49: Unraveling the Mysteries of Personality and Well-Being

to have Brian Little on the show. Doctor Little is an internationally acclaimed scholar and speaker in the field of personality and motivational psychology. Professor Little is currently at Cambridge University, where his Fellow of the Wellbeing Institute and Director of the Social Ecology Research Group in the Department of Psychology. He is also affiliated with the Cambridge Judge Business School and the Psychometric Center at Cambridge. His latest book is Me,

Myself and I No Just Kidding. His latest book is Me. His latest book is Me, Myself and Us The Science of Personality and the Art of well Being. Brian has been described as deeply informative, outrageously funny, and quote a cross between Robin Williams and Einstein. That what an awesome way to be described and very accurate in my opinion. Thank you Brian for being on the show. I'm delighted.

Thank you Scott. What a wonderful introduction. I totally butchered it in me myself, and I indeed, yeah, that's totally not what your book is about. No, the US actually matters, doesn't it, that it all comes together? And that brilliant last paragraph in your book, Yeah, thank you, thank you. That's the one paragraph that I'd like people to read. Actually, they can skip the rest of the book. Yeah, well they don't even need to buy it, just going into

the bookstore and read that last paragraph. Well, you know, this US part is a kind of a common theme through this book is that it's not just a personality, is not just something that comes from within, you know, context matters. And also in creativity, I really liked how you talked about, you know, what about all those people that like supported you know, those quote creative geniuses, you know, the control group, the mute, inglorious folks who were simply

on the comparison group. I guess which mckennon's creative individuals seem to be so heroic, and that's something I think has been given relatively short shrift in the literature, and I'm very happy you picked up on that because to me, that the central issue, and I think what that does for those of us who study creativity is it deflects or attention away from the creative person to the creative project.

And we often differentiate between the person, the process, and someone These are very frequently invoked concepts and creativity research. But the creative project itself is really interesting because I think that it is a sustainable pursuit of these core

projects that matter in our lives. And the sustainability comes from motivation of the individual who's the creative one, but it also needs the touch of the less heroic one who tells the creative individual when things aren't going too well, or deals with the bank, or deals with the detail. So the administrative stuff that I'm thinking of the Creative Architects study. They hate details, they hate that kind of stuff, but their creative project would flounder if they did not

have the support cast members around. Yeah, you're referring to the famous Iparer study, And I didn't know that your office was down the hall from McKinnon's, who was the director of those of the stuff. I hadn't know that you knew him, that's amazing. Yes, it was his assistant for a short while on the IPAR studies. Yeah, I was a teaching assistant for his course that he gave on creativity and the dynamics of behavior. Did you see Frank barn as well? Very little we crossed paths, but

I had more contact with Don McKinnon. What legends, Well, you're a legends. It was an exciting it was a really exciting time to be there. But Scott, it was nineteen sixty four and that was when the student member that Delli in the student the free speech movement started and there was this creative tension, as it were, between being so involved with what was happening on campus on the one hand and dealing with the academic side of

things on the other. And McKinnon was quite a conservative fellow, and his course on the unconscious was fascinating because I wasn't sure that he was really processing what creativity was being unfurled on the campus in those days. So as as teaching assistant, I had all sorts of interesting discussions with the students about just what is happening on campus and how it challenges the Orthodoxy and how it tries to create a new regime in a conservative institution. Did

your pass ever across with Abraham Maslow? No, I was very much at George Kelly student. And George Kelly visited Stanford when I was at Berkeley, and I went down to take his course, and he invited me to come to Brandize the next summer and to meet with him and Maslow, with whom he had some agreement, but not that much really. And that's a fun thing to get into,

is where did Kelly differ from maslowsion? Well, the whole notion of whether it there's a self in you, and this is Rogerian as well, a whole self waiting to be discovered. George Kelly would have none of that. There's no enter you waiting to come out. You nact the you. You pursue it through the constructs you create to anticipate the future. And so I was very excited to go

