Here's some things I think don't exist.
So if you're going to predict anything
in the real world, here's some things not to use.
I don't think self-esteem exists.
I think there were 25,000 published papers on self esteem.
Take ten grand of paper, which is comparatively conservative estimation.
So you can do the math 25,000 x 10,000.
So that's the total amount of research
funding it's gone into looking at self-esteem.
It's like, well, what's self-esteem?
It's a word, actually. It's two words, right?
And it's sort of something you think you might have or not have.
But, that's a figure of speech.
That's not an empirical phenomena.
And most of extroversion is just neuroticism.
As it turns out. It's like if you have a lot of negative
emotion, you don't feel that good about yourself.
Well, isn't that a surprise?
You have a lot of negative emotion.
And if you want to fix it up a little bit,
then you can also subtract positive emotion from that.
Because if you have a lot of negative
emotion and you don't have a lot of positive emotion, so that's neuroticism
minus extraversion, then your self-esteem is even lower.
And then maybe over time,
conscientiousness starts to make a bit of a difference.
Right? Because if you're conscientious and you
work hard, you can start to see that that's paying off and
Tafarodi has done some work that seems to sort of indicate that.
But,
you know, the first thing that happened is everybody went on a self-esteem bender,
even though the measures were pretty appalling.
And even though you could, you know, model it with the Big Five.
And then one of the things that happened as a consequence of that was
that the whole California school system started to teach students self-esteem.
It's like A) what makes you think you should have high self-esteem?
Maybe you're a miserable little worm. God only knows, right?
It's not the case that you should have
a good opinion of yourself in every bloody situation.
You know what if you're a bully who pounds people out in the schoolyard?
Bullies by the way, do have higher self-esteem than normal.
So there because it's not like they're feeling bad about themselves.
When they pound you, they're feeling bad about you.
And the best work, the low self esteem equals bully hypothesis.
Lots of people believe that.
But if you read Dan Olweus, who's the world's leading authority
on bullying and who's actually done something about it?
What he says is that bullies have
inappropriately high self-esteem, which is why they think they're
in a perfectly good position to pound you out if you happen to be on the playground.
So it's not like they're suffering from a neurotic weakness of self image.
It's quite the contrary.
So
anyways, in the California school system, they tried to teach kids self-esteem.
And there's no evidence that you can do that first,
because neuroticism is actually quite hard to shift.
And if we knew how to treat it, well, Hurray! Everybody would be thrilled about that.
But it's not easy. And second, there are people like
Jean Twenge used to be a student
of Roy Baumeister, who claims that all that self-esteem
training has just made younger people, like you guys, more narcissistic.
Yeah.
Because the self-esteem becomes
disconnected from the actual accomplishment, because you might hope...
Well, you sort of feel good.
How good should you feel about yourself?
Well, you might say, well,
you should grant yourself the right to exist like you do everyone else.
That's sort of like a basic human right.
As a human being, you're valuable.
And then maybe you should sort of think
you're about as valuable as other people roughly think you are.
That seems about right. Right.
So the right amount of self esteem would
be your perception of your value within the context of a group.
It's got to be something like that.
So there should be a concordance, because, like, maybe you need to improve.
Could well be.
And are you going to improve if you're feeling really good about yourself?
Well, the answer to that is what we don't know.
How much misery about yourself do you have
to have before you're motivated to improve yourself?
None?
Well, that doesn't seem right.
But we also don't know whether it's shame
or guilt or anxiety or pain or these negative emotions that motivate you.
Now, it's clear that if you have enough
negative emotion that can paralyze you, but that's like depression and
psychiatrically high levels of anxiety, that's not like low self esteem.
So that's a problem.
I don't believe that working memory
and executive function are distinguishable from IQ.
Our research, we've done a lot of it,
A factor analyzed the battery of ten
dorsolateral prefrontal tests given to 3000 people.
It's a very big sample.
We haven't published this for a variety of reasons.
But one factor comes out, you know,
when Carol's rule for IQ was, you take cognitive tests, a bunch of them.
You factor analyze them.
You pull out the first factor that's fluid intelligence.
It's like, well, that's basically what we found.
