previous day the incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children who she was now leaving forever even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her come on

now say goodbye to your children here's the sort of people they were a letter from her 15-year-old daughter came to yveta tetova in the kadan prison for long-term prisoners Mama tell me why write to me are you guilty or not I hope you weren't guilty because then I won't join the commum All so that was a Soviet youth group sort of like the boy scouts or the brownies except it was the Communist version because then I won't join the commum all and I won't forgive them because of you but if you are guilty then I

won't write you anymore and I will hate you and the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp grave likee cell within its with its dim little lamp how could her daughter live without the commo how could she be permitted to hate Soviet power better that she should hate me and so she wrote I am guilty enter the commo how could it be anything but hard it was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the Beloved Axe and then to have to justify its wisdom but that's the price a man pays for

entrusting his god-given soul to human Dogma even today any Orthodox communist will affirm that set kova acted correctly even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely the perversion of small forces that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul here's the sort of people they are they were YT gave sincere testimony against her husband anything to Aid the party oh how one could pity them if at least now they had come to comprehend their former wretchedness the whole chapter this whole chapter could have been written quite differently if today at least they

had forsaken their earlier views but it happened the way Maria Daniel and had dreamed it would if I leave here someday I'm going to live as if nothing happened loyalty in our view it's just plain pigheadedness these devotees to the theory of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation of any personal development whatsoever as Nikolai adamovich villanu said after serving 17 years we believed in the party and we were not mistaken is this loyalty or pigheadedness no it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in

defense of all the government's actions they needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness otherwise Insanity was not far off you know people build memorials now they build Holocaust memorials there's a Holocaust Memorial in Washington and there's a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and you know the The Motif or the slogan of those memorials is we shall never forget and I think you you can't remember something you don't understand you can say you're not going to forget all you want but unless you understand what happened you can't remember it

and we don't understand what happened you know and as far as I can tell you know the most important thing that happened in the entire 20th century with regards to evidence for for you know absolute existential catastrophes that threaten the human race at the individual level and at the and at the state level and at the international level it's all whatever it was that produced the Nazis and that produced the Soviets and that produced the maist and that hasn't gone away and that's partly because we don't understand it you know and from what I've been

able to tell and this is partly why I teach you guys about the existentialists and the phenomenologists because they're not covered very often in personality classes anymore it's because I do believe I do believe that there's I do believe it was demonstrated by those who thought it through most carefully that there is a direct causal relationship between individual ethical corruption and I I can Define that the corruption is when the individual does something that they know themselves by their own standards to be wrong it's not a relativistic claim at all and it doesn't really have

much to do with the truth it has to do with falsehood because I don't think people can identify the truth but I know they can identify false Hood so and I think that people become corrupt when they act out actions that they know by their own moral standards to be wrong and they they do the same thing in a pedian sense when they refuse to accommodate to what they've assimilated so if I pick up a piece of information and it contradicts a dearly cherished belief and then I refuse to take that piece of information and

transform my perceptual and belief structures to account for it then I'm doing the same thing that's willful blindness and that makes you smaller and smaller and the world more and more out of your control and you weaker and weaker and more likely to be paranoid and angry and hurt and I also don't think that the connections between people and the society are as abstract and distant as we think because you might think well what the hell difference could it possibly make you know the way I behave it's like well you're a node in a network

you're not an individual ual connected by a linear line to another individual connected to a linear line by another individual in a line that's 7 billion people long that make you nothing you just pull you out and you know the line would reclose and that would be the end of that you're a node in the network and the Network's communicating and we know for example that you know you're roughly going to interact with in some serious way a thousand people in your lifetime that's a minimum minimum estimate you know so and all those people know

a thousand people so that's a million people that are one person away from you and two people away from you is a billion people and you know as soon as you get to three well that's far more people than there are so you know you're only three or four or five connections away from everyone and so it's very very difficult to know exactly how your behaviors and misbehaviors Echo and ripple you know and we know that people can be tremendous forces for good we know that because we do see people like that from time to

time and we certainly know plenty about the reverse and so God only knows what what role you play in determining you know whether the the part and the whole of mankind goes seriously wrong or seriously right but I wouldn't dismiss it as a fantasy from everything I've seen you know what you do definitely definitely affects your family what your family does definitely affects the community and what the community does definitely affects the state like it doesn't take much Rippling for these things to start to have effect you know it doesn't for example it doesn't take

that many people in a country to cheat on their income tax before the whole damn economy falls apart I doubt if it's more than 10% you know and it's pretty it's a miraculous that there are countries where that doesn't happen but there are and God Only Knows Why So anyways it's worth thinking about you know because people ask questions like well what you know does life have any meaning I can tell you one meaning that it has like it's perfectly reasonable for you to devote yourself to not producing any more suffering than is absolutely necessary