to Grandis that summer. I happened to be. I'd left Berkeley to go to Oxford, and I was all set to go back to Grande Ice and George Kelly died in the interim, and it really hit me because that would have been a wonderful opportunity to see if we could affect any Raproschmont between the Kelly and view and the Mesovian view. Unbelievable. That would have been just such a legendary meeting. Yeah, of three legends. So I mean this is I'm absolutely obsessed with this idea of the

self as an illusion. And you know there's a modern neuroscience and Bruce Hood, you know, talks about how the self is an illusion, and you know there is a biogenic self as you talk about in the Yes there, thanks for using that term. It encapsulates forty other terms we have to use, like neuroandrochronology and so on. So biogenic works for me, and I'm delighted to use that.

Thank you. I like it. I like all the little like words of you, like you, coin, like what you like, sake, sake, sphere of the I'm going to give you a new thing, you know, like Einstein and Robin Williams. I'll be like less your heart. Well yeah, so no, I like that.

So there is something that it means to be you DNA wise, I mean, you would be Selen, you would literally be someone else if I had, you know, one hundred percent of your genes, Well maybe not not maybe not, because two identical twins who have one hundred of the same genes, they're still not the same person, right, that's right.

And that's because of the imposition of what I call the other two natures, the sociogenic self, which is broadly used to refer to the impact of the environment and the cultural codes and norms that you are socialized into. And then what I regard is the emergent third nature, which is that which is driven by our aspirations, our goals, and particularly are personal projects, and they are what give meaning to us, and the self is often created through

those projects. And that's where I think that I would I'm a little skeptical when I see the advertisements for the genetic whole genome analyzes that you can do commercially. Now, I'd love to do one that I left a subtle hint with my kids that i'd love one for Father's Day. But when the advertise it is get to know the real you, well, not really in the sense of who am I really? Well, you're somebody that can detect whether you've eaten artichokes or whatever. It is the night before

because you have that gene. And I think the real concept of self comes through how you identify with and explore your values and enact your values through the projects that you take on during your life at different stages of the life cycle. Yeah, you use the phrase to do so. I like that phrase is like we can create new selves we never had before the engagement in

new projects. Yes, so you know, there is this big theme in this book of the flexibility of personality, and I really like the idea of what the self is is this bundle of values and goals and these kinds of things versus what we focus on an education, like standardized test performance and IT and intelligence And even you don't, I know, you don't equate the Big five personality traits

with who you are. But that's interesting because the whole intro revolution there seems to be one particular dimension of the Big five where a whole bunch of people have made that a huge part of their identity. Absolutely fasting phenomena. And I get it in a lot of ways as a biogenic introvert myself, Like, I appreciate wanting to own who you are, but doesn't it also lead to potential and flexibility. Oh boy, have you got seven hours now?

I thought you had described yourself in a wonderful piece, wrote it as an Eurotic extrovert. So that gets into some really And now this is not an interview about you, but if we were back in Philadelphia and I had a beer in front of us, I'd be talking to you about whether you are a biogenic introvert or more

a biogenic extrovert. Yeah. So I think that these things are tricky, like introversion has become something beyond you know, when people say I'm an introvert and that's their identity, they're not referring to the technical definition of the Big Five. You're absolutely right. I really have to tell you about something.

For now forty years I've been lecturing on the interversion extraversion to mention to large audiences in a whole bunch of different guilds teachers, physicians, corporate groups, and so on. And this really began in the seventies, and it was before the Big Five had really been articulated, of course, as you know, and the dominant model of extraversion was

