Читать книгу Dr. Jordan Peterson - Man of Meaning. Complete Edition (Volumes 1-5) - Hermos Avaca - Страница 5

Hi everyone. I'm making an announcement today, and I suppose you might regard it as an advertisement, so I'm warning you to begin with - because I don't want you to waste your time, if you're not interested in listening to a description of the newest thing that we've created.

We put up a website called UnderstandMyself.com, that is a personality assessment for individuals.

It's based on a personality model that was developed in my lab by Dr. Colin DeYoung and Dr. Lena Quilty, about ten years ago.

Dr. De Young is now a professor at the University of Minnesota.

It was based on some ideas that I had been developing with another former student of mine, Dr. Daniel Higgins, who is a partner with me in this enterprise, along with my former graduate supervisor Dr. Robert Peel from McGill University.

The test is based on the Big Five personality model, which measures "Extraversion", which is a positive emotion dimension, and is associated with gregariousness, enthusiasm, assertiveness, sociability and that sort of thing.

Then a trait called "Neuroticism", which is basically negative emotionality, which is associated with a proclivity towards anxiety and emotional pain.

"Agreeableness", which is compassion and politeness. Agreeable people are, broadly speaking, rather maternal in their orientation, they tend to care more for others than for themselves. They are more cooperative than competitive - whereas so-called "disagreeable" people are more competitive, more brusque, I would say, more straightforward and more able to stand up for themselves as well.

"Conscientiousness" is another one of the dimensions, that's orderliness and industriousness.

The last dimension is "Openness to Experience", which is a combination of interest in ideas (which is often known as intellect) and interest in aesthetics (which is associated with creativity) and that's the dimension that's also most highly correlated with IQ.

We developed the big five aspect scale in an attempt to take the Big Five - Extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, concientiousness and openness to experience (which are the canonical dimensions of personality)... we developed the Big Five aspect scale in order to break down those big five traits, each of them, into their two most statistically robust subcomponents: We call those "Aspects"!

That has actually become a pretty popular personality model: The scientific paper which announced that statistical division has accrued about 750 citations, which is a lot of citations for a scientific paper - it makes it into a kind of classic.

Especially, as it only had ten years to accrue citations. A citation is when some other scientists refer to the paper in one of their papers, by the way.

Anyways, I've been working over the last couple of years to generate really detailed personality reports on each of the big five traits, and the ten aspects, at about seven different levels of specificity, *It's nine ranging from extremely low to extremely high - and we think, that we have produced the most comprehensive and accurate personality reports that are currently available.

You answer a hundred questions in order to complete the personality survey. The questions themselves are actually public access, you could also call them "open-source", they were derived from Lew Goldbergs' IPIP: International personality item pool.

They're the consequence of many decades of attempts to define a set of phrases that most comprehensively - and also most concisely - captures the variation in human personality. You can find those questions at many places online, but the reports themselves and the comparison sample of approximately 10,000 people, these features are proprietary and constitute essentially the central elements of value in in our offering.

What we're hoping is that people use this personality test in order to develop a much deeper understanding of themselves, so that they know what they're like - especially compared to others. With the reports, people can also compare themselves to anyone else who has taken the test.

See, the thing about personality is that the differences between people actually run quite deep, there's a lot of individual variability. There are people who are extreme extraverted, they want to spend every moment of their time socializing with other people.

There are people who are very introverted and they want to work alone they find interactions with large groups of people, or even small groups sometimes, quite tiring and they have to spend a lot of time recovering. These people tend to be much more quiet. They're not necessarily shy, because that shyness is more a consequence of the variation on the second dimension: neuroticism.

People who are high in neuroticism feel much more anxiety and emotional pain per unit of uncertainty and stress than people who are very low in neuroticism, who are often known as "emotionally stable" and who tend to be quite imperturbable.

Agreeable people, as I mentioned before, are warm and compassionate.

They care very much for other people, but are also likely to be taken advantage of - and to feel a certain amount of resentment; whereas disagreeable people are tough and straightforward and competitive and out for victory, but can also be somewhat self-centered and harsh.

