TRANSCRIPT LECTURE 7

Conscientiousn
ess:
Industriousnes
s & Orderliness
Lecture 7

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0:09
So, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. I do have to leave at quarter after 5:00. I have
something else I have to be at, so if I have to rush out of here—I’m going to try to leave some
time, but I don’t know if I can manage it. So, that’s housekeeping item number one.

0:25
Number two is thank you, all very much for coming. It’s much appreciated, and I also
understand that you’ve all been Patreon supporters, so thank you very much for that as well. It
is definitely much appreciated, and it’s really nice to have you here, to have an audience for this.
You’ve sacrificed a whole day to come and do this, so it’s definitely much appreciated on all
fronts.

0:47
Okay, so lecture 7, conscientiousness. Well, we’ll start the way we stated with the other traits.
Conscientiousness can be broken down into two aspects, and the aspects are industriousness
and orderliness. So, if you’re an industrious person, these are the sorts of, what would you call,
specific trait indicators that you rate yourself highly on.

1:16
Carry out my plans; waste my time, reversed. Find it difficult to get down to work, reversed.
Mess things up, reversed. Finish what I start; don’t put my mind on the task at hand, reversed.
Get things done quickly, always know what I’m doing; postpone decisions, reversed. Am easily
distracted, reversed. That’s industriousness.

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1:48
I like the first one, carry out my plans. It’s kind of an interesting differentiator because it’s not
plan things. It’s carry out my plans, and those actually turn out to be importantly different. We’ll
talk about that in a little while.

2:01
Orderliness. Leave my belongings around, reversed. Like order, well that one seems rather
obvious. Keep things tidy, follow a schedule; am not bothered by messy people, reversed.
That’s an interesting one, too, the bothered part because that implies a certain amount of
judgment to be bothered by messy people.

2:24
Want everything to be just right; am not bothered by disorder, reversed. Dislike routine,
reversed. See that rules are observed, want every detail taken care of.

2:38
So, conscientious people. Well, they’re conscientious versus negligent, careful versus careless,
reliable versus undependable, well-organized versus disorganized, self-disciplined versus
weak-willed, persevering versus quitting.

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2:55
So, you see, to some degree conscientiousness suffers from the same problem as
agreeableness. It’s pretty obvious why it would be good if you’re conscientious, but it’s not so
obvious why it would be good if you weren’t conscientious. So, we’re going to try to solve that
mystery I think by looking first at the downfalls, or when we come to that, by looking at the
downfalls of conscientiousness rather than the upside of being unconscientiousness. We’ll do
that as well.

3:24
Alright. So, imagine again that we’re back in the story that I talked about. You’re getting from
point A to point B, but what might conscientious people value. They value duty, diligence, and
focus. That’s if they’re industrious. If they’re orderly, they value organizational ability,
concentration on detail, insistence on borders and boundaries.

3:55
Okay, well let’s talk about some interesting things, about conscientiousness from a theoretical
perspective. This has been a great mystery to me this trait, and here’s the reason. It’s the
second best predictor of life outcome. The first best predictor is IQ.

4:14
So, IQ is a very powerful predictor of life outcome. It accounts for about 20%, 25% of the
variance in overall success, let’s say, depending on how that’s measured. It’s a very high
proportion given how difficult it is to measure success. That’s another thing to remember.

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4:30
The next best predictor is conscientiousness. That’s especially true in managerial and
administrative positions. So, it’s hard to see given its positive association with life outcomes
how there could be any utility in being unconscientiousness, but to understand that, I think that
you have to look at the pathologies that are potentially associated with hyper-
conscientiousness.

5:00
Now, this has been unbelievably difficult to figure out for psychologists, and here’s why.
Remember I told you when the Big Five models were first developed that there weren’t really
any theoretical models. There weren’t any neuropsychological models. There weren’t any
biochemical models. There weren’t really any animal models because it was all extracted out at
the lexical level. That was also true of conscientiousness.

