JOHN MAYER: Thanks very much, thank you
to Holly Manning for helping to arrange this,
and for others of you here today who have helped arrange it.
And I guess we just crossed over into this afternoon,
so this afternoon I'll be talking
about personal intelligence, and I'll
start with one big idea behind this idea.
If you're like me, you encounter pretty much all
through your lives, we encounter people
who advise us how to live.
Philosophers, religious figures, teachers,
pundits, no matter where we've come from around the world.
Mental health professionals, and life
coaches-- I suppose those are a little bit more Western.
But no matter where we come from in the world,
there are people who want to give us
advice about how to live our lives.
And I wondered, what if there were a common intelligence
that they used to understand what they were saying?
A common logic that they drew on to reason about people,
and to understand people.
Maybe to anticipate they're using
some kind of common intelligence that we
might call a personal intelligence.
So I'd like to start with elaborating a little bit more
about this theoretical basis for a personal intelligence.
And I'll start with the idea that we can't help but watch
people.
No matter who we are, no matter how shy we are,
no matter how introverted we are, by the way,
I'm an introvert.
Even though I'm really introverted,
I can't help but watch people.
We can't help but wonder about the people who we see.
For example, right now, I'm so glad that you've come,
and I'd like to welcome you here,
and I'm wondering about all of you.
May I ask a couple questions of you all?
I'm assuming you're pretty much all from Google,
but how many people here are from marketing?
Or advertising?
How many people are from the engineering area?
OK, so I better talk about personality in robots and stuff
like that, as part of the talk.
How many people are from sales?
OK.
And did I leave out any areas, is there some area I missed?
AUDIENCE: Editorial.
JOHN MAYER: Editorial?
How many people are from editorial?
OK.
Well great, welcome to you all, and thank you
for telling me a little bit about who you are.
But that's part of understanding one another,
and I tell this to my students at the University
of New Hampshire too, usually when I'm starting a course.
They have already formed an impression of me
from the first moment, even from before I started talking.
In fact, the getting to know you process really
begins finding out about people's reputation sometimes
before you encounter them.
So we can't help but wonder about the people who we see.
We watch people wherever they are,
and even things that look like people catch our attention.
So here are some sculptures by Raymond Mason, or "Mah-sahn,"
and they just look like people, but we can't help but look
at them.
So now if I might, I'd like to go into some ancient history.
I'm going to go back I think to 1988 or so.
Now, you may have seen this gentleman here,
I know this gentleman was at Google this past September.
This is Professor Peter Salovey, a colleague of mine,
and now president of Yale University.
And I understand he was somewhere in Google
in New York, speaking.
But in 1998, sorry-- 1988, 1988.
Peter and I had traveled to a conference in social psychology
called the Nag's Head Conference,
and we were busy working on a project
that we called Emotional Intelligence, at the time.
And to continue my theme of people reading,
you can already tell some really important things
about my character, and about Peter's character
I think, from this image.
First of all, here I am, wearing shorts and white socks.
I'm the nerd, right?
And then Peter, we didn't know at the time
why he was wearing long pants at this hot, summer, North
Carolina location, but we realize now
that he was aiming to become president of Yale,
and that's why he was wearing the long pants.
So if you can read these clues, you
can figure out what happens.
But actually, the serious lesson in that
is, we didn't know why he was wearing
long pants at that time, and there
are a lot of clues that we just, we don't understand,
and it may have nothing to do with the fact
that he ultimately became president of Yale.
Now 1985, there were a bunch of intelligences
that researchers were studying.
Human intelligences that researchers were studying.
They included things that I think many of you
have probably heard of, you know what,
can I just check, how many people
have heard of verbal intelligence?
How many people have heard of general intelligence?
And of spatial intelligence?
Performance or mechanical intelligence?
They're sort of the same thing.
That one's a little bit less familiar to you?
OK.
You don't have to know what all these are,
and I'm not going to go over all of these,
but I'm just mentioning that in '85, these
were some of the intelligences that were being discussed.
Social intelligence?
OK.
And then there were a group of researchers
who were interested in multiple intelligences as well.
That is the idea that, well that there's
more than just general intelligence.
