The Mind, Explained (2019) s02e03 Episode Script

"Tends to be disorganized."
"Worries a lot."
"Difficulty getting started on tasks."
[smacks lips]
Depends on the task.
[narrator] In the quest
to understand ourselves,
some of us look to the stars or the cards,
but increasingly,
the method of choice is personality tests.
For different kingdoms of men
in Lord of the Rings,
uh, we would be Rohan
- Rohan.
- And I would be?
Uh, uh, um,
the Elves.
- Oh God.
- [woman] No!
[narrator] We know we're all different,
with a way of thinking, feeling,
and acting that's entirely our own.
We get that message
from a young age from trusted sources,
like Mister Rogers.
There's only one
In this wonderful world ♪
You are special ♪
[narrator] But then we grow up
and we make all sorts of memories
and all sorts of mistakes,
and we learn that special
doesn't necessarily mean perfect.
It's why there's a multi-billion-dollar
self-help industry
selling the promise of a new, better you.
We have to become somebody else.
We look for the weed and we rip it out.
If you will change,
everything will change for you.
[narrator] But can people really change?
How much control
do we have over our personalities?
And where do they come from
in the first place?
They say it takes all sorts of people
to make up a world.
Maybe so.
[theme music playing]
[man 1] What do we mean
when we talk about personality?
What is your personality?
[man 2] Different parts
of our personalities
grow at different rates.
Some of us never grow up entirely.
[man 3] And what about his mental balance,
his imagination, his personality?
And how has life affected him
as an individual?
[narrator] The tradition
of personality types dates back
at least to the ancient Greeks.
They believed there were four of them.
There was the sensitive artsy type,
the quiet thinkers,
the popular fun lovers,
and the type
that's passionate and impulsive.
All based on the balance
of your four humors, or bodily fluids.
Those calm types were phlegmatic.
That is extra phlegmy.
That might seem silly now,
but a lot of personality types
developed since
aren't much more scientific.
Like the ones featured
in this groovy documentary
about the health impacts of smoking.
[man] People can be divided
into Behavior Type A
and Behavior Type B.
[narrator] Those were pioneered
by this guy, Dr. Ray Rosenman.
[man] He has found a striking association
between behavior types and heart disease.
[narrator] Being Type A,
uptight, angry, intense,
increased your risk.
And it also supposedly meant
you were more likely to smoke.
Ipso facto, smokers were more likely
to develop heart problems.
So then you would find a correlation
between smoking, personality, and disease,
but smoking wouldn't cause the disease.
It would be the genetic factors
that caused both.
[narrator] That wildly misleading film was
brought to you by the tobacco industry.
The two most popular tests today,
the Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram,
whose results you see
all over social media,
aren't smoke screens for big tobacco.
But they still have issues,
including the fact that humans
don't actually exist as types at all.
Even the psychoanalyst Carl Jung,
whose theories inspired the Myers-Briggs,
acknowledged that every individual
is an exception to the rule.
There are so many different ways
to think and behave,
there's no way personality
could be tidily categorized.
That doesn't mean, however,
that it can't be measured.
Researchers combed the dictionary,
pulling out all the words
that described a way of behaving.
There were thousands.
[overlapping voices] Anxious. Impulsive.
Shy. Ambitious. Emotional. Curious.
[narrator] And then
they started to cluster them,
since someone who is gregarious
was probably also sociable.
And then they clustered those clusters.
And again, and again,
until they landed on
Five major traits of personality,
and they spell out an acronym.OCEAN.
[narrator] The so-called Big Five.
[horn toots]
There aren't a set number of types
because each trait is on a spectrum.
Most people fall somewhere in the middle,
but there are billions
of potential combinations.
And amazingly, time and again,
these traits have proven
pretty meaningful.
Someone close to you will rate you
similarly to how you'll rate yourself.
And even years from now, you'll score
mostly the same as you do today.
So these traits
seem to be a stable part of who we are.
One study found
the Big Five even holds up across
all major cultural regions of the world.
Although outside wealthy countries,
some of the survey questions
seemed to get a bit lost in translation.
So what do these traits really mean?
To start, openness.
So a high open-to-experience individual
loves to do things in ways
that are distinctive, creative, original.
[narrator] While low scorers
prefer sticking to the conventional.
One indicator of openness
is aesthetic chills.
If your skin tingles
when you experience something like
[Debussy's "Clair de Lune" plays]
you're more likely to be open.