5:25
The problem is basically it remained true of conscientiousness. So, here we have this weird trait
that is pretty easy to measure with self-reports, and by the way, you can get valid measures of
conscientiousness from others’ reports. That’s something I haven’t mentioned about the Big
Five in general.

5:42
If you report on your own personality, then that will predict certain elements of your behavior
reliably into the future, but if other people report on you using a Big Five framework, that also

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predicts, and you can take the self-reports and the other reports and put them together, and you
get better prediction from the combination than you do with either separately.

6:01
You know some things about yourself that are accurate and not some other things, and some
other people know some things about you that are accurate that you don’t know. So, that’s
interesting to know, and with conscientiousness, you can get decent self-reporting. You can get
decent reports from other people as well. So, it’s reliable, and it predicts like mad.

6:20

Okay, so what is it exactly? I’ve been looking, literally I’ve been looking to figure out what
conscientiousness is for probably 30 years, and it’s been mostly a dismal failure on every front.
Let me give you an example.

6:40
So, conscientiousness people seem to be good at carrying things out. You think about planning
and carrying things out, and so there’s this idea that’s central to the literature on human
cognitive functioning at a neurological level that your prefrontal cortex is responsible for
planning.

7:05
I mentioned right at the beginning of this entire lecture series that I had made this battery of
tests with my colleagues that tested dorsolateral prefrontal function, and so those were all tests

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of abstractiblity [sic] and hypothetically associated with the ability to plan. That’s how all the
neuropsychologists describe the function of the prefrontal cortex.

7:29
So, the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex over the course of evolutionary history,
and the motor cortex is the part of your brain that you really use to engage in voluntary activity.
What good is the part of your brain that thinks?

7:45
Well, basically what it is is an extension of that part that acts, so the idea would be you can use
the part that thinks to think before you act. So, what are you doing when you’re thinking? What
you’re doing is you’re planning actions, and maybe you’re also laying them out in a conceptual
space. If I act this way, what’s likely to happen?

8:05
You could think about those as practical fictions. Maybe that’s why we like reading fiction. If we
acted in such and such a way, what’s the likely outcome because then you can fictionalize the
outcome, and you can experience it, and you don’t have to experience it in real life.

8:19
If the outcome is good, well then you can go implement it, and if the outcome is bad or fatal,
then how about you don’t act that way, and maybe that’s why we like stories, and maybe that’s
why we like movies and why we like communicating with each other about what our plans are

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and how our lives are going, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex seems to be integrally
involved in that planning and envisioning.

8:41
So, we thought well, maybe conscientiousness is associated with dorsolateral prefrontal
cognitive ability. That seemed to make—we couldn’t see how that could possibly be wrong
given the parallelism of the theories. That’s what that part of the brain was supposed to do, and
that’s what conscientiousness was. We have data—I never published this data, although some
subset of it’s been published—the correlation between dorsolateral prefrontal cognitive ability
and IQ was extremely high. They might even be the same thing. They probably are. We’ll get
to that when we get to openness.

9:15
The correlation with conscientiousness was zero, and zero that’s low, man. Like it’s not
negative, but it’s as low as you can get without being negative. It’s so strange because it’s not
that easy to find in psychology two variables that aren’t correlated at all, especially if they’re
theoretically supposed to be. So, no neuropsychological correlation whatsoever.

9:39
So, it was like oh, isn’t that completely incomprehensible. Yes it was, so I had another student.
We thought okay, fine. We’ll make up a battery of conscientiousness tests. This has to work,
man. So, here’s one of them.

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9:54
The conscientiousness person has to be better at this, so imagine a row of letters Ns, Ms, and
Us. Small print, very close together. Your job is to zip through and circle all the Ns. Now,
there’s nothing intrinsically motivating about that. You’d think a dutiful person would maybe do
that fast or maybe do it with more accuracy.