So in 1990, there was a grand organization
of accepted intelligences, in which it kind of looks
like an organizational chart, and you could think
of it as an organizational chart, in which
general intelligence is at the top,
and then there are these broad, important, intelligences
underneath, which include spatial reasoning,
and verbal comprehension.
Those are the ones that you're most familiar with.
There were no what I would refer to as newer intelligences,
or well, that's probably not the right word.
But there was nothing like a social intelligence in there,
and nobody had even heard of emotional intelligence
at that time.
So that was the approximate status
of the field when I introduced our 1990 Theory of Emotional
Intelligence with Peter Salovey.
So in 1990, Peter Salovey and I published this article
called "Emotional Intelligence," and almost nobody
paid any attention to it.
But the idea was, that people have the capacity to reason
about emotions, to reason about things like anger, sadness,
happiness, and other emotions, and could
use that to understand one another.
As I said, we published this paper, we described it,
and not many people paid attention to it until 1995.
And in 1995, a New York Times journalist
named Dan Goleman, wrote a book which covered,
in part, our article.
That he also entitled "Emotional Intelligence."
And his account received an enormous amount of attention.
And people really around the world
became very excited and interested
in this idea of emotional intelligence.
But a few odd things happened in that journalistic account
of our concept of emotional intelligence, one of which
was that the book made an enormous number of claims
about emotional intelligence that Peter and I had not made.
So there were claims made around the book,
I'll say around the book, I don't
want to single out any particular journalist.
That emotional intelligence predicted 80% of success
in life, for example.
Well the original claim was 50%, maybe as high
as 50% of the success in life.
Then the claims rose higher, 80% of the success in life.
Now Peter and I had never made any statements
as to any-- we had not quantified anything
about how important emotional intelligence was.
We just wanted to make the point that we thought
it existed as a broad human intelligence.
That's a real key to understanding our humanity.
Because it meant that instead of having
people who we might label hopeless romantics,
or people who think with their hearts,
that's an actual reasoning was going on.
The more interesting thing to me,
and incredibly frustrating thing to me,
was that the concept of emotional intelligence,
which was really focused on the ability
to reason with and about emotions, became generalized,
so that people said, and here I will look at the actual quotes,
that emotional intelligence involved graciousness,
super optimism, good networkers, not too authoritarian, and then
another quote from journalists, there's
an old fashioned word for this body of skills
that emotional intelligence represents, character.
Well emotional intelligence was none of those things.
Emotional intelligence involves the capacity
to reason with emotions.
And so it's quite possible that you can be very pessimistic,
and be emotionally intelligent.
And why should we pick on-- I think the thing that I found
disturbing, is why should we pick on people who
are pessimistic, maybe they've had a tough upbringing already,
and that says nothing about their emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is reasoning.
At the same time, what was fascinating about
it was people seemed to need to broaden it.
They really seemed to want to talk about the personality
qualities beyond emotions.
And I also resonated to that, but in a more positive way.
I thought well, of course, I'm interested in that too.
How do we think about personalities?
But Peter and I both knew this theory
of emotional intelligence, it wasn't powerful enough
to hold all of those personality characteristics.
And in fact, if you think about reasoning about personality,
you should be able to reason about personality no matter
what your personality is.
And you may not decide to become a let me see,
a super optimist, or a gracious person, or a good networker.
You may decide to become something else
if you reason with your personality.
So it didn't work.
That broadening of the concept in the media, did not work.
It also didn't work from a scientific standpoint,
for reasons that I will maybe talk about a little bit later.
So there we were, we had our hands full,
it was actually kind of cool that the journalists got
it a little bit off, emotional intelligence a little bit
off, because that gave Peter and I a very
nice job for the next five or six years,
we could travel all around the world,
explaining what emotional intelligence actually was.
And we had something fun to say to people, I think,
and that was very enjoyable.
But meanwhile, what about this personality issue?
I mean, could there be a personal intelligence?
Well, there were a lot of reasons
why it wasn't really possible to just turn around and publish
something, develop a theory of personal intelligence.
The first reason was that in 1990,
and in 1995, when the journalistic accounts came up,
many psychologists did not believe that personality
was an important system to begin with.
There was a movement in psychology, generally speaking,
that people's behaviors were all determined by the situation.