Next up
Conscientious people are those who place
a premium ongetting things accomplished,
on being on time, on being dutiful,
on being reliable and dependable.
[narrator] Ask yourself,
would you rather plan a trip
with a regimented schedule
of sights and activities?
[camera clicking]
Or just show up and wander around?
[Little] The "E" of the Big Five
is extraversion.
And extroverts are primarily motivated
to seek out positive stimulation.
[narrator] Especially social stimulation.
Are you energized by large social groups?
Or do you find them draining?
[Little] "A" is agreeableness,
and agreeableness refers
to the disposition to be pleasant,
to go along with others.
[narrator] Think, do you tend
to question people's motives?
Or do you usually assume
the best in people?
And lastly, there's neuroticism.
[Little] I think we need to acknowledge
at the outset
that neuroticism is
a bit of a pejorative term.
I prefer the term "sensitivity."
[narrator] Neurotic people
are more sensitive
to everything that could go wrong.
Neurotic people see the negative things.
They see danger.
We each literally see things
from a different perspective.
[narrator] In one study, researchers had
about 100 volunteers look at two images,
one in front of each eye.
Most people reported seeing
just one image at a time.
Their brain suppressed one
in favor of the other.
People with a higher openness score were
more likely to see the dots morph together
into one multicolored image.
And all our traits interact too.
So whether you're open and conscientious,
or not so open and agreeable,
your view of the world
will have a slightly different shade.
Now the Big Five isn't perfect.
For one, there are
a lot of aspects of your personality
that don't correlate much
with these traits at all.
Including a dimension that I feel
is very important, called humor,
which cannot be reduced
to any of the other Big Five.
[narrator] You can be funny and pleasant,
or mean,
neurotic,
or not,
and honesty seems to be
distinctive and stable enough
that a lot of researchers
think it should be big number six.
And the Big Five isn't exactly nuanced.
Say you have
an average agreeableness score.
It could be that you're actually
extremely compassionate.
You're just also really stubborn,
and those canceled each other out.
And the Big Five
doesn't even try to measure your style,
your likes and dislikes,
or the values you live by.
So it's a somewhat crude
and incomplete summary of who you are.
But you can learn a lot from a summary.
Your Big Five score actually has
just as much of an impact on huge things,
like your lifespan, your marriage,
and your career success,
as your socioeconomic status
and your cognitive ability.
Open people tend to get married later,
favoring more romantic exploration.
Agreeable people make less money.
And when researchers followed
hundreds of Dutch people over 16 years,
neurotic people had more bad things
happen to them.
- [crash]
- [man groans]
[narrator] Which in turn
made them more neurotic.
And conscientious people
tend to live longer.
In fact, personality tests
taken by elementary school kids
could predict whether they'd have
heart disease in their fifties
with an accuracy of almost 70%.
So, of course, a lot of us wish we could
change something about ourselves.
Certain personalities
seem set up for better lives.
But it's not so easy to do that.
We see eye to eye on most things.
Especially really big things.
A lot of the same music.
- [Adam] Like a lot of the same food.
- Yep.
- We both love tag sales.
- Both love tag sales.
- Yeah.
- That's a big one.
[narrator] About half of your personality
is inherited.
In fact, it starts to reveal itself
before you can even talk.
[Little] At a few weeks of age,
you can make a loud noise,
and some babies
will turn their heads away,
and other babies
will orient to the loud noise.
And those seem to predict what later on
will become individual differences
in extraversion and introversion.
[narrator] Nervous babies usually grow up
to be nervous adults,
shy babies tend to become shy adults,
and chatty babies
often become chatty adults.
Adam has always wanted to talk.
He'd be telling me about this
and about that.
He would, like,
get all of his dinosaurs together
and they'd all have a little tea party
along with the dog.
He's always reaching out, looking to talk
with other people, engage other people.
- He has always been like this.
- Great ingredients.
A good recipe.
Totally good recipe.
[narrator] But if all of your personality
is predetermined at birth,
identical twins would have
the exact same one.
[woman] If you were an animal,
what animal would you be?
- A cheetah.
- That's what I was gonna say.
- Yeah, right? Yeah.
- [both laugh]
[woman] Why a cheetah?
[both] It's fast.
[narrator] And while
they are pretty similar,
they are not the same.
I would say Lu has more friends than me.
Lu straight up has more friends.
I'm a super introvert.