10:16
The correlation with conscientiousness, zero. We did a bunch of tests like that. We tried delay
of gratification tests. That didn’t work. We thought well, conscientiousness people are probably
more likely to delay gratification. Not with any delayed gratification test that we could come up
with. We couldn’t find a single thing in the laboratory that conscientiousness people did better,
which is amazing when you think that it’s the best predictor apart from IQ of how people do in
the real world.

10:44
So, nobody that I know of has yet been able to come up with a measure of conscientiousness
that isn’t a personality self-report or other report. Worse, we don’t have an animal model. Well,
what animals are conscientiousness? It’s like is that a specifically human thing? Well, maybe
sled dogs. Like, they are animals, but they’re domesticated. We’ve kind of trained them to be
work creatures. Sled dogs seem to like to pull sleds. I don’t know if that makes them
conscientiousness, but it’s not that easy to find a conscientious animal, so there’s no animal
model.

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11:20
Then, there’s no real theoretical model, especially when the planning idea went out the window,
and there’s no correlation with IQ either, so that’s kind of surprising because IQ is correlated
with damn near everything that’s positive.

11:35
So, well, it’s just been—I still really can’t believe it, even when I’m thinking about it now. It’s like
how can we have a predictor that’s that powerful because it has to be—after IQ it’s probably the
second best predictor of important outcomes that psychologists have ever developed, and we
have no idea what it is.

11:56

Well, maybe. Maybe we got some insight a couple of years ago. So, this is new stuff. Some of
it’s been published, some of it hasn’t, and very little of it’s been aggregated.

12:11
The first thing that happened was that managed to successfully subdivide it into industriousness
and orderliness, and that turned out to be, we think important, because orderliness predicted
political belief. So, conservatives are lower in openness, which we’ll get to next, and they’re
higher in orderliness, so that was kind of interesting.

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12:34
Then, we found that orderliness was associated with sensitivity to disgust. Now, disgust is a
basic emotion. We didn’t talk much about it. I didn’t talk about it when we talked about the
negative emotions even though it’s a negative emotion, and that was because I knew we were
going to talk about it when we got to conscientiousness. There is a disgust system. There’s a
specific facial response that’s associated with disgust, and it’s associated with orderliness.

13:03
So, why are people orderly? Because they get easily disgusted. They don’t like to be
disgusted, so they work at keeping things orderly so they’re not disgusted

13:12
Then, the question is what’s the utility of disgust. Well, like if you’re really disgusted with
something, you vomit, and you get rid of it because it’s a contaminate. So, the purpose of
disgust is actually very terrifying, by the way. It’s a very terrifying set of propositions as far as
I’m concerned, maybe the most frightening set of propositions that I’ve ever encountered as my
time as a psychologist. So, disgust, you manifest disgust to contaminates, pathogens, let’s say.

13:43
Now, Jonathan Haidt who wrote the book that I referred to over, The Coddling of the American
Mind, has done stellar work as a psychologist because he was one of the first people who
looked into the psychology of disgust as an independent psychological phenomenon, and he’s
associated the emotions of disgust with moral purity. So, purity is the opposite of disgusting,
let’s say. Pure is the opposite of disgusting, so there’s a moral element to this.

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14:11
Whatever is pure is the opposite of whatever’s disgusting. So, orderly people are aiming for
what’s pure, and they’re aiming away from what’s disgusting. So, how might that be associated
with conservatism? Alright, well, let me tell you about another study that’s deadly relevant to
this, and this is such a surprising study.

14:35
This is a good example of how science discovers things you wouldn’t expect that have
potentially promising outcomes, and so I came across this paper a few years ago when we were
looking into disgust, and it was published in a journal called PLOS ONE. Murray, Schaller, and
Suedfeld, 2013, “Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence that Parasite Prevalence Predicts
Authoritarianism.”