And indeed, if you look at our behavior in this room
right now, it is determined by the situation.
A number of you are sitting, looking at me, listening to me,
and I'm walking around, speaking fairly louder than I usually
speak.
If I did this at home, my wife would
go, hey what are you doing?
Right?
Or if I did this on the street, you would think I was crazy.
So the context, situations really
do determine a lot of how we behave
in one situation or another.
And so there was this concept of situationism,
and there were many psychologists
who said there's no such thing as character.
Who believed there is no such thing as character.
A second troubling issue was that nobody understood
personality very well in 1990, 1995.
As a consequence really of this belief that personality didn't
matter, and by the way, I explain more
about the background of that, it was a reasonable belief
to hold, as counter intuitive as it is.
I explain more about this in the book,
in the introductory chapter, where
I'm talking about sort of the context of all of this.
Given that belief that personality wasn't important,
very few researchers wanted to spend any time studying it.
And so there was very little good contemporary information
about how personality operated.
Then I had some personal reluctance
to propose the theory as well, I was worried that it would seem,
kind of like, I don't know if you know this expression,
I guess it's an old fashioned expression, like navel gazing.
Lying around and thinking about yourself,
being just really self-absorbed.
Would people think of personal intelligence
as self absorption I wonder?
So these were some of the impediments
to proposing a personal intelligence back in the 1990s.
Recently, I've suggested that there
was a tipping point in the field of personality
psychology in around 2007.
And when I say 2007, I really mean like, from 2000 to 2010.
There were huge changes in the field.
There was an enormous amount of data
that had been collected about personality.
So that, we knew a lot more about how traits related
to one another across people, a lot more about how people set
goals, effectively or ineffectively.
There was a consensus that personality did matter,
situations matter yes, but personality matters as well.
And so in the summer of 2007, I was
working on a couple of different papers, neither of them
were going very well, and then suddenly
this idea of a personal intelligence came back to me,
and I thought, well, you know, now we know enough,
I'll write the theory up now, and let's see
if personal intelligence actually exists.
So in 2008, I published a paper called "Personal Intelligence,"
I published it in the same journal
that Peter and I had published "Emotional Intelligence"
in earlier.
Peter and I discussed this, but by this time
Peter was provost at Yale, and he was a busy guy.
So I published the personal intelligence paper,
and I suggested that there were four areas
that we use to reason about one another.
First, we pick up the clues to one another
as we're looking at them.
So for example, you picked up clues to who I am
and to my behavior as you've been watching me.
Secondly, we form those clues into models of one another's
personalities.
That was the second area.
Do we have a white board here, would it
help to-- so clues to people, the second area
was forming models of what a person is
like, the third area is guiding choices, both one's
own and others, and the fourth area
is systematizing one's goals.
So at this point in the talk, I have a very nice picture
of my colleagues David Caruso, and Abigail Panter.
David Caruso and I worked together
on developing the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional
Intelligence Test, and I contacted a professor
of what's called psychometrics, which
is the study of mathematical models of testing,
named Abigail Panter, at the LL Thurstone laboratory
at the University of North Carolina.
And I said, I've got this new idea,
and I know you guys are busy, but would you
be willing to take a little bit of time, and work with me,
and see if we could possibly develop
some measures in this area, and see
if personal intelligence exists.
Now it may seem-- I don't know how intuitively clear
this is, it may be very clear, it may not be clear.
But to prove that an intelligence exists,
that one of those broad intelligences
that I was showing you earlier, to prove that one of those
exist, you have to go through certain stages
of empirical research and testing.
And the first is that you have to create problems
that people can solve, or fail at solving.
So as I was writing the paper, I started writing down test items
that I thought might be difficult or easy for people
to answer.
So for example, let's say I tell you about a woman,
and she prefers to be around people more
than she prefers to be alone, and she's also very talkative.
Now I'm going to ask you, so she prefers
to be around people more than she prefers to be alone,
and she's very talkative.
Now I'm going to ask you, is she A,
anxiety prone and fairly sensitive, or B,
full of energy and lively.
And I won't go through any other alternatives,
we had other alternatives, but I'll just stick with those two.
Anxiety prone and sensitive versus
full of energy and lively.
So which would you say?
