And so, I sent in my email a link to the other lecture that was supposed to happen, but I

have to go to a conference on Thursday and Friday and so I'm going to do the last lecture

today, and you can watch the second-last lecture from last year, which will cover the territory,

hopefully, sufficiently well.

So, I usually use the last lecture to sort of sum up where we've been and also to talk

to people about… let me open it up here first… about my more specific thoughts on

personality.

So I think that's probably what I'll do today.

I'll start with what we've… where we've been.

So I started talking to you about mythological representations of personality, and I wanted

to do that for a variety of reasons, but the most important was to place the rest of the

course in a deep history context, essentially.

Because personality is the consequence of very many things.

And many of them are grounded in our biology and therefore grounded in evolution.

And I generally think that in some ways, the social sciences don't take evolution seriously

enough.

They don't take the fact that we're 3.5 billion years old seriously enough.

It's a serious thing.

And some of that is evident in a relatively straightforward way conceptually, in that

we share so much of our biological platform with other creatures.

You know, there was a recent genomic analysis, I think, of gorillas.

And I don't remember what percentage of our DNA we share with gorillas, but it's

like 99.2% or something like that, which, you know, is quite shocking, until you realise

that we share about 70% of our genetic make-up with yeast.

So, you know, yeah, obviously we're a lot closer to gorillas than to yeast, but we're

still pretty damn close to yeast.

And it also indicates not necessarily just how similar we are to gorillas, but how minor

modifications in a genome can also make substantial differences, because alike as we are to gorillas,

we're a lot different from them too.

So there's the biological aspect, which is really important.

But then there's what you might describe as a quasi-biological element, which seems

to be operating in the space between biology as evolutionarily determined, and culture.

Those things are often… you know, we have an archetypal tendency to consider culture

as something in opposition to nature.

And there's utility in that, from a heuristic point of view.

You can do a lot with that division from a conceptual perspective.

But in a lot of ways it's misleading.

Because some of the primordial elements of culture are biological.

And I think the most striking example of that, fundamentally, is… there's two striking

examples.

One is the existence of structures of power, or structures of authority, or structures

of influence; hierarchies, which are incredibly old, at least 400 million years old.

And which have in consequence been around for so long that you also have to think about

them as part of the environment, part of nature.

Because we tend to think of the hierarchical structure as cultural, and also as easily

alterable, in some sense.

But there's no reason to think that, given that it's been around, as I pointed out

in one lecture, longer than trees.

It's a very, very permanent element of the environment that human beings find themselves

in.

So much so that… you know, you can think of a dominance hierarchy as the prototype

of culture, but because it's been a constant environmental feature for so long, our nervous

systems are built for operation within a hierarchy, and they're really built that way, and it's

not a trivial matter.

Because the serotonin system that regulate our emotions (because the serotonin system

does that, fundamentally), is also the system that sets up your brain during fetal development.

The serotonin system is above all, perhaps, concerned with calibrating your nervous system

in accordance with your position in a hierarchy.

And its basic rule is, the higher in a hierarchy you are, the less negative emotion you have

to feel.

And the lower in the hierarchy you are, and the more tenuous your actual life (because

there's a direct connection between the tenuousness of your life and your position

in a dominance hierarchy), the more negative emotion you're going to feel.

And then that has drastic consequences and those are best exemplified in longevity.

So there was a famous study called the Whitehall study, which was done in Britain.

And basically what they were looking at was health, including mortality, of English civil

servants.

And the first study was done 50 years before the second study.

I think the second study was done in the 80s.

Anyways, in the first study, you have a power hierarchy, with the top civil servants at

the top, obviously, and the bottom civil servants at the bottom.

And you might ask yourself, what constitutes top and bottom, and some of it might be regarded

as autonomy over choices.

So that would be part of it, you can make choices so you have a bit more control over

what's going to happen to you.

But also, the probability that you have a stable and productive place is higher the

higher you go and lower the lower you go.

And the consequence of that, all things considered, is that the civil servants at the bottom of

the dominance hierarchy died younger and more frequently than those at the top.

Now you could attribute that to poverty, right, because the people at the bottom, especially

in the 1930s, were materially deprived in comparison to the people at the top, although

they certainly weren't materially deprived in comparison, say, to UK citizens a hundred

years before, or to most people in the world at that time.

So, a poverty argument is hard to make, although a relative poverty argument is easier to make.

But then, 50 years later, Britain was a lot richer, and so the absolute level of wealth

of the entire hierarchy moved up substantially, so that the people at the bottom were richer

than the people in the middle in the previous study.

But the pattern of overall mortality remained quite similar.

And you know, the importance of studies like that, as well as studies that indicate the

consequence of income inequality on behaviour, are so important that they should be put front

and center in university curricula.

I mean one of the things that really bothers me about the humanities education in particular,

although some of the social science education too, for modern university students, is that

there are some things we know that you're never taught.

And it's really appalling, especially the relative poverty issue, because most of the

phenomena that people tend to attribute to poverty have nothing to do with poverty.

