To take the test, you give yourself a point every time you see the surname of someone you know personally—someone whose name you know and who knows yours. If you know two people with the same surname, you give yourself two points.
Among a group of college students who took the test, the average score was 21. Among a sample of Gladwell’s friends—many of them journalists, most ten years or more out of college—it was 41, ranging from a low of 9 to a high of 95.
If you scored 9 on Gladwell’s test, it doesn’t mean you have only nine friends and acquaintances in your social circle; you have vastly more than that, since the 250 names on Gladwell’s list are only a small fraction of all the names there are. And Gladwell asked only about friends and acquaintances. What if he asked about all the people, living and dead, you can identify by name—movie actors and politicians, sports figures and scientists, authors and musicians, even fictional characters in TV shows and books? It has been at least fifty years since I last read Little Women but I still remember Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. My brain didn’t have to toss out Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy to make room for Tiger Woods and Ernie Els.
The ease with which we collect information about people, and the pleasure we take in collecting it, are matched by the ease and pleasure with which we share it. The sharing is called “gossip”—a pejorative term that takes note of the fact that it’s fun while denying that it might have a serious purpose. As soon as children can talk to each other they begin to talk about each other. “Do you like Jamie?” “No, Jamie broke my crayon.” Older children spend much of their lunchroom and playground time gossiping. Too bad they don’t enjoy learning math and science as much as they enjoy exchanging information (which might not even be true) about people (whom they may never have met).
Grownups gossip too, of course. Robin Dunbar and his students listened in on people’s conversations and found that two-thirds of conversation time is spent on “matters of social import. Who is doing what with whom.” Dunbar believes that the ability to share information about people had important survival and reproductive benefits for our ancestors. “In a nutshell,” he says, “I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”35 To propose that gossip is the primary purpose of language is, I think, carrying it a bit too far; language serves many important functions and is unlikely to have evolved just so A can tell B what C is doing with D. However, a weaker version of Dunbar’s proposal is plausible: one of the reasons that language evolved is to allow us to gossip.36
Whatever A wants to tell B about C, their language is sure to provide a way of saying it. In 1936, a couple of obsessive-compulsive American psychologists went through Webster’s New International Dictionary from A to Z and marked every word they judged to be “descriptive of personality or personal behavior.” They counted 17,953 of them.37 English is exceptionally rich in vocabulary, but all languages provide a variety of words to describe personality and personal behavior. Gossip is a popular activity all over the world—a human universal.38
Universals often go unnoticed. We tend to take for granted things that everyone can do. That’s one of the reasons why atypical individuals—people who can’t do these things because there is something wrong with their brains—are of particular interest to researchers. The British cognitive scientist Simon Baron-Cohen has learned a great deal about the normal human mind by studying children with autism.
Autistic children, as we now know, are born that way; it’s not something their parents did to them. Something went wrong—neuroscientists don’t yet know exactly what—in the development of their brains. Genes clearly play a role; identical twins are generally concordant for autism. When one twin has the disorder, the other is likely to have it too.39
Autism doesn’t knock out a single ability; it knocks out a whole family of them. To an evolutionary psychologist (Baron-Cohen is an evolutionary psychologist as well as a cognitive scientist—an increasingly common combination), this means that the mental mechanisms that normally serve these abilities are missing or malfunctioning. Indeed, it is hard to explain autism without invoking mental mechanisms, because some abilities are spared while others are absent.
One of the abilities that is missing or badly impaired in autistic children is the ability to recognize faces. There is neurophysiological evidence that autistic people visually process faces the way nonautistic people process objects.40 It is a tedious business, learning to tell people apart the way we learn to tell objects apart, and autistic children take no pleasure in it. Normal babies, as I mentioned, gaze avidly at people’s faces; autistic babies do not. Their lack of interest in learning to tell people apart is evidence, not only that their people-information acquisition device isn’t working properly, but that this device, when functioning normally, supplies the motivation as well as the ability.
Individuals with autism not only lack an interest in finding out what makes people tick: in some sense they are unaware of the ticking. They lack what cognitive scientists call a “theory of mind.” Simon Baron-Cohen wrote an interesting book on this topic, titled Mindblindness, in which he worked out the specifications of the theory-of-mind mechanism. Autistic children are mindblind because they don’t automatically realize that other people have minds. They don’t realize that other people have thoughts and knowledge that may differ from their own. They don’t realize that, simply by telling a person something, they can put a thought—possibly a false one—into that person’s mind. Normal children develop the abilities that underlie these realizations by the age of four.41
What I haven’t seen mentioned in the literature on autism is that these children not only fail to appreciate that other people have minds: they also fail to appreciate the variation among minds. They don’t seem to be aware of, or interested in, the fact that people differ in personality. They don’t seem to realize that people have personalities, and that knowing something about their personalities can help to predict their behavior in the future. They also lack the motivation to share information about individuals. Autistic children don’t gossip.
