John Burn-Murdoch

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.

We have these devices now which are always competing for our attention.

And, you know, we are what we give our attention to.

I know you've done a huge amount of work on this space, but being conscientious is about delivering on the goals you made for yourself.

And distraction is almost by definition is taking you away from what you thought, what you meant to be doing.

Similarly, when it comes to intelligence, the way I've been thinking about whether it's intelligence or conscientiousness is we have an innate capacity and then we have the deployment of that capacity.

And so someone might be super smart, people might be as smart today as ever, even smarter.

But if our ability to express those smarts, as it were, keeps getting outcompeted, displaced by or distracted by devices, technology, then we're just not able to bring that to bear in the same way.

So I think it's possible that similar things are going on there.

And

People like the analogy of muscles.