Unique Individuality

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 it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you'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

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello 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 144 today ryan and i are joined by dr nigel nicholson author and emeritus professor of organizational behavior at london business school to talk about

1:10unique individuality which is the focus of his new book unique you how individuality works and why it matters although nigel's esteemed career as a business psychologist has focused on things like the application of evolutionary theory and business and management educational innovation and coaching political and business leaders the topic of individual differences has fascinated him for much of his life because personality and individual differences have been a pillar of hogan's since

1:40its inception we're thrilled to have him join us for what we think will be a fascinating episode but before we get to our conversation with nigel 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 the science of personality dot com or follow the science of personality on linkedin now let's get to it nigel welcome to the podcast hello yeah is there anything you'd like to share with our audience before we get started well it's wonderful

2:11to be with you uh and it's such a special topic this uh and it's extraordinary that it's been so neglected and that my book is the first book in the modern era to try to analyze what individuality means and how it how it works together uh just a bit of personal background if you don't mind my digressing a little bit i had a very unusual background i was raised by my both my parents were published authors and i lived in a kind of wild bohemian household so i was used to having very old people around the house continually and i i i guess the fascination with individuals and with

2:45people came out of that sort of literary background i only discovered i was a harder scientist uh much later and i left home at 16 i left school at 16 and i wandered the world i became a journalist and i wandered the world and so on and eventually about four or five years late i i got into university and studied psychology when i got there i i to my horror i discovered that really nobody was really interested in individual differences apart from those people in vocational guidance and assessment you know and some business assessment military assessment but otherwise the whole discipline seemed to be

3:19focusing on uh issues like behaviorism and so on which ruled out any any anything inside the human mind and then of course along came uh the school of sociology the social constructionists who then kind of said well you know we could make ourselves up at any point in time and that didn't seem that didn't seem right to me either um so uh and you know it's it's like it's it's 75 years since gordon allport the great father of of personality psychology called for what he called an ideographic

3:51psychology meaning a psychology of the individual but it never appeared i mean there's been some interesting work on narratives and so on but it never appeared and i kind of wondered why this is and i i i think you know there's um uh there's i think we used the whole approach of most psychology is to say is to find good solid generalizations about what most people do or or what why things happen the way they are with groups of people and individuals are regarded as a nuisance a disturbance

4:26their error variance in in a lot of that stuff um and whereas for me that's well as soon as i get in the executive classroom everybody's an exception as far as i can see when i talk to the executive leaders everything is bespoke for them and that's the only approach that makes sense to me and that's really why i wrote wrote the book i think just as an afterthought i think people are slightly afraid of the idea too and as as we go through this discussion uh perhaps that will that will become that will

4:56become clear but as far as i'm concerned this is a new way of seeing this is my my book is ambitious in this respect i'm trying to i'm trying to create a new way of seeing that i think i all your test users will find uh i hope refreshing and and reinforcing well not nigel thanks for that uh for that background information and again thanks for joining us on the podcast um i'll say a couple of things first of all i'm really interested in hearing more about this fear right why people might be afraid of i have some thoughts of my own but i'm sure we'll dig into that later but i also want to just let our

5:28audience know uh you know nigel has had an impressive career as a researcher scholar and academic he's been cited more than 18 000 times and he's published research around uh our human biology and how that affects our individual differences published quite a bit of research on transitions and jobs and careers published research on absenteeism and and how personality is related to absenteeism in the workplace and even published work on family businesses which is of course a major topic and we're seeing more and more uh people doing consulting around family businesses these days as well so

6:03a whole variety of research topics that nigel is an expert on so we're super thrilled to have you here today and of course we're thrilled to talk about your book unique you so thanks again for joining us can i just add one to that uh one of the most interesting periods of of my my research career was i i did i spent a few years leading a team on studying behavioral finance in uh in investment banks um where we did some work on risk and personality that was that is proved to be very widely cited so um personality plays a plays a a major part in the finance industry i can tell you