A, anxiety prone, or B, lively and energetic.
B. OK.
So the answer there was B. And the way
that we keyed the correct answer, is we could-- by 2008,
we could go back to tables of which traits go together
in people, that had been developed over hundreds
of-- well tens of thousands of people by that time.
And key the correct answers to those questions that way.
Now that's one kind of question.
But here's another kind of question,
see if I actually-- well, I'll just-- which
goal is more likely to work for a person?
To become a better employee at work,
or to always tell the truth to other people?
A, all right.
All right, A, right?
Now, when you think about it though,
and you're right, again, A is the answer.
I didn't do what I might do if I had my full overheads
and stuff like that, which is to go around the room and poll
people.
But the first thing that you notice when you do that,
is that there are differences.
Some people pick B for the second question.
They think it's possible to always tell the truth.
And for the first question, a certain number of people
pick A. They think that people who are talkative and basically
sociable are anxiety prone, more apt to be anxiety prone
and sensitive.
And surely, there are people who are outgoing and talkative who
are anxiety prone and sensitive.
It's just that there are more people who
are lively and have high energy.
Now let me point out another-- a key issue
with those two test items.
They are very different.
The reasoning is very different.
In the first question, I'm asking you basically,
what have you noticed about the people around you?
How can you describe the people around you?
In the second question, which asks about always telling
the truth, I'm asking about what is
a plausible goal for somebody to meet?
Those are two very different areas.
We asked questions in 16 different areas
in the first test that we constructed.
And the idea was, our hypothesis was,
if there is such a thing as personal intelligence, then
people who are good at any one of those 16 areas,
will be good at the other 15.
On the other hand, there may not be such a broad intelligence,
and it could be that people might be very good at noticing
traits, which social traits go together,
or socio-emotional traits go together.
And there might be another group of people
who are really good at solving questions about goals,
and there may not be much relationship
between those two kinds of people.
And at the same time, we tracked verbal intelligence
as kind of a baseline.
So we knew that this was not a jumbled intelligence effect
that we were getting.
Well I suppose I wouldn't be speaking with you here today,
if it turned out that these were all 16 different areas
of reasoning that were unrelated to one another.
It did in fact turn out that the 16 areas, people
who are good at some of those areas,
were good at the rest of the areas.
And what that allows us to do, I think
is profound at several different levels.
It allows us to, enlarge our knowledge,
enlarge our sense of human intelligences,
it allows us to understand that there is information
about personality that permeates our environments,
and it also, this is maybe more scientifically of importance,
it allows us to specify what the reasoning is.
Because although I presented this to you rather simply,
like all 16 areas work together, and that basically
is the story.
Since that time, we've been building around those 16 areas
with new areas, and we find that if we ask the questions in some
ways, people cannot answer them.
Or it doesn't relate to personal intelligence,
but if we ask them in other ways, it does.
Now what does this mean?
What are the implications of this in our daily lives?
Well, early on in conducting this research,
I started to look at biographies of people,
to see if I could locate individuals
who were particularly, who exhibited particularly
high perception in this area.
And one of the biographies I encountered
was that of Katharine Graham, who
is the publisher of the Washington Post.
And she has like five pages in her memoir, where
she describes taking over the Washington Post
from her husband, who tragically had committed suicide-- who
had led the paper, but tragically committed suicide.
And in this account, it's so full of her models
of other people, her understanding of herself
and her own reputation, that it's really quite striking.
The first thing that she says, was
that people tried to buy the paper from her,
and that made sense, because she had never
run a business before.
And so she's got that humility, that self understanding,
she's never run a business before,
she also has a very good sense of her goal,
there was no way she was going to sell the paper,
she said, not after what her father and her husband
had put into it.
By which I mean their effort and their creative abilities.
Then she said, she started walking around
the halls of the paper, which she owned,
because she inherited it from her father and husband.
She started walking around, she said,
I realized people looked at me-- I realized a lot of people
didn't care I was there.
A lot of people looked at me like an ignorant intruder,
and a few people were interested in talking to me,
and maybe helping me out.
And by the way, I'm working no slides here,
no notes here, so this is the gist of my recollection,
but it's pretty close, I think.