I thinking. I had great discussions at Oxford with Jeffrey Gray, not the Jeremy Gray who you've worked with, and every Gray wrote the best book ever on consciousness, by the Way and the Hard Problems. Yeah, he was a truly brilliant scholar. And I used to after my talks on how extroverts and introverts differ in terms of the impact they have on their success, and that introverts tend to do better in school, they are more careful, they have

a tendency to do detail work better than next. So I would draw the picture of them as being estimable creatures. And people come up and say, I've never thought of myself that way. It's really amazing that there's something about us that you think is admirable. And I say, of

course there is. And so that became, I guess, in a way, my shick when I was talking to groups over the years, and then many many many years later, Susan Kine contented me writing a book about this, and you know, we chatted a lot about it, and she drew on some of my research in her book. And now it has become a social movement, and as we both know, because we're affiliated with the Quiet Group, that

it has taken on a considerably lively force in social life. However, that said, and this goes right back to your initial question about identity. I'm seeing pushback, and the pushback's coming from the extroverts are saying, hey enough about these one sensitive, thoughtful Elene Aaron would have some concerns about this, but that depiction of introversion because they're not totally overlapping, but there is this tendency for them to be pushing back.

That isn't as much of a concern as it is for me that some introverts are simply seeing them as themselves as not but introverts. They're ignoring the other four of Big five dimensions. And once you start going through the Big five to glom onto one identity associated with one poll of the Big five, as you point out, and you're absolutely right. First of all, it's intriguing why

that has happened, but yeah, it really is. And the second thing is that I think it is dangerous because it decreases our degrees of freedom to enact our lives and craft our lives in a way that we'll rere down to our values and to the things that really matter to us. And it can also serve as a pretext for not engaging with the world. And so as

we increase the degrees of the freedom. And it's a phrase I like to use a lot when I'm discussing personality by recognizing the strengths of introverts, the quiet strengths of introverts is Susan so beautifully portrayed in her book. I worry that we not say that's all you are. For example, you may say I don't want to go to the party, and now I am encouraged to speak on and say, hey, I'm okay. I just would rather

curl up with a nice book tonight. That's great. But there's some recent research I don't know whether you're familiar with this, out of John Zelenski's lab at Carlton. Oh yeah, that's has shown that introverts who It goes to Dan Golbert's work on being able to anticipate your future happiness. When introverts are asked to imagine what it would be like to go to a social event, they rate it is quite low. But when they actually go and experience it,

they rate it much higher. And so acting extrovert extrovertedly for an introvert may actually have a sally toary effect upon their well being. If they identified strongly as an introvert and only assimilated that notion of this is who I am instead of accommodating to the possibilities of getting engaged. Then I think they should change themselves. No, absolutely, there's so many things to unpacked there. But I think a big you know, the question about like what am I?

When I said I was a neurotic extrovert and I wrote that article I was, that was my attempt to like gently introduce the idea of multidimensionality to the public, you know, in my own you know, quirky fashion. So that was like an exercise as a professor to people about how look on both these independent they're independent dimensions.

But you know, the thing that's tricky is that like when I and I, you know, I think Susan's great, great person, and I really really like her, and her heart's in a great place and she they're doing a lot to help people. So but I feel like, you know, when I put my scientists hat on, I'm like, oh, you know what, I'm an extrovert on the big five because when it comes to positive emotions, I have lots

of positive emotions, and the other dimension is assertiveness. And you know, I, you know, love asserting my wants and needs. But then I say, I look at I read Susan Kane's books, and I said, I'm an introvert. So it created Yeah, I'm a Susan Kane introvert and a Big five extrovert. I have the same concern and that mean what I mean, So you know, yeah, I do completely. I have aired I think on the side of invoking rather too much of of the Isinkian model of neocordical

arousal and so on. I find it it's a model that works for certain areas such as a pharmacological effects stimulant drugs and and sedative drugs and their impact on performance and so on. I find it's more helpful to look at that from an arousal point of view than from a dopaminergic system engagement a point of view, which is how speak five researchers are strictly looking at it now as dopamine they are. Yeah, and I think that's fine.

