John Burn-Murdoch

Great to be here.

Right, so this one I should say out of the gate that this is something I've been wanting to look into for ages.

I'm fascinated by how the world changes.

I'm also fascinated by how we within the world change in response to that.

And one of the things I often come up against is

how few studies actually track the same people or any people across time in terms of who we are.

So what I wanted to look at here was, your listeners I'm sure are familiar with the concept of personality traits.

Some people are more extroverted, introverted, that's the most common one people grasp, but there are all these other traits.

And I wanted to see how people's levels, prevalence of these traits have changed over time.

I landed on this survey, which has been tracking Americans for just over a decade now.

And what I found was that across the population, but especially true of younger adults, so people in their 20s and their 30s, what we've seen is this decline in some of the most positive, valued traits that we would all consider to be good traits

good aspects of a character, so that someone being conscientious, disciplined, committed, extroversion, chatty, agreeableness, that kind of thing, these have declined especially significantly among younger adults.

While neuroticism, and that can feel like a loaded term, but what we mean by that is the extent to which people feel emotions particularly strongly, especially negative emotions, that has been significantly rising among those same age groups.

Yeah, it's a fascinating one because, again, we can get into this down the line in terms of what we really mean when we talk about someone's personality.

But the way these traits are typically measured is there's a large battery of agree-disagree statements that people are given which describe traits.

the type of person the type of behavior someone might have so it's things like i am outgoing and talkative or i am often distracted i'm often careless or i'm really someone who always makes plans and follows through with those plans these are the the sort of ingredients as it were that go into the scores that define um someone as being more or less conscientious neurotic etc

And so loads and loads and loads of people have studied this across all sorts of countries and over many, many decades.

But it's relatively rare that someone has or that a study has tracked this repeatedly among the same people, same place, over time.

Now, what we do know, as you say, is that where there have been repeated studies, whether that's same place in time or different place in time, they are pretty consistent with one another.

So regardless of which culture, Western, East Asian, South Asian, you tend to get these distinct groups or distinct traits showing up in the data frequently.