The third dimension is conscientiousness: Conscientious people are hardworking and dutiful.

Conscientiousness is a really good predictor of long-term life success - especially in academic attainment, where it's second only to IQ - and also in managerial and administrative routine work jobs that require attention to detail and a fair bit of responsibility.

"Openness to experience" is the creativity dimension: Some people are extremely high in openness to experience, and they want to do nothing but discuss ideas and and spend their time in creative and artistic pursuits.

Other people are more conservative, because low openness is associated with conservatism. They're not really interested in novel ideas, they don't think abstractly that often and they're they're not out for new experiences or flights of fantasy or imaginative exercises or any of that thing - there are a lot more concrete and practical.

Now the reports that we've prepared not only provide you with information about all of the aforementioned Big Five traits, they also break each one down into its dual aspects, so there's actually 15 different sources of information that are contained in the reports.

For extraversion, you get a description of the degree to which you're "assertive", which means forthcoming in public and willing to put your opinions forward. The second aspect is "enthusiasm", which is a more pure marker of positive emotion and the capacitiy to look forward and to enjoy events and situations sponateously.

With neuroticism, you learn about the traitaspects "withdrawal" and "volatility". Withdrawal is the tendency to be stymied or stopped by fear - to be frozen, in some sense, like a prey animal. Volatility is an aspect that's associated with irritability and the tendency to be easily rubbed the wrong way and to react emotionally to that.

For agreeableness there's two aspects, one is "compassion", which means pretty much what it says: It's the ability to embody the feelings of others and to react in a caring manner to that. The second is aspect is "politeness", which is something like respect for authority and social conventions. One of the things you see, for example, is that liberals are higher in compassion and conservatives are higher in politeness, even though both of these aspects are part of trait agreeableness.

Conscientiousness breaks down into two aspects as well, which are quite interesting: One of them is "industriousness", which is associated with diligent hard work and the ability to stay task focused without distraction. "Orderliness" is the second aspect of Conscientiousness, which seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity and is a pretty good predictor of conservative belief. It has turned out that some elements of conservative belief are associated with higher than average levels of disgust sensitivity.

The final trait division in two aspects is that of openness to experience. It can be divided into "openness" proper, which is essentially a dimension of creativity and aesthetic sensitivity - preference for engagement in activities that are associated with fiction, drama or art. The second aspect is "intellect", which is an index of interest in ideas, abstractions and philosophical concepts.

The report produces a very high resolution representation of personality and there are very interesting differences at the aspect level that are worth concentrating on.

We tried to develop a personality test that isn't designed to make you feel good about yourself - although it might, it depends on your personality - but to give you the most accurate and straightforward description of who you are, that is possible, so that you can use that genuine information in order to organize your life.

The report also helps you to understand the difference between yourself and other people, because we often think that the reason that we don't share the same viewpoint, is because we have differences of opinion - but it actually goes a lot deeper than that!

This is a lot deeper and more profound, because you're very perceptions are dependent on the variability in your personality! It isn't only that people differ in their opinions, they differ very much in how they see the world, how they actually perceive the world - because your personality constitutes a kind of template, or filter, through which you organize your perceptions.

It's very important to understand that there is substantial personality variability in the world and that you're often talking to people who see things differently than you.

A good example of that is the divide between, let's say, left-leaning people and right-leaning people: the left-leaning people tend to be very high in openness to experience, and relatively low in conscientiousness - especially in the aspect of orderliness - whereas the conservative types tend to be very high in conscientiousness - especially orderliness - and relatively low in openness.

Those different tendencies are fundamentally different orientations in the world. You could say that the more conservative types, the more right-wing types, are much more concerned with the preservation of tradition and tend to believe, that things that have been done the tried-and-true manner in the past are the most reliable.

In contrast, the people who are on the Left, who are more radical, are more concerned with the fact that he environment shifts radically, rapidly and unpredictably - so we have to be willing to shift with it.

