Jordan Peterson: Why Do Nice Guys Nice Finish Last? (MUST WATCH) — Transcript

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1. 0:07If you ask a disagreeable person what he wants, say,
2. 0:10or she wants, they'll tell you right away. They know. It's like "This is what I want
3. 0:13and this is how I'm gonna get it."
4. 0:15But agreeable people, specially if they're really agreeable, are so agreeable,
5. 0:19that they often don't even know what they want.
6. 0:21Cause they're so accustomed to living for other people, and to finding out
7. 0:25what other people want, and to trying to make them comfortable, and so forth, that is harder
8. 0:28for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life.
9. 0:33And that's not-
10. 0:34Look, there's situations where that's advantageous,
11. 0:37but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to
12. 0:40forge yourself a career.
13. 0:43That just doesn't work at all.
14. 0:45And so, even though,
15. 0:46on average men and women don't- this- don't-
16. 0:50aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group,
17. 0:53if you go out and you look at the extremes, they are very different.
18. 0:55So all of the most agreeable people are women, and all of the most
19. 0:59disagreeable people are men.
20. 1:00And the thing is the extremes
21. 1:02are often what matter, rather than what's in the middle.
22. 1:05And so one of the ways that's reflected in society, by the way, is
23. 1:08there's way more men in prisson
24. 1:10and the best personality predictor of being imprissoned
25. 1:13is to be low in agreeableness. It makes you callous.
26. 1:17Now you may think "Well, what's the opposite of compassion and politeness?"
27. 1:20And the answer to that is,
28. 1:22I think it's best sort of conceptualized as a-
29. 1:25as a trading game.
30. 1:27So let's say that
31. 1:28we're going to play repeated trading games. And if you're
32. 1:32very agreeable, then you're gonna bargain
33. 1:35harder on my behalf, than you're gonna bargain on your own behalf.
34. 1:38Whereas if you're disagreable, you're gonna do the reverse. You're gonna think
35. 1:41"I'm in this trading game for me, and you're gonna take care
36. 1:44of your own interest." Where an agreeable person is gonna say "No, no.
37. 1:47At best, this is-
38. 1:49At worst this has to be 50/50, but I'd like to help you every way I can."
39. 1:53One of the things you have to be carefull of if you're agreeable,
40. 1:56is not to be exploited.
41. 1:57Because you'll line up to be exploited.
42. 2:00And I think the reason for that is because
43. 2:02you're wired to be exploited by infants.
44. 2:05And so, that just doesn't work too well in the actual world.
45. 2:08And one of the things, one of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy
46. 2:11you know, people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons,
47. 2:14but one of them is they often come because they're too agreeable.
48. 2:17And so what they get is so called 'Assertiveness Training'.
49. 2:20Although it's not exactly assertiveness that's being trained.
50. 2:23What it is is the ability to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf.
51. 2:27And one of the things I tell agreeable people, specially if they´re conscientious, is
52. 2:31Say what you think, tell the truth about what you think.
53. 2:34There's gonna be things you think that you think are nasty and harsh.
54. 2:38And they probably are nasty and harsh, but they're also probably true.
55. 2:42And you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message.
56. 2:45And it's not straight-forward at all because agreeable people
57. 2:48do not like conflict. Not at all.
58. 2:51They smooth the water.
59. 2:53You know when you can see, you can see why that is,
60. 2:56in accordance with a hypothesis that I've been putting forward.
61. 2:58You don't want conflict around infants.
62. 3:01It's too damn dangerous. You don't want fights to break out.
63. 3:03You don't want anything to disturb the relative peace.
64. 3:07You know, and if you're also more prone to being hurt, physically, and perhaps emotionally,
65. 3:12you're also maybe loath to engage in the kind of high intensity conflict, that would solve problems
66. 3:17in the short term, because a lot of conflict-
67. 3:20It takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term.
68. 3:23And, you know, if that can spirale up
69. 3:25to where is dangerous, which it can if it gets uncontrolled, it may be safer
70. 3:29in the short term to keep the water smooth, and to not
71. 3:33dive into those situations where conflict emerges.
72. 3:35The problem with that is it's not a very good medium-to-long-term strategy, right?
73. 3:39'Cause there's a lot of times there are things you have to talk about.
74. 3:42Because they're not gonna go away.
75. 3:45And the advantage to having a well-socialized disagreeable person is that
76. 3:48they really don't let much get in their way.
77. 3:51So if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized,
78. 3:54that person can be quite, quite a creature, you know? Because they're very-
79. 3:58They're very forward-moving in their nature and very difficult to stop.
