ChatGPT Interviews Ryne and Blake

0:00People are the most consequential and dangerous forces on Earth. Well, personality psychology is about the nature of human nature. It's about people. And wouldn't that be useful to know? I can't think of a more important problem.

0:19You're listening to the Science of Personality podcast, brought to you by Hogan Assessments, the global leader in personality and leadership. Guided by your hosts, Hogan Chief Science Officer and world-renowned personality psychologist, Dr. Ryan Sherman, alongside Hogan's PR manager and resident storyteller, Blake Lepp, this podcast explores the impact of personality on life, leadership, and the nature of human nature.

0:46Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Science of Personality podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Sherman, along with my co-host, as always, Blake Lepp. Say hello, Blake. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Science of Personality podcast, episode 147. Today, Ryan and I are joined by ChatGPT. Yes, you heard that correctly. Ryan and I are joined by ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that is one of many AI chatbots being used by people all over the globe to do a variety of tasks.

1:19Whether it's writing essays, drafting emails, generating code, planning vacations, or podcast hosts asking for help in building a koi pond in their backyard. These AI engines are rapidly changing how we live, work, and play. But most of the time, it's us asking ChatGPT questions and looking for answers. In this episode, we're letting ChatGPT ask the questions, and Ryan and I are going to answer them to the best of our ability. More on what the format will look like in just a moment.

1:52But before we get to our conversation with ChatGPT, if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes, or you want to ask Ryan or me a question, shoot us an email at hello at thescienceofpersonality.com or follow the Science of Personality on LinkedIn. Now, let's get to it. So, we originally had a guest schedule for this episode, but due to a scheduling conflict, we had to move that guest to a future episode. So, stay tuned for that one. It's going to be a good one. Also, because we have some fantastic guests booked through mid-June,

2:23we thought one more episode without a guest, or at least a human guest, would be appropriate as those tend to be some of our more popular episodes. I'm going to give Ryan credit for that. You know, I think people like listening to Ryan. So, Ryan and I, we were brainstorming some topics, and we actually, you know, Ryan sent me a list that he had ChatGPT generate for us as potential topics for this episode. And as I was coming through the list, I kept seeing so many topics that we had already covered in previous episodes.

2:56You know, the list included topics like reputation versus identity. Well, check. Psychological safety, check. Burnout, conspiracies, etc. Well, we've discussed all of those subjects before. So, that's when I went into ChatGPT and entered the following prompt, word for word. And everything I'm going to tell you now is going to be word for word, just so we have in the interest of transparency. So, the prompt I put in was, My name is Blake Lepp, and I am one of the hosts of the Science of Personality podcast.

3:27My co-host, Ryan Sherman, and I are wanting to have you on as a guest. But you will be asking us the questions you want to learn more about as it pertains to personality psychology, leadership, and team dynamics. What 10 questions would you like to ask us for this episode? So, the following questions, I'm actually going to ask Ryan. And then, of course, I'm going to pretend like I'm ChatGPT, but, you know, I'm going to answer to the best of my ability. Ryan's definitely the expert here.

3:58These are questions from ChatGPT verbatim. We didn't change any of the words or anything. So, although I am asking the questions, this is the exact order in which they were presented, and we did not change a word. But, before we get to the questions, I just want to say again, in the interest of transparency, here's what ChatGPT said first in my response to the prompt before giving me the questions. That's a really cool twist on the format. Basically, flipping the interviewer-interviewee dynamic.

4:29If I'm in the guest seat asking you questions, I focus on things that surface real-world insight, tension, and practical application, not just theory. Here are 10-eyed asks. So, let's kick this thing off, Ryan. The first question from ChatGPT is, if most organizations say they value certain personality traits, like humility, collaboration, but reward others, like dominance or self-promotion, what actually predicts success?

5:01Yeah, I think, first of all, this is a really good question. And I think it hits on a topic that we have covered, but this is a sort of a different angle in how to think about it. And that's about how you define success. I think that's really the key to this question. How do we define what counts as success? Now, we've talked about on this podcast before, and I talk about in lectures and talks around the world, about the distinction between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. Now, some of the original work done on this topic

5:34by Fred Luthans and colleagues in his book, Real Managers, talked about two kinds of successful leaders. They called these leaders successful if they did one of two different things. One of those things was getting promoted very rapidly and very quickly. It called that the group of leaders successful. Another group of successful leaders was ones whose teams performed really well, or a high-performing team. So those are two different routes to success, two different ways of defining success. One is about your own individual success,

6:05and the other is about success in your team. And I think that's really the critical distinction here when we think about this dichotomy of, or this sort of distinction between emergence and effectiveness. If organizations are rewarding certain traits but saying they want others, why is that the case? And what really is success about? Well, if we're talking about success as getting promoted at our own individual success, or sometimes what we would call winning that within-group competition,

6:36then it is things like dominance and self-promotion. That is what's getting rewarded in many organizations. However, when it comes to team performance, when it comes to the performance of the organization, the data show that things like humility and collaboration are more important when it comes to that between-group competition, beating out the other group, building a high-performing team. So for me, it's really about how we define success is the critical factor there. I think that people can define success

7:07in a variety of ways. At Hogan, we tend to talk about success in terms of the team's outcomes, the organizational outcomes. And if we define it that way, then we know that those personality traits that organizations say they value are more important. But in practice, it turns out that those ones that get rewarded are often what individuals tend to work their way towards.

7:31Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that this was a good question. The problem is, is that when I read the question, I had more questions myself. And it goes along the same line of thinking that you had, because the first thing that came to mind was a question, and it was success for who? You know, if you're an employee who gets promoted into a leadership position because you're a good marketer or self-promoter, or maybe you have that alpha mentality that some organizations,

8:01although they say they reward these other things, but actually in practice do reward those types of people, I mean, wouldn't that be success for the person getting promoted? I mean, if I was the person getting the promotion, I'm thinking success, you know? But from an organizational standpoint, I mean, can they truly predict success if they ignore the longstanding data and research that says, you know, maybe these charismatic people who are good at networking typically don't translate into good leaders. So, I mean, I think the answer is no.