Those are both valid viewpoints, because every element of lived experience has an orderly element and a chaotic element. You have to be prepared for both.

The purpose of straightforward political dialogue between people of different personality types is, to help determine on an ongoing basis

 how much we should be relying on tradition and

 how much we should be attempting to transform ourselves.

There's no permanent solution to that problem, because things stay the same and change - and they do that at different rates at different times. Therefore, dialogue is unbelievably important, which is the reason why I'm such an advocate for free speech: free speech is the mechanism that keeps people of different types speaking instead of fighting, so it's really important!

The website is called "UnderstandMyself.com". You can go there and sign up for the personality test, the report is immediately delivered to you after you fill out the questions. Each question is posed as a phrase and it will take you about 15 minutes to complete the questions.

You can only do it once and the reason for that is, is that the norms that we compare you against - that would be the self-reports of the 10,000 other people against whom you're compared to - they were only allowed to do it once and so we have to maintain stringent control over that, to maintain the validity of the test.

I would say:

 don't do it when you're hungry

 don't do it when you're tired

 don't do it when you're feeling down or in a bad mood about yourself or feeling self-critical, and

 don't do it when you're likely to be interrupted or distracted

You want to take it seriously and you want to think about your answers. Now, you're supposed to answer as you are typically - not, as you'd like to be! You don't want to be either too hard on yourself or too good to yourself. You want to be as accurate as possible, because then you'll benefit most from the feedback. The last thing I want to add is something a few of you already know about:

We've also developed a set of interventions called "self authoring", and that's available at "selfauthoring.com",

and what self authoring can help you do, is reconfigure certain elements of your behavior and perhaps, over the long run, your personality.

The self authoring suite helps you write an autobiography and detail out both positive and negative experiences of your past, so that you can capitalize on the positive experiences and figure out, how to duplicate them - and how to put the negative experiences to rest. We feel that that's a good way to reduce trait neuroticism over the long run. The evidence shows, that writing programs of this sort tend to improve peoples mental health, decrease their negative emotion and stabilizes them.

If you take the personality test and you're not happy, for example, with your scores on trait neuroticism - you feel that you would benefit from some additional emotional stability - then the "past authoring program" from the self authoring suite might be something worth considering.

With regards to the other personality traits: the "present authoring program" at "selfauthoring.com" is also a personality exercise of a sort, but it helps you to center on your virtues and your faults, using a Big Five model again. The purpose for you is, being able to identify what's good about your personality and figure out how to capitalize that on that in the future and , on the other side, you can identify where your major weaknesses are and figure out how to rectify those. That's useful for general personality work.

Then the last one, which we've done the most research on, is called "future authoring", and the future authoring program helps you think about your life, and we think about it as an adjunct to conscientiousness over the long run - and also as an exercise that could increase positive and decrease negative emotion, by helping you establish your goals and stabilizing your view of the world.

In the future authoring program you're asked to consider your life along seven dimensions:

1 friendships

2 intimate relationships

3 what you do outside of work with your private life, in terms of useful, creative, enjoyable or social activity

4 what you're aiming for in your career

5 how you're going to configure your self-education

6 how you're going to take care of yourself, mentally and physically

7 how are you going to handle your use of drugs and alcohol,

because those are pitfalls that people often encounter that tear them down and hurt them badly.

You're asked to think about yourself three to five years down the road, as if you were taking care of yourself, as if you were a valuable person! You want to extend that courtesy to yourself, because you're as valuable as anyone else and you should treat yourself that way!

You're asked to design a future three to five years down the road, where your experience along each of those dimensions is optimized. Then you're asked to write for 15 minutes about what your life could be like, three to five years down the road, if you were taking care of yourself the way you should and things were working out properly.

With this task you can develope a vision of the life that you'd like to lead.

Then you're asked to reverse that and to write for 15 minutes - and think about this as well - about what your life would be like if you let your bad habits and your characterological weaknesses take the upper hand and auger you into the ground, so that you became a failure:

Bitter and resentful and isolated and unhappy and all of the terrible things that go along with that, like bad luck and missed opportunities - let's call them ethical errors.

