Jordan Peterson || Wonder, Creativity, and the Personality of Political Correctness

Today we have doctor Jordan Peterson on the podcast. Doctor Peterson is a psychologist who has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the un Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an advisor as senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe with his students and colleagues at Harvard and

the University of Toronto. Doctor Peterson has published over one hundred sig scientific papers. Doctor Peterson is also author of two books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief and Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, which is a number one bestseller. Jordan, great to chat with you today. Hey, Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, as we were saying just backchannel before we started, it's nice to finally like see you and talk to you. We've been in touch for

a while, and publish the paper on creativity. And I should give even further context which I never gave you when we were actually collaborating, which is, as I was working on my dissertation, I drew a lot on your work. I drew a lot on your work on creativity and personality, and I thought there'd be no better place than to start with our discussion than some of that seminal work

you have done on creativity. And one concept that really fascinated me in grad school was the idea of latent inhibition and you had done some work on that and had found this really interesting link between late and in in amibition and the personality trade, openness to experience. And then you did this, you know, you did that with Shelley Carson, and then you did this work linking at to creative achievement. I thought you could talk a little about what is

late in amibition and how how is it related to creativity. Well, a lot of what we learn, you know, you might think that you learn what things mean, and there is some truth in that, but it's more accurate in many ways to reverse that, Like reversing so many things in psychology is useful. It's not that useful to try to figure out why people get addicted. For example, it's very useful to figure out why some people, but most people aren't addicted all the time. It's not that difficult to

figure out why people are afraid. What's hard is to understand why people aren't afraid all the time. So a lot of things in psychology we get backwards, and we tend to think that we learn the meaning of things, but that's not exactly true. It's more reasonable to point out that we learn that things are irrelevant. They start

out meaningful and we learn that they're irrelevant. And the reason for that is that when you first encounter something, you don't want to assume that it's irrelevant, mostly because it might be dangerous, partly also because it might be useful. But most of the things that we encounter prove to neither be dangerous nor useful, and so that we can safely put them aside with all the other things that we don't attend to, and we don't attend to almost

everything so learned. Irrelevance is unbelievably important, and latent inhibition is in some sense a way of measuring how fast someone can make something irrelevant through learning. So imagine that something surprises you and you have a big response to it, but nothing comes of it, and then the next time it pops up it doesn't surprise you at all. That's

basically learning through latent inhibition. Now, one of the things we started to contemplate, this was back twenty years ago with my student Shelley Carson and Daniel Higgins, was the role that artists play in revivifying perception. So if you look at a van Gold painting of viruses, for example, or sunflowers, very famous paintings, as if the artist makes you recall how those remarkable phenomena manifest themselves, so that you can see them as if you're seeing them again

for the first time. And what we thought was that perhaps what the artist was doing was stripping away your latent inhibition so that you could see things the way you saw them the first time, in all their splendor and glory before you packed them away conceptually as irrelevant. And so we tested that with creative people and found that creative people did have lower laytent inhibition, and so did people high in the personality trade openness. I love that.

I should say that Hans Isaac got their first curse his soul. He got everywhere he did the personality I mean, William James. William James got everywhere first, but he in terms of personality, isa think got there first. Yeah, well, William,

what's funny. I guess in some sense William James even got there before Isaac because he played around with nitrous oxide, right, So he was one of the first experimenters with hallucinogens fundamentally, and he wrote hippie poetry on nitrous oxide, noting what was likely something like the stripping away of latent inhibition

as a consequence of hallucinogenic use. So yeah, it's another and all the eldest Huxley, of course too, believe that the hallucinogens in particular cleaned the doors of perception, using William Blake's terminology, so that it was possible to see everything as if you were seeing it for the first time.

There's some forms of brain damage that can produce that too, So anyways, that yeah, so we tested it and well it turned out that latent inhibition does look like low latent inhibition looks like it's importantly related to creativity and to trade openness. You know. Abraham Maslow, he talked about newness of appreciation as one of the main characteristics of self actualizing people, and I think that that can be linked to leane inhibition. I'm sure you would agree it was.