8:34And organizations that disregard the data need to overhaul their approach if they truly want to have success. That's just what's kind of my take on it. Yeah, Blake, there's an interesting point in there as well, which is that, you know, how can you say, like, let's say an organization puts in one of these leaders who's dominant and self-promoting, and the organization continues to do well, continues to exist, and that's one way of defining if an organization does well. Does it continue to exist? Does it continue to persist into the future? Does it stay alive, so to speak? Like, how can you say that isn't success?

9:07And what I would argue is that a lot of times organizations have built things around themselves to protect themselves from even really bad leadership. So, if we look at certain kinds of companies, certain kinds of companies can do really well even with bad leadership if the economic factors are in their favor. Right now, I think a lot of Americans and a lot of people all around the world are getting a little bit squeezed by the price of oil. Well, I don't think you have to run a super effective oil company.

9:38I'm not saying that you can't ruin one, but I'm saying you don't have to be the most effective leader in the world when oil is $110 plus a barrel.

9:49So, my point there is that sometimes economic factors can sustain an organization, sometimes other factors around an organization. I think a lot of governments put in protections designed to perpetuate the organization, perpetuate the nation, even if the leader isn't very effective. So, sometimes you can have ineffective leaders in place that are self-promoting and sort of focusing on their own dominance, and the organization can still persist just because of these other kind of factors. The argument is really that

10:19the organization would do much, much better if they had more effective leaders in place. Yeah, it's more about,

10:31well, okay, yes, you can maybe still have success if you promote these charismatic or leaders who are good at self-promotion, but you're not necessarily maximizing potential. And I don't know, if I was a shareholder of that oil company that you were talking about, and I knew something or knew some of the things that I've learned along the way here at Hogan enough to be dangerous in this personality psychology realm,

11:03if I was a shareholder, I would be saying, hey, this is great, but if we do this, we can be even better. That's just my take on it. Yeah, no, I mean, it's the old adage of, you know, high tide lifts all boats. So sometimes even really poorly performing boats can look really good and, you know, vice versa. Or as I think it was Warren Buffett who put it, you know, when times are tough, or right when the tide is low, that's when you can see who's been swimming naked. And so that's part of it

11:34is that you see, you know, who's really not effective at leading when things get tough. Okay. Okay. ChatGPT's second question is, what's something personality psychology gets wrong, or at least oversimplifies when applied to leadership selection?

11:55Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that we tend to get wrong as personality psychologists, that we think that there's a one-size-fits-all to leadership, that we think this is the profile. And believe me, as someone who tried to find this, right, tried to identify the personality profile of successful leaders and found out that there's, in fact, many ways that leaders can be successful. Many different personality profiles can be highly successful leaders. So I think that's probably the biggest way that we could get things wrong

12:26is that we, well, it's a little tricky for me to say. I would say, as someone who's sort of an expert on this topic, that that's where the experts get it wrong. However, I would say that the non-experts have a tendency to get it wrong by focusing on the wrong personality dimension. This ties in a little bit with part one or that first question that ChatGPT asked, which is that we tend to focus on things like confidence. We tend to focus on things like who can provide a compelling vision

12:56for the future, who's charismatic and charming. So most of us tend to focus on that. So that's the way that I would say most people get personality psychology wrong or think about, you know, that they get leadership wrong by thinking that this is, these are the personality characteristics of leaders. But I think even the experts have a tendency to get things wrong by trying to define leadership effectiveness as one single personality profile when in fact we know there's a variety of profiles that can lead to

13:26effective leadership. Okay, and I want to preface this by saying, you know, because I think we're in the same ballpark, but I want to let the audience know that I think this is a good time as we're early on in the episode that you and I didn't discuss what we were, what our answers were going to be at all. Like, so we don't, you know, I think we each kind of took some notes and made sure that we prepped adequately for this. So when I was looking at this,

13:57I was thinking, first off, I'm not a personality psychologist, so I just play one on a podcast or pretend to, you know, but I've been around this stuff for, you know, more than 11 years now. And to me, I just thought, I guess it depends on the personality psychologist and their academic lineage, for lack of a better word. Because, you know, at Hogan, we are steadfast on Bob Hogan's definition of leadership, which essentially says that successful leaders

14:28are those who build and maintain a high-performing team. But, you know, that was not a widely held position among personality psychologists until more recently. And it's my understanding that it's even still a work in progress. So, you know, I guess it just kind of depends on where you, where you learn, who you learn from, you know, who, who were your mentors, who were your influences? I mean, it's kind of like a musician, you know?

14:59I, but I feel like we just, everybody has a different, people have different definitions of what leadership is or successful leadership is. And I think it just kind of depends on how you were, how you were taught, how you were raised, if you will. I don't, I don't know. What are your thoughts, Ryan? Yeah, well, I think it's the same thing with the term personality psychology. And this is something we've, I'm pretty sure we've talked about on here before, is that I think even the Wikipedia page for personality says that

15:30there's no agreement about what personality is, which is not really great for a few to say, well, you know, the researchers, the scholars don't even agree on what counts, what all counts as personality and what doesn't. There's some general agreement, but there are some things around the edges where not everyone agrees. And I would say that that's another area where I would say things go wrong depending on your definition of personality. So many people will define personality, even professional personality psychologists will define personality by your traits. And they define your traits as these things that exist inside you