Well I read that, and I thought, that's
probably-- having been an employee,
and watched new bosses come in, that probably
is the way people were looking at her.
And then she did something, like several paragraphs
later, which again amazed me, she said,
I started taking over, and things
started to go well for me, but I didn't
feel like I was living up to what my husband had done
before me, and neither did a lot of other people.
And then, and this gets to this forming models part.
So she was getting clues from how people reacted to her,
and the clues were not necessarily very subtle,
but some people miss even clues to how people are responding.
But in this forming models point,
she said, I realized I had idolized my husband,
I had idolized his leadership, and of course when somebody
dies, we say all the wonderful positive things about them,
so that's the tendency to idolize rises.
And she said, I realized I could not become him,
and I couldn't reach that level of becoming an idol myself.
I had to start over again and find my own style.
And that's great, that's both forming a model,
understanding that her original model of her husband's
leadership might have been exaggerated,
and it's also guiding a choice.
As a consequence, because I cannot become what my husband
was, I have to start over again with who I am,
and how I can lead.
So that's an example, I think, of how this capacity to reason
that we're able to now isolate in the laboratory,
and track using this test of personal intelligence, which
is called creative, really creatively,
the Test of Personal Intelligence, or the TOPI,
we can see that in the laboratory on the one hand,
and then we can see its consequences
for a person's life, in situations such as biographies.
If I might draw on a second example.
Yesterday I was at the Rubin Museum,
which I think is just several blocks from here, yes?
And I had the privilege of interviewing a poker
player named Vanessa Selbst, who's
one of the leading poker players in the world.
And as I interviewed her, I was interested in kind of applying
some personal intelligence ideas to how she thought
about her card game, I should say, by the way,
I know very little about poker.
I was introduced as knowing nothing
about poker, which isn't too far from the truth.
But I do know this much about poker,
it involves a variety of different understandings
at the same time.
So there is for example, this statistical understanding
of the card game.
And the statistical understanding,
just to go back to that diagram of broad intelligences
that we were talking about.
That could come from either of two different kinds
of intelligences.
One is the verbal propositional.
Because some mathematicians, the engineers here,
because I know there are a lot of engineers here--
a number of you probably work with formulae a great deal.
So you're masters at manipulating formulae, using
formulate, and so forth.
But there are some of you who work
with a different intelligence to solve math problems, which
is spatial intelligence.
So you imagine, if you are drawing
on spatial intelligence, or some of you draw on both,
in fact, all of you draw on both, I'm sure.
those of you who lean more towards spatial intelligence,
may manipulate geometrical objects in your minds,
and get solutions that way.
In fact, I had a professor at Stanford,
where I was a post doc, and he would come up
with solutions to problems completely
using spatial reasoning, it seemed like.
And then he would turn to his graduate students, who
weren't entirely happy about this,
and say, OK, here's the answer, can you please go prove it.
And then they would have to go, and go line
by line through the verbal propositional proofs
to demonstrate what he was imagining
in his head, which was great.
I mean it did work out for both.
But anyway, Vanessa is doing that statistical calculation
as she is looking at that poker game.
She's calculating the likelihood of different cards
that people are holding, and that
doesn't have much to do with personal intelligence.
She's also calculating different wagers,
the value of different wagers she's making.
But here's where the personal intelligence comes in.
She is forming models of people, and what's
interesting about her models, is they are very poker focused.
So she doesn't really care, I don't
think she would mind my saying this,
and this is my characterization of it,
but there's a lot of things for example,
if you're trying to form a model of your boss,
you want to know a lot about your boss.
She doesn't want to know that much about the people
she's playing against, she's got, I don't know,
how many people sit at a poker table,
I didn't ask her that question, do any of you know?
Sorry?
Three?
Three I heard, more?
Up to nine.
OK.
So some weren't like, she's got let's say, five people
around her.
She's got to form a model of each of those five people,
and as she said, I hope I'm not giving it,
I don't think I'm giving away any deep, dark secrets here,
she said, if you're a beginner at poker,
one of the mistakes beginners make is that they talk.
And she said, you should never talk in my presence
if you're a beginner because, and she gave an example.
I can't wait, I just saved my money for two years
to join this tournament, and I'm really looking forward
to playing with you all.
She says, OK.