You just described, you know, kind of everything is you, kind of there's a wonder to the world. There's a wonder, everything is kind of fresh again. Yeah, the cost is

likely something like cognitive overload. Like one of the things that Shelley Carson and I were trying to investigate when we studied the high openness pieceeople at Harvard the High Openness Students, which was a very good place to study that, was that it looks like, in order to handle the excess sensory input of low late and inhibition, it's really useful to have very high well probably high IQ but

and high working memory. Those two concepts are quite overlapping, so it's difficult to distinguish between them, but it seems probable that if you're prone to be overwhelmed by sensory information, that you need the cognitive capacity to handle that, and also perhaps the and we don't know about this yet, but the personality ability to sort through that critically so

you don't end up overwhelmed. So the shared vulnerability model of your student, Shelley Carson, is very relevant here, right, And I don't know do you know about I haven't kept up so well in the last couple of years with the recent work detailing out the shared vulnerability model. Shelley and I wrote a joint series of articles for the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry on shared vulnerability between openness

and predisposition to schizophrenia. Yeah. I mean that's always lurking in the background when you talk about creativity, right, the share the overlap with manic depressive disorder and potentially with schizophrenia.

I don't think that's ever been sorted out properly. I've written a couple of papers in the past five years on the genetics of psychosis and its overlap with creativity, which is a fascinating you know, there's there's a lot of recent research on the genetics of this stuff and showing this overlap, and it seems to be particularly associated with this openness that things relate to open and things

relate to the default networks. I think the discovery of the default mode network in recent years has really allowed us to understand this. So my colleagues and I published a paper recently showing a direct link between the efficiency of the default mode network and the personality trade openness to experience. So a little bit yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, so we can now link, we can link, you know,

the brain structure and network dynamics. Okay, So we used a network approach to look at the connectivity of the default network and actually analyze individual differences in the connectivity between people within the default networks as a measure of your efficiency within that particular brain network as a start, and that was correlated with the opens to experience demean But then, so what does that mean in increased connectivity within the default network which associated with okay, and what

did increased connectivity signify? What do you think the functional significance of that is? Well, I think efficiency in the sense of quicker information flow between the three major sub hubs of the default mode network is the three sub networks the default mode network involve the meaning making. Meaning making seems to be huge part of this network. You know, the construction of self. People who get kind of this network knocked out, they don't even know who they are anymore.

And I find that fascinating. And then there's the mental simulation part, being able to imagine the future. That's why I've called this network like the imagination network to be sexier about it, because I think default mode is like it connotes that it's kind of a passive network when it's actually a really active network, you know what I mean, Like it's not like a Yeah, it does sound like it.

The default does make it sound like it's passive. Hey, did you see the work done with psilocybin showing radical increase in brain connectivity under the influence of psilocyber Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I think that like we're on the verture of something really integrated, Jordan, because like you know, you wrote that paper with Rachel Gracio point A and Colin you mapped out the whole terrain. I love that

because we've been building off that. I could send you a paper where we had a synthesis of the whole literature. We have this hierarchical model of the cognitive exploration demean where you have like cognit expiration at the top, and then you have openness and then intellect, which is the paper. You know, we showed openness into like differentially predict creative achievement.

But then under that you find all sorts of facts which contradiction, which are negatively correlated with each other, even though one step higher in the hierarchy they're positively correlated. Right, Well, it seems to be going on there, right, is that there are these breed of humans that can take these contradictory modes of thought within themselves. You know, most people, the general population of all these sorts of echotomies. You're

either selfish or you're not selfish. You're either compassionate or you're not. You're either. But it seems like credit are amazing and able to like harness these seemingly contradictory modes of being. And well, you know, I suspect it's probably a process of neotany. You know, I think that the creative people stay immature. I love that. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, you know, there's a proclivity and evolution for

creatures to evolve towards their neotanous form. Yeah. So, and it looks to me like the creative types are they're sustaining that plasticity they have as really early children. Maybe they're permanently locked to some degree into that pretend play mode that's so characteristic of children between the age of

four and say, well maybe eleven something like that. Well, it's good to have both those things operating, you know, because often you talk to people this is really characteristic of people who are sort of on the new age end of the spectrum. Carl Jung said something interesting once about how people think. He said, for most people, a thought appears in their mind and they just accept it uncritically. So that's the thinking. And but that's not really thinking.