16:01in some way that cause you to behave in certain ways. And my point of view and the Hogan point of view and Bob Hogan would totally agree with this is that that's just fundamentally wrong that you don't have these traits that drive you to do certain things. You're driven to do certain things because of who knows what. We actually don't know. I mean, that's what Freud and some of his work was all about. It was all about trying to understand ourselves, trying to understand why it is that we do the things. The notion that certain motivations

16:32are hidden from even ourselves and we don't really understand why it is that we do the things that we do. But that's probably what drives our behavior more is some set of motives. Some of these are born in and are fundamental. Other ones we might adapt later on. There's certain agendas, certain goals people are trying to achieve and so that's why they do things that there aren't these traits that exist that cause them, right? You don't have some extroversion that exists inside you that cause you to do things. But this is one that I would say personality psychology gets wrong a lot

17:02is that we attribute causes to traits whereas traits are really descriptive in nature. They really describe what a person is like. They can be used to predict the future, right? We can describe the height of the Nile River at various points in the year and various phases of the moon and therefore we can predict what it's going to be like later on but that doesn't explain cause, right? We can't, I couldn't tell you why the Nile River floods or why it doesn't flood from just that information alone. I could describe it. It's the same thing

17:33with personality, with personality traits, even trait terms in my view is that you can use to describe a person and those descriptions are very useful for predicting how the person might behave in the future but that doesn't provide a causal explanation. So for me, that's another area where I think the experts, my view, they would disagree with me but I think they get it wrong is that the traits don't really have that causal effect.

17:59Well, I mean, I'm already having flood with ChatGPT's questions. This is already a very enjoyable episode but let's move on to part three or the question three from ChatGPT and it says you both study personality professionally and I'm going to interject here. I was like, I took a job that happened to be around personality and now I've just been around it for so long that I kind of know like I said enough to be dangerous but you both study personality professionally so where do you

18:30still see yourselves falling into predictable personality traps in your own work or collaboration? Well, I mean, for me, there's a number of traps that I would say I fall into even though I'm a supposed expert on this topic and what is even those, right? The ones that I just mentioned even I can have a tendency to attribute causes to traits sometimes and I realize wait a minute that's not really what caused it it's something else but another one

19:01that I run into just like everybody else and I have to consistently remind myself to watch out for this one is assuming I'm an expert on other people's personalities assuming that we know the people that we've met assuming that I can predict what someone's going to behave like just because I've met them because I've seen them right assuming that I'm a good judge of other people's personality when we know that judgment of personality is sort of normally distributed some people are better

19:32at it than others and assuming or using you know using my judgment of personality to maybe even get myself caught up in some of these traps that we talked about before falling in love with charisma one of the traps that I see people fall into that I know I'm pray to fall into as well is falling in love with interviews we tend to like candidates who interview better even if their resumes aren't as strong as another candidate

20:02we tend to part of it I think is a sort of a recency bias as well we have a tendency to look at resumes first narrow down our candidates and get down to some that we want to interview then we interview and then but we treat each step of that like a separate hurdle right okay all the candidates have passed hurdle one now they're jumping over hurdle two and let's see who jumps over hurdle two but maybe that first hurdle maybe that resume was more valuable more important than that second hurdle and that's not really

20:33the way candidate selection process should work there's no evidence that setting these up as different hurdles actually helps you choose better candidates but even I fall prey to this and I have to remind myself wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute we can't just now compare all the candidates remaining based on their interviews and make a decision from there we have to consider the whole candidate so for me that's an area where that's a that's a trap that I certainly have to watch out for on a regular basis yeah so I

21:04the one I'm going to describe about my own personality is one I actually because I mentioned before that I do some feedbacks and I particularly with the the external PR firms that I work with particularly hopscotch PR in Europe here and then here in the Americas and we had a there was one on the Americas team and she listens to the podcast so Sydney shout out to you she actually

21:34you know younger professional that is we found out this week she was she's she got a new job she was going to go work in a new agency where the you know hopscotch being more of a remote setup she kind of wanted to just kind of get into the the inner office agency world and kind of just see what that's like you know she's early on in her career but I I took a look back at her her flash report and it's the exact same story for me I saw this the same thing

22:05and I then I was remembering the feedback I did with her about a year ago and here's what it is I know that I score high on the dutiful scale on the Hogan development survey which is the dark side measure and that can be a major strength for someone until it gets you know maybe to that point of being annoying where you're constantly however when you couple that high dutiful with my high score on interpersonal sensitivity it creates a whole new problem and that

22:35is you can kind of be easy to take advantage of or maybe people see you as a pushover kind of get you to do things because it makes it hard for you to say no because you're trying to please these others and you don't you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings or rock the boat with that interpersonal sensitivity so reminding Sidney about that was a good reminder for myself to try and make sure that you're not allowing

23:06others to take advantage of you and not to let anything that they might try to get you to do to compromise in any way your values or your beliefs that's that's kind of I think what I tend to fall in the trap and of course the mischievous trap if I get bored there's no telling what I'm going to do I did not do an April fool's joke this year probably the first year in a while so the mischievous can get me in trouble sometimes but you know Blake

23:37that reminds me of another one that I certainly fall prey to which is the likability trap right which is sort of similar to this sort of thing with interviews but you know people who you like if you've known people for a while you like them you just have a tendency to see them with rose-colored glasses right you tend to not see their flaws you tend to not see the kind of mistakes you can't you tend to not see the kind of negative impact they might have on other people because you like them so I'm thinking about this collaboration angle there's people that I collaborate with that I really like

24:08and I understand that other people might not like them and sometimes it can be difficult what do you mean you don't like this person this person is great and so I think we're all susceptible to that but you would think that maybe as an expert on this topic I would be less susceptible but I sometimes see myself falling into that trap as well yeah and I mean that's the thing which is fascinating to me but it also kind of makes a lot of sense that you can be the expert on this but you know there's still things about your everybody has

