Derek Thompson

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.

So how unusual is a change of this magnitude and this suddenness?

So the fact that personality seems stable makes it all the more remarkable, I think, that your analysis showed this level of change among young people in the last few years.

Let's talk about that change.

You told me that people today are meaningfully less conscientious

What does that mean?

And what kind of behavior does it predict?