After watching this your brain will not be the same Jordan Peterson
if you ask a disagreeable person what
what he wants say or she wants they’ll
tell you right away they know it’s like
this is what i want and this is how i’m
going to get it
but agreeable people especially if
they’re really agreeable are so
agreeable that they often don’t even
know what they want
because they’re so accustomed to living
for other people
and to finding out what other people
want and to trying to make them
comfortable and so forth that it’s
harder
for them to find a sense of their own
desires as they move through life
and that’s not look there’s situations
where that’s advantageous but it’s
certainly not advantageous
if you’re going to try to forge yourself
a career
that just doesn’t work at all and so
even though on average men and women
don’t
exist don’t aren’t that much different
in terms of their levels of
agreeableness by the group if you go out
and you look at the extremes they’re
very different
so all of the most agreeable people are
women and all of the most
disagreeable people are men and the
thing is the extremes are often what
matter
rather than what’s in the middle and so
one of the ways that’s reflected in
society by the way is
there’s way more men in prison and the
best
personality predictor of being
imprisoned is to be low in agreeableness
it makes you callous now you may think
well what’s the opposite of compassion
and politeness and the answer to that is
i think it’s best sort of conceptualized
as a as a trading game
so let’s say that we’re going to play
repeated trading games
and if you’re very agreeable then you’re
going to bargain harder on my behalf
than you’re going to bargain on your own
behalf
whereas if you’re very disagreeable
you’re going to do the reverse you’re
going to think
i’m in this trading game for me and
you’re going to take care of your own
interests where an agreeable person is
going to say no no
at best this is at worst this has to be
50 50 but
i’d like to help you every way i can one
of the things you have to be careful of
if you’re agreeable
is not to be exploited because you’ll
line up to be exploited
and i think the reason for that is
because you’re wired to be exploited by
infants
and so that just doesn’t work so well in
that actual world and
one of the things one of the things that
happens very often in psychotherapy you
know people come to psychotherapy for
multiple reasons
but one of them is they often come
because they’re too agreeable and so
what they get is
so-called assertiveness training
although it’s not exactly assertiveness
that’s being trained
what it is is the ability to learn how
to negotiate on your own behalf
and one of the things i tell agreeable
people especially if they’re
conscientious is
say what you think tell the truth about
what you think there’s going to be
things you think that you think are
nasty and harsh
and they probably are nasty and harsh
but they’re also probably true
and you need to bring those up to the
forefront and deliver the message and
it’s not
straightforward at all because agreeable
people do not like
conflict not at all they smooth the
water
you know and you can see you can see why
that is in accordance with the
hypothesis that i’ve been putting
forward
you don’t want conflict around infants
it’s too damn dangerous you don’t want
fights to break out you don’t want
anything to disturb the
the relative peace you know and if
you’re also more prone to being hurt
physically and perhaps emotionally you
also may be loath to engage in the kind
of high intensity conflict that will
solve
problems in the short term because a lot
of conflict
it takes a lot of conflict to solve
problems in the short term and
you know if that can spiral up to where
it’s dangerous which it can if it gets
uncontrolled
it might be safer in the short term to
keep
the water smooth and to not delve into
those situations where conflict emerges
the problem with that is it’s not a very
good medium to long-term strategy
right because lots of times there are
things you have to talk about
because they’re not going to go away and
the advantage
to having a well-socialized disagreeable
person is that they really don’t let
much get in their way
so if you can get a kid who’s
disagreeable socialized that person can
be quite
quite the creature you know because
they’re very they’re very
forward moving in their nature and very
difficult to stop
but if you don’t get them successfully
domesticated
tamed roughly speaking by the time
they’re
four their peers reject them
and that’s a big problem because your
job as a parent is to make your child
socially
desirable by the age of four like you
gotta you you wanna burn that into your
brain
because people don’t know that that’s
your job and here’s here’s why
you think it’s it’s easy if you think
about it carefully so you imagine
you’ve got a you’ve got a three-year-old
child so sort of halfway through that
initial period of socialization
and you take that child out in public
okay what do you want for the child
who cares about you what do you want
from the child for the child
you want the child to be able to
interact with other children
and adults so that the children are
welcoming and smile and want to play
with him or her
and so the adults are happy to see the
child and treat him or her properly
and if your child’s a horrible little
monster because you’re afraid of
disciplining them or you don’t know how
to do that properly
then what they’re going to do is they’re
going to experience nothing but
rejection from other children
and false smiles from other parents and
adults
and that’s so then you’re throwing the
child out there into a world where every
single face that they see
is either hostile or lying and that’s
not something that’s going to be
particularly conducive to the mental
health or the well-being of your child
your child can learn a couple simple
rules of behavior
like don’t interrupt adults when they’re
talking too much and pay attention and
try not to hit the other kids over the
head with the truck any more than is
absolutely necessary
then and you know and share and play
properly then
when they meet other kids the kids are
going to try out a few little play
routines on them and that’s going to go
well and then they’re going to go off