because I don't care what you think about meaning and the absence of positive meaning it's pretty damn hard to deny pain and you know you could at minimum live in such a way that you're least likely to create Mayhem and misery so you know maybe that's not enough but at least it's a start and I certainly know that if you don't decide to live that way the probability that you can cause serious trouble is extraordinarily high and so you got to ask yourself is that what you want you know cuz it is sometimes what people

want so I think it's an abdication of responsibility and I think it's resentful and weak to do that so I think there's no there's nothing in it but misery and weakness okay so that ends the philosophical part of the course ly speaking because you can't separate Philosophy from anything because philosophy is about what things mean and even though we're going to go into psychometrics now and we're going to go into biology it's all building the same edifice so I'm I'm going to I'm going to start to talk to you a little bit today about psychometrics

now I doubt very much that any of you decided to go into psychology because of psychometrics like that's the theory of measurement basically it's you know it's kind of dry the theory of measurement it certainly wasn't something I was enamored of when I was a an undergraduate or or a graduate student you know um but then as I started to dig into things and started to try to really understand them and you know understand means that you can use the knowledge that you have to do something valuable with that's sort of what understanding seems to

me to be the thing I kept running into was the fact that measurement is everything in in psychology as a science it's everything because if you don't know what you're measuring you have no idea what you're up to and then it gets worse because it turns out that measuring things especially psychological things is really really really hard and so psychologists do it badly all the time and sometimes it's because they just don't know what the hell they're doing and sometimes it's it's willful blindness and sometimes it's blind careerism and it's those two things a lot

and so one of the things I want to do with you and for you for the remainder of the course is to well teach you some biology you know some neurobiology because actually there have been some real biological psychology Geniuses and they've outlined you know the the the schema of brain function quite nicely and in a way that I think is really interesting to know about and that's important and useful but also to to familiarize you with the basic concepts of psychometrics because you'll be armed against stupidity that way and it's really useful to be

armed against stupidity and that's especially the case if any of you are interested in science or if you're interested in psychology as a science now how many of you are interested in psychology as a science okay so there's a substantial number of you and I presume that some of you are interested because maybe you hope to make a career of it or you know or at least to finish your degree as a you know a psychologist with biological orientation so either way you need to know you need to know what we're going to learn in

the next couple of weeks and the first thing you have to really come to terms with is how the hell do you know something is real that's a measurement problem you know now the people that we've been talking about have been concerned about that too and they argue about it because some of them are more like objective materialist scientists and some of them are more like phenomenologists and so everybody's sort of concerned with well what's the nature of the real but scientists have an additional concern which is well how do you measure it and it's

not a secondary concern the measurement is everything it's everything you can't get anywhere without the meas measurement so then you think well what are people like you know what are people like do they have beliefs do they have attitudes do they have values do they have personalities do they have emotions do they have motivations do they have cognitions do they have behaviors how do you separate those from one another it's like good luck with that and then like how do you how do you assess them at at micro and macro levels how do you conceptualize

them like what's a unit of behavior that's a really difficult thing to figure out or what's a value and is what you value independent of your personality well what's your personality or what's a trait you know and it's it's a complete mess it's it's it's something that's chasing its own tail constantly it's been very difficult for psychologists to come to terms about this now so I can tell you something about measurement Theory first so one thing you might ask yourself is like how is it that you determine what's real in the world okay so the

first thing you might think of about is well this is an empirical idea you have senses and so a radical empir empiricist would say you get all the information about the world from your senses so it's sense data okay so so then you might notice and you might think well okay let's say sense data provides you with a picture of the world and let's even go one step further and let's say Well it it provides you with a picture of the reality of the world then you might say well how many senses do you need

and is one eye enough well we have two eyes so one eye doesn't seem to have been enough for people and then okay it's two eyes and then but it's not just two eyes it's two eyes in hearing and then it's not just two eyes and hearing it's two eyes hearing smell taste and touch okay so that's interesting so what that means is evolution has calculated that for a for a beast like you you you need five dimensions of evaluation before you can be certain that something is real you can't rely on one you know

you can't rely on two now if you can see something and hear it it's much more likely to be real than if you can just see it or just hear it but if you can see it and hear it and touch it it's like at that point it takes a pretty damn sneaky thing to fool you and then if you add taste and smell to that it's like well what we' figured out is that's enough if you could if you get those five things working you probably won't die and that's a good measurement of whether

that's sufficiently real okay so that's interesting he so your your sensory apparate ey are measurement devices but you don't just need one you need five and then you think well are those five the same or different now it turns out that's a complicated question because although this may not seem obvious two things can be the same and different in an infinite number of ways so one of the things you might say is well what makes why do you put two things in the same category and you'll say well because they're similar it's like well actually