That would be more associated perhaps with what you described as activation of this imagination network. But it's a lot more difficult to have the thoughts appear and then to take them apart. And I think it would be really worthwhile to analyze the role of Well, we know IQ is important in that obviously, because IQ just enables you to handle a larger number of variables. Hey, did you find out if that increased connectivity that you were describing

was positively associated with IQ? Okay, I'm so glad to ask that, because I was going to tell you about the follow up paper. And by the way, this I want to be totally fair to my collaborators. This was led by Roger Beatty. I ran something with Martin Selgum in the last four years that Penn called the Imagination Institute, and as part of that we put out a huge

grant for people to do research. So we funded some of this research and I was a co author in some of these papers, but Roger Beatty did a lot of this work. Now with that out of the way, the follow up paper showed that increased connectivity between the executive network and the default mode network was essential for creative thinking. So openess experience is not equivalent to creative thinking, right, So that the kind of one step is to show

there's a link between the imagination network and openness. But really, real novel and meaningful creative cognition seem to require that both the default mode network and executive network, executive tension and the salience network. Actually the salience network is an interesting network. We could talk about the interaction between those three networks were essential for the cognition to be novel and meaningful. It's fascinating because most people in the general

population it's anti correlated. Some of these networks are anti correlated like most people. For most people, it's like as soon as you focus on the outside world, you shut up your imagination or when you go imagine. Yeah, but creative people are really goot creative. They're like a good

at keeping on call. That's yeah. That really is interesting because Shelley and I, back when we were doing the Creative Achievement Questionnaire research, we kind of thought that one of the things that might characterize creating people is that ability to switch back and forth between openness and critical thinking was under voluntary control. It's interesting to think the

extent of which is undervoluntary control. I wonder how we could study that, Like we just know that this is what the brain networks are doing, they're toggling back and forth. But could we ask could we do reports. It's almost the sense that like creative people, as soon as you ask them to think about it, if they're in the flow state, then suddenly it evaporates. You know. It's like, yeah, well,

it's it's hard to tell how much. Okay, so well, of course, defining voluntary scientifically is not a straightforward thing, but it'd be interesting to see if people do think about that as voluntary, and if it's a skill as well, if it's something that people can learn to develop, because you can to some degree teach people critical thinking, like you can teach them to look at an idea and break it apart and analyze it. So all that remains to be determined, I guess. So let's move on to

some other topics. You did this really interesting study that you know I wrote about Inside of America with Christine Brophy on the personality of put. Yeah. We found we were looking, well, two things we wanted to establish. The first is we wanted to establish if there was a coherent group of political beliefs and attitudes let's say, that

you could bring under the rubric of political correctness. You know, because of course you know that just because a concept pops up in the popular literature, let's say, or often even in the psychological literature, that doesn't mean that the concept has any basis. In fact, what we did was we did a standard psychometric investigation, and so we oversampled

the politically correct attitude domain. We had a bunch of people come up with questions that seemed to be indicative of what people were describing when they discussed political correctness in the media, and we put together I think four hundred questions and had a very large number of people answer all of them, and then subjected the question the answers to a factor analysis and came up with a coherent,

two factors solution to political correctness. One that looked like it was associated with what you might describe as the radical left, the interventionist radical left, and the other that was more associated with I would say, just left leaning liberalism. And then looked at the personality predictors and personality and cognitive predictors of of both of those. They weren't that

highly correlated, interestingly enough. I mean that was partly because we used an extraction technique that decreased the correlations, but you could extract out two quite separate sets of political belief and yeah, trade agreeableness was a good predictor, which was quite interesting because it hadn't showed up that power trade agreeableness and being female as well, which was also

quite interesting. I mean, we're in a situation now where it isn't obvious how men and women are going to cooperate politically, because it does look like our differences our intrinsic differences in personality and interest might divide us quite radically politically, and so God only knows how that's going to play out on the political realm. Yeah, it's a

really interesting think about it. And I've try to like wrap my head around the real practical applications when I look at the data and then try to like, and I like to hear your thoughts on what you think the percentage of this could really be impactful. So, like, I looked at a figure the other day of the overlap of the distribution and compassion and there is in the general population we're not talking about, like it's a

totally different plant. You know, seventy percent overlap in the b fast that you have co created with Colin, And so in that paper where Colin looked at the gender differences in the different Big ten capassion did have the

largest gender difference. But if you look at the actual graph, you know, you see like seventy percent, and of course that doesn't saying about at the extremes, Well that's the problem, you know, Well, this is something that people really don't understand, and social scientists don't understand it well either, Although we should like there's two things that were not trained well,