15:04
Think about that. Now, what the h***? Where does that come from that idea? Why would you
look into that even? So, imagine that you could rank order countries by how authoritarian they
were, which you can do with a fair degree of reliability and accuracy, and you can even rank
order regions within countries with regard to how authoritarian they are. Then, you can look at
what predicts authoritarianism.

15:30
Here’s some things that predict authoritarianism. Warfare, negatively. There’s no positive
relationship between war and authoritarian governance. In fact, there’s a slight negative

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relationship. Malnutrition, barely. The correlation is 0.05. A perfect correlation is 1.00, so 0.05
you’re barely registering.

15:59
Famine, 0.26. That’s getting up there. That’s accounting for about 8% to 10% of the variance,
so hungry people are more likely to exist under authoritarian regimes. Now, you don’t know the
causal direction because it could easily be that authoritarian regimes produce more famine,
which is highly probable, or maybe there’s a bidirectional result, whatever.

16:24
Pathogen prevalence, 0.42. That’s pathological prevalence as measured by blood parasite
count, 0.42 I think. Well, how big a correlation is that? It’s bigger than the correlation between
conscientiousness and lifetime success or approximately of the same magnitude.

16:50
It’s way, way up there in terms of the power of relationships found by psychologists. It
approaches the relationship between IQ and academic performance; 0.42, this is like 25% of the
reason that people exist under authoritarian governments is because of pathogen prevalence.

17:11
Think, okay, well what the h*** is going on there? Is it some direct biological consequence of
pathogen infestation? The answer to that seems to be no. It seems to be the case that
conservative forms of political belief are part of the process by which we put borders and
barriers between things.

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17:36
Okay, so, let’s back up a bit. The two best predictors of political belief are openness and
conscientiousness, so open people are creative. They like to think laterally, and open people
like free information flow between places because it produces new possibilities. They don’t like
things to be bounded and bordered. They’re always transgressing against borders. That’s sort
of the definition of creativity, to think outside of the box.

18:02

Now, if you’re conservative, you don’t want to think outside of the box. You want to say in the
d*** box, and you do that partly because you’re low in creativity, so you don’t have any real
intrinsic interest in the aesthetic or intellectual consequences of lateral thinking, but you also do
it because you’re orderly.

18:18
You think well, why would you want to say in the box? The question is well, what exactly is the
box keeping out? The liberal answer to that is ideas and the free flow of information and goods.
It’s like yes, that’s absolutely right. That’s a big cost of having things boxed in. What else does
it keep out? Pathogens.

18:37
What happened when the Europeans came to North America? The Europeans lived in cities
packed together, and they lived close to animals packed together, and there was incredibly high
pathogen load. Small pox, which killed a third of Europeans, but left two-thirds of them

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somewhat immune to small pox. Measles, mumps, a whole array of the classic childhood
diseases.

19:09
Europeans come to the western hemisphere. The native populations have zero immunity to any
of these diseases. What’s the consequence? Well, 95% of them died. Right.

19:24
So, you think well, what’s—and you know, there’s some evidence the black plague in Europe,
how the black plague—now, we don’t know this for sure, but one hypothesis is that as the
Europeans opened up trade into other countries, the rats that were on the ships got infected
with fleas that had bubonic plague, and they brought them back to Europe. Then, one-third of
the European population died.

19:46
It’s like there are reasons to keep things inside the box. That’s a terrifying idea. It’s a terrifying
idea that.

19:55
So, let’s say disgust sensitivity drives orderliness because the correlation is there, and then let’s
say that disgust sensitivity protects us from pathogens, and then let’s say that the need for
protection from pathogens is truly real. Well, then you might think well what happens if that gets
out of hand. What happens if you get too orderly?

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20:18
We don’t know what happens if you get too industrious. You know, industriousness is still a bit
of a mystery. I mean, you can work on the thing that you’re working on to the exclusion of
everything else. So, that might not be for the best, but I’m going to leave that aside because we
still don’t have a good model for industriousness.

