John Burn-Murdoch

And there's not, again,

annoyingly for me, there's not a completely watertight answer.

The way I would talk about this is a couple of things.

So one, if we're saying that what we think is happening here is that people have simply started being more down on their conscientiousness, as it were, maybe they've become more strict evaluators of their own traits.

I think you had to come up with an explanation for why that suddenly started happening and why it's specifically happening among younger adults.

That's quite hypothetical, so let me give you a more direct answer, which is one of the reasons Lisa Damore said what she said is that we have decades of research showing that

People who have more conscientiousness, as evaluated by their responses to these questions, have better life outcomes.

They earn more, they live longer, and it's less likely that their romantic relationships end in separation.

So this is something that has real external validity in terms of what it seems to be associated with.

And one of the things I did as part of my analysis here was to check exactly that.

So this same survey that's been running for 11 years also captures income.

And what it shows is that A, conscientiousness is still positively associated with income, but B, that has only become more true.

So if conscientiousness, as measured by these surveys, was actually more fuzzy and it wasn't clear exactly whether the most conscientious people in reality were giving the most conscientious replies, as it were, then we wouldn't have seen that pattern.

So again, ultimately, this is a survey like any survey.

We can't know anything.

how sort of really true to someone their answer is we also can't really know how that's changed over time but all of the sort of related data both within the same survey and outside it would suggest that there's no reason to doubt this these responses these personality measurements anymore today than we did uh 15 years ago

Sure.

So the way I tie these two together is that I've been thinking about this and I've come up with a catchy way of describing how the internet or specifically ubiquitous mobile internet, smartphones and so on, how they impact us.

And I think of it as the two Ds, which are distraction and displacement.

So distraction, I think, doesn't need a huge amount of explanation.