about a month ago I had my funding for
my ongoing research projects refused by
the federal government Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council and
ezell event from rebel media decided to
host indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to
replace it which was very good of him so
thank you to era and also to i10 gill
board who helped out a lot and to Hannah
van der coy for managing it was
extraordinarily helpful we raised about
$80,000 the first day and then since
then we've raised about a hundred and
eighty thousand dollars twenty-five
hundred backers the original grant
proposal was for three hundred thousand
dollars across five years so that's
basically three years of funding so I'm
extraordinarily impressed by that and
also very thankful so for all of you who
donated thank you very much I've put
together this video with two of my
graduate students whose academic careers
will be supported as a consequence of
this funding so that you know a little
bit more about them and also about what
it is that you helped out with the third
Christine Brophy is working on political
correctness and the relationship between
personality and political belief as well
as on on a biological basis of the big
five personality traits
she couldn't contribute to the video for
for various reasons this time around
although she did a lengthy interview
with rebel media that you can catch on
on social justice issues and and their
basis in personality and so after this
very brief introduction I'm going to let
the students speak for each for five
minutes they've prepared a video telling
you what they're up to
so anyways thanks very much we have one
day left of the funding campaign runs
for 24 more hours so this is the final
update in all likely living my life hi
everyone my name is John Tennant
I'm a first year masters student in dr.
Peterson's lab my research interests
include technology for condom
personality development and music
commission my background is a little bit
different I did my bachelor's degree in
music theory and my undergraduate
research focused on mathematical models
of musical harmony and Tambor this year
I'll be designing and testing a
biofeedback system for increasing
people's ability to flow self-regulate
and get in tune with one another I'm
using a variety of sensors to measure
things like heart rate breathing arousal
and brainwaves I'll be turning these
signals into quasi musical stimuli to
give people feedback about their body in
mind in real-time this should be able to
help people better understand themselves
and regulate their stress and emotions
if used in pairs it might even be able
to help people sync up with one another
perhaps fostering empathy and helping
them get into a kind of interpersonal
flow State I have a huge personal
interest in combining music psychology
and technology in my undergraduate work
with dr. Peterson I tackled theoretical
issues surrounding visual
representations of music while working
on that project I developed a method for
making important musical parameters such
as harmony pitch rhythm and Tambor
accessible to our visual system I
created two software music visualizer
based on these principles
I found these techniques also translate
well to other applications such as the
visualization of biological data if
you'd like to see the music visualizes I
developed or read about the principle
behind them you can check out my website
at John Matthew Tennant comm there you
can also find my undergraduate paper on
math and musical harmony in my
personality research this year I looked
at female made perfect in an online
study women read the profile a fictional
man and size picture women then rated
demands attractiveness and personality
they also answered questions about their
own personality and complete an IQ test
from this data we were able to build a
model of what kinds of personalities are
attractive to who on average women
tended to prefer men who were
conscientious extroverted agreeable
emotionally stable and open to
experience higher IQ participants
however where the men is much less
attractive on average and they were less
moved by those traditionally attractive
characteristics like extraversion
conscientiousness and emotional
stability for more intelligent women the
only things that made a significant
difference were creativity employment or
Jerris of aspects of openness and
agreeableness we think creativity might
be especially attractive because it
indicates competence in unfamiliar
situations the attraction to
agreeableness might be due to a desire
for a partner who will share resources
and care for children in my upcoming
personality research I'm developing a
new method for investigating the
structure of personality in traditional
personality studies participants rate
themselves on every item this limits the
number of items that can be analyzed
simultaneously instead we're going to
use collaborative ratings of fictional
characters and public figures multiple
people will provide ratings of the
targets personality and we can build up
a complete description from the multiple
raters this will allow us to investigate
the personality data contained inside
larger sets of descriptors this will
help us rapidly expand the vocabulary of
words we can use to measure personality
which should increase the precision of
our models the first study to use this
method will attempt to integrate
positive and negative person descriptors
with our existing personality models
this is important because when the
original scales were devised researchers
purposely omitted words like evil
untrustworthy wise and admirable by
adding these words to our models of
personality we'll be able to further
explore the virtues and vices associated
with personality dimensions we might
also be able to pick up on new effects
and correlations this could be
especially useful in the labs ongoing
research into the personality
underpinnings of political beliefs I'd
like to thank everyone for supporting
our research it makes a really big
difference especially to us