24:38things in their personality that they can work on and I've got I think in a couple questions I feel like we'll get into that a little bit more but well I think sometimes just even knowing doesn't really help sometimes right I mean there's doctors who still smoke there's doctors who eat unhealthy I mean there's sometimes even if you know exactly so like that's a great thing so like my brother and I have the same doctor and he actually works with the doctor at the hospital my brother's not a doctor but

25:08I I asked him I was like so you know our doctor he's great and everything I was like I'm curious though you have lunch with him three to four times a week does he order health does he eat really healthy or anything he's like oh no no no he's like no he's eating cheeseburgers and everything like that I'm like oh great this is the guy who's who's you know checking my blood pressure and things like that so okay

25:39question four from chat GPT how stable is personality in practice within organizations do people really change or do they just learn how to strategically adapt yeah I'd say I feel pretty strongly about this one both from a data standpoint and a personal experience standpoint I don't think people really change that much so I think personality is really quite stable I mean

26:10there's just so many instances where you meet someone you learn something about them and that shows up again later and it's not just biased perception other people see those same behaviors other people independently report the same kind of impact that person has the same kind of reputation that that person has across a variety of different contexts so from my point of view it's really quite stable I don't know if I've told this story

26:40on this podcast Blake or not I can't remember I know I've told some people but I had a recent incident where I was flying to Johannesburg trying to get to Johannesburg and I was here in Tulsa at the airport and this was the first flight I was flying Tulsa to Atlanta to Johannesburg at least that was the plan that's not ended up what happening but that was the plan and as I was waiting on this flight to go we were just about to board the plane and this guy jumped up in front of the line jumped up

27:11right in front of everybody else in line he was ready to go and they were just doing pre-boarding at the time but the gate sign had changed to say group one or whatever it said and the flight attendant or not the flight attendant but the gate agent she said sorry we're still just doing pre-boarding could you please back up and the person response was well where do you want me to go and he was just very annoyed and she's like you know like anywhere like out of the line so that you know and so okay fine so he's clearly annoyed he gets out of

27:42the way she finishes pre-boarding and now she changes the group sign over again and so okay boom he's there first one in line again and immediately he says I want to know your name and who's your manager and asks all the and it's just like oh my goodness here we go so of course we get on the plane and this guy's sitting right in front of me and so I get to listen to all the other complaints now the flight has a maintenance issue and it's delayed so again this is why ultimately this wasn't the route I ended up taking I ended up getting

28:12off the flight myself but that'll be coming later here he's just he's pushed the flight attendant call button three or four different times to call the flight attendants at one point he says well what's going on what's happening I looked up there and the pilots aren't in the cockpit and he says no they're outside checking out this maintenance issue I want to know what's going on the people these people on the plane they deserve to know what's going on the flight attendants being very polite he's saying look I don't know they said there's a maintenance issue they're waiting on a person to come over to check it out well I don't know Delta is telling the airline

28:42the airline is calling me and telling me this he was just making these things up the airline wasn't telling him anything but he was trying to pressure the flight attendant into giving him more information he felt like the flight attendant was hiding information from him and he was using all the other people's excuse these people deserve these people have a right to know what's going on then he started talking to the passenger next to him saying he needs another drink because the flight attendant was trying to give him

29:13hey can you calm down and he said oh no I'm calm but he needs a drink over here you need to help this guy and he pushed the flight attendant call button again I pushed this button 15 minutes ago and you didn't come over here and the flight attendant I'm sorry I didn't see the button and he just continued to do this and then at one point he even said well if I was an air marshal would you tell me he didn't quite say it like that he implied that he was an air marshal oh wow and yeah so the flight attendant is like okay look first of all I know you're not an air marshal because an

29:43air marshal would never do that and he said look basically I want you to stay calm because I don't want to have to oh I don't want to get kicked off the plane I don't want to get kicked off the plane oh no no sir we wouldn't kick you off the plane we would gently escort you off the plane so eventually he decides he's not taking this flight this flight isn't going I know it's not going so he gets off the flight and just takes off now about half an hour later I have to get off the flight as well because I'm not going to make my connecting flight and the next flight available is until the next day anyway so I

30:14decide you know what it doesn't make any sense for me to sit here and wait I might as well just go home too and fly out the next day so I go down to the counter and this is the whole point about this Blake is actually about consistency of personality we've gotten this preview of what this person is like right over the last say 45 minutes or so and I go down to the counter to change out my ticket because I need to get a new ticket for the next day and I say so and I knew this guy had luggage underneath because he was saying that he needed to get luggage so I knew he had to go to the counter as well

30:44and I said to the ladies working the counter so did you get to meet you know Mr. Nice Guy earlier and they said oh we don't know who you're talking about I said I think you know who I'm talking about and they said yeah we met and he was a real jerk and they said you know we said hey it'll take a few minutes for your bags to get here could you please sit down and there's seats right behind you know and he said well where do you want me to sit of course the place is empty you know there's seats everywhere and it just you know but the point is the consistency of his personality

31:14was so readily available it didn't take very long before you could tell just what this person was like and you know so I don't know I guess it's a long way of answering the question that I just don't think people change that much yeah yeah I mean I guess I guess before I even you know talk about you know kind of what my thought was around this question was there's a very good comparison here I feel like you know with that maintenance issue and like well the pilots are out looking

31:44at the flight attendants saying the pilots are out checking out the maintenance issue like in our realm you would be kind of like the pilot and I'm kind of like the flight attendant I know there's a maintenance issue maybe I have somewhat of an idea of what it is but the pilot has a better has a better understanding of that I feel like that sums up you and me and personality psychology I'm just the flight attendant but I've been on a plane to kind of know some things you know a little more than maybe I should but my