20:35
It looks like it might be associated with guilt and shame, that people who are industriousness
work so that they’re not useless. They feel if they’re inactive that they’re useless in some way
and that that’s not morally acceptable, and they’re working to avoid that. That goes along with
being dutiful and pulling your weight and all of that. We don’t know enough about that to do
much more than speculate, but we do know more on the orderliness side, and so that’s disgust
sensitivity, and that’s a very, very powerful relationship.

21:06
Now, here’s something that I was working on at exactly the same time. So, at the same time we
were uncovering this, relationship between disgust and orderliness and then the relationship
between disgust and pathogen protection.

21:26
So, imagine what you want to do if you’re in the presence of contagious pathogens is limit your
contact with everything. You can certainly think about that. Some pathogenic processes are
transmitted sexually, for example, so you can imagine—this certainly happened in the Victorian
times, by the way, when small pox became epidemic. Small pox might be the one thing that

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was brought back from the Europeans from the western hemisphere. There’s some evidence
for that, about the only disease that made its way the other way.

21:57

Anyways, when small pox—sorry syphilis, not small pox. Syphilis. So, when syphilis became
epidemic in Europe, it produced Victorian sexual morality. Of course, that makes perfect sense
because what are you going to do in the presence—syphilis was a really, really nasty disease.
It could mimic virtually every disease. It was transmissible from parent to child, and it had
terrible consequences, and it was quite contagious. So, you’d expect strictures on sexual
behavior to emerge as a logical response to the presence of pathogens. That’s a more
conservative attitude.

22:36
The same thing happened, at least to some degree, in the rise of AIDS in the 1980s. Of course,
that’s what’s going to happen, so you can see that one of the forces driving strictures on sexual
promiscuity is the attempt at the population level to avoid exponential contamination. So, that’s
just one form of social policy driven by pathogen prevalence.

23:04
Now, part of the question is what constitutes a pathogen. The answer to that is well, we don’t
know because it’s not like we’re evolved to detect microorganisms. We didn’t even know about
microorganisms until about 300 years ago, but we do have an innate disgust system. So, we
get disgusted by things that are quite likely to harbor contamination.

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23:27
Then, you think well, what does someone have to do in order to do something disgusting. The
answer to this well, they can do something that’s directly associated with the contaminate, but
there’s moral significance to the idea of disgusting. You can say well, that was a disgusting
idea, or you can say that was a disgusting behavior, or he conducted himself in a disgusting
manner completely independent of whether or not it’s associated with something that was
biologically contaminated.

23:58
The idea of disgust is a broader category that reaches up into what we consider moral and pure.
So, then the question is well, what happens if this—and this is perhaps the downside of
conscientiousness, which was where I was going with all of this, what happens if the desire for
purity becomes paramount?

24:20
Well, there are pathologies associated with excess orderliness. One of them I would say is
anorexia because what seems to happen to women, which it’s mostly an illness of women, by
the way, is that they become unbelievably disgusted with their own bodies. We have a very
opponent process relationship with our own bodies. We have to pack them around, and we
have to live in them, but we’re not always thrilled at exactly what they produce and how they
behave.

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24:48
So, to keep our bodies acceptably orderly and clean is not a straightforward matter. What
happens to the anorexic types who often are hyper-conscientiousness because you’ve probably
heard this that anorexia is a disease of upper-middleclass young women. I think the reason for
that is genetically they’re more likely to be conscientious, or maybe they’re likely to be raised in
households where conscientiousness is facilitated, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s
deeper than that.

25:21
They are after purity and perfection. One of the anorexic women that I worked with said I want
to reduce myself right down to the bones because there was something pristine about the
bones, and her perceptions were altered. Anything that was part of her body that was fleshy at
all she regarded as contemptible and fat, and she really had—she was unbelievably judgmental
about people who couldn’t regulate their eating behavior, and I mean it takes a h*** of a lot of
willpower to starve yourself to death.