I think in its social scientists. Is one is consideration of the tails, because the tails have disproportionate impact on behavior and on political and economic outcomes. And then now there is the preto distribution problem, because most of us are taught that almost everything is normally distributed, and that actually turns out there's a lot of important exceptions to that, including creative achievement. It's not normally distributed at all. It's

a standard prito distributed. Yeah, relatively small differences at the average level, and then walloping differences at the extreme. And then it's the difference is at the extreme that determined behavior. So, for example, you know, there's good evidence that the difference between men and women with regards to interest in people versus things is about one standard deviation, which is the largest psychometric difference between the genders that's been reported as

far as I know. And so then you think, well, okay, it still means that men and women overlap to a large degree. But if you look at what determines someone's decision, for example, to go into a field like engineering, you probably have to be I wouldn't think what percentage of the population are engineers. I bet it's no more than two percent take five yeah, yeah, yeah, So okay, so let's say one in fifty. Maybe it's one in twenty five, but whatever, it's something like that five of the population.

So let's say to be an engineer, well, you have to have a high IQ and you have to be conscientious. But then you have to be interested in things. But you don't have to be just a little bit interested in things. You have to be really interested in things. And if the average difference between men and women is only one standard deviation, which is still comparatively large, that could mean that virtually everybody who's really interested in things

ends up being male. And that's exactly what you see. You see about a fifteen to one preponderance of male engineers versus female engineers. And you know, you might say, well, that's sociocultural and can be aliorated, but the evidence doesn't support that at all, because those differences maximize in the Scandinavian countries. Can you mind if I hal you there, because you just think really interesting? Okay, And by the way, I want to thank you for I've watched like one

hundred of your videos to prepare for this interview. So like, even if I don't always agree with you, it helps clarify what in the hell I actually believe, So thank you for being so authentic in your opinions. I totally believe in quality of opportunity, right, And it seems like what really irks you is when people call for equality of outcome, that that's really where you're infuriate. Is a better way because I know how dangerous it is. It's

unbelievably dangerous. People have no idea what they're messing with when they mess with the equality of outcome. Well, and then to have a nuanced discussion about it, let's say, because that's what we should do. It's like, Okay, the data indicate more and more strongly that there are significant differences between men and women and a variety of dimensions, and more importantly that those differences expand as cultures become more egalitarian. Okay, So then that opens up an avenue

of political questions. It's like the first political question would be the first observation should be we better accept that as fact because it actually seems to be grounded in very serious science, and the scientists who discovered this were biased in the opposite direction. It wasn't what they were happy to find, No one expected it. Okay, but let's take it at face value, just for the sake of argument, and say, all right, now this opens up a minefield

of political questions. The first is, so, for example, let me take a pro diversity stance just for a minute, even though it hurts my heart to do so. So it looks like if we allowed naturalistic sorting to take place merely as a consequence of people's express choices, that all of the elementary school teachers would end up being women a lot. Yeah, well, so it's going to be there,

and it already is the vast majority of them. But if the sorting continues unabated, that's likely to increase that increasingly. It is what it is, but we don't know what to do about that from a sociopolitical perspective. Now, you know, hypothetically we could enforce equity of outcome equality of outcome, but it would be extremely costly, it would require a tyrannical effort on the part of the government, and there would be all sorts of unintended negative consequences. Now, those

might be consequences that we're willing to bear. But we don't want to move into this under the presupposition that the differences that we're trying to eradicate are only sociocultural in nature, because clearly they're not. And you'd hope that we would get to the point where we could actually have an intelligent discussion about we don't know what to do about this, say, that's the thing, but you need

a proposal what to do about it. In one of your videos that I wanted to talk to about because you actually made a concrete in one of the videos that I watched, you made a very specific argument. You said, I think that we should eliminate poverty, that we should eliminate unnecessary suffering, you know, give everyone a relative sort

of baseline of income. But then after that, as the next stage, we should sort of allow the free market to sort of like allow people to then express You still stand by that way, You said that video about their function of the state, Well, I don't know, because it's so complicated, Like I don't I certainly don't think that we should rush headlong into the provision of a universal basic income because the probability that that will have

radically unintended consequences is unbelievably high. So I think one of the things that would probably do, especially among unemployed hopeless people, is increase their access to drugs like oxycontinent opions see. The problem with the left wing view of improve moving economic equality is the left wingers are so obsessed with the economic side of inequality that they don't

pay enough attention to the cultural side of inequality. So, if you're down at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the fact that you don't have enough money is a big problem, but it's only one of many serious problems you have. And I would say an equally serious problem is that you don't have anything productive, engaging and meaningful