32:15thought here is that you know we've talked about it you know I don't really think people change their personality because that's what I've kind of learned at Hogan and you know they if anything maybe they can change their behavior doesn't sound like this gentleman did but we did talk about this on a previous episode with Jackie Psalm so that said I think really all that matters is changing your behavior because we've also talked about how being your authentic self is probably not the best route to take and so

32:46if you're just kind of able to have that strategic self-awareness to know what behaviors need to change and how to do that you're probably already putting yourself ahead of so many others like this gentleman on your flight so I guess just knowing and then trying to change it not easy to do which is why I think whole scale personality change is pretty much impossible but you can change how you act if you know what needs to be changed well and I

33:17think to the point of the question like you're right in the sense that it talks is asking about strategically adapting and that's one of the goals of personality assessment from our point of view is to give people that strategic self-awareness so that they can adapt their behavior but the goal is to change your personality okay question five from chat GPT what's the most common way leaders misinterpret personality assessments like the Hogan tools yeah this is a good

33:47question because you know thinking that that key part there is the most common way and you know when somebody asks me something like that you know I'm wanting to get empirical I'm wanting to dig it in and I don't know that I really have data to say oh this is the most common way for sure that people misinterpret them but but some things do come to mind for me I think one of the most common ones and it is one we've talked about here on the podcast before is that they assume that the HDS is bad they assume that high scores in the HDS that are all

34:18derailers that it's always a bad thing and that low scores are good I think that's to me one of the most common mistakes that I see we also see people yeah again attribute dark side meaning that's bad things when it really just means these are things that are out of view that aren't always seen so to me there's a lot of misunderstanding of the HDS and the dark side of personality what do you think well okay so I want to I think I want to come out of the gate saying it depends

34:49on who the feedback facilitator is if you're going through like a full-scale Hogan debrief because some people I think some facilitators might be nicer especially whenever they talk about the HDS like they're really sure to be like well these are these really are strings you know until you overdo it which is you know technically true but how much you emphasize that and if

35:20you if you do too much of that I feel like some people might forget that it's it's also a problem but that's not what I came up that's you know what I'm thinking of what I immediately went to when I read this is that all the scales on the HPI come with with the Hogan personality so like our our standard measure of personality based on the big five all the scales in the HPI come with good and bad whether you score whether your score is high or low you know there's positives and negatives so the problem that I think

35:51occurs is that people naturally want to cling to what is good about their their score on the HPI whether it's high or low so for example I'm pretty proud of my high adjustment because I tend to remain calm in otherwise chaotic situations but I have to remember that the high adjustment score comes with a cost and that is that I don't receive and implement critical feedback all that well and and then I then I got to thinking I was like well there's also issues with the bold scale on the HDS

36:21because people really take pride in a high bold score because I feel like we're naturally wired to think bold is good I mean especially if you think of like the Wizard of Oz if you grew up watching I mean like the lion and being bold and courageous you know things like that or there's some company I want to I mean you know like it's not Nike's just do it but it's like I don't know dare to be bold or yeah dangerous I don't know I feel like there's some marketing brand that's around that something yeah so I feel like too

36:51often people have associated in their day-to-day lives bold being a good thing and I'm just kind of like well it's not because if you have too much of it it also might mean you're a narcissist so that's those were the two things that really stood out to me but do I know that those are the most common ways no I don't know and you know sure maybe we can dig into that at some point but that's what stood out to me yeah well you know I think those that it reminds me Blake of

37:21a thing I learned back in graduate school about personality which is it's sort of a technical psycho babble kind of term which is that personality is egocentronic and what that means is that we have a tendency to like our own personalities so to your point earlier when we get scores back on our test we tend to think yeah that's good because that's the way you should be because that's how I am and I like who I am not again not everybody does this but but most people on average have a tendency to like themselves they have a tendency to like

37:52their own personalities so they have a tendency to like the scores they get on the test because they go yeah that's me that's how you should be and we have we do have a tendency not to think about the downsides of those things we tend to think yay that's you know who I am I used to do this with my graduate students I would give them the HDS the Hogan assessments at the time was kind enough to allow me to to give my graduate seminar on personality Hogan's assessments and they would give me the HDS scores and I would give those scores to my students and these students are kind of

38:23you know young and wild and crazy and impulsive and all these kinds of other things and they would love their scores on the HDS even though some of those scores would be things like really high bold and really high mischievous and they would go oh yeah this is great and I just thought that's so true that we have a tendency to like ourselves we have a tendency to like growing scores and we have a tendency not to see the downsides of those scores whether it's high low or whatever we have a tendency to say yes that's the way we should be because personality is ego syntonic well okay in interest

38:58of time let's move on to the next one question six from chat GBT if you could design the quote ideal team from a personality standpoint would you optimize for similarity complementarity or something else entirely yeah another tough one here and I think I'm going to pick the something else entirely that's what I think the data best supports there's been a lot of work on teams a

39:29lot of work on how to identify and design and build the high functioning high performing team what's the right combination there's lots of assumptions about things like team personality and you can do all kinds of things like give everybody a personality assessment you can aggregate their personality scores together you can look at extremes do we have somebody over here do we have somebody over there do we have complementarity in our personality do we have some people who are high on this and people are low on this are we all in agreement are we in alignment our personality is there a lot of variation our personality you can look at all of those kinds

40:00of things and the data suggested none of that stuff really matters when it comes to performance and I'm assuming here we talk about ideal team we're talking about the high performing team that it's not about some combination of personality traits it's not even necessarily about right there's some assumptions sometimes that oh it's about missing if you have a missing link if you're missing some personality trait then that could be that could be a problem it's not even necessarily that although I will point out that sometimes a team can have a blind spot because they

40:32they're missing some some components so sometimes that can be the case but what I would say instead is that it's really about the most important thing is understanding how to work together how do we work together functionally what makes us most productive as a team how can I communicate with my team members in a way that's most functional and most productive how can we have conflict in a healthy way how can that work inside of our team