25:49
That’s no easy thing, man. There’s plenty of willpower there, even though it’s misguided. The
thing is that willpower and the desire for purity can get to the point where it’s not commensurate
with life itself.

26:11
So, while I was reading this, there was all this literature coming out of the social psychology end
of the discipline suggesting that conservative types were more afraid than liberal types. Maybe

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they’re more afraid of strangers, but the problem with that was there wasn’t any evidence that
that was the case.

26:28
So, for example, if conservatives were more afraid than liberals, which might account for their
desire for borders, let’s say, to keep the other people at bay, to keep people where they belong
in their boxes, which isn’t a bad way of thinking about conservatism.

26:43
Think of Trump’s effect on conservatives when he talked about building a wall. Conservatives
like borders, and they like boundaries, and they like structure. I’m not saying this in an insulting
way, especially given what I’m talking about. They have their reasons. I think that that interplay
between openness and orderliness is best actually conceptualized in terms of boundaries and
borders.

27:08
The open people have reason to flatten boundaries because they like cross-contamination of
ideas, the cross-fertilization of ideas, let’s say, but the conservatives are not into that because
they’re not creative, and because they’re orderly, they’re disgust sensitive, and they’d rather
keep the d*** walls up and keep everything where it should be so that all h*** doesn’t break out.

27:25
You might think well, there’s something there that’s associated with fear, but it doesn’t look like
it’s fear. It looks like it’s disgust. So, one of the supporting pieces of evidence, which I think is

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quite clear, is that conservatives are not more neurotic than liberals. In fact, they’re less
neurotic than liberals. The strength of the relationship between political belief is neuroticism
isn’t very high. It’s not a major determinant of political belief on either side of the spectrum, but
it’s certainly not enhanced among conservatives.

28:00
So, whatever it is that makes conservatives more ethnocentric, because that is one of the
elements of conservatism, doesn’t have anything to do with fear. So, maybe it has something to
do with a different emotion. Well, Haidt was looking at that in terms of the relationship between
disgust and purity, and then we found the same thing from a different direction with regards to
the overlap between orderliness and disgust sensitivity. That was quite amazing.

28:24
Here’s the kicker, man, so to speak. At the same time that we were piecing all of this together, I
was reading a book called Hitler’s Table Talk, and Hitler’s Table Talk was a diary, a transcript
essentially, of his spontaneous conversations at dinnertimes from 1939 to 1942. They were
transcribed by his secretary, so you could just buy this book.

28:59

So, I’d been very interested in the motivation for the totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany. So, I
thought I’d read what Hitler said spontaneously and see what I could make of it.

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29:11
He was also a great admirer of willpower, and so one of the things he used to do when he drove
around in his staff cars is he’d hold his arm out like this, so that’s that Hitler salute, and he could
do that for eight hours a day. He was very, very proud of his ability to do that. There was ways
in which he was hyper-disciplined. Remember, he’d been a trench soldier as well, so he was a
product of the military.

30:07
One of the best predictors of military success is conscientiousness, orderliness. It’s not like the
Germans aren’t known for their orderliness. They’re known for their orderliness and for their
precision in engineering, for example. So, you think about all those things precision in
engineering, you think about that as a Hallmark of a sophisticated civilization. It’s like yes, but
what’s the price exactly.

30:32
Here’s an interesting price. This is another reason why conscientiousness might get in the way.
German tanks in World War II would last forever. They were made way better than American
tanks. You think well, great. Good work, Germans, so to speak. It’s like, no. How long is a
tank going to last? What do you do with tanks? You put them on the battlefield, and then
someone blows them up.

30:57
So, if they’re made to last 30 years, that’s not necessarily that helpful given that their lifespan is
two months. So, the Americans just cranked our hoards of quick and dirty tanks, and they

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weren’t particularly reliable, and they weren’t built to last, but it didn’t matter because they could
produce them at tremendous scale, and that actually worked out to be a much better strategy.