to do with your time. And the problem with that is that you know, I don't know if you know this or not, but it's pretty easy to get rats that are isolated in a cage singly to be addicted to cocaine. You can do it very rapidly, But it's almost impossible to get rats in a naturalistic environment addicted

to cocaine. That's really interesting, it is. Yeah, well, there was there were ethologists slash behaviorists that studied rats in their natural environment, and they're quite a bit different than the genetically modified, three quarter body weight, starved single lab

rat existing alone in a cage. Rats are social creatures, you know, So you think, well, yeah, yeah, Well if you were sitting alone in prison, yeah, and somebody and offered you endless access to cocaine, It's like the probability that you'd take it is extremely high, but if you have something better to do, then it's low. The problem we're going to have to deal with is more like the provision of meaningful activity to people who are being

displaced by large scale socioeconomic transformations. And that's not a matter of merely redistributing income. Do you know the video I'm talking about where you talk about the function of the state, Yeah, I think. I think I was at a political convention in Canada about five years ago. You know, I've done work on what it called like, I've done work on giftedness. I've ben work on because of learning disabilities. Trying to the equality of opportunity is what I'm fighting for.

That's what I'm flaighting and in terms of aligning it with the science as well, you know, like it's a beautiful thing for me when they're not a post, when there's the truth and the helping someone are you know, the same thing. You know, that's a beautiful thing, right, Yeah, So this is an interesting question, is like what could the function of the state optly be to help to make sure that there's a quality of individual expression. I

guess that's what we're talking about here. Well, that's written. That is a fundamental question, I mean million dollar Yeah. Well, one of the things the state does quite effectively is invest in universally accessible infrastructure. So everybody benefits from safe, clean streets, right, everybody benefits from an active cultural meal U. Like a city like Montreal is a really good example

that is extraordinarily culturally active. There's festivals going on there all the time, and a lot of them are outside, a lot of them are free. Everyone benefits from that. Education is a good, hypothetically a good place for the state to invest with regards to equality of opportunity, although it disproportionately benefits people who are on the upper end of the cognitive distribution. It's hard to escape from that. A So that's a whole fier topic. Oh yeah, that's

for sure. Back to the intrinsic difference issue is like we don't really know what the political impact act is of the fact that men and women seem highly likely to sort themselves out into different occupations if we just allow them free choice, because no one has thought that. No one thought that was what was going to happen, you know. And the bloody radical leftists are fighting this like mad because they insist that all these differences are

socio cultural. But the problem is, it doesn't look like they are, like all these politics and fractions, right, individual difference is what is what fascinates me. People are complex systems. Every one of us is a complex system of lots of personality, traits, motivations, et cetera. And you know, there are people who score high in compassion regardless of whether you're male or female. A lot of I score high

in compassion. I heard you say you score high on compassion in one of your videos, you know, when you went through the bfas. So it's not like we're saying, like, you know, you have to be female to be compassioned. It's funny. With the politically correct research we did, we did find that a lot of the predictive power, a lot of what was predicting affiliation with politically correct standpoint was trait agreeable to, but being female was an additional predictor.

And that was really strange because most of the time, and I'm sure this is the case with the literature that you've investigated as well, most of the time, if you look at sex differences in a particular outcome, you can get rid of them by controlling for temperament. Most of them look like we couldn't know there was an additional effective, there was an additional effect sex. Yeah. Did you look at the beefest? Did you look at politeness

versus compassion? Yes, we did, but I can't It's been a while since I reviewed the paper, and I can't bring it to mind. I think it was driven mostly

by compassion if I remember correctly. Yeah, And it makes sense, you know, because I think that what's happening on the end of the spectrum, let's say, where political views are driven by compassion, is if compassion is primarily a dimension that's there to facilitate intense relationships between individuals and their dependence, which kind of looks to me like what compassion does is that so you know, you have compassion for an infant,

or you have compassion for someone who's elderly and unwell. If you're a very compassionate person. It's very easy to take the side of the downtrodden and to look for a perpetrator or cause, and lots of time that's extremely useful. Right, If you're taking care of an infant and the infant is in distress, the first thing you should be doing is scanning the environment for the cause and eliminating it.

One unanswered question is, well, what happens when you scale up that personality attribute and it starts to operate politically. See here's the thought for you. Tell me what you think about this. Yeah, I think that we have two traits that orient us in the social world. I think agreeableness orients us in small groups and conscientiousness orients us in large, impersonal groups. And that the switch point, the point where you transition from an agreeable viewpoint to a

conscientious viewpoint, is indeterminate. Way. Is there sex difference on consciousness or males higher? And yeah, it's a bit. No. Women are a little more orderly and men are a little industrious. Industrial. Well, yeah, I was gonna ask industrious in particular because Roy Balmeister made a similar you could link that to Roy Balmeischer's argument and what are men good for? I think that's the title of the book.

He argues that that's the major sex difference, that it's not that like men or women are better than each other. It's that like there have been different motivations in terms of how we want to help people, and a lot of men have tended throughout course of history to wanting to help, you know, like huge social networks, have huge social networks. And I wonder if that's a difference in exactly what you're saying between well, I think it might be.

I think it might be. Well, look, human beings are strange. First of all, there's no animals water for conscientiousness. Yeah, oh was that right? I've never seen one. Oh that's so interesting. You know, it's funny. I was trying with Colin the other day. He said that they just found a correlation between the salience network and conscientiousness, and that's not really well evolved in other animals. That's that's just interesting.

So look, if you think about it this way, if you think that, imagine that there's a human niche that's distinguished as for animals. And I mean obviously there is, but I mean that one of the distinguishing elements is that we can produce groups whose size exceeds that of our primate cognitive capacity. So, you know, I think it's Dunbar's work indicates that with human beings, our tribes tend to fractionate when they exceed about a group of about

two hundred. But obviously we can produce groups that are much much larger than that that are functional. But what that means is that those groups have to operate on principles that are outside of the networks that other primates would use to organize themselves socially. And I think that's where conscientiousness kicks in well. And if you look at what predicts performance in bureaucracies, it's conscientiousness. It's not agreeableness.

In fact, agreeableness is slightly correlated negatively with managerial performance, and so I think once a group exceeds the size where it's familiar, then you have to use a different ethical system to cope with it, and that's conscientiousness. I think one of the problems with what's happening to us politically right now is that we're trying to implement agreeableness as a political trait, and I don't think it functions

well in large groups. I hear that argument. I think sometimes some of the things that you are perceiving as relevant to the agreeableness. To me, it might be actually something different. And let me elaborate what I mean. So, I've done some research late. I realized that there's no scale of pathological altruism. It's a construct that Barbara Oakley has written about. But I wanted to do systematic research

on this. I think this is relevant to this conversation. Yeah, and so I constructed a reliable and valid scale of pathological altruism. And it is negatively correlated with agreeableness and compassion. We're not talking about it's in that domain. What did you find were the defining characteristics of pathological altruism? Okay, So we looked at grandiose narcissism versus vulnerable narcissism. I am so fascinated with that distinction. I don't think vulnerable

narcism has got as much attention in the literature. We found aboutero point six point seven correlation between pathological altroids and vulnerable narcissism. Oka And Okay, vulnerable narcissism is this They called it the psycholano It's called a closet narcisism, where it's like you have these grandiose fantasies inside and you have entitlement, so you score score sky high on entitlement. However, you don't present yourself that way. You present yourself as

really vulnerable. So we find that the grandiose narsis vulnevaris. They score just as high on the Grandiose Fantasies questionnaire and entitlement subscripe. What differentiates them is trait neuroticism. That's the thing that differentstrates them. So whereas graandios narisism is cort with much lower neuroticism, vulnerable narsism almost perfectly correlated

with high neuroticism. Almost perfectly correlated. Oh, how correlated. One of my collaborators who on that paper, he wrote another paper with the title Vultan Narcissism is mostly just neuroticism. We're talking about if you do a structural model, we're talking literally almost perfectly correlated. The only thing that additional variance that's explained is some antagonism. Like I said, entitlement

for instance. It's so it's a subset of highly new erotic people who also have developed a sense of entitlement, entitlement and a sort of interpersonal antagonism towards others. So we're not talking about yeah, that's man, you guys are really onto something there. Oh great, great, yeah, yeah, I alreally think so. I mean, the question is whether or not you're just fleshing out neuroticism with those sorts of correlations, or whether you've got a subset of people in there

who have taken neuroticism to the next step. I don't think it's synonymous with neuroticism, because most people who present themselves with high neurosism to the therapists, as you know, they are depressed, not like they have this grandiose fantasies and entitlement early developmental experience. It seems to be a

