Derek Thompson

The modern world changed our personality.

115 years later, it's changing us again.

According to new analysis by the Financial Times writer John Byrne Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to America's personalities in just the last decade.

According to longitudinal tests that he'll describe in just a moment, we have collectively become meaningfully less extroverted, less agreeable, and more neurotic.

But the most important thing Byrne Murdoch found is that measures of conscientiousness among young Americans appear to be in a kind of freefall.

Today's guest is John Byrne Murdoch.

We talk about the value of conscientiousness, what it is, what kind of behavior it predicts, and how the modern world might be scrambling our personalities by making us less interested in other people and more consumed with our own neurotic interiority.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain English.

John Byrne Murdoch, welcome back to the show.

You reported that in the last decade there's been an important change in Americans' personalities.

Tell us what you found.

So falling conscientiousness, rising neuroticism, falling agreeableness, and falling extroversion.

Those were the big four of the big five findings that I saw in your paper.

Before we dive into some of the details here, including the methodology, I want to scope up at a high level

How unusual is it for a population's personality to change this suddenly?

It was sort of my understanding, not being an expert in this field at all, that a population had a certain stable personality genotype,

if you will, that there was a certain amount of agreeableness and extroversion, and it didn't change much over time.

And in fact, people don't change that much over time.

That's part of why the big five personality test seems to be so respected is it captures something quite profound and unchanging about people.