So my model of that person is now incremented, you know,
n plus 1, for the engineers.
I know that that person is very unlikely to bluff early
in the game, because if they were discovered,
they would lose all their money, and they
would lose their part in the tournament.
So I know that if that person starts wagering,
they've got a good hand.
OK.
That's her poker limited model.
She also looks at socioeconomic status
of the people who she's looking at.
So if they seem wealthy, she evaluates their behavior
at the table differently than if they seemed less wealthy.
And she has limits on her-- she knows,
she's really quite remarkable, she
knows the limits of her mental models.
She knows that a lot of her mental models
work in the United States, but if she's playing overseas
in London, and if she's got foreigners at the table,
her models won't work well enough for her
to use in guiding the way she gambles.
So that's a very different kind of personal intelligence
than Katharine Graham used, but it's personal intelligence
nonetheless.
It's a very utilitarian personal intelligence,
that she uses for those moments when she's gambling.
And I assume, I didn't ask her, I'm
sure she uses personal intelligence in other areas
of her life as well, maybe more broadly,
when she's deciding to get married
or whatever, she's going to evaluate
her partner a lot differently than that.
So, had I my slides here, I would invite you all
to take a test of personal intelligence with me,
but I don't have them here, so I can
invite you to go online, to personalintelligence.info,
personalintelligence, all one word, dot info, or of course
you could just Google it, and it would,
and it actually comes up first.
And on the banner navigation bar, is the quiz.
And so after this lecture if you like,
you can take the quiz if you're interested.
I will say a few things about the quiz.
Our tests are about 140 items in length,
because we're serious about our measurement,
we want to give people accurate feedback.
You cannot give people accurate feedback by either asking
people, oh how good is your personal intelligence?
Because everybody's above average.
On average, people are above average.
And so we set them problems to do.
But anybody here, how long did you
stay in school to get a job at Google?
Some number of years, right?
Some number of years.
You do not learn an area quickly,
and it is not possible to measure your aptitude
in an area quickly either.
Which is why the SATs are four hours long,
and our test has to be-- well we're measuring one sub area,
our test is about 40 to 45 minutes long.
So when you do that quiz, it just
shows you how the test works.
It doesn't really give you much of an answer, because as I say,
those items are too short to do.
So to sum up, I think that personal intelligence
is really important, because it tells us the logic that people
use when they reason about personality.
I'm kind of a lazy person in certain respects,
and all those people giving me advice throughout my life
is difficult for me, because it's a lot of different things
to remember, and I do notice that there
are repetitions that run through them, which help me remember,
kind of like, follow what you're interested in, one which
is very high in personal intelligence,
but I really don't like is, I can't answer
that question for you, you need to make up your own mind.
I hate that, like when I'm asking what should I do,
and people say, well that's really up to you,
like, go, go away.
But that's got high personal intelligence,
because the answer is, I mean we have to guide our own choices,
only we know how we are inside.
And so, I'm very excited that we've
uncovered this new area of reasoning,
and I think also it has to come back to that robot issue,
it has applications in engineering
as well, soon after Peter and I came out
with emotional intelligence, I don't
think I'm remembering her first name correctly,
but I think her last name is Breazeal, at MIT,
created Kismet, a robot who could
perceive emotions and express emotions.
And I noticed in the front page of the Wall Street Journal
today, there's an article about how at Carnegie Mellon,
there's a person there who's developed
a robot that or rather artificial, an expert
system that plays Scrabble, and the expert system
has the advantage of making rude comments to other players
while playing, so as to gain some kind of an advantage,
and to cover up, actually, for its less than superb
Scrabble playing skills.
So I think probably as we understand personality more,
and we start deciphering the exact rules, which
is to me the most exciting part of understanding personality
that people employ, that may have
some practical applications as well.
So I want to thank you very much,
and I'm very open to questions.
Yes please.
AUDIENCE: This is a really great topic,
so thank you so much for coming here and talking to us.
I've got two quick questions, so you
know when you talk about personality, a lot of people
say how malleable is personality?
Surrounding like, time, situation, and your need
to change, you have to adapt to different situations,
are you changing your core personality?
What are your thoughts on that?
And then a follow up question is,
do people with higher emotional personal intelligence
have a higher degree of self awareness?