But there's all also a domain of performance that I think aligns better with the modified I sink in view. And when I said, over the many, many decades, I am an introvert I'm referring to neocortical arousal because I can't have caffeine after four o'clock at night and expected sleep when I'm have a lot of people talking to me. Let's say, halfway through a lecture, you've got a ten minute break. I get so over aroused. And it's not

autonomic arousal. It's neocortical arousal that I'm flooding. I can't really process information. But then that can kick into autonomic arousal as well. And it's that biogenic introversion that I think can lead people like us. Both of us are highly agreeable, right, so we when we're on with our students, we love them to bits. But I and I don't know about you, but I overload with that and I need to get away and an escape at the break.

If I'm going to give a lucid lecture. When I come back, if the lecture's over and I don't need to give a lecture, I don't need to perform at all, then I'm happy to have five fives and a lot

of excitement with my students. Well, this gets to the essence of the introverse extrovers dimensions, because Big five researchers would listen to this conversation right now and they'd say, you're just describing neuroticism like you're just describing like the neocortical like arousal stimulation that's within the neuroticism demean And it doesn't feel quite you know when I read these descriptions, You know, Susan is describing a phenotype that might actually

be a blend of things, but it's still in itself a phenotype that a large swaths of people identity. Even if it is a blend of Big five traits, it's still a particular blend that a whole bunch of people

are resonating with, including me. Yeah, which creates you know contract when I because I like, you know, you call yourself a passionate introvert, So passion is like one of the facets of extroversion on the Big five enthusiasm, you know, Scott, Here is where we need to bring in what I call idiogenic nature, the part of human nature that derives

from our core projects in our lives. And irrespective of my neocortical arousability, I have a passionate project and that is to excite my students, and that means that I have to act out of character. Why because if you give a highly introvertent circumspect lecture at eight in the morning, you're going to lose them. And so I've learned over the years to, as it were, act out of character. But and now it's so wonderful to time somebody really

understands the psychophysiology of this. When I say that I'm talking about acting away from my natural biogenic orientation, it may be linked to Indeed, I'm sure they're is some link with the dopaminergic system and I'm more than willing to concede that. And I'm a big fan of Colin de Young's and his colleagues Aspects Model, and you've been

involved in that work as well, one of my closest collaborators. Yeah, And Colin is working with me incidentally, we're working right now on He's looking at the Big five Traits and personal projects in a no way, Yeah, which is so exciting. I can't wait to see what comes out of that. And that's funded by the Templeton Foundation. Wonderful. So we're getting these links finally building up so that we can create an integrated picture of the person's guy I love

this idea, the integrate picture of the person. So let's talk about authenticity for a second. I mean, we know that as a explanatory variable, authenticity is a predictor of well being. And you wrote this brilliant paper on personal projects in nineteen ninety eight where you distinguish between happiness and meaning. And that's with Ian McGregor. Ian McGregor and I in the book. I noticed you didn't get into the nitty gritty details of that study, but in your

book you didn't. But I want to discuss this paper because I blew my mind. So you found that integrity. To me, integrity is an important part of authenticity, right, yes, so some people use the phrases synonymously. Integrity in your projects, your personal projects was correlated with meaning but not happiness, however, and this is what blew my mind. Acting out of character in a sense was correlated with happiness but not meaning. We're complex little creatures, Scott, aren't. We sure are, and

that's part of the delight of studying human personality. I had some development in my ideas about authenticity recently. Our mutual friend Adam Grant has written in recent I don't call it a screed, but a recent article on how perhaps we are overemphasizing authenticity. It's an inverted to your shaped curve. At least he evoked that in there. But basically he's making an argument very similar to other arguments that have been preferred in recent years, that authenticity may

have a limiting influence upon us. And I broach that topic, but I'm going to do it more in a new book I have coming out in the next few months, which is a ten book, and there's a chapter on authenticity in it. And here's my most recent thinking on it that I think that there are three kinds of authenticity. Now, I like to use the word fidelity. You can show fidelity to your biogenic nature. That is, you can do what feels right, and this is the hedonic notion of