Earlier in this chapter I described a mental bias called the fundamental attribution error. I gave the example of the subjects who thought that a grad student was cold and unfriendly because she behaved that way during a brief conversation. A few pages later I provided another example, without drawing your attention to it. Did you notice that I called the researchers who went through the dictionary counting personality words “obsessive-compulsive”? The only thing I knew about them was that they went through the entire dictionary and counted 17,953 personality words, but from that meager information I concluded something about their personalities.
Neurologically normal humans have a strong tendency to draw conclusions about an individual’s personality on the basis of a sample of behavior, even if there are other possible explanations for why she behaved that way. The conclusion that an individual has a certain personality is a prediction about how she will behave in the future. We jump to the conclusion that a sample of behavior is a clue to someone’s personality because our minds—more precisely, our people-information acquisition devices—are built that way.
Mental organs are expensive to build and to run, and the fancy ones require a lot of evolutionary time to get them working properly. They don’t evolve by chance; they don’t evolve unless they provide their owners with some benefit in terms of survival or reproduction. The way the people-information acquisition device works implies that the following things were as true during the evolution of our species as they are today: that people had personalities, that personalities differed from one individual to another, that behavior was an indication of personality, and that it was useful to learn something about a given individual’s personality because people were, at least to some extent, consistent. The information was worth acquiring because it told us what to expect in the future from that individual.
Today we store information about individuals we will never meet because the people-information acquisition device
, which was designed a long time ago, doesn’t know we will never meet them. In ancestral times, when there weren’t so many humans around, anyone you encountered once had a good chance of showing up again. They might turn out to be important, one way or the other, to your survival.42
There are websites where you can search for articles that have been published in psychology journals. If you type the word “personality” in the search box you will be deluged: 165,620 relevant articles published since 1985, when I just tried it. But if what you want is a definition of the word “personality,” those 165,620 articles are not the place to seek it. Look instead in a textbook of introductory psychology. A good example is the definition offered in the textbook written by the psychologist Peter Gray:
Personality refers to a person’s general style of interacting with the world, especially with other people—whether one is withdrawn or outgoing, excitable or placid, conscientious or careless, kind or stern. A basic assumption of the personality concept is that people do differ from one another in their styles of behavior, in ways that are at least relatively consistent across time and place.43
This definition captures two essential components of the concept: variety and consistency. Personality is about the ways in which people differ from one other but remain true to themselves. A third component is the emphasis on social interactions. To a large extent, we’re talking about differences in styles of social behavior.
People differ from one another in a great many ways; consequently, articles about personality cover a wide range of topics. Here, for example, are some of the topics—presumably aspects or manifestations of personality—touched on in a single eighteen-page review article:
The ability to delay gratification, the ability to process social information, aggressiveness, agreeableness, behavioral inhibition, carelessness, coercive behavior, conformity, conscientiousness, criminal behavior, curiosity, distractibility, driving while intoxicated, emotional expressiveness, extraversion, fearfulness, impulsiveness, industriousness, irritability, job satisfaction, leadership ability, moodiness, narcissism, neuroticism, openness, political attitudes, religious attitudes, restlessness, self-confidence, self-control, self-directedness, shyness, sociability, social potency, social responsibility, spouse abuse, submissiveness, substance use, the tendency to feel mistreated or deceived by others, the tendency to have temper tantrums, and the tendency to seek or avoid danger.44
This article was titled “Personality Development Across the Life Course.” It had to do with children as well as adults, which means that the research reviewed by the authors didn’t come only from standard personality tests. You can’t sit six-year-olds at a table, hand them a pencil and a sheet of paper, and ask them to check off their degree of agreement or disagreement with statements like “When people don’t treat me right, I get angry.” Self-report personality questionnaires are used mainly with adults. In fact, the term personality is applied primarily to adults; researchers who study children generally just talk about the particular characteristic they are interested in: aggressiveness, self-confidence, emotional expressiveness, whatever.
Because there are so many different things to measure, and because paper-and-pencil tests are not always appropriate or possible, the behaviors and characteristics that fall under the rubric of personality are measured in a variety of ways. Aggressiveness in children may be judged by their parents, teachers, or peers; or by researchers who observe them in their homes, on the playground, or in a laboratory. Assessments of criminal behavior may be based on court records; of spouse abuse, on the say-so of the spouse.