If they are able to see maybe others clearly,
do they see themselves more clearly?
Or is there no correlation?
JOHN MAYER: OK.
So the first question, and this is
going to require some concentration,
so if I forget the second question
I may come back to you.
But the first question is how much can personality change?
And I believe personality can change,
I think I've changed my own personality,
I think I've watched other people change.
A few years ago I had braces, because I had braces as a kid,
but my teeth didn't, it didn't take,
my teeth got crooked again, so I had to have braces again.
It took like three or four years to get my teeth straight
the second time, and I think with personality,
one of the issues if it's something
core about your personality, it may
take a few years to guide yourself into a new place,
but I do think it's quite possible to do.
Your second question was--
Self awareness, right.
Yes, I think that people are-- I think
people have an enormous advantage if they are higher
in personal intelligence, in becoming
self aware for a couple reasons.
First of all, I mentioned in 2007,
I was working on several papers that didn't work well together.
The reason was, one was actually on self understanding,
and the other was on understanding personality.
And I realized in the midst of that, oh, you know,
you can't do one without the other.
Like, if I don't know the difference between somebody
who's an introvert, who likes to spend time alone,
and somebody who's shy, who might prefer to spend more
time with other people, but is anxious doing so,
how am I ever going to use those labels accurately
as applying them to myself.
So that's one advantage, is that, we have to understand
personality in general, which is why I call
it personal intelligence, in part,
we have to understand it in general
to apply it either to ourselves or to others.
But the other, as I was writing the book, another thing that
really, surprised me, because I thought
I was sort of done with the theory, but in the book
I learned all kinds of new things.
And very instructed by the people
whose examples are there.
If you're defensive, sorry-- if you're low in personal
intelligence, you don't know who to trust and who not to trust,
and who is accurate about personality, and who isn't.
So you are in a position of not being able--
and people say all kinds of things about us, right?
And some of it's true sometimes, and some of it
isn't at all true.
And so one of the hard things about taking criticism
and feedback, is you have to sit there, and of course nobody
likes criticism and feedback, and you
have to sit there and go, oh darn it, is that right?
Could I be a controlling bastard?
Or whatever.
Could that apply to me?
And we think about that for a while,
and we go, you know, I think there might be a germ of truth
in that, because I can see it in this spot, and that spot,
and the other spot, and plus somebody else
said that to me once too.
But if you're low in personal intelligence,
you hear that and you go, well I don't know,
that could be as much off the wall
as what that person said to me yesterday,
I don't know whether it's true or not.
So I'm not going to take it seriously.
And you're in that existential position
of not knowing whose advice, whose feedback
is accurate or not.
Because sometimes people say things to us
that are completely wrong.
And we have to be able to know which is right,
and we have to be able to know on reflection,
and thinking about it, which is right and which is wrong.
AUDIENCE: I have a question.
JOHN MAYER: Yes, please, Matthew, right?
AUDIENCE: You mentioned sort of practical applications
and things like artificial intelligence systems
and [INAUDIBLE], and you did tell us
where we can go and take the test, I'm wondering,
it almost sounds like you be better having everyone else's
test answers walking into the room, so that you can apply
that out, what are the like, lower level
first steps of personal application of getting
the results of the test.
JOHN MAYER: Sorry, can you clarify just a little bit more?
AUDIENCE: I guess I'm wondering like, if you go and you find
out that you have a certain skill set
in this personal intelligence, how can you
apply that back onto yourself to change parts of your day
to day life that you might want to tweak or improve.
JOHN MAYER: OK.
So I think one way to look at that question is, how can we
learn more, how can we gain more knowledge about personality so
as to be able to reason with it better.
And my first line of defense, I realize
it sounds self serving, in answering that question,
is to say, take a look at the book, because that's actually,
that's one of my joys in working on the book,
was to be able to look at a lot of people who
are high in personal intelligence,
and think about those people as role models for how to do it.
Now ultimately, I'd like to see there be curricula
that teach us about personality.
But the other way that I hear your question
is asking, if there's a part of my personality
that I want to tweak, how do I go about doing that?