31:15
So, that’s kind of interesting, you see, because what you got there was a couldn’t see the forest
through the trees phenomenon. The Americans thought they’re tanks, man. They’re a dime a
dozen so to speak, so let’s crank those things out. The Germans said no, they have to be
exactly right. It’s like, no they didn’t have to be exactly right. There just had to be more of them.

31:32
So, that’s a good example, too, of how that orderly obsessiveness with detail can cloud your
vision maybe for the broader picture. The thing is to implement something at a broader level,
you do have to focus on the details, you do have to get things done, but you can’t let your focus
on the details interfere with your acquisition of the big picture, and you really can’t let it interfere
when the big picture has to switch.

31:58

So, one of the things that’s interesting about businesses is we’ve done a fair bit of work
predicting success in businesses. There’s two different patterns of prediction. There’s the high
IQ, high conscientiousness pattern, and that predicts managerial and administrative success.
There’s the high IQ, high openness pattern, and that predicts creative and entrepreneurial
success. So, there’s a bit of a conflict there, and it’s the same conflict as the conflict between
conservatives and liberals.

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32:29

It’s like if you want a job done, and you know what the job is, and you don’t want deviation from
the path, and you want it to be done efficiently, you should hire someone who’s conscientious
and conservative, but if you don’t know what the job is, and things might have to move laterally,
then you should hire someone who’s liberal and creative. So, this is also an extremely useful
thing to know, I would say practically speaking, because if you’re left-leaning you might think
what the h*** do we need these conservatives for, and if you’re right-leaning you might think
what do need these liberals for.

32:59
The answer is if the conservatives don’t have the liberals, then they just go down their pathway
in this unidimensional way, and as soon as the path becomes counterproductive, they’ve pretty
much had it. That’s on the conservative side. The liberals, for their part, they can think up an
idea every 15 seconds, but they can’t implement them worth a d***. So, if the liberals don’t
have the conservatives to implement their ideas, then their businesses never succeed, and if
the conservatives don’t have the liberals to revivify the axioms, then they auger in.

33:27
If you think about that from a trait perspective, it actually makes a certain amount of sense
because you would assume that these different personality configurations do have different
niches of utility because otherwise there’d be no use in the variability. So, it’s not that
surprising, and in order for things to move along in some harmonious manner across long spans
of time that we need the interplay between people of profoundly different temperaments to keep
everything properly balanced.

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34:01
This is also why I think that it’s so important for people to be respectful above all of the notion of
the free exchange of ideas, free speech, because if part of our strength is, in fact, in our
diversity, which is a mantra you hear promulgated continually on the left, then what you really
want to do is make sure that diverse ranges of people actually have the opportunity to
communicate with one another, even though there’s going to be a fair bit of tension and stress
in that because if you’re hyper-liberal talking to someone who’s hyper-conservative, that’s not
going to be an easy thing.

34:37
Some of the time they’re going to be right, and some of the time you’re going to be right. The
question is can you keep the dialog going long enough to figure out who’s right, right now.
That’s really, hopefully, what you do with a stable political system is you have that dialog.

34:51
Anyways, back to Hitler. So, he used this metaphor of the Aryan people as a body that was
under assault by pathogens. I thought, oh my God, it’s disgust that’s driving him. It’s disgust.
What do you do with things that are disgusting? Well, you don’t freeze in fear. That’s
neuroticism, that’s withdrawal. You destroy, you burn, and destroy. That’s what you do. If
something’s infested, that’s what you do.

35:25
Well, Hitler was also a great worshiper of fire. He was someone who thought about the
purification of Europe. In his nighttime spectacles because he was also very high in openness,
he used fire. You know, Hitler died in a blaze of fire with Europe in ruins. My sense is that he

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never got to fulfill his longings for purification and that the death of Europe by fire was the
closest that his pathological imagination could manage.