41:03building out those kinds of things is more important and you can learn about that via personality assessments by learning about each other's personalities you can learn how to better communicate with each other better better how to coordinate activities which is really really important in terms of group productivity but I wouldn't say that like oh this is the ideal you know personality clustering I will say get that one caveat of there is some potential that a team could have a blind spot and so that is one thing I would watch out for is

41:33if the team was all really high bold just since we were talking about that a blind spot that the team might have is overconfidence they might assume they can be more successful I would say that was characteristic of the the John F. Kennedy's cabinet during the Bay of Pigs affair right I mean this is sort of a classic example some people talk about this group thing and that was certainly part of it as well there's a whole number of factors that played a role but one of those was this over confidence it's the belief that this is a group of geniuses the

42:04some of the smartest people in the world the future leaders of the world are all right here in the cabinet we can't make a decision that's wrong whatever we decide will be right because we decided it was sort of the attitude and you lead to those kind of disasters so you can't have these blind spots so that's one thing I would watch out for from a personality standpoint but otherwise I'd be looking at things like communication skills coordination skills how can we be more more productive as a team okay well yeah now I wish I could have gone

42:34first because now I'm starting to I mean I agree with you but I'm gonna go ahead and just you know say what I where I was leaning on this and the thing that I the note I put down first was that first and foremost you need to determine if someone can do the job and they go from there so once that's determined I think you didn't start trying to assemble a team that is composed of people who complement each other well in some sense but not in a way where you're you're you're doing it

43:07for this just for the sake of doing it you know but also knowing that what makes someone good at x you know might make them not quite so good at y and vice versa therefore I do think if you have the right mix of both to ensure that all your bases are covered would be the safe way to go about it but that was my take on it but whenever you started talking I was like well I kind of agree with this I don't think it's I'm I'm entirely different from

43:37your answer but but but you're you said it more eloquently and better than I did yeah well no I mean again certainly when we talk about complementarity there's sort of literal combo there's like empirical complementarity meaning oh that this trait goes with this trait so for example in in the sort of interpersonal literature complementarity might refer to somebody being dominant and somebody else being submissive right that that tends to coordinate better when you have one person who's dominant and one person who's submissive than

44:08two people who are dominant or two people who are submissive in their behaviors in terms of court you know the group coordination and rapport building and those kinds of things so there is complementarity in that kind of sense which I think you know is valuable it's it's one of the classic examples that people would say you know too many cooks in the kitchen kind of thing where you know if everybody's trying to take on the same role that can be problematic but I don't know that there's a personality dimensions that necessarily say that you

44:39might say well what if your team is all high ambition that doesn't necessarily mean everyone is going to want to adopt the leader role in the group oftentimes people can adapt to to their their sort of functional roles in the group and make those make those trade-offs accordingly but so you're right about the complementarity in that sense Blake but I was taking it sort of be literally like do you need to have people who are high social and low social and people are high interpersonal sensitivity and lower person like in that sort of complementarity kind of way right the evidence

45:10suggests that that's that's not the case okay question seven what personality traits become more dangerous as someone gains power or authority yeah so this is a another good one and I think this is a place where the HDS really stands out because the HDS is always with us and again as we talked about earlier it doesn't always mean bad things it doesn't always mean

45:41trouble but it can be particularly in times when we let our guard down we have a tendency to let our guard down when we have power or when we have authority so you know one thing that we've said around Hogan in the past is that power doesn't corrupt it reveals it reveals something about what we truly want what we really want to go do if we you know don't have to to self-monitor or self-present and so when I think about things that can lead to danger you know actual danger in power or authority I'd

46:14look at things like mischievous the things that that many executives have that do get them into a lot of trouble bold mischievous imaginative that sort of moving against cluster can be really problematic particularly when you start combining it with things like high skeptical and high excitable so now we've got someone who's emotionally volatile doesn't trust others and is very overconfident as very creative and sort of impractical in their thinking and once you have power there

46:47may not be anybody to check you anymore they might not be anybody maybe there's nobody who's even willing to say right this is the emperor has no clothes kind of situation where there's nobody to tell you that hey this is a bad idea they're just willing to let you go along with it because you have so much power and so I think that those are the traits that that I think can get people in the most trouble yeah again we did not discuss these answers with each other before recording but I will read verbatim the the first line

47:19in my notes and it is probably the moving against cluster on the HDS like mischievous bold imaginative and colorful that was that was exactly what I wrote down but you know kind of in it's just like you said in a leadership position it's it's so tempting and I think it could be like it's it's it's not even you're not consciously doing it necessarily I just feel like it's just naturally it's so hard for

47:50people to not let some of those dark side behavior surface when maybe the the chance of there being consequences for those behaviors maybe not being as high or maybe there's no consequences at all I think that's what could get people in yeah that's a really good point that the fact that there's no consequences yeah that was that was my thought on that one so yeah I

48:21mean I I totally agree and yeah maybe I should let you go first on the next one no no no I like hearing what you had to say I think it I think it it helps me even shape what I'm what I it helps me build out my thoughts a little bit better because you I mean yeah you're this is this is your day job I'm my job is to tell everybody how great we are but question eight how should organizations think about the trade-off between hiring high

48:53performers who may be toxic versus solid performers who elevate team dynamics yeah I mean this is a this is a really important one and one that we've been tackling a lot lately I mean some of the data suggest you know four to one right you need to hire four superstar performers to account for one toxic employee because of the the costs that toxic employees have even though toxic employees might bring a lot of value to

49:23the organization particularly in terms of innovation in terms of ambition and drive they might be able to bring a lot of those kinds of things there's I mean in particular here we're talking about high performers who may be toxic you know a friend of mine told me we were talking baseball and he was telling me about an example that I thought was so powerful and it suggests I think it speaks to this question so there was a young guy in high school he was trying to get recruited he really wanted to play at a school out west so I'm not exactly