I am what I really want and need. The deep me is my biogenic me in our terms. Another way you can show fidelity and show authenticity and the sense of fidelity is to be authentic to your cultural norms. And you are a member a particular ethnic group, or you are a student of particular school, or you were from a neighborhood in a city, and that is me. That's a corny you prick me, and I bleed Philly or Yale in your or your ethnicity, and Philly a

lot more than Yale, trust me. Well see, we've learned something already and that has a claim on us, and sometimes in some cultures it has an incredible claim on us. So that I studied it at at Berkeley, also with Ted Sarmon the role theorist who used to let us know just how vital cultural scripts were. Literally, individuals can die from subscribing to a social role. If they are shamed,

it may shut down their psychophysiology. Now, the skeptical and we would want to see more evidence on that the claim is a fair one that our culture can give us the signature of who we are in a way that can be really quite indelible. That's the old biogenic sociogenetic,

the old nature nurture dialectic playing out. If when we discuss these two to me, and now we're going to get to integrity, the idiogenic self, the third nature as a source of fidelity and a source of authenticity is the one that I think is really most important, because it is the self that I am not because of my biology or my cultural and trainment, but the self I am because of what I have chosen to be and the projects to which I commit in my life.

You sound very Sautra esque here for a second. Well, this is like really an interesting conversation because you know, the existential philosophers you don't really believe he would would love you what you just said, you know, but you know Maslow, you know, would disagree. A lot of the humanistic psychologists were like, no, they're actually they got it wrong.

The exerten of philosophers. We actually there is an essence to who we are that is influenced by our genes and that we can grow our potentialities, but we, you know, don't completely create our potentialities. I would agree with that, and I do both perspective. I don't think they're incompatible there. We do have a biogenic nature and like he was an agreeable person. I want everybody to be happy together, right.

This has been one of the common themes in my work is you know, can't we actually get the bio genetically oriented individuals and the social constructivists together? Yeah? I love integration, I love well. I written a couple of articles which has been distinguished by the lack of citations to them about the need for integration and personality psychologists.

But I think that it's entirely possible. Unlike an existentialist or Asocram, I think it's entirely possible to give credence to the biogenic aspects of our nature and the sociogenic

and yet still have degrees of freedom left. But those degrees of freedom to enact the projects that matter to us, projects like take care of my mum because their cognitive declineate is getting alarming, or the project of be there for my daughter during this trying time, or the project is enjoy myself with Dave because I love them more than anyone else in the world. These are the stuff of daily lives. They're not biochemical reactions, they're not social codes.

They're the way we makes sense of our lives. And I think that therein lies the groundwork for both identity and a sense of integrity, a sense of value exploration and a sense of true authenticity. Does that make sense? It absolutely does. But then so that explains your meaning finding. But then explain to me why acting in like doing things that it might be like complimentary or like, you know, maybe fulfill a hole in who we are actually can

make us happier. That's how I interpreted your findings. Yeah, the best answer to that is that I found it really hard to explain that, and I thought Ian McGregor, who is a senior author on this and a really fine scholar who's now at University of Waterloo, I think he did a great job in explaining it. I'm still puzzled by that finding. All I can say is that I invoke often, and I do in the book, the notion that it's not the pursuit of happiness, but the

happiness of pursuit. And there can be happiness that emerges as a consequence of inacting challenging roles or projects that ask us to act out of character and we say, wow, look at I'm I'm standing in front of four hundred students and they're loving it. Or I'm running for public office. I've never done that before, but I'm yeah, I'm happy on doing it. Oh, I'm just loving this conversation. And I just have a million questions I want to ask you.