80. 4:02But if you don't get them successfully
81. 4:04domesticated, tamed, roughly speaking,
82. 4:07by the time they're four, their parents reject them.
83. 4:12And that's a big problem because
84. 4:14your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four.
85. 4:19You've gotta- You wanna burn that into your brain
86. 4:22because people don't know that. That's your job.
87. 4:25And here's, here's why, it's easy, if you think about it carefully.
88. 4:28So imagine you've got a three-year-old child
89. 4:32so sort of half way through that initial period of socialization.
90. 4:35And you take that child out in public.
91. 4:37Ok, what do you want for the child?
92. 4:40Who cares about you? What do you want for the child?
93. 4:43You want the child to be able to interact with other children
94. 4:46and adults, so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her
95. 4:52and so the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly.
96. 4:56And if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining them,
97. 5:00or you don't know how to do that properly,
98. 5:02then what they're gonna do?
99. 5:03They're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children,
100. 5:07and false smiles from other parents and adults.
101. 5:10And that's so then you're throwing the child out into a world where
102. 5:13every single face that they see,
103. 5:15is either hostile or lying.
104. 5:17And that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive
105. 5:20to the mental health or the well-being of your child.
106. 5:23If your child can learn a couple of simple rules of behavior
107. 5:26like "Don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much"
108. 5:29and "Pay attention" and "Try not to hit the other kids over the head with a truck any more
109. 5:32than it's absolutely necessary"
110. 5:34then- and, you know, and "Share" and "Play properly".
111. 5:37Then, when they meet other kids, the kids are gonna try out a few little play routines on them
112. 5:41and that's gonna go well and then they're gonna go off and socialize each other for the rest of their lives.
113. 5:46Because that's what happens.
114. 5:47It's that from four years old onwards.
115. 5:49The primary socialization with children takes place among other children.
116. 5:54And so if the kids don´t get in on that early, they don't move into that
117. 5:58developmental spiral upwards, and they're left behind.
118. 6:01And you can imagine how terrible that is, because
119. 6:03a four-year-old would not play with another four-year-old who's two.
120. 6:08But a five-year-old certainly will not play with a five-year-old who's two, right?
121. 6:12'Cause the gap is just starting to get unbelievably large.
122. 6:15And so the kids start out behind
123. 6:18and then the peers leave them behind,
124. 6:19and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life.
125. 6:24Those are the ones that grow up to be long-term anti-social, right.
126. 6:27They're already aggressive. It doesn't deep down.
127. 6:31Now, what happens to normal boys, roughly speaking?
128. 6:34Imagine that aggressive two-year-old types get socialized,
129. 6:38so their level of aggression goes down.
130. 6:40And then they hit puberty and testosterone kicks in and bang!
131. 6:43Levels of aggression go back up.
132. 6:45And so that's why males are criminals between the ages, roughly, of 16 and about 25.
133. 6:50So, when it matches the creativity curve, by the way, it's so cool.
134. 6:53If you look at the spike of creativity among men 16 to 25, and it starts to go down.
135. 6:59Criminality matches that absolutely perfectly.
136. 7:01That's quite cool.
137. 7:03So and part of- So,
138. 7:05the testosterone levels raise the average level of aggression among men.
139. 7:09It's more dominance than aggression, actually
140. 7:11and testosterone is, by no means, all bad.
141. 7:13And then starts to decrease about age 25 or 26, which is usually when men
142. 7:17stop staying up late at night,
143. 7:20stop drinking as much,
144. 7:22develop a full-time career, and take on
145. 7:25burdens and responsibilities and opportunities
146. 7:26that are associated with a long-term partner and family.
147. 7:29And so-
148. 7:31Well, so that's the development of
149. 7:35what I would call predatory aggression.
150. 7:38Because I also think that the agreeableness distribution
151. 7:41is probably something like predatory aggression
152. 7:44versus maternal sympathy. It's something like that.
153. 7:48So, if you look at other mammals, that are predators,
154. 7:51'cause we're predators, as well as prey animals.
155. 7:53If you look at other animals like bears,
156. 7:56the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants.
157. 7:59In fact, the female bears would keep the male the hell away
158. 8:02because he's likely to kill the infants and maybe even to eat them.
159. 8:05So there's no maternality at all
160. 8:08in solitary male
161. 8:11mammalian predators.
162. 8:13It's really useful to investigate the viewpoints
163. 8:15of people who have opposing views to yours.
164. 8:18Because they'll tell you things- Not only will they tell you things you don't know,
165. 8:22they'll also tell you how to see the world in ways that you don't see it.