49:54sure what school it is but I'm just gonna say it was Oregon State because that's one that I can think of so let's say he wanted to go play for Oregon State and he was playing in a game and he had a really good game and he knew the Oregon State Scout team was there he knew that team was there that day he went four for four that's four hits and four at bats he made no errors in the field he had a really great game the team won that was wonderful Scout didn't say anything didn't didn't stop to him afterwards didn't say anything and he had already emailed and had reached out to Oregon State letting them you know say hey I want to come play for you the next

50:25game a few days later he played another game he went three for three made no errors had another great game he knew the Scout was there Scout didn't say anything to him the next day had another good game he went two for three so this time he wasn't perfect he did get he did get a hit but again no errors in the field had a really good game Scout didn't say anything to him so now it's been about two weeks and they've played a few games the Scouts still haven't said anything to him and he's had the Scouts had another game that he plays and he has a terrible game he goes over four he makes three

50:55errors in the field and the coach pulls him pulls him out of the game and doesn't play him in the next game and when he goes to the bench when the coach pulls him out of the game he just does what he always does he starts cheering on his teammates and he's rooting them on and hoping they would do better and at the end of this game he goes back home that night and he gets a phone call from Oregon State and they say hey we'd love to recruit you as a player we'd love you to come play for our program and he says oh I was just you know so grateful so happy was hoping you would call but I have to ask you you know

51:28why why now why did you wait till I had this terrible game to do this and they said oh no we knew you could play what we wanted to know was how you responded to adversity how did you react when things didn't go well we knew you were a good ballplayer we wanted to know if you're the kind of guy who could fit in our locker room right we wanted to essentially they want to know if this is a toxic personality because it's easy for people to be front runners so to speak it's easy

51:58to be positive when things are going well but it's really difficult to be positive and upbeat when things aren't going well when you're not performing that well are you going to be a good teammate and that's and that's one of the things that they were looking for so clearly in this case of and again I think it was or I don't know what school it was but let's say Oregon State in their mind in the mind of that coaching staff avoiding a toxic performer was really critical because this guy could clearly perform at a high level but it was so essential they

52:29basically said look if we see signs of this guy's toxic we're not going to recruit him we've got to wait and see so they waited to see they saw he wasn't toxic they said they wanted to recruit him so in that regard I would say it's extremely important to to to keep to to avoid those toxic workers you know this reminds me of a story I read yesterday about I'm of course everybody if they listen enough I'm an Oklahoma State University grad big football fan and there we have a new coach that just came in there was a story about his offense coordinator that he brought with him and

53:02this offensive coordinator so this the head coach used to be the guy he got his first head coaching gig incarnate word in Texas and there was a quarterback there who had started three years and was going into his senior year and before the season started the coach set this quarterback down and said you're not you're not going to be the starting quarterback and the the

53:32kid of course you know upset he said there were some tears shed and everything and then he said it was a day later that quarterback came in and said coach I'm going to be the best teammate ever mark my words I'm gonna be the best teammate ever and he did all these things behind the scenes to kind of like scout the other team come up come to the coach with some plays that might help the team do better and so instead of dwelling on it you know what he lost his job he just found a way to

54:03make the team better even though he wasn't playing so I think that really aligns pretty well with with the kind of character that like the person you described now whenever I was coming up with my my answer to this it was like my first question was what affects your bottom line more all right so like a toxic high performer in a position that doesn't require like maybe a ton of collaboration with others on a team you know if they're performing well and they don't they're not poisoning the well or their ability to do so is limited maybe

54:35it's not going to affect things that much you can you can deal with that but in a collaborative setting I think it's hard to go with a toxic worker who brings the team down so like if it's a basketball team for instance I'm taking the solid performer who elevates team dynamics every day of the week that's just my my thought yeah yeah I agree with you all right question nine what's one counterintuitive finding about personality and job performance that most people wouldn't expect and Ryan honestly I don't I'm gonna have to hear your answer because I want to I want to see where

55:07this goes because I'm not sure yeah I mean the funny thing about counterintuitive findings is that basically once people hear about them they tend to sort of lose their counterintuitiveness people go oh that makes sense right so you know there's been a number of things we've talked about over many many years at Hogan I mean Bob Hogan was one of the first people to suggest that hey I don't think most leaders most corporate leaders are doing that well most corporate leaders are really ineffective and that was a big shock to everyone they said oh come on that's crazy

55:38and now everybody pretty much agrees yeah most corporate leaders aren't very effective so sometimes what seems like a crazy wild counterintuitive idea one day can be quite intuitive the next day so one of the ones that comes up all the time is about generational differences everybody thinks there's generational differences everybody thinks there's generational differences personality everybody thinks that different generations have to be treated a different way to perform well that they have different expectations for performance from different generations and our data show that that just that's

56:08not really a thing that these generational differences are largely made up at least when it comes to workplace performance that doesn't mean that there aren't age differences certainly people from different ages have different expectations and but but there really tend to be consistent over time is that what young people are interested in motivated by it's kind of the same things that young people are interested in motivated by for for many many years and so I think that's one of the big ones and some people tell me that you know it's really funny like because some people tell me oh yeah we've known

56:39that for a while that there's no generational differences but other people tell me that they find it to be oh that's counterintuitive everybody thinks that there's generation differences so I don't know whether it counts as counterintuitive or not but it is certainly one where our data don't match with the sort of common expectation of generational differences yeah I'm just gonna have to go ahead and agree with what you're saying here because I'm still this was one I just really had a tough time kind of well I can give another comment on this to Blake one that I also

