John Burn-Murdoch

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.

They tend to have similar shapes of prevalence, by which I mean things like younger people tend to be historically more extroverted than older people.

Conscientiousness, which we're going to talk a lot about, has tended to be lower among teenagers, builds into adulthood.

So there are these pretty consistent patterns.

And then where people have tried to study the same people over time, they've tended to get pretty similar scores on those traits over time.

And as I say, that's been one of the reasons that

this has been accepted as a really valid instrument.

If someone scores as pretty conscientious in one survey and then not conscientious at all in the next, that would mean, what are we even doing here?

But historically, across space and time, these things stand out pretty well.

Sure.

So this is a good question because I think people often think that this is to do with someone's conscience and, you know, how sort of considerate and kind they are and everything.