And so if you look at the correlation
between each of the single tests and the first factor,
it's only about .3 or .4. But that's also what you find in IQ tests.
Each individual test only correlates with the aggregate at about .3.
But if you aggregate enough of them,
you get fluid intelligence, and it's just as solid as a rock.
So, emotional intelligence, ha
not only does that probably not exist because it's agreeableness.
You know how you always hear you need
emotional intelligence to to thrive in the workplace.
Like, turns out that's exactly backwards.
Disagreeable people do better as managers in the workplace.
So it's actually if you lack emotional
intelligence, you're more likely to be an effective manager.
So an emotional intelligence is a great
indicator of sort of pathology
and psychology because it was invented by a journalist.
You know, you can't just have some word invented by a journalist and then go make
a whole bloody, you know, enterprise out of it.
You got to find out if it... If it's really
there and there's not a lot of evidence that it is.
And what does it mean anyways?
Emotional intelligence.
What does that mean?
I can infer what you're feeling?
Well, is that IQ, like, our smart people better at that?
Or, like, am I mirroring you in some way, or do I care for you?
Like, maybe I can figure out exactly what
you're feeling, and I just don't give a damn, you know?
Is that still emotional intelligence?
Well, I don't know. Right.
How would you separate that from sympathy or empathy?
And what if you're over sympathetic to someone?
Is that emotional intelligence?
Like, maybe you feel way too sorry for your children.
So it's like you're all empathetic and all that, but you're not doing them any good.
Or sometimes you would be.
But sometimes you should say, you know,
quit whining, go the hell outside, because that's the right response sometimes.
These things are not straightforward at all.
And, of course, emotional intelligence is generally measured with questionnaires.
And we know the rule for questionnaires.
What's the rule for questionnaires?
Measuring one or more of the Big Five, either well or badly.
Okay. And as far as I can tell,
that doesn't mean that personality has a five dimensional structure.
I'm not making that argument because who the hell knows?
I don't think it does likely, although it's very difficult to say.
But what the Big Five theorists have
really demonstrated, as far as I'm concerned,
is that if you factor analyze questionnaires, what you get looks a lot
like a five factor structure, and you can do that cross culturally.
And so I think we sort of nailed
the question of how our questionnaire structured.
So you can't just invent some new thing
and term it something and then pretend it something new without testing it against.
And I would test it against IQ, because that bloody thing.
We know.
For example, IQ eats up most of the variance in disgust sensitivity scales.
You would think, why would I be related to disgust sensitivity?
It's inversely related, by the way,
The smarter you are, the less sensitive you are to disgust.
Now, I don't know if that's because maybe your critical inhibition of underlying,
like, limbic motivational systems is better.
Who the hell knows? We don't know why,
but we do know that it's a major predictor, orderliness also predicts.
But the thing about IQ is that it predicts things that you'd never expect.
So you should validate your scale against IQ and against the Big Five and not some
trivial little ten item measure of the Big Five, either.
Because then if you use two questions per trait,
you're going to have a lousy measure of the Big Five.
And if your stupid questionnaire
predicts over and above that, all that means is that you didn't test it
against, you know, you didn't set it up for a good challenge.
You set it up for a weak challenge.
There's a problem with the measurement of self-esteem, and that actually matters
because self-esteem is a psychological concept, a scientific concept,
if you like, and you have to get the measurement right.
And you can predict selfesteem almost
perfectly by measuring someone's extraversion and subtracting
from that their negative emotionality or neuroticism.
So it's actually just a combination of Big five traits.
And so people who are extroverted, who feel a lot of positive emotion and who
don't feel a lot of negative emotion score high on scales of self-esteem.
Okay. So conceptually,
it's a non starter because you're not going to move people's levels
of neuroticism, let's say, by trying to get them to feel good about themselves.
Okay.
Now, having said that, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage people.
Right now, there's this psychologist named
Jerome Kagan, who's quite a great psychologist, developmental psychologist.
I think he's an emeritus at Harvard at the moment.
He studied temperamentally inhibited children.
So they're basically kids who are high
in neuroticism, probably low in extraversion.
And he found that if those children,
you can identify them as early as six months, right.
It's very, very inculcated in their temperament.
He found that if you encourage them
in the world, you could shift them into a more stable personality configuration.