35:54
So, here’s how things got going, and this is how something that’s positive can have an aspect
that’s so negative that you can hardly even conceptualize it.

36:04
When Hitler first came to power, one of the things he wanted to do was to get rid of tuberculosis.
He had these vans that used to drive around, and there were x-ray machines in them that would
screen people for tuberculosis. He was big on public health campaigns, and that kind of makes
sense with someone who’d be obsessed with pathogen and contamination, but that’s an all right
thing.

36:24
It’s like hey, who needs tuberculosis, right? It’s certainly the case that cleanliness and hygiene
are actually very effective techniques in the battle against pathogens, and there are pathologies
of that, too, of obsessive compulsive disorder, for example. It’s really a disorder of disgust, so
people who have obsessive compulsive disorder, they always feel like they’ve been
contaminated if they touch the wrong thing.

36:49
So, that’s why they’ll go wash their hands obsessively like use up a whole bar of soap or maybe
a whole hot water heater full of hot water because they can’t stop because they’re so obsessed

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by the idea of contamination. It’s called the behavioral immune system, which is the
manifestation in the psyche and in behavior of the immune system that’s designed to defend us
directly from pathogen attack. It also has these external manifestations that are behavioral, and
they can become pathologized, which is what happens with obsessive compulsive disorder.

37:22

Anyways, so Hitler had his public campaigns. Then, he had a let’s clean up the factories
campaign because the factories were full of rats and mice and flies. It was just messy and
counterproductive, and so he had the German people clean up the factories and plant flowers
and fumigate the factories, and he used Zyklon gas to fumigate the factories, and I think Zyklon
A, and so it was a very toxic gas.

37:51
So, then the factories were cleaner. You think well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing to have
the factories more orderly and perhaps a little bit more aesthetically attractive.

37:59
Then, he started to clean up the hospitals, and that wasn’t so good because that’s when the
euthanasia campaigns started, and the idea was well, these people are living substandard lives,
subhuman lives. It’s actually an act of mercy to put them out of their misery, and that included
people who were, I would say, well what would you say, incurably insane and otherwise likely
long-term residents of residential care facilities.

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38:33
Well, that wasn’t good enough because things still weren’t clean enough. Then, he started to go
after the people who weren’t ethnically identical with the Aryans, so that was the gypsies and
the homosexuals and the Jews and so forth, and we all know where that went.

38:48
You know, the gas that was used in the concentration camps was Zyklon B. It was a variant of
the gas that was used to fumigate the German factories. So, that was an indication of
orderliness gone mad and a good indication of how something—you know, you think
conscientiousness, that’s a good trait. That keeps the world on track. That keeps the trains
running on time, which was something that the fascists were always proud of. It’s like yes, a
little bit of something is good, but too much of it, man, you better look out.

39:21
So, what’s the utility of being on the unconscientious end of the distribution? Well, that’s one
form of pathology that you’re not going to fall into, and maybe you need people around like the
Dude in The Big Lebowski, who’s just not taking things that seriously. He’s a bit of a lay-about,
let’s set, and might depend a little too much on other people to do his work for him, but that’s
one particular catastrophe that someone like that would never lead us into.

39:49
The hyper- conscientious people get hyper-judgmental, and they do it morally. Again, it’s so
tricky because it’s not like judgment isn’t necessary. It’s necessary to separate the wheat from
the chaff. It’s necessary to do things efficiently, but there’s limits to that.

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40:08
Maybe that’s why you also need agreeableness because I could judge you according to your
efficiency and your functional merit, but that’s a cold judgment, and it might be a good way of
keeping a factory-like structure moving forward, but a little mercy to temper that and maybe a
judgment that’s not too harsh and strict is sufficient so that we can move things forward while
still encompassing the fact that human beings are imperfect and frail, which is something that
we have to live with.

40:40
So, that’s well, that’s the end of the lecture on conscientiousness.

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson