What an intriguing of individuals you are to a psychologist
I’ve had the opportunity over the last couple of days of
listening in on some of your conversations and watching you
interact with each other and I think it’s fair to say , already,
that there are 47 people in this audience at this moment
displaying psychological sysmptoms I would like to discuss
today. And I thought you might like to know who you are.
But instead of pointing at you ,which would be gratuitous and
intrusive , I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in
which you may catch a glimpse of yourself. I’m in the field of
research know as personality psychology, which is part of a
larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from
neurons to narratives. And what are you try to do, in our own
way, is to make sense of how each of us , each of you is, in
certain respects, like all other people, like some other people,
and like no other person. Now, already you may be saying of
yourself, I am not intriguing. I’m the 46th most boring person
in the Western Hemispher. Or you may say of yourself, I am
intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great,
thundering twit. But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and
your inherent “twitiness” that makes me, as a psychologist,
really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so. One
of the most influential approaches in personality science is
know as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five
dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe
universally held aspects of difference between people. They
spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, “O” stands for “open to
experience.” Versus those who are more closed. “C” stands
for “conscientiousness,” in contrast to those with a more
lackadaisical approach to life. “E”--- “extroversion,” in
contrast to more introverted people. “A”—“agreeable
individuals,” in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And
“N”—“neurotic individuals,” in contrast to those who are
more stable. All of these dimensions have implications for our
well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for
example, openness and conscientiousness are very good