really interesting moderator we found. We found that those who were told that they're worthless in childhood or that were actually in some sense did experience some sort of trauma in their childhood that seems to actually correlate with later on. And I think that, you know, from a clinician perspective, you know, we want to help these individuals integrate healthily in a society. And I think maybe that's where your

responsibility argument comes into play. Well, the union idea behind that was that those grandie those fantasies were compensations, right, and that within them there is the seeds in some sense of a developmenttal pathway. So if someone is oppressed and put down continually and they develop compensatory fantasies, the fantasies are you can think about them as the manifestation of that imagination network trying to lay out an alternative

mode of being. But then those fantasies have to be subject to critical analysis so they don't become dwelling places or reasons for bitterness in relationship to the world. We just can't full circle in the sense that in a ways it's like the start of this discussion, you know, like this interplay, dynamic interplay between imagination and then rationality and well, the problem with those fantasies, well, the problem

with those fantasies is that they're not decomposed. So like, if you're dealing with someone clinically and they have these fantasies, then you might think about them as a starting place for how they could modify their life. So the fantasy is saying, you know, the fantasy is serving as a counterpart to the painful reality. The painful reality is downtrodden neuroticism.

The fantasy is as far on the other end of the scale as like it balances the pathology by putting something on the other end of the scale that's equally far away. But then you have to help the person take a critical look at the fantasy and start to make it a reality instead of just a fantasy, and to lay out a strategic plan for doing that exactly exactly, you know. I mean, look, we were all human, Like

I personally went through a stage. I think when I was in my early twenties, I was so insecure, like I wanted to be like academic acad I wanted to like that was my way of proving that I was smart, and that wasn't healthy, you know, And like I get it, but I also get, you know, the value of when I really decided to take some of these grandiose fantasies I had of like being academy, and I say, well, look, you know, I'm going to just take it out of

my head and I'm going to like work really freaking hard. I mean, I was in special education as a kid, because I did an auditory disability. Yeah, but when I was really young, at one point, I just took one hundred percent responsibility for that situation. Okay, so you took the right route out of that. Those fantasies, like you can think of those fantasies as part of the attempt by the mechanism that generates creativity to lay out a

pathway forward. The problem is is when people dwell in the fantasies and dwell on the fantasies instead instead of breaking them down into a strategic plan and realizing them, which is what a good therapist should help someone with. Absolutely, I'm sure you've done that in your practice. You're in practice over twenty years or yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Well, that's also what happens with our Future Authoring program, because what we really ask people to do in the Future

Authoring Program is to generate a compensatory fantasy. No, we say, well, lay out how your life could be improved. Then imagine what your life would be like if all those improvements took place. But we don't stop with that. Then we say, okay, now subject that to some critical analysis, decompose it, make it into a strategic plan, break it down into things you would do day by day and week by week

so they can become real liable in the world. Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's so sensible, right, I mean it's like, by the way this paper and I get sent to you, it's actually under a review right now. We have a whole section on the quinal complications of these findings, and you know we talked about like missings. I'd like to see it. Roy Baumo is sort of a really interesting book on I think it's the best sort of real honest assessment of evil. Have you read it Evil Inside

Human Violence and Cruelty? No, I haven't read it yet. No. Now, something he talks in there because he wants to get a full understanding of all the causal forces of what we call evil. And something in there he talks about is he makes it so clear that responsibility is not the same as culpability, Like responsibility not the same thing

as believed. Well, look at the situation you just described, Like, let's say that you are high in neuroticism and you were subject to bullying of a real sort and trauma when you were a kid. Well, it's not like you're culpable for that correct, but correct you need to take responsibility for it, because well, who else is going to right? You know, as a scientist, if we want to truly, truly understand a phenomenon, we need to understand all of the causal factors, and we need to do that as

objectively as possible. That's not saying that we're not allowed to have compassion, Like I have immense compassion. I want to make the world a better place. I know you want to make the world a better place as well. But I think I can like kind of separate those things at different times and then try to kind of thoughtfully think through how we can integrate this. Yeah, I'd like to see the paper. I'm very interested in what

you're doing. I'd like to see both of them, the one on the default network and also the one on vulnerable narcissism. I really do think that's associated with the sorts of things that I've been talking about relationship to the school shooters, for example, because they develop Grandio's compensatory fantasies and then act them out in the most pathological way. So good talking with you, good talking to Thanks your time, and let me know when this goes up And I'll

tweet it in all of that sounds good. Have a good day, Okay, okay, I see ya bye. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of

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