It's relative poverty.

And that is absolutely not the same thing.

Because the first one is a material deprivation hypothesis.

But if you think about it, there's almost no one in America who's materially deprived.

Now you know, you could become… and I'm not saying there's no one.

I'm saying there's almost no one.

And you know, it also depends on your definition of material deprivation, but most people,

the vast majority of people, have too much to eat, and a place to live.

And, you know, once you have plumbing and heating, and food, and access to information,

you've pretty much got everything that wealth can give you that isn't relative.

The privation part of it is gone.

But relative poverty, relative position, is an unbelievably powerful determinant of almost

everything that you could imagine.

So, longevity is one, health is another.

And a lot of those are stress-related.

It's a lot more stressful at the bottom than it is at the top.

I'll tell you something interesting we found out about conservatism.

And this is… when I wrote…

I wrote a book called Maps of Meaning a long while back, and I realised that I was trying

to account for why people are prone to identifying so strongly with their belief systems, you

know.

And part of it, in some sense, was a control over negative outcomes hypothesis.

So partly, if you have an ideological theory, it's a set of tools that you can use, with

quite a bit of proficiency, to operate in the world, right?

Simplification strategy enables you to control uncertainty.

It also enables you to communicate with people.

But even more importantly, to the degree that we share a cultural system, we can predict

each other.

And that's not psychological, it's you act out the game and I act out the game, and

so, I don't really have to know much about you.

And I don't have to assume that you're a barrel of snakes.

I can assume that you're more or less like me.

And so if we interact I don't have to be on constant alert.

And so that's not a psychological function of a belief system.

That's a direct, real world function.

And if you listen to people like the terror management theorists, they're always telling

you how belief systems protect people against psychological uncertainty, or maybe the fear

of death.

They never tell you that shared belief system actually prevent from death, which is even

more important than protecting you from the fear of death.

So, there is the stabilisation of society aspect that's a motivator for maintaining

a set of shared beliefs.

Because it kind of makes us identical.

Which you might say is bad on the side of individuality.

It's like yeah, yeah, individuality.

It's really good on the side of not having to assume that the next person is going to

kill you.

And that's way more important than individuality.

You know, the other thing that I'd like to make a case for briefly is that, you know,

in the West…

people think that Western people are individualistic.

That's the stupidest theory ever I think.

Except for maybe the theory that poverty is at the root of all these social problems that

we see.

Western people are hardly individual at all.

All you have to do is go out and look at traffic patterns to figure that out.

Everybody stops at a red light.

Everybody crosses when the walk signal turns.

Virtually everybody waits in line when there's a line-up for some restricted access event.

We all dress the same way, men and women alike.

You know, we follow the rules like mad, like crazy.

And then on top of that there's a bit of fluff, which is the things we could do if

we were free, which we could talk about and dream about but which hardly anybody does.

And that's what looks like individuality.

So you get that freedom, but the cost of it is incredible obedience.

But you know, the fact of the obedience is that, well, you can sit here for example,

and look at this, it's all safe and everything.

And you can come here with all these other weird primates and you don't know a damn

thing about them, and they come from all sorts of different places but there's a shared

social structure and everybody participates in the game and then all of a sudden, it's

basically safe.

Fine.

That's one reason for conservatism and for identification with a belief system.

It's like stabilise the damn game so you can predict the other primates.

And a lot of people who talk about conservatism as a political belief make the assumption

that that control element is the fundamental motivator for right-wing political belief.

But weirdly enough, the other thing that happens when you stabilise a game, let's say, which

would be a shared belief, is that you provide a goal.

Because a shared value system is always oriented towards a goal.

Otherwise it's not a value system, it's not a belief system.

And the things is, and this is a Piagetian point, as soon as you organise something around

a goal, you give the people opportunity to do two things… three things.

Cooperate within the rule framework, compete within the rule framework, so that brings

in the possibility of victory and loss, and also to experience some positive emotion.

Because if we haven't unified our game (which is basically the job of a bloody three-year

old), and so we're each playing our own games, there's no way that we can collectively

aim at something and there's no way that you can progress.

So you know one of the things that, when you're taught about the oppressive structure, say,

of the patriarchal system, one of the things that's never noted is that because that's

a hierarchical system, it's also a pre-condition for any kind of victory.

And that would even be victory over yourself.

If you want to be better tomorrow than you are today, basically what you're doing is

aiming at a point that's defined by the value system, so that's aiming up, and trying

to move yourself towards.

If you get rid of that shared value system there's no structure for positive emotion

anymore.

So, part of the reason people want to stabilise their belief systems is so that the environment

(mostly other people, but also the environment) remains under control, and thank God for that,

because otherwise it's just outright bloody chaos.

But the other reason is, no game, no winners.

Nothing to do.

And that's, I think, why there's an orthogonal relationship between agreeableness and conscientiousness.

You know, conscientiousness seems to do something like stabilise rule structures across long