But because self-report personality tests are easy to give and produce lots of data that can be processed by computers, a good deal of what we now know about personality is based on this method. I’m not talking about tests (such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) used in the diagnosis of mental illness, or tests (such as the Rorschach or the Myers-Brigg) that have not held up to scientific scrutiny. The kind of tests I’m talking about have been honed over the years, through trial and error, to be reliable and accurate; their accuracy is judged by how well they agree with other methods of assessment. They are designed to assess personality within the normal range by giving quantitative estimates of where an individual falls in terms of a few basic personality dimensions. The number of dimensions varies from one brand of test to another, but the most popular format uses five: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion. Each of these dimensions is bidirectional: agreeableness–disagreeableness, extraversion–introversion, and so on. (Neuroticism means the tendency to get upset easily or to feel anxious or depressed; its opposite is emotional stability. Openness means the willingness to entertain new ideas or try new experiences.) The idea is that the infinite variety we see in human personality can be cooked up from only five ingredients, just by varying the recipe a little.45
You might be skeptical about self-report personality tests—many people are—but the truth is that every method of assessing personality has its drawbacks and we have to start somewhere. Unsupported by other evidence, data produced by a single method aren’t worth much. Be assured that no conclusion I come to in this book is based solely on the results of personality tests.
Oh, about personality development across the life course: the authors of that article concluded that there is “modest continuity” of personality from childhood to adulthood, and that personality gradually becomes more stable as people get older. But even in mid-adulthood there remains some flexibility. If your life changes, so might you.
Though evolution has provided the members of our species with built-in curiosity about how people tick, it has provided no built-in explanation of why they tick that way—why one individual is excitable and another placid, one withdrawn and the other outgoing. Stories about the origin of personality, like stories about the origin of the universe, are products of their culture—cultural myths that may be passed on for generations or overturned and supplanted by new ones almost overnight.
The developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan provided a good example: the contrast between the autobiographical writings of Alice James (sister of Henry and William) and those of the writer John Cheever. Both were subject to spells of depression that plagued their adult lives. But Alice James, writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, “believed with the vast majority of her contemporaries that she had inherited her nervous, dour mood,” Kagan reported, whereas Cheever, writing in the latter half of the twentieth, “assumed that his bouts of depression were due to childhood experiences…the conflicts that he imagined his family had created.”46 In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, explanations of why people differ in personality were based mainly on “nature”—heredity. Cultural myths changed rather abruptly in the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, explanations of why people differ have been based mainly on “nurture”—how their parents treated them while they were growing up. Notice that I do not define nurture as a synonym for environment. The word environment has a broader meaning; it means everything that isn’t heredity. But nurture, from a verb meaning “to take care of” or “to rear,” singles out one particular part of the environment: the part provided by the parents. It is nurture in particular, rather than environment in general, that plays a starring role in our cultural myths about the origin of personality.
Earlier I mentioned two new brooms for sweeping out the cobwebs in psychology: evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. Practitioners of both these disciplines are often accused of believing that “everything is genetic.” The accusation is true in neither case, but what is often overlooked is its double meaning: nature or genetic means one thing to an evolutionary psychologist, something else to a behavioral geneticist. An evolutionary psychologist uses “nature” to account for the ways that all human beings (or all those of the same sex) are alike; a behavioral geneticist uses it to account for the ways that human beings differ from one ano
ther.
Evolutionary psychologists were not breaking new ground when they proposed that human beings come with some built-in abilities and predispositions. All theories of personality include as one of their axioms—whether explicitly stated or not—that something is built in. For behaviorists it is the ability to learn from one’s experiences; for social learning theorists (who believe in observational learning) it is the ability to learn from someone else’s. For Freudians it is the libido, powered by the unconscious drives of sex and aggression; for the followers of Abraham Maslow it is the drive to self-actualize. Like evolutionary psychologists, believers in these theories use “nature” mainly to explain the ways in which all people are the same. To explain why they differ, they rely mainly on differences in environment or experiences.
Behavioral geneticists are psychologists who specialize in studying human differences. They have shown that one of the reasons people differ—not the only reason, but one of the reasons—is that they have different genes.
But neither different genes nor different environments can solve the mystery of individuality. Neither can explain why Laleh and Ladan Bijani—conjoined identical twins who, in Ladan’s words, were “stuck to each other” for twenty-nine years—had different world views, different lifestyles, different goals in life, different personalities. Neither can explain why George and Donald—identical twins who are not stuck together but who are being reared in the same home at the same time by the same parents—are different individuals, each with a unique personality.
Yes, identical twins (even those who are reared in separate homes) share lots of little quirks. But people who know both of them say things like “Ladan is the friendly one.” Whether reared together or apart, identical twins are by no means identical in the answers they check off on personality tests: the correlation between their scores is only about .50. This is a moderate correlation, not a strong one. Alice James believed that her depression was inherited, but the identical twin of someone who has experienced a major depression has only a 40 percent chance of becoming seriously depressed. The identical twin of someone with schizophrenia has only a 48 percent chance of developing the disorder.47
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