You're fun going.
He's so, like, just free spirit.
I love that. I wish I had some of that.
If we were both like me, man,
it would be a disaster.
Yeah.
So at every stage of development,
our genetic propensities are shaped by
and are expressed by the situations,
the cultural context that we confront
as we, uh, live our lives.
[woman] Our genes provide us
with our limitations.
And then, with practice,
you can get to either
the higher end within your constraints
or, you know,
you could be at the lower end.
[narrator] It's like with singing.
Everyone can get better with practice.
I can practice too,
and I might become a better singer,
but I might not be
someone like Mariah Carey
who can reach these crazy range of notes.
[vocalizing]
It is what it is.
[narrator] Same with something
like neuroticism.
If you're born within this range,
a traumatic experience
might push you to this end,
especially when you're young.
Think of it like your brain
is like a piece of clay being sculpted,
and it's really soft and malleable
at first, so it's easier to mold.
[narrator] But unlike vocal range,
it's hard to isolate
what factors shape our personalities
because everything we see and experience
potentially does.
Like the example set by your parents.
My mother grew up in the Depression
and, you know, from then on,
it's like, "I am not gonna be poor again."
"I'm gonna do whatever I can
to give everything to everybody,"
and we were gonna be educated.
My mother came from the West Indies.
You know, she she came here,
she only had an eighth-grade education.
She worked so hard.
Yeah, I admired her.
Long and short of it is, I admired her.
Research shows that parental influence
As much as we think
we have so much influence over our kids,
we don't have that much influence,
unless it's at the extremes.
But outside of that,
really peer groups have most influence.
[narrator]
Especially in our teenage years,
which are this golden period
when our brains are still pretty moldable,
but we have more freedom
to decide what's molding them.
We did everything together
throughout high school.
I danced, Janet didn't,
and I asked her
to go to a dance class one time
and she came along
just for the experience.
We went to Carnegie Ballet
She did not tell me
it was a room full of dancers.
Like Carnegie dancers.
- I want to live fully as long as I can.
- We don't want to miss anything.
Yeah, exactly.
I think we're similar.
That's our most similar quality.
- But I think we're similar to our mothers.
- Yes.
I hope that doesn't change
now as we get older.
I don't want to be
the crabby old lady for sure.
[narrator] Through life, all of us
tend to shift gradually in one direction.
We get nicer, more reliable, mellower.
And major life events
push us to change a little faster.
Marriage, on average,
makes us less extroverted.
Military training makes us less agreeable,
while college tends to do the opposite.
Same with retirement.
I think the evidence is pretty clear
that our personalities change and grow
as we develop along a life path
[narrator] As we grow up,
the clay of our brains just hardens,
so it takes more work, or more time,
or a more intense experience
to make a dent.
But that clay never dries completely.
Every time you learn something new,
you're actually changing the brain.
You're creating a new connection
or strengthening a connection.
There's still always room for change.
Psychotherapy, for example,
can change substantially a person's score
on the neuroticism factor.
[narrator] And early research shows
that just one guided psychedelic trip
can make people more open.
Likely because psychedelics
cause your brain
to make all kinds of new connections.
In a sense,
re-softening the clay of your mind.
But if you want to be more open,
you could also just take a picture
of something beautiful every day.
If you want to be more conscientious,
you could try cleaning
a corner of your home every day.
You can change by just acting
like the person you want to be.
The important thing
is to do it consistently.
You're not trapped
in these behavioral patterns.
I think, once you become aware of them
and notice them,
you have the capacity to change.
If we can enact a behavior
or sequence of such behaviors,
it can become easier
to do it in the future,
and it becomes second nature.
I grew up in a traditional Chinese family.
I didn't stand out too much.
I knew that if I stand out too much,
people will realize, "That kid is queer."
"That kid is too feminine."
"That kid is not like
the rest of the boys."
So I was really trying
to be really low profile about it.
I used to be really quiet.
I used to be really reserved.
I used to be an extreme introvert.
I still am.
But now if I have to be an extrovert,
I can be.
So eventually, through drag,
by putting on
my superhero cape slash mask,
I was able to find that confidence,
I was able to find
that courage and bravery
as my "superhero" Yuhua Hamasaki,
and I was able to translate all those
characters to my out-of-drag character.
[announcer] New York City, show some love
for the one and only Miss Yuhua!
Give it up for Yuhua!
[Little] There are fates beyond traits.