that turns out not to be why because they're similar and different in an infinite number of ways and so you can't use that as a basis for categorization plus it's just circular you put similar things in a category because categories contain similar things not helpful not helpful so when you're trying to zero in on something not only do you need to sense it but you need to use senses that in some sense are qualitatively different from one another so you might you might almost think about them as uncorrelated isn't exactly the right phrase but they're

different methodological techniques so for example your eyes re rely on light waves right and then your ears rely on sound waves and th those are quite different they don't even interfere with each other to any to any real degree and so that means what you're getting is information from two independent sources so that's helpful but then if you if you smell something or more accurately if you taste something I I don't know if you know this but it seems to be the case that taste is a molecular phenomena that you know that when you taste

something you're actually assessing it at a molecular level and there might be as many tastes in some sense or at least as many smells because you're sensing that at a molecular level and smell is more complex as there are substances now people aren't quite sure about that but it's you know it's pretty it differentiates a lot and so you're detecting molecular signatures with your nose and then with your hands you're detecting the electron shells on the outside of your fingertips are pushing against the electron shells of solid surfaces and they can't push through and so

that's basically what you're detecting you're detecting the surface of electrons more more or less and you can't push through it and so that's that's a different way of that's a different way of determining whether or not something is real and so the reason I'm telling you this is because there there was a famous set of papers published in the 1950s by a researcher named kronbach and another researcher named meil and they were trying to figure out how in the world should psychologists figure out what a phenomena what phenomena is real you know it's the same

question in some sense that the chemists had to sort out but they sorted that out they got the periodic table of the elements and that was the end of that that was a big that was a big step forward cuz they got their basic they got their idea about what the world was made of nailed down pretty damn tight and then they could move from that but in Psychology it's like we have this problem what are the basic phenomena okay so what meal and kronbach were trying to figure out is not so much what the

basic phenomena were but how it would be that you could go about figuring out what they were if they existed and they basically came up with a strategy that's very similar to the sense strategy so their hypothesis was was you can't really tell if something is real unless you can measure it using a variety of different methods and get the same answer now the first thing you should remember is that every psychologist knows this unless they've been trained extraordinarily badly because this is a key paper okay it's the key paper of what's called construct validation

and a construct is a measurement you know and so the issue with construct measurement is how do you construct your measures so that you know they're measuring something real it's not something peripheral you got to get this right and the rule from cback and meal was multi method multi method now there's a bit of a problem there because it's not exactly clear when you're using the same method and when you're using a different method you know like if I if I say I filled out a questionnaire about your personality and then you filled out a

questioner about your personality is that the same method or a different method well there's some similarities and some differences maybe if I had you fill out a questionnaire you know maybe I gave you an electric shock and I had you fill a questionnaire out about uh how you felt about that and at the same time I measured changes in your skin conductance because those occur because you sweat a bit if you've been stressed maybe I measure your heart rate acceleration you know I might notice that when you report you know being unhappy or miserable or

angry or frustrated or disappointed or stressed you also show a skin conductance increase CU you're sweating a little bit and your heart rate goes up and then I think well I've kind of triangulated on the phenomena we don't know what the phenomena is but at least we can measure it three different ways it turns out that with heart rate for example it's been damn tricky you know because you might think well heart rate's an objective measure so you could get at what it indexes quite easily so you know if you get afraid your heart rate

will go up but if you get excited your heart rate will go up it'll go up if you take cocaine and it'll go up if you run it's like so it's not exactly clear what heart rate index is indexing it turns out that from the psychological perspective the theory has developed to the point where we we we assume that when I measure your heart rate increase to a phenomena that isn't associated with exercise say that what I'm actually assessing is your body's um the the intensity of your body's prep preparation to do something what makes

sense right why does your heart rate go up to get more blood to your muscles why so that you can go and do something so if your heart rate goes up it's because you're preparing to do something what well it depends on the situation so it's not that fine grain to Tool you know so that's that's a measurement problem um so you want to measure the thing multiple ways and you want to hope that you get the right answer now that's what a real scientist does a real scientist looks to see that they've got the

damn thing they want to measure they've identified it and that it will manifest itself across multiple levels of measure me CU then they can sort of be clear that it's there now this guy Jeffrey gray who you're going to read about for the next lecture he's a brilliant scientist and gray I love gray because gray when gray uses a word you know exactly what it means and he's a behaviorist and those people are known for precision you know the philosophers that we've been talking about in the clinical psychologists they take a broad overview of the

world and that can be really useful you know but gray is a master of the reverse which is zeroing in on what something means so when he says anxi iety he usually talks about animals he means something specific about it he means that there's a particular biological circuit that gets activated you can measure that a variety of different ways that it will respond to the administration of barbituates benzo aines or alcohol because those are primary anxiolytics and that there will be certain behavioral concomitants that are associated with that so the theory has to work across