And I think that the steps involved in that are probably
first, are you sure you want to change it,
because it is time consuming, like when I got my braces,
my dentist and some other dentist, the orthodontist,
were having a debate as to whether I should have braces.
And I think, start that debate.
You can ask people who you trust and know,
hey if I changed in such and such a way,
would that make me a better person, or would
you like, relate to me better, if I were that way,
and if they say yes, then I think the change process itself
is a matter of self coaxing, and having very low expectations,
and realizing that you're going to fail--
and I'm saying this out of personal experience.
When I try to change something in myself.
OK, it's not going to be tomorrow, it's going to be,
I'm going to try this out for a year very gently,
month after month, and I'm going to backslide, but kind of lean
it that way.
Does that help at all?
How about one, two, and three?
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
JOHN MAYER: Well intelligence, researchers
think of intelligence as an aptitude.
But I think it's possible to improve your functioning
with whatever personal intelligence you have.
And I like to draw the analogy of most of us,
no matter how good or bad at math we are,
we usually use textbooks to teach us about math.
So same way with personality, it doesn't
matter, as long as we have a reasonable amount
of personal intelligence, we can learn
some amount of, if you will, personal intelligence algebra,
from the experts.
There are few exceptions sorry, it just
comes to mind, I can't help-- John Stuart Mill, who
had a recorded IQ of 210, reports from his tutors were,
that it would be easier for him to solve
the problem mathematically and derive the formula,
rather than look it up in the book.
So it said that he was able to solve most math
problems without reference to the book.
But most of us refer to the book.
And so-- whatever book that may be,
and so I think that's the better way to do it.
Now, did I miss a part of your question?
No, OK.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: From a marketing perspective
in your book, [INAUDIBLE] you want to measure something,
you usually want to measure something to improve it.
So you talked about the Stanford professor who
has the high spatial intelligence ability,
and you alluded to having some of these examples in your book,
could it be some of these emotional intelligence heroes
are people that we would look up to, and want
to be like, and therefore want to take this quiz so that we
can improve ourselves, and be like them?
JOHN MAYER: Well first, your premise, if I may.
There are intelligences that I'm not particularly good at,
and I just go, OK.
There are a lot of broad intelligences,
I don't got 'em all, I don't have them all,
and that's all right with me.
So one of the points I try to make in the book
is that, you can do this as a voyeur,
without necessarily needing to go there.
But if you were interested in that, some of the people
who, there are a lot of different people, some
of the public figures that I talk about are people
like Oprah Winfrey, gosh, who is the Michael Jordan,
a all the people are, hang on, I have them on a slide.
Yeah, Katharine Graham, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan,
David Carr of the New York Times, Sydney Blatt of Yale
University, and research participants
in dozens of ingenious experiments.
That's a short list of some of the people who are there.
Other questions?
Yes, oh right, sorry.
AUDIENCE: So with emotional intelligence,
I think there are like four key pro tips right?
So you got the self awareness, I think
it's situational awareness, I can't think of the third one,
and then it's like, relationship management?
JOHN MAYER: Yeah, that's the journalistic account,
that's not our four.
That's not the four that Peter and David and I work with,
but that's OK, I can go there with you, so go ahead.
AUDIENCE: So would you say that the four
concepts of personal intelligence map in parallel,
or is it more so mapped to one in particular?
JOHN MAYER: Well these four are different than either-- I
think the issue with the broadened emotional
intelligence model, is that model emphasizes
having a certain personality.
And that personality is good social relationships, optimism,
persistence, zeal, you probably know them better than I do.
But there's a long list of qualities
you're supposed to develop, right?
I think that's wrong.
I think you can have, and we know from our research,
that people of all different personalities
can be high or low in personal intelligence.
And in fact, the personality that you
want to develop-- well first of all, some of it,
it's set to some degree, I mean we have some genetics
and learning, you know, 10, 20, 30 years of background
that's formed our personality as it is.
So I'm more of a kind of-- to go back to the poker analogy,
you've got your hand, what's the best way to play it,
kind of person.
How can I be the most high functioning pessimist ever?
How can I be completely oblivious to social cues,
but still have people like me, and respect me,
and want me to be around.
So I think that's more of the personal intelligence
model I'm talking about.
Any other questions?
Thank you very much.
Thanks, thanks very much for coming.