And what you basically did was when they were manifesting signs of distress.
Instead of encouraging them to withdraw and retreat, which is what they might be
attempting to do, you encourage them to go out and explore.
So, for example,
if you have a temperamentally inhibited child and you go to a playground,
and there's kids out there, like if you have an extroverted,
emotionally stable kid three years old, as you put them on the ground,
their feet are already moving, right, like a puppy over water,
and you let them go, and they just run to the to the kids,
and they're there, and then you have to drag them away.
But if you have a temperamentally inhibited child,
the child will sort of stand around your legs and sort of peak out.
And then what you do is wait it out,
let them watch, encourage them to move a little bit forward,
and encourage them to take their steps out into the unknown and the strange land.
And don't let them withdraw like you can do it.
They're slower to warm up, they'll warm up, they'll habituate.
And if you continually expose your
inhibited child to the things that make them anxious in measured doses,
then you can transform their psychophysiological temperament.
Now, you're probably not going to shift
them way the hell out onto the extroverted emotionally stable land,
but you can make a big difference.
That's very different than making them
feel good about themselves, which is such a ....B.S.
You need to curse.
You need to curse when you discuss that concept, right?
It isn't improved their self-esteem.
It isn't how you feel about yourself, right?
It's how you act effectively in the world and how you're trained to do that.
Okay.
Now, then you were talking about negotiation, and you said, well,
you said something like, don't people who feel good about
themselves, aren't they able to negotiate better?
And I know that's a poor paraphrase.
Excuse me.
Negotiation is actually a practical issue to some degree.
Like, the first thing is that you have to figure out what you want, because you
were saying, well, it's not merely rational.
It's like, yeah, yeah, that's for sure.
You have to bargain from a position of authority, let's say not power.
Authority is a better word,
but you don't have authority unless you know what you're talking about.
And unless you can bring some, unless you can bring some, let's say force.
That's not the right word.
You can negotiate with anyone unless you can say no,
and you can't say no unless you've set yourself up with alternatives.
So when you go to your boss and you negotiate for a raise,
you need to have this sort of CV that enables you to go find another job,
and you have to have your CV prepared, and you have to have looked for another job,
and you have to be able to get one, because then you can go in there and say,
I'm not as productive as I could be at my current level of remuneration.
It's not reflective of what I'm able to do, and I want this.
And this is what will happen if you give me this.
This will be the good things that will happen.
And what do you think of that?
The person is going to know,
even by the way, that you hold yourself while you're having a discussion,
whether or not you're someone with options, and you can't fake that.
Well, you can, but it's not helpful.
It just doesn't work for very many iterations.
You have to. It's not rational.
You're preparing yourself for battle.
That's what you're doing.
And you can't be weak when you prepare yourself for battle, because if the person
says no, I'm not giving you a raise, which is exactly what they should say.
Because what are they going to do?
Just like sprinkle the money around?
You need to be able to say, okay, then.
There will be consequences that you don't like.
And that's what it means to say no to someone.
No means if you continue to push this, things will happen that you don't like.
Now, in that case, it'll be all depart and take my talents with me.
And if they don't care, well,
then you're in the wrong business or you don't have any talents to begin with, right?
So, in order to negotiate properly, and this is more difficult for people
who are agreeable for example, because there tend to be more conflict averse.
You have to put yourself in a position
where you can push back as hard as you're going to be pushed on.
And that means you have to open up your space of available options,
because otherwise the person says no, and that's it.
You're done well.
You'll lose that.
It's as straightforward as that.
Now, with regards to the self-esteem part is
practice on small things because you build the skills.
Forget about the self-esteem.
It isn't about being confident or feeling confident or any of that.
It's about knowing bloody well how to negotiate.
Start with small things, you know.
So you'll notice that there are things
in your relationships in particular that aren't the way you want them to be.
And that you could see how it could be
improved is like figure out how they can be improved.
Negotiate with your partner, make the incremental improvement.
Keep doing that. You'll get better and better at it,
and then you'll be able to go out and have a harder negotiation in the world.
So, it's a set of skills.
There's an attitude behind it, and it's easier for some people than others.
But fundamentally, it's a set of skills.