166. 8:26And they'll also have skills that you don't have, that you could develop.
167. 8:30So, for example, if you're an introverted person, it's very useful
168. 8:33to watch an extroverted person, because the extroverted person
169. 8:36has ways of being in the social world that aren't natural to you,
170. 8:39that you can use as- to improve your tool kit.
171. 8:41And if you're disagreeable, one of the best things to do with disagreeable people,
172. 8:45specially if that's alienating them from other people, for example, because it can, you know?
173. 8:50People treat you like you're a selfish, arrogant, son of a- maybe that's because you are.
174. 8:54It's like- Ok, so what do you do about that?
175. 8:55One of the most
176. 8:59promising
177. 9:01treatments -let's say for that-, is get the person to do something for someone else once a day,
178. 9:05just as a practice, and learn how to do it.
179. 9:07Maybe you can wake the circuit up, you know?
180. 9:09If you think that it's lying dormant in you, which is probably right.
181. 9:12You know, I think we have a very wide range of propensities within us.
182. 9:16Some are switched on:
183. 9:18genetic propensities.
184. 9:19Some are switched on. But I think that if you put yourself in the right situation
185. 9:22or walk yourself through the right exercises, you can switch some of these other things on as well.
186. 9:27But it takes work, and dedication and discipline, too.
187. 9:30I would say generally speaking, if you want to adapt yourself properly to life,
188. 9:33you should find a niche in the environment that corresponds with your temperament, right.
189. 9:37You shouldn't work at cross-purposes to your temperament,
190. 9:40because it's just too damn difficult.
191. 9:42But having done that, then you should work on
192. 9:45developing the skills and viewpoints
193. 9:48that exist in the space opposite to your personality.
194. 9:51Because that's where you're fundamentally underdeveloped.
195. 9:54Now, well, I think you can extend out your temperamental capability
196. 9:57across a wider range.
197. 9:59And to me that's roughly equivalent as bringing a richer tool kit to each situation.
198. 10:04You know, so if you're hyper-extroverted, you should probably learn to shut up in parties now and then
199. 10:08and listen just to see what's going on, to see if you can manage it, you know?
200. 10:12And if you're introverted, well,
201. 10:13then you should learn how to speak in public, and to learn
202. 10:16how to go to parties without hiding in the corner
203. 10:18and saying nothing to anyone, you know?
204. 10:20And if you're agreeable, then you need to learn how to be disagreeable, so people can't push you around.
205. 10:25And if you're disagreeable, you need to learn how to be agreeable, so you're not an evil son of a b-
206. 10:30So, and the same thing applies even in the conscientious domain
207. 10:33It's like if you're too conscientious
208. 10:35you need to learn to relax and let go a little bit.
209. 10:39And if you're unconscientious it's time like
210. 10:42get out the Google Calendar, man, and start scheduling your day, right?
211. 10:46And beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick until you're disciplined enough
212. 10:49so that you can actually stick to something for some length of time.
213. 10:52And not living in absolute squalor,
214. 10:54which is something that would characterize someone who's very disorderly,
215. 10:58for example, 'cause they just, they don't notice.
216. 11:01It doesn't bother them, disorder. It's like-
217. 11:04Maybe they can see it, but it doesn't have any emotional valance.
218. 11:07so it doesn't have any motivational significance.
219. 11:10Now, so, the other thing you might wanna think about too if you're choosing a partner is
220. 11:14try not to choose someone who's too distant from you
221. 11:17on the temperamental variables.
222. 11:19Because you're gonna have a hard time bridging the gap, you know?
223. 11:22It's hard for an introverted person and an extroverted person to coexist.
224. 11:26And it's really hard for an orderly person and a disorderly person to coexist
225. 11:30'cause they will drive each other nuts.
226. 11:32"Why don't you pick up?" "Why are you so obsessed by it?"
227. 11:35That's the basic argument, you know?
228. 11:37So, it's useful to know about your temperament so that you
229. 11:40can negotiate a space with your partner, and the other way as well.
230. 11:43And I don't think you should try to find someone who's exactly the same as you.
231. 11:46Because then you don't have the benefits of the alternative viewpoint.
232. 11:51But you gotta watch it, because you may hit irreconcilable differences of various sorts.
233. 11:56And I've seen that most particularly among couples who are
234. 11:59high and low in openness, that's a rough one.
235. 12:02And also high and low in conscientiousness, that's another rough one.
236. 12:06'Cause they just cannot see how the other person sees the world at all.