57:11thought about for this is that when people think about job performance where they tend to think about things like ambition they tend to think about things like prudence and sort of conscientiousness those kinds of things as being really you know low neuroticism or high adjustment as being really associated but the one that really surprises a lot of people is actually interpersonal sensitivity interpersonal sensitivity or agreeableness tends to be a really good predictor of job performance but it's an interesting one because it tends to be a good predictor of job performance because people who are

57:43highly agreeable or people who are interpersonally sensitive tend to be liked more and so it's not necessarily a predictor of job productivity right are you actually getting more stuff done but people just like working with you more and so I think to some extent that's a little bit counterintuitive because again people who are conscientious show up on time and they work really hard and they put in extra hours and they say good things about the company and so they tend to be more productive and so they get job good job performance ratings but people

58:13who are high in agreeableness or high on interpersonal sensitivity tend to get job good job performance ratings too not because they're more productive but just because they're more pleasant to work with and so they get the benefit of the doubt well I'm again I'm just gonna go go with you with you on this one because I was just at a lack for for words on this one I just did not know how to how to even respond to this one so way to go chat GBT you've rendered me speechless probably for the first time and might be the last time

58:45ever so at least if you ask my wife so last question question 10 looking ahead five to ten years how do you think personality psychology will need to evolve in an AI driven workplace where quote agents may replace or augment human roles yeah so of course this is a big question that everybody's facing right now so it's a you know it's of course a timely question as well there's a few

59:15things that come to mind one is a question that we don't really know much about is to what extent do AI agents need a personality do you or do people want their AI agents to have a personality are there certain personality characteristics certain behaviors certain attitudes certain emotions expressed by agents that are better suited for certain roles or not these are big questions we don't know I mean presumably if you had a customer service AI agent you would want it to be friendly and polite and and those kinds

59:46of things but we don't really know and and what does that mean in terms of his personality you know can AI agents really have a personality or is it just sort of the perception of how the perception that other people have of that agent what really matters I think that's one of the big questions we have to figure out is to what extent does personality psychology need to be advising on the production creation development use of AI agents I'm not sure but certainly I do think there's a

1:00:18big impact that AI agents are going to have on on how we work and our personalities are going to play an impact in how we work with AI agents I think we're going to see the impact of actually an increase in interpersonal skills you might say wait a minute if you're working with an AI agent how interpersonally skilled you need to be actually you need to be a really good communicator when working with an AI agent because working with an AI agent is like working with a computer it's like working with a computer program even if you have rudimentary experience

1:00:51doing a computer program or working with a calculator right if you put in the wrong inputs that calculator is going to happily give you the wrong answer and it's going to work really hard to do it a computer if you program the computer to do something wrong it's going to work really hard and give you that wrong information and so it's the same thing with these AI agents you have to be really good at communicating with them you have to make sure the inputs that you give them are going to get you the outputs that you want because if you don't

1:01:22if you give them the wrong kind of inputs you you're going to it's going to work really hard and happily give you the wrong answer and you may not know you may not realize or if you do realize you realize oh no I have to go redo this there's more time more work more effort put in so being successful in working with AI agents which I where I do think workplace is headed where we're going to many of us are going to be working with alongside and with AI agents for a while requires really clear and effective communication skills in

1:01:53a way that we may not fully appreciate that's such a great point I don't because I try not to lean too much on an AI agent to do my work but when I do I'm like the to me the prompt is so important I mean and I sometimes I even get I make sure that any even details that maybe I

1:02:24normally wouldn't think of or you know consider I'm trying to consider anything and everything to make sure that I'm getting the best possible outcome from this agent and so that I mean I think I talked about koi pond like you know I was entering all the dimensions and all of these things you know making sure that everything is right and you know as being as detailed as I was I was even able to catch the mistakes chat GPT made sorry to the interviewer here today chat GPT but I

1:02:58find a lot of value in doing the right prompt but for me whenever I was thinking of this question I was really thinking about the emphasis I think I don't think we emphasize it enough or maybe we haven't had to yet but I do think the learning approach scale on the Hogan personality inventory is going to become a lot more important because I think people are it's just we're gonna have to learn to do things maybe that we're not accustomed to do or

1:03:31maybe we don't know how to do just yet as we transition this new world that's my thought is just the ability to to pick up new things and learn new things because whatever you know AI might be able to do a good portion of your job right now well if you're going to remain relevant in this workforce you're going to probably have to to get out of your comfort zone and learn to do some more things so I think you know looking at that learning approach is going to be something organizations maybe want to

1:04:03take a little bit closer look at I think also that I think emphasizing you know some versatility and being a little bit and also being more adaptable I think the things like that I think we talked about our previous episode two episodes ago you know critical thinking judgment those things are going to be critically important so I think those are the things that we're going to need to emphasize more but that's that's just a PR

1:04:34guy's take on this I am I'm really curious I think what you started off with is like we kind of need to have a better understanding of exactly where this is going to go what the the what the human's appetite is going to be for this and I don't think we know yet but we're gonna we're gonna find out sooner or later whether we like it or not and that's what I think people are gonna need to come to terms with yeah I mean I think you you made some really good points there about yeah just about how we're gonna we're gonna

1:05:06have to work with these kinds of things and and so yeah yeah Blake I'm I'm with you on this one okay Ryan any closing thoughts before we wrap this thing up no I mean this was a lot of fun to talk about you to hear this this set of questions that made us think a little bit or made me think a little bit more on some of these I mean some of these are questions that we kind of get all the time but some of these really like oh that's an interesting question I hadn't thought about that so I I love this idea and I and I'm glad you thought of it like well sometimes you know even a blind squirrel

1:05:38finds a finds an acorn every now and again so and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 147 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun informative episode cheers everybody this has been the science of personality podcast brought to you by Hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website the science of personality dot-com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time you

1:06:12you you you you you you