Can I think we began this in Philadelphia a year ago, this conversation. I miss you. I'm like, you're not not in feeling anymore. So we you know, there's this constant tension between our drive for self understanding and authenticity and our drive for personal growth, and they are, you know, they're compatible with each other. Carl Rogers often talked about how once you know self exit, once we accept ourselves, then we can truly only then can we truly grow,

and he talked about that a lot of ways. But there's a balancing act. What is the right optional balance there between like eventually just like wanting what you have or having what you want. So there's actually some interesting research kind of distinguishing between those things, and ultimately they say that the greatest predictor of happiness. I don't know

if you saw this paper. They found the greatest predictor of happiness was being okay with like wanting what you have, like who you are, and growing along those lines, as opposed to having an idealized self that really is so far away from who you are that you're not happy with you who you are. That makes any sense absolutely. I think that when I talk about free trades, and the example I've used is introverts such as myself acting as pseudo extroverts. We talk about the downside of this,

that it can lead to burnout and so on. But one thing that is really crucial that you raise is that it is a chance to expand yourself. And there's increasing evidence, as you know, because you're on top of the literature thoroughly, that there is increasing evidence that you can actually change gnomic structures by social processes and the projects you engage in if you are chronically lonely, that has an impact upon your biogenic self. When I begin genetics,

was that is that epigenetics? It's similar to epigenetics. Indeed, and ten years ago even I would have thought this was really it sounds like Lamarckian, and I would have thought that it was highly implausible. But increasingly there's evidence

of the interdigitation of the sociogenic and the biogenic. And I think part of what brings that interplay into effect is human action, the things you commit to, the projects you pursue in which you have an interplay of your genetic propensity the affordances provided by your environment, and there are consequences both downstream to your well being and backstream to your relatively fixed traits. That is really exciting. That goes way beyond my competency to speculate on how that

research might develop. But I know what's going on and and these you know, you say, relatively fixed traits. But I really like the Fleecin model of density distributions so pity so that we all act out of character a lot throughout our day in the sense that we all are all through all five levels of extroverts, introvers all of those things all throughout our day. So it kind of confirms a lot of your a lot of your research that he just found that with experienced sampling, I

guess exactly. And you know, some of the time we'll have a conversation about the difference between experienced sampling and personal projects, because projects are subsume the kind of data that comes with experienced sampling. But let me say a little bit about will Fleeson and his work. I think it's terrific, and I'm very much in agreement with Willsworth. I came at it from a slightly different perspective, but

I've never really developed this thoroughly. I wrote about it in the Handbook of Environmental Psychology or was it the Handbook of Personality Psychology Burdon's volume, the second edition of it. Somewhere I talked about Bust and Craig's model of the act frequency approach to dispositions, where they talked about dispositions as being the relative frequency of being engaged in acts that are prototypical in a Russian sense of each of

the big five traits. For example, so during the day, you may engage in sixteen acts that are quintessentially or prototypically extroverted and four that are introverted. And you look at and I thought that act frequency, which is not unrelated at all to Willsworth, was really quite brilliant. Jack Blot attacked it. Part of his attack was, I think, bang on but on this history because it wasn't crucial to what David and Bus and kin Creek were arguing.

But I took a slightly different view, and this is where my George Kelly approach comes in. I developed what I called an ax saliency view. It's not the acts that you engage in in terms of their frequency, but what you think you're doing that is really pivotal to understanding your personality. The example I gave it was an

environmental handbook chapter. The example I gave is that you may see a fellow who spend all summer and deep into the autumn, in camping gear, going out to the lake, casting his fishing rod, chomming down trees, and generally acting in such a way as that we would call him a rustic warrior. And I actually pointed to some environmental disposition characteristics and he would be very high on. But

we may be sadly mistaken. The reason he is engaged in those prototypical acts of the outdoorsmen isn't because he's out. It's not that he has a stable drade. It's that his wife is dying and he loves her deeply, and she loves going into the woods. This is their last chance to do that. Scott, this is to me what the human condition is about. You can't just look at the at the prototypical acts, at the density distributions and expect to engage fully with what a human being is.

It offers us a terrific inroad, and it's necessary, but it's not sufficient for understanding what I think human personality is all about. I actually want to stop right there because I thought there's there's nothing I could possibly say I would be more profound than that. Thank you, thank you so much, so much for this chat. Bryan and everything wonderful questions. Thanks so much, Jures. Thanks for listening

to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking and interesting as I. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com