Okay, so agreeable people are compassionate and polite.
What are disagreeable people like?
They're tough minded, they're blunt,
they're competitive, and they won't do a damn thing they don't want to do.
So it isn't exactly that they're aggressive, although they will push you
the hell out of their way if you're in the way.
They're not, like, volatile like you are.
If you're high in neuroticism, it isn't defensive aggression.
It's more like predatory aggression.
It's dominance behavior.
And so for someone who's high, highly disagreeable,
they look at the world as a place in which they can compete and win.
And I'll tell you a story. I have a friend.
I gave him my personality test,
the big five aspect scale that Colin DeYoung developed in my lab.
And I knew he was a disagreeable guy.
And by interacting with him, I mean,
he's even rude to people, sort of spontaneously on the street.
I actually like him quite a bit. He's very, very funny.
He's also very conscientious, so you can trust him, but disagreeable as hell.
And so I gave him this test because I thought it would be funny.
And he came out as the most disagreeable person in 10,000, reasonably reasonable
in compassion, about 30%, but like .001 in politeness.
So he's extraordinarily blunt,
and he'll just say absolutely anything, no matter how horrible it is.
And he was often brought into corporations to sort of clean them up.
So if a Corporation was tilting and not doing well, they'd bring him in to find
out who the useless people were and fire them.
And I talked to him about that because I've had the miss opportunity to have
to not have graduate students in my lab, for example, that weren't performing well.
And I find it very, very difficult to,
you know, dress someone down and certainly difficult to fire them.
I just hate it because I'm actually quite an agreeable person, much to my chagrin.
And I asked him about that, and I said, Well, what do you do?
You have to fire people all the time? How do you handle it?
He said, Handle it? I enjoy it.
And I thought, wow, that's so interesting that someone would have that response.
I said, Well, what do you mean, you enjoy it?
He said, Look, I go into these companies
and I analyze the performance of groups of people.
And in those groups, there are people who are really striving,
really trying hard and working themselves really hard and being productive.
And then there's these people that are just doing nothing.
They're completely in the way.
They don't carry their weight at all.
They take advantage every chance they get.
And they're always whining about why they can't work.
It's like, I find out who they are
and call them into my office, and I tell them exactly what they've been doing.
It's like, Hit the road, buddy.
You've had your run of it.
And I thought, oh, yeah. Okay.
Fair enough, you know?
Well, I can tell you, you know,
I've had situations in my lab where I had under performing graduate students.
And one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really
hard on the high performing graduate students because they felt that even being
in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their
weight devalued what they were doing, you know?
And that's exactly right.
And so this is also why there's
a conscientiousness trait and an agreeableness trait,
because conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments, right?
They don't give a damn about your feelings, not a bit.
It's like, are you doing the work or not?
Whereas agreeable people think, well,
you know, your mother is sick and, you know, you've got a bunch of family
problems and we all have to take care of each other.
And it's no wonder that you're having a rough time.
Like you can't say that one of those
attitudes is correct and the other isn't correct.
You can't say that.
There wouldn't be those
two dimensions if there wasn't something correct about both of them.
But you can certainly point out that often they conflict.
And so the demand for inclusiveness
and unity and care, and the demand for high level performance in a hierarchical
structure, there are very different orientations in the world.
And so it's complicated for people who are agreeable and conscientious.
And actually, I think often that large
corporations and large, large institutions of any sort run
on the unheralded labor of people who are high and agreeableness and high
in conscientiousness and they're disproportionately women.
In my experience in large institutions has
been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately.
No, not appropriately.
If you want to hire someone to exploit productively, you hire middle aged women
who are hyper conscientious and who are agreeable because they'll do everything,
they won't take credit for it, and they won't complain.
And that's nasty.
And I think that happens all the time.
And so one of the things you have to be careful of if you're agreeable is
not to be exploited because you'll line up to be exploited.
And I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants.
And so that just doesn't work so well in that actual world.
And one of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy
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 socalled, 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, 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 relative peace.
And if you're also more prone to being hurt physically and perhaps emotionally,
you're 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, because lots of times there are things you
have to talk about because they're not going to go away.
And so partly what you do with agreeable
people is you get them to figure out, and they have a hard time with this, too.
If you ask a disagreeable person what he
wants, say or she wants, they'll tell you right away.
They don't.
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...