After watching this your brain will not be the same | Jordan Peterson

if you ask a disagreeable person what what he wants say or she wants they'll tell you right away they know it's like this is what i want and this is how i'm going to get it but agreeable people especially if they're really agreeable are so agreeable that they often don't even know what they want because they're so accustomed to living for other people and to finding out what other people want and to trying to make them comfortable and so forth that it's harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life and that's not look there's situations where that's advantageous but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to forge yourself a career that just doesn't work at all and so even though on average men and women don't exist don't aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group if you go out and you look at the extremes they're very different so all of the most agreeable people are women and all of the most disagreeable people are men and the thing is the extremes are often what matter rather than what's in the middle and so one of the ways that's reflected in society by the way is there's way more men in prison and the best personality predictor of being imprisoned is to be low in agreeableness it makes you callous now you may think well what's the opposite of compassion and politeness and the answer to that is i think it's best sort of conceptualized as a as a trading game so let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games and if you're very agreeable then you're going to bargain harder on my behalf than you're going to bargain on your own behalf whereas if you're very disagreeable you're going to do the reverse you're going to think i'm in this trading game for me and you're going to take care of your own interests where an agreeable person is going to say no no at best this is at worst this has to be 50 50 but i'd like to help you every way i can one of the things you have to be careful of if you're agreeable is not to be exploited because you'll line up to be exploited and i think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants and so that just doesn't work so well in that actual world and one of the things one of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy you know people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons but one of them is they often come because they're too agreeable and so what they get is so-called assertiveness training although it's not exactly assertiveness that's being trained what it is is the ability to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf and one of the things i tell agreeable people especially if they're conscientious is say what you think tell the truth about what you think there's going to be things you think that you think are nasty and harsh and they probably are nasty and harsh but they're also probably true and you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message and it's not straightforward at all because agreeable people do not like conflict not at all they smooth the water you know and you can see you can see why that is in accordance with the hypothesis that i've been putting forward you don't want conflict around infants it's too damn dangerous you don't want fights to break out you don't want anything to disturb the the relative peace you know and if you're also more prone to being hurt physically and perhaps emotionally you also may be loath to engage in the kind of high intensity conflict that will solve problems in the short term because a lot of conflict it takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term and you know if that can spiral up to where it's dangerous which it can if it gets uncontrolled it might be safer in the short term to keep the water smooth and to not delve into those situations where conflict emerges the problem with that is it's not a very good medium to long-term strategy right because lots of times there are things you have to talk about because they're not going to go away and the advantage to having a well-socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way so if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized that person can be quite quite the creature you know because they're very they're very forward moving in their nature and very difficult to stop but if you don't get them successfully domesticated tamed roughly speaking by the time they're four their peers reject them and that's a big problem because your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four like you gotta you you wanna burn that into your brain because people don't know that that's your job and here's here's why you think it's it's easy if you think about it carefully so you imagine you've got a you've got a three-year-old child so sort of halfway through that initial period of socialization and you take that child out in public okay what do you want for the child who cares about you what do you want from the child for the child you want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her and so the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly and if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining them or you don't know how to do that properly then what they're going to do is they're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children and false smiles from other parents and adults and that's so then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying and that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the well-being of your child your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior like don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much and pay attention and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary then and you know and share and play properly then when they meet other kids the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them and that's going to go well and then they're going to go off and socialize each other for the rest of their lives because that's what happens is that from four years old onwards the primary socialization with children takes place among other children and so if the kids don't get in on that early they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind and you can imagine how terrible that is because a four-year-old will not play with another four-year-old who's two but a five-year-old certainly will not play with a five-year-old who's two right because the gap is just starting to get unbelievably large and so the kids start out behind and then the peers leave them behind and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life those are the ones