And those are concerned with or due to
what I call the personal projects
that we engage in in our daily lives.
Everybody does drag.
When you go to work, you go to school,
you meet your friends,
your first dates, your family,
we all have these different kinds
of "costumes," quote unquote,
that we wear and characteristics
that we play up to fit in that group.
That's part of what makes us human
is that we don't just have to act
on our sort of baseline
animalistic instincts.
- [crowd cheers]
- [announcer] Yuhua!
[announcer cheers]
[audience cheers and applauds]
[narrator] But while we all have
the ability to act against our traits
and change them in the process,
we can't completely
relay the foundation of who we are.
[Little] There is a phenomenon
known as Rank Order Consistency.
If you go back
to your high school reunion,
you may not be as extroverted
as you were as a high school kid,
but your rank order
is likely to stay the same,
so that you're still the one that is
likely to crack jokes at the reunion.
Janet is the fastest talker
you will ever meet.
Now, she has slowed down with each decade,
but if she gets going,
you'll see exactly what I mean.
I'm the funny one.
I'm also the one that's on top of things.
If something has to be taken in charge
or planned, they'll be like,
"Here, go ahead, girl."
Adam has this sturdy center in himself,
and he's had it since he was a little boy.
He helps me be a better person.
It all changes you.
I mean, that's for sure.
But at the core,
you're still the same person.
[narrator] Which is how connections
forged as kids can last a lifetime,
keeping us tethered to the parts
of ourselves we hope won't ever change.
Bryant's like my rock.
He's like my protector.
He's always been like my right hand.
That's who he is. My right hand.
We always have a friend forever.
And so, for those
who want to change, fine.
I guess my caveat would be,
"Are you sure you want to change?"
[narrator] Humans evolved this incredible
range of personalities for a reason.
Our neurotic ancestors
were less likely to get eaten by a lion
than their more stable, cheery friends.
And in the modern world
It can bring value to even a relationship
where an individual may raise things
that a more happy-go-lucky person
may ignore and therefore not deal with.
[narrator] We need
less agreeable people too,
to stand up for what's right.
Less open people
help keep society functioning.
Less conscientious people
take more risks that push society forward.
Without them,
life would be a lot less fun.
And some of history's greatest leaders
were introverts.
Fear did not deter them in 1776.
Fear must not deter us now.
Traits of personality are subtle.
And we need to be careful
that we don't just say,
"These are the good traits,
these are the bad traits."
They interact with the projects,
the tasks, the situations,
the context in which we live.
[narrator] Including the context
we create for ourselves,
because we aren't just
the protagonists of our stories.
We are the narrators.
[Dianne] We were very lucky.
Adolescents need that sense of security.
The ability to feel like they fit in.
We fit in.
- We felt comfortable, I would say.
- We did.
[Lucius] I would be the one
to go out and just mess up. Right?
And Bryant would be the one to lay back,
watch me do it first,
then learn from my mistakes.
- It's like I'm kind of like the
- The go for it one.
Yeah, and Bryant's kind of like
he'll take the wheel later.
As a kid, I wanted to fit in.
I wanted to belong.
I wanted to be like everyone else
so that I'm not the oddball.
But the older that I get,
the longer that I do drag,
the more comfortable with who I am,
I realize that
just be yourself.
[narrator] People tend to be happier
if their stories contain more agency.
They made things happen,
as opposed to things happening to them.
And the struggles you've faced
matter less to who you are right now
than your ability
to turn them into tales of redemption.
We had some
very difficult things happen.
My oldest son was killed and, uh,
my other two boys
were just left destroyed.
I had a lot of difficulties
with my relationships with some friends,
with some family.
I definitely had
a lot of internalized anger.
[inhales deeply]
Worked through that,
came out, uh, the other side,
and, uh, continued on
being a clergy person through that.
I found a much deeper appreciation
and excitement in other people.
And now, as an adult,
I think I'm just, uh
I'm a really nice, kind of outgoing nerd
who likes to spend time, uh, by myself.
[narrator] Personality tests
can be useful.
They reassure us that we're not alone
and remind us that we all see the world
a little differently.
[indistinct]
[narrator] But they're also just one way
to tell a story.
A story you haven't even finished writing.
Are they worth doing?
Yes, as the beginning, not the end,
of a process of discovery.
And that discovery is about who you are,
where you're going,
and what you might yet become.
[closing theme music playing]