John Burn-Murdoch

And

That's an element of this.

But I think of it more and it helps to actually look at the survey questions that go into making up this trait.

So it's things like people are asked whether they strongly agree, strongly disagree, et cetera, about whether they are someone who does a thorough job.

whether they're someone who is reliable whether they're someone who tends to be organized uh are they easily distracted are they someone who makes plans regularly and follows through with those plans you know are they someone who's goal-oriented high agency that kind of thing um do they persevere so it's yeah it's about are you someone who goes out and gets things done do you

Do you come up with goals in the first place?

And then do you make sure that you pursue those goals?

Do your friends, your coworkers, can they rely on you to deliver essentially?

For sure.

So it's a great question.

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.