And then you're asked to take your positive vision for the future and elaborate that out into a detailed plan, where you justify your goals:

 You describe what those goals are

 you rank order them in importance

 you describe, how you would be better, how your family and your society would be better, if you stuck to your goals and

 you make a contract with yourself, to determine how it is that you are going to approach those goals and stay on path.

These are quite extensive exercises and we developed them, you might say, as an alternative to lengthy and expensive psychotherapy. There's a fair bit of research evidence suggesting, that writing exercises of this sort are extremely effective ways of reconfiguring the manner in which you approach the world.

We ourselves have done research in this field as well, specifically in three different locations andwith several thousand college students - although this is not a program only designed for college students. Our research has indicated: Even if you do a relatively poor job of, let's say, the future authoring program, it increases the probability that you'll stay in your university program by about 25%, which is a walloping improvement. The intervention has also about the same effect on your grade point average.

These positive results seem to be particularly true for people who are doing the worst, it's been really effective for disenchanted ethnic minority males in Holland, compared to the dutch national females - who do better than anyone else in the sample that we looked at: Two years after the entire group did the future authoring program, the ethnic minority males - who were underperforming by about 80 % - caught up and slightly exceeded the performance of the dutch national women! That was an absolutely staggering result, as far as we're concerned, and we also duplicated that at in Canada at Mohawk College, showing that the program worked particularly effectively for men, again. It worked extraordinarily well for males - who are in general underperforming females in the academic world - especially, if they hadn't done that well in high school and hadn't carved out a very specified route forward in their academic achievement. This program is an excellent way of getting your act together.

The UnderstandMyself.com-page is designed to give you a picture of your personality in detail, and then the self authoring program is designed to help you reconfigure the way that you approach life.

We're hoping that the combination of those two things are a particularly effective way of bringing high-quality psychological information and advice and help to a very broad audience at a very low cost and at a relative minimum of demands on time.

We do know with the self authoring program, that the more you write the better it works, which is sort of tantamount to saying "the program works better, and your life gets better, the more you think about the future!", which really stands to reason. But it's nice to see that actually represented and duplicated as part of a scientific research project.

We tried to keep the programs as reliable as possible, as straightforward as possible, as dependent on your own actions as possible - because the writing is really crucial to reconfiguring your personality - and as widely distributable and as low cost as we could possibly manage.

We're trying to provide you with accurate psychological information, so that you understand yourself and other people better. With this knowledge, your life can be configured in a manner that is hopefully much more beneficial to you personally, helpful to your family and also has a positive effect on the broader society around you - because that's a great triumvirate of attainment, and it's exactly what you should be aiming for.

I encourage you to determine who you are and to think about that very carefully and then to determine very carefully who you want to be and why make a plan. You don't get the opportunity to do that in school. Junior high, high school, college, university... no one ever sits you down and helps you figure out where you came from, who you are and what you're doing - and you really need to know that!

I should also say, that with the UnderstandMyself.com site, we're also working on a couples module that will enable the people who have filled out the report to ask someone else to also do the questionnaire and then they'll both get a report that details out their similarities and differences, so that they can come to understand where they're going to be in agreement, get along and share interests - and where they're likely to have conflict and what might be done about that. I would say, that's at minimum a month to two months away.

We're also going to release a high school version of the self authoring suite, so that people can start to plan their lives when they're much younger. We'll only ask the high school students to think about three to six months out into the future, because when you're that young, that's about the practical limit of your... I wouldn't say ability to think forward into the future, but the younger you are, the shorter your time horizon - partly because you haven't been exposed to the world that much and there's you still have plenty to learn.

Anyways, we have a high school version in the works and I'll announce that when it comes.

We all hope that you find these offerings useful and practical and that they help you put your life together, so that you can be a solid citizen and a responsible person and as emotionally stable as possible - and maybe even find some happiness along the way, from time to time. That would be really good!