multiple levels of analysis pharmacological physiological psychological Behavioral and then he thinks okay we kind of zeroed in on this maybe we can cautiously move forward it's a beautiful beautiful way to proceed and you get results that way I mean he wrote a book called The neuros pychology of anxiety in 1982 and he updated it in 1999 and you know that thing that thing stood the test of time because he was absolutely rigorous in his definitions and the behaviorists were very good at that when they measured something and defined it you knew what it was very

good now now it turns out that for a lot of the things that psychologists study it's not so straightforward you know you you can't get multiple measures of the same thing and so you have to often you have to proceed forward with what you've got in the hope that you can cre acrew additional evidence later and I'm going to talk to you in detail about one such approach and that's been the psychometric approach with in relationship to the establishment of the basic personality traits so so what happened with the statistics approach because that's primarily what

we're going to talk about is that the initial discovery of the basic traits was done only at a statistical level and then what happened was that as the traits were established statistically and people got more comfortable with the idea that they might be real then the way they manifested themselves across different levels of analysis started to become understood so for example once I knew that there was such a thing as extroversion I could start to associate certain kind of behaviors and certain emotions with and then I could start to document what the neurological systems were

that that underpinned it and then I could start to understand the neuropharmacology and all that stuff started to stack up and that's sort of where we are with psychometric personality theory and the first element of psychometric personality theory is a hypothesis and here here you think this hypothesis through so this so imagine that one of the things that human beings communicate about with their language is person it I'm really interested in describing what you're like to someone else and you're interested in describing what I'm like to someone else it helps us keep track of our

of everyone's relationships and and reputations but it also helps us understand their behavior and we're obsessively curious about each other and it's no wonder because you know we're weird and unpredictable things but we're kind of useful too so the so the linguistic hypothesis and this is what started the psychometric the psychometric movement forward in the domain of Personality there's a linguistic hypothesis and the linguistic hypothesis is the important variation in human personality will be captured by the language okay so that's like a hypothesis that the language is a good measurement device we're trying to use

the language to assess and communicate about each other and roughly we've we've nailed the structure within that language if we could figure out how to extract it now people debate that he cuz it's not self-evident that we would have captured all the important variation in personality in our language but it's not a bad hypothesis and you can test it and the way you test it is by deriving personality-based descriptions from an analysis of natural language and then seeing how those derived descriptions do in the real world do it predicting things do it being correlated with

different physiological structures due at predicting responses to pharmacological interventions and so forth and so on and the answer to that is being hey it's done pretty well so so the first hypothesis is that important trait variation is encapsulated in the language but there's another hypothesis and I'll leave you with this and you really need to think about this because psychologists do not get it right and they should it's a sin it's a scientific sin not to get this right the big five theorists and they're the psychometric guys who did the language analysis they make a

claim they make a strong claim and a weak claim the strong claim is you can extract out information about personality from the language it lays itself out in five Dimensions we'll we'll talk about what that means extroversion neuroticism conscientiousness agreeableness and openness and that is where all the important variation in personality lies okay that's the strong claim the weak claim is this we're going to forget about the strong claim because you guys can evaluate that as we go through it the weak claim is this in so far as you can measure personality with language and

so that means with words or phrases or sentences in so far as you can measure it with language you're going to measure one or more of the big five traits well or badly now the reason I'm I'm stressing this is so many of you have taken many psychology courses so far and you may have noticed that people measure all sorts of things with questionnaires they measure self-esteem for example they measure self-efficacy you know they measure authoritarian personality they measure any bloody thing you can think of there's going to be a questionaire with a name on

it but the big five theorists say hey hey wait a minute we've got a hypothesis going here if you're using language and you're measuring traits you're measuring one or more of the big five traits bad ly or well and so what that means and no one's challenged this by the way the the challenge is well do five traits completely cover it or do we need six or seven and then maybe what's the hierarchical structure there's questions about that but no one seriously questioned the weak hypothesis and so what that means is that all those things

you read about that are measured by questionnaire that have all sorts of different names are elements of the big five that have either been measured well or badly and so what that means is whenever you read a psychological paper and this is something that's particularly endemic in social psychology no matter what they name the damn measure if it's a questionnaire it's extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness or openness and it's incumbent on the researcher to prove that that's not the case and they don't now the reason they don't in part is because they don't know the psychometric

theory then the next reason is they do know it but they ignore it and the next reason is if they know it and ignore it then they can invent a construct and name it something and they can conjure up a whole career on it you don't get to do that we know some things exist in Psychology IQ extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness they exist in so far as you can encapsulate personality and language and use statistical techniques to derive private maybe other things exist but I don't think there's any credible evidence that they do

so all right so we'll pick that up on Thursday