Derek Thompson

Like if you take my test scores and you tell me, Derek, you are the kind of person who has low conscientiousness, what kind of behavior would that predict in me?

When I reached out to Lisa Damore, a childhood psychologist, she pointed me to a 2013 essay that she wrote for the New York Times that I want to quote from here because it's so relevant.

Quote, when we look at the research on childhood precursors of adult wellbeing, the traits we see in children who go on to become happy adults,

we find that the driving factor is childhood conscientiousness, not childhood happiness.

Children who are industrious, orderly, and have good self-control are more likely than their careless or undisciplined peers to grow into happy adults, end quote.

John, you just walked through some of the sub-traits of conscientiousness where people are answering questions like, do you make plans and follow through?

Do you persevere until finished?

Are you easily distracted or careless?

These are all questions that someone could lie about.

I mean, someone could just say, yeah, I love making plans.

I'm incredible at following through.

My focus is impeccable.

When underneath that, they actually make no plans and are easily distracted all the time.

How...

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.