Derek Thompson

confident are we that we're getting a good read of people's conscientiousness or a good read of their personality, period, when there's all sorts of reasons for folks to misrepresent who they actually are to some anonymous pollster?

One of your other pieces that I absolutely adore is about the possibility that we've passed human peak brainpower.

You found that data across several countries, especially industrialized countries that I was looking at, show that adults and young people are struggling to concentrate.

that there's declining verbal scores and numerical reasoning scores, how might that finding that education assessment scores are declining in the U.S.

and throughout, I suppose, the industrialized world, match up with the finding that conscientiousness, at least in the U.S., in this most recent paper of yours, is also falling?

So you have this finding of declining conscientiousness at a time when we're also seeing declining education scores.

The other findings that you have, neuroticism up, agreeableness down, extroversion down, these also seem to me to have what you called external validities, right?

Neuroticism up.

I look around the internet and I certainly see, not just the internet, but also surveys, and I see not only is negativity through the roof, but also self-reports of anxiety and depression are up.

When I see extroversion down, I think, well,

I spent all this time writing The Antisocial Century about how we're spending less time around each other.

And in many cases, this is chosen aloneness.

It's people who could go out and see their friends who are choosing day after day and week after week to spend more time on their couch, watching television on their phones.

I wonder...

What you think it means, don't necessarily draw from what I just said.

What you think it would mean for a population, especially of young people, to have lower conscientiousness, higher neuroticism, less agreeableness, and significantly less extroversion.

What kind of a population would this describe?

So we've established the what here.

I want to talk now a little bit about the why.

What is the strongest case that the most obvious usual suspect here, the internet and smartphones, are significantly to blame for these personality changes that you've described?