6:39that oh i can imagine well nigel you know as i mentioned in the intro you've been intrigued by individual differences for much of your life which led you writing this new book and for our listeners this book uh as we're recording is not quite released but by the time we publish will have been released and we'll be sure to include a a note in the show description where you can go uh check out the book buy the book uh and all of that but nigel before we get to the meat of this

7:13episode would you mind giving our audience your broad definition of unique individuality well i guess that is the meat of the uh of the issue right we're going to get straight into it i guess because um i start the book out with what i say there are here are four inescapable truths about you which i call the four laws of unique individuality and perhaps they they capture the idea the first is that no one like you has ever existed on this planet before nor ever will again so you are unique you are

7:46one-off you're born unique your brain is configured uniquely at your birth along with your dna um uh and uh so so we uniqueness is is uh it is a fact of all our lives as it is for actually in any other species it just matters in a very different way for humans i think the second thing is um the second law is that you are a stranger to yourself to use um to to quote another psychologist but uh the idea that we don't really know who we are because so much of our processing is unconscious and indeed

8:20uh one of the functions of consciousness is to help us um make decisions that can't be made automatically as other species do uh so the this this hidden processing is really important and it involves biases and feelings and things that affect our judgment so um we could be blindsided by ourselves very easily and we are inherently unpredictable in in many ways the third law is that we don't really know anybody else and they don't really know us um we try to get very close to each other and try to

8:54imagine what it's like to have somebody else's experience but you you only have the idea you you never have the experience itself and um so these first three laws would seem to be put you in a very lonely place um but that's not necessarily the case because the fourth law is that we have to connect it's the reason for our existence we wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't connected um so so connection is important and valuable and not only that it's actually the meat of all social all the

9:27most valuable social processes because as to say because although in biologically we're we're actually a very tightly defined genome as a species much more than chimpanzees and others because we went through an evolutionary bottleneck a long time ago but within you know but that but we magnify that the diversity of our individuality because we cooperate in so many different ways and so that this fourth law is that we have lots of ways of cooperating for love and for productivity and for fun and

10:02all kinds of things different ways of combining with each other so individuality is the stuff of life and it's it's also the driver of cultural change and the arts and a lot so much more in life and it's it's astonishing to me that people have not really first written about this or talked about it in the uh in the modern era well nigel this is really fascinating uh that these these four laws i really find them all really interesting i just wanted to dig in a little bit on that very first one

10:33um you mentioned no one like you has ever existed and i have to say that when i talk with folks people ask me frequently about the difference between say hogan's assessments and other i won't name them but other popular uh assessments out there you know some assessments might tell you that there are only 16 different people for example whereas actually we did some math some years ago where we found that with hogan's assessments uh there are more possible combinations of scores than there are atoms in the universe or something like that it's just outrageous right but but to me the point of that is that it

11:09really does emphasize the new unique you but i'm going to guess that you think even beyond just scores on assessments when you're talking about unique you so are you just talking about combinations of personality scores you talk about even even more that makes us up as individuals than that well we have to add into the mix there uh uh two words that what you won't find feature in many psych departments and you might wonder why and those words are free will now um we don't really

11:39well is it arguable whether how how free our will is uh uh we're constrained by these biological businesses themselves and we uh we we have the feeling that we are free but indeed this is an extension of this consciousness point that we it enables us to stop the action whenever we want do what we want to to to change and so you know people people i know there's a lot of literature about faking tests but of course that's a deliberate choice that somebody may may choose to make is i'm going to fake this fake this test right so i mean even the decision to do that is is a is an

12:14interesting fact about themselves and about the person's ability to assert control over their own experience um and indeed you know maybe later in our discussion but certainly when we when you look in within families uh any attempt you have to to shape your child's identity is is hopeless they're going to reveal themselves to you and the other thing is of course with i mean i'm a huge fan of of psychometrics but they they're all frozen points in time and for me the only approach that really works

