Men & Women: Personality Differences | Discovering Personality with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson — Transcript

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1. 0:00well this is lecture 6 and it's on sex
2. 0:03differences in personality and so the
3. 0:08first thing that you should be aware of
4. 0:09this is the reason I put it in after
5. 0:11neuroticism and agreeableness is that
6. 0:13the biggest differences in temperament
7. 0:16personality between men and women are in
8. 0:19agreeableness and neuroticism and that
9. 0:24seems to be true cross culturally and so
10. 0:27because you know one of the things you
11. 0:29want to know is so look look what's
12. 0:32happened is that psychologists have
13. 0:33established a relatively a theoretical
14. 0:36model of personality and I don't believe
15. 0:40that there was any bias built into it or
16. 0:44at least that the biased was minimized
17. 0:46by the method because the method was
18. 0:48asked people as many questions as you
19. 0:51possibly can and use statistical methods
20. 0:54by multiple teams to sort out the
21. 0:56relationships between the answers and
22. 0:58you know I thought that Big Five was a
23. 1:00pretty ugly theory when I first came
24. 1:02across it it wasn't one that I warmed up
25. 1:04too quickly I would say it probably took
26. 1:07between five and ten years before I was
27. 1:10convinced by the brute power of the
28. 1:14analysis that it had to be taken
29. 1:16seriously and as that happened because
30. 1:19the theory was first laid out only
31. 1:23linguistically and statistically there
32. 1:25was no neuro psychology there was no
33. 1:28neurobiology there was no real theory
34. 1:30there was no developmental theory it was
35. 1:31just lexical description and so it was
36. 1:35kind of was call so it was like a theory
37. 1:37in search of a place to exist as well
38. 1:39because of course before it was
39. 1:41established we didn't know what it was
40. 1:43also capable of predicting and that all
41. 1:45got built up around that say five to ten
42. 1:47year period - and it became more as we
43. 1:50started to understand the relationship
44. 1:52between the descriptors and the
45. 1:54underlying biology then the theory
46. 1:56became richer and more useful and also
47. 1:59more credible but but but that actually
48. 2:03that actually had certain benefits its
49. 2:05lack of initial theoretical
50. 2:08attractiveness because it also mitigated
51. 2:10against bias you know because if you
52. 2:12find a theory attractive
53. 2:13for whatever reason then you're more
54. 2:15likely to maybe be biased in favor of
55. 2:17evidence that's supported and I really
56. 2:19don't believe that the people who
57. 2:22develop the big5 theory were very much
58. 2:24affected by that I mean there are people
59. 2:26who built their reputation on this
60. 2:28theory and of course they would be
61. 2:29biased in favor of pushing their career
62. 2:33forward but peer review when it's done
63. 2:35properly keeps that nicely under control
64. 2:37and then the fact that multiple
65. 2:40different methods have converged on the
66. 2:42same model and that there's pretty good
67. 2:44evidence that it remains you know
68. 2:45reasonably stable cross-culturally and
69. 2:48that it's associated with the child
70. 2:49developmental literature that's all
71. 2:51power pretty powerful convergent
72. 2:53evidence and and so well once you have
73. 2:57the theory laid out you can start to use
74. 2:59it to ask and answer interesting
75. 3:01questions like well are there
76. 3:03differences between men and women that'd
77. 3:04be the first pretty simple question and
78. 3:06the next question would be if there are
79. 3:09differences well then why did those
80. 3:11differences exist but you don't have to
81. 3:13get to that to begin with you can just
82. 3:14start with are there differences and the
83. 3:17answer is yes there are differences and
84. 3:20I'll tell you what they are what we know
85. 3:23so far so by far the biggest differences
86. 3:26are in extraversion or agreeableness and
87. 3:29neuroticism and the biggest difference
88. 3:32is actually in agreeableness and so the
89. 3:35the the difference is roughly this if
90. 3:39you picked a random man and a random
91. 3:41woman out of the crowd and you said
92. 3:44who's more aggressive and you bet on the
93. 3:47woman you'd be right 40 percent of the
94. 3:49time which is actually quite a lot of
95. 3:52the time so there's more overlap between
96. 3:54men and women and there are differences
97. 3:57even in the dimensions where the
98. 3:59differences are the most pronounced and
99. 4:00then if you took a man and a woman out
100. 4:02of a crowd and you asked who feel
101. 4:05negative emotion and you bet on the
102. 4:07woman you'd be right about 60% of the
103. 4:09time and so it's it's it's that's not
104. 4:11exactly right but it's close enough you
105. 4:13get a flavor for it with with that with
106. 4:16that degree of estimation and so the
107. 4:17first thing you note and this is the
108. 4:19first thing to note from the comparisons
109. 4:21of men and women is that men and women
110. 4:23are more alike than they are different
111. 4:25especially at
112. 4:27trait level we did analysis with the big
113. 4:30five I never published this but I tried
114. 4:32to come up with a set of questions that
115. 4:33would maximally differentiate men and
116. 4:36women so if you didn't know who had done
117. 4:38the answering could you predict by the
118. 4:41pattern of answers and if I took the
119. 4:43most if I took the questions that most
120. 4:46differentiated the best I could ever do
121. 4:49was about 75% and classification
122. 4:51accuracy and that's probably a bit of an
123. 4:53overestimation because the statistical
124. 4:56technique I used was predicated on the
125. 5:00fact that we already knew which men in
126. 5:02which women had answered these questions
127. 5:03and so capitalized to some degree on
128. 5:07chance so my guess is that that if you
129. 5:11use personality testing and it was
130. 5:13optimal you could probably get about 70%
131. 5:15accuracy and classification maybe 65%
132. 5:18something like that and and and you know
133. 5:21that's that's not bad but it's not it's
134. 5:24not enough to think of men and women as
135. 5:26fundamentally different