Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English BEST OF: The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality for the Worse
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of America's personality shift?
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Hi everybody, Derek here. In December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world. I'm gonna be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays. So we're gonna be re-airing some of our favorite episodes from the last 12 months, a kind of best of compendium.
And this list includes interviews that really stuck with me and others that really stuck with you and you had lots of feedback and thoughts on, including this one. I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then, happy holidays and happy new year. Today, America's personality shift.
Every few decades, it seems, the Western world seems to experience a social crisis in the face of new technology. 120 years ago, as I wrote in a recent Substack essay, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the US gradually made its way across the Atlantic. The doctor George Miller Beard called it neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion.
Europeans at the time, in the 1900s, sometimes referred to it as American nervousness, or even New York-itis. According to Beard, the affliction was most common among, quote, the indoor classes of civilized civilizations, end quote. That is to say, the illness mostly affected white-collar workers operating at the frontier of technology, handling new, fast machines.
And at the time, there were plenty of things in America that were fast and new. In 1875, there were no skyscrapers, no electric lighting, no Coca-Cola or basketball, few bicycles, no aspirin, no cars or sneakers, no cardboard boxes, no hamburgers or Kodak cameras or recorded music players.
By 1905, just 30 years later, everything I just named, from the skyscrapers to the Kodak cameras, was invented. In one 30-year swoop of history, the modern world was conjured into being. And throughout the West, people lost their minds. In Germany, the number of patients in mental hospitals rose from 40,000 in 1870 to 220,000 by 1910.
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Chapter 2: How has technology impacted social behavior in America?
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.
So the fact that personality seems stable makes it all the more remarkable, I think, that your analysis showed this level of change among young people in the last few years. Let's talk about that change. You told me that people today are meaningfully less conscientious What does that mean? And what kind of behavior does it predict?
Like if you take my test scores and you tell me, Derek, you are the kind of person who has low conscientiousness, what kind of behavior would that predict in me?
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. 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?
When I reached out to Lisa Damore, a childhood psychologist, she pointed me to a 2013 essay that she wrote for the New York Times that I want to quote from here because it's so relevant. Quote, when we look at the research on childhood precursors of adult wellbeing, the traits we see in children who go on to become happy adults,
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Chapter 3: What significant personality changes have been observed in young Americans?
The idea that people would record themselves dancing when someone canceled a plan with them. They would essentially be like, oh, it's absolutely fantastic that it's a Friday night and I can just stay at home and don't have to go out. I wanted to stay at home and watch Netflix anyway. And it's really interesting to think that you're looking at a generation
that is spending more time alone than any generation on record, and they're also celebrating when their social plans are canceled, right? This speaks to not just a loneliness crisis, I think that's misdiagnosed, but a phenomenon of chosen
aloneness, which seems very different and speaks to exactly what you found in this piece, not just maybe rising neuroticism, but certainly declining extroversion, right? Less motivation to even put yourself out there in the first place. So I, again, asked the psychologist, Lisa Damore, what do you think is causing this, right? Like it's easy to say, blame the phones.
Maybe the phones are to blame, but it's certainly common to say, just blame the phone. So what does an actual child psychologist think about this? Here's what she told me, quote, in terms of what's causing this, Here's an unsexy answer. When it comes to a trend that is observed at the population level, I think we should assume there are many factors at work, some contenders.
One, the pandemic for the extroversion finding. Two, the rise of a wellness industry that is often heavily focused on the self as opposed to being focused on others. Three, algorithmically driven digital environments that readily create psychological silos. So number three, I think we've covered. Number one,
I think it's important to say here, and correct me if I'm wrong, the changes that you're observing might have been accelerated by the pandemic, but the beginning of those changes predate the pandemic. This is a common phrase in lots of psychological and mental health changes that we've seen in the U.S.
But before I ask my actual question, is that right, that these changes both predated the pandemic and were mildly accelerated by them?
That's true, yes. So actually, with conscientiousness, it's pretty much a straight diagonal line through the 2010s up to the last couple of years. With neuroticism, agreeableness, and extroversion, you've got a slight decline pre-pandemic, a slight decline post-pandemic, but a sort of acceleration of that trend in 2020-21.
So let's focus on the second idea that Lisa suggested, which I think is really interesting and surprised me. But it's one that I just started to think about a little bit more. Again, quote, the rise of a wellness industry that is often heavily focused on the self as opposed to being focused on others, end quote.
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Chapter 4: How does conscientiousness affect behavior and life outcomes?
But I just wonder if something that changes us away from this sort of curated, photo-driven, nose-to-screen world, some subtle change that is not brought about by someone wanting to get rid of smartphones, but just some technological change that makes this a thing. That could have these sort of socio-cultural trickle-down effects that weren't anticipated.
It's tough. I like this being a solution show, but values are tricky. Value change is really tricky. Some people value reading and some people don't. Some people value watching weird 1970s movies. Some people don't. Some people value reading. making friends in adulthood. And some people don't. Changing values at a societal level, I think, is quite difficult.
And my guess is that the most likely way that we begin to see these curves bent is that we see such overwhelming evidence, as we sort of saw in teen mental health, such overwhelming evidence that these things are damaging, that the graphical evidence scares people into a kind of mass cultural change. But it's very, very hard to do.
And I really appreciate, speaking of graphs, just the incredible work you do making visual the most important trends in the world. So John Byrne Murdoch, thank you for coming on the show. Great to see you.
Thank you so much, Hamid.
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