if you're interested and you might work
I'd love to hear from you you can also
check out my site at John Matthew tenon
com I have demos and papers posted there
thanks for watching my name is Victor
Swift and I am a PhD student in Jordan
Peterson's lab I joined the lab in 2013
as a master student primarily
researching how mental health is shaped
by the ways in which people relate to
their own descriptions of the world
today my overall research investigates
the nature of the big five personality
traits the big five represent distinct
patterns of feeling thinking and acting
that are shared by all of us humans and
higher primates seem to possess five
distinct dispositions hence the name
openness a tendency to seek novel ideas
and experiences neuroticism
a tendency to seek certainty and
experience negative emotions
extraversion the tendency to seek
attention and experience positive
emotions
agreeableness a tendency to seek social
harmony through politeness and
compassion and finally conscientiousness
a tendency to adhere to standards and
goals by working hard and staying
organized this final trait has been the
focus of my research for reasons that I
will explain shortly
every person has these five traits to
some degree and these traits remain
relatively stable throughout adulthood
as such the big five traits are
important to both industry and academia
because they can be used to reliably
capture who a person is now we are
confident that the Big Five model
represents a real and meaningful
psychological construct because it has
been arrived at through several
independent methodologies however we do
not yet know why human dispositions
cluster into these five traits nor do we
know how to ascertain big five traits
without directly asking people to
introspect about themselves this is
where my research comes in
for the past three years I've been
investigating how the big five traits
can be detected without self-report this
effort has taken many forms which I will
continue to pursue throughout the course
of my PhD for instance I've been
investigating whether the big five
traits map onto the differences in
fundamental cognitive processes such as
attention thus far I have found support
for the idea that conscientious people
are remarkably better at deliberately
attending to specific features under
distractions while people who score high
on openness are notably flexible as
attending to changing attentional
demands this research suggests that the
big five traits may have a basis in
fundamental cognitive processes and this
may lead to the development of
personality screening measures that have
a basis in part on cognitive performance
I've also been investigating whether the
big five traits reveal themselves in
motivational reactions to positive and
negative feedback on a variety of tasks
so far this line of research has
revealed that conscientious and neurotic
people can be provoked to work harder by
using negative feedback however this
effect only emerges when the task is
somewhat enjoyable and the effect is
prefers the task is frustrating this
line of research suggests that the Big
Five may have a basis in more
fundamental motivational tendencies and
this may lead to the development of a
motivational intervention that's
tailored to specific personality
profiles one of my most promising
research projects concerns the detection
of personality through language use this
research is founded on the
presupposition that character can be
revealed through the words that
individuals tend to use these ideas
intuitive we think about simple
dispositions such as pessimism and
optimism for example we would expect an
optimist to use a disproportionate
amount of positive words
however it was unclear as to whether
this would extend to complex
dispositions such as conscientiousness
which again represents a tendency to
work hard and stay organized this
disposition does not clearly map on to
word choice so to test our hypothesis we
generated a list of more than a thousand
adjectives that are theoretically
relevant to conscientious people these
words included things such as methodical
persistent and resourceful we then
acquired a variety of writing samples
from different groups of people these
writing examples included recollections
of positive memories negative memories
ordinary experiences as well as stream
of thought essays and even Facebook
statuses across all of these samples we
found highly conscientious people to use
a disproportionate amount of
conscientious related adjectives not
only that but we also found that the use
of these adjectives predicts the same
outcomes at conscientiousness itself
including increased income and increased
passion for work thus we have
demonstrated that it is possible to
identify complex personality traits from
many different language samples easily
and reliably we started with
conscientiousness alone because of its
clear real world applications many of
our most valued social organizational
and individual outcomes are determined
by conscientiousness people who possess
this trait enrich our communities by
exercising social responsibility and
relational fidelity as top performers at
work in school conscientious people
drive up the productivity of our
organizations and the grades in our
classrooms by demonstrating that
conscientiousness can be detected
through natural language use we have
opened the door to a new approach for
detecting a highly desirable personality
trait the trait that many people lie
about precisely due to its societal
value
in my coming years in the Petersons lab
I plan to develop a personality
measurement battery based on these
natural language findings the
development of this battery will require
more research into the language
production tendencies associated with
conscientiousness as well as an
extension of this methodology to other
Big Five personality traits taken
together with my research in attention
and motivation this work will help
solidify what the Big Five represents
and will afford the development of new
tools for measuring and accommodating
personality