and socialize each other for the rest of
their lives because that’s what happens
is that from four years old onwards
the primary socialization with children
takes place among other children
and so if the kids don’t get in on that
early they don’t
move into that developmental spiral
upwards and they’re left behind
and you can imagine how terrible that is
because a four-year-old will not play
with another four-year-old
who’s two but a five-year-old
certainly will not play with a
five-year-old who’s two right because
the gap is just starting to get
unbelievably large
and so the kids start out behind and
then the peers leave them behind
and then those kids are alienated and
outside the peer group for the rest of
their life
those are the ones that grow up to be
long-term anti-social
right they’re already aggressive it
doesn’t dip down
now what happens to normal boys roughly
speaking
imagine the aggressive two-year-old
types they get socialized
so their level of aggression goes down
and then they hit puberty and
testosterone kicks in and bang
levels of aggression go back up and so
that’s why males are criminals between
the ages roughly of 16 and about 25
so and it matches the creativity curve
by the way it’s so cool if you look at
the spike of creativity among men 16 to
25
and it starts to go down criminality
matches that absolutely perfectly
so that’s quite cool so and part of so
the testosterone levels raise the
average level of aggression among men
it’s more dominance than aggression
actually and testosterone is by no means
all bad
and then it starts to decrease at about
age 25 or 26 which is usually when men
stop staying up late at night stop
drinking as much
develop a full-time career and take on
the burdens and responsibilities and
opportunities that are associated with a
long-term partner and family
it’s really useful to investigate the
viewpoints of people who have opposing
views to yours
because they’ll tell you things not only
will they tell you things you don’t know
they’ll also tell you how to see the
world in ways that you don’t see it
and they’ll also have skills that you
don’t have that you could develop
so for example if you’re an introverted
person it’s very useful to watch an
extroverted person because the
extroverted person has ways of being in
the social world that aren’t natural to
you
that you can use is to improve your tool
kit and if you’re disagreeable one of
the best things to do with disagreeable
people
especially if that’s alienating them
from other people for example because it
can
you know people treat you like you’re a
selfish arrogant son of a maybe that’s
because you are
it’s like okay so what do you do about
that one of the one of the
most uh promising
treatments let’s say for that is get the
person to do something for someone else
once a day
just as a practice and learn how to do
it maybe you can wake the circuit up you
know if you think that it’s lying
dormant in you which is probably right
you know i think we have a very wide
range of propensities within us
some are switched on genetic propensity
some are switched on but
i think that if you put yourself in the
right situation or walk yourself through
the right exercises you can switch some
of these other things on as well
but it takes work and and dedication and
discipline i would say generally
speaking if you want to adapt yourself
properly to life you should find a niche
in the environment that corresponds with
your temperament
right you shouldn’t work at cross
purposes to your temperament because
it’s just too damn difficult
but having done that then you should
work on
developing the the skills and viewpoints
that
exist in the space opposite to your
personality because that’s where you’re
fundamentally underdeveloped
that way i think you can extend out your
temperamental capability
across a wider range and to me that’s
roughly equivalent as bringing a richer
toolkit to each situation
you know so if you’re hyper extroverted
you should probably learn to shut up at
parties now and then
and listen just to see what’s going on
to see if you can manage it
and if you’re introverted well then you
should learn how to speak in public
and to and to learn how to go to parties
without hiding in the corner and
saying nothing to anyone you know and if
you’re agreeable then you need to learn
how to be disagreeable so people can’t
push you around
and if you’re disagreeable you learn you
need to learn how to be agreeable so
that you’re not an evil son
so and the same thing applies even in
the conscientious domain it’s like if
you’re too conscientious
you need to learn to relax and let go
a little bit and if you’re unconscious
it’s time like
get out the google calendar man and
start scheduling your day right and beat
yourself on the back of the head with a
stick until you’re disciplined enough so
that you can actually stick to something
for some length of time
and not living in absolute squalor which
is something that would characterize
someone who’s very disorderly
for example because they just they don’t
notice
it doesn’t bother them disorder it’s
like
maybe they can see it but it doesn’t
have any emotional valence and so it
doesn’t have any motivational
significance
you know so the other thing you might
want to think about too if you’re
choosing a partner is
try not to choose someone who’s too
distant from you
on the temperamental variables because
you’re going to have a hard time
bridging the gap
you know it’s hard for an introverted
person and an extroverted person to
coexist
and it’s really hard for an orderly
person and a disorderly person to
coexist because they will drive each
other
nuts why don’t you pick up why are you
so obsessed by it
that’s the basic argument you know so so
it’s useful to know about your
temperament so that you can negotiate
the space with your partner
as well and i don’t think you should try
to find someone who’s exactly the same
as you
because then you don’t have the benefits
of the alternative viewpoint
but you got to watch it because you may
hit irreconcilable differences of
various sorts and
i’ve seen that most particularly among
couples who are
high and low in openness that’s a rough
one
and also high and low in
conscientiousness that’s another rough
one because they just cannot
see how the other person sees the world
at all
you