12:48is a biographical approach in conjunction with that with with those data that um uh that we can see what the significance of a profile is in the context of a unique life and of course so the uniqueness spreads will be on that and you know just to underline the point you only have to think of yourself in a different way to fundamentally change lots of aspects in your behavior for example thinking of yourself as an attractive person or an unattractive person will set you on a completely

13:23different set of experiences um and these of course these things can be modified they can be modified through therapy or self-talk or whatever you know so i individuality it seems to me to to be washing up on the shores of our existence in every from every direction well nigel this is already so cool i'm i'm i'm i'm fascinated already by what we're getting into so uh for my next question let's let's talk a little bit more about you know why individuality matters

13:56you know can you can you tell us yes well in in the book i quote the uh the victorian um surgeon general of america who was actually a canadian sir william william osler who said words to the effect of don't ask what disease the patient has ask what patient the disease has well this is a very interesting idea you know is to say and of course we all know this you know if you watch people for example taking alcohol as an example i use in the book people's reactions to

14:26alcohol are purely their own i mean some people fall asleep some people get excitable some people you know behave badly so anything you anything you ingest and by ingest i mean all lived experience uh is qualified by you is qualified by by who you are by the template that's absorbing it uh like any like any material you know there's a sort of an accretive process it has to to some extent fit in with

15:00what's already there or transform what's already there and of course experience can do both but how it does that is entirely individual uh so before we and you know as we say you know psychology is largely interested in saying most people do this but if you think about training courses in fact i got a very nice message from john cutter the other day who said that my my thinking on this upends a whole lot of leadership development uh presumption which is the which is the average manager but

15:36there is no average manager um you have to deal with the raw material in front of you you have you have to understand what you're doing to people uh what it means in the context of their lives and indeed my book is very much centered around my teaching of a course of what should i call biography for um mid-career midlife uh sloan fellow fellow students and i tell lots of their stories in the book uh but but all those stories illustrate this this point and and of course one of the reasons for the fear

16:09of of the of in of the idea of individuality is people want to believe a they can hide in a group and they can merge their identity and then become as it were invisible or protected um and the other is they don't really want the responsibility of having to make themselves up or having to having to take that responsibility of being a unique individual and finding out who you are and living your life um and all this is being made infinitely worse by social media where young people especially

16:40i think in a great state of confusion about about identity needlessly in my view uh they should stand on their own two feet and say this is who i am uh and let me find way ways of being the way i i want to be authentically in the world and the world doesn't often make that very easy for people nigel yeah a couple of interesting points there but one question that i have sort of a follow-up centers around this idea of unique individuality and is that really accessible right can we actually

17:17assess the unique individual certainly from hogan point of view we can assess these sort of core personality dimensions and talk about how you vary on those kinds of things but you know one of the points you sort of made there which struck me is that there's sort of no average person and i think about medication right yeah medication dosage is targeted for the average person right this is the right but there is no average person so maybe for one person they need a little more a little less and and how would you figure that out and and i guess that's what i i'm really getting down to is

17:51can we actually measure fully the individual or i mean i know there's approaches i don't know how familiar you are with like dan mcadams and his sort of personal narrative these life story kind of narrative kind of approaches in a quantitative way but yeah go ahead no i love that dan mcadams work and i think he's i think he's i think he's uh he's he's really uh on the money with with with his his approach um but your medical example if i in the in the book i talk about you know you take out the slip of paper with with a prescription medicine and it lists all these different things that could

18:25happen to you and the probabilities of them and so on and you at the end of you realize nobody has a clue i mean they don't know what symptoms you're going to get you know they give you the drug and if you feel these things top stop taking the drugs yeah okay so um so the approach is for me the approach is is biographical uh i i think it goes beyond beyond narratives but narratives play a very strong part of it and so so my methodology for doing this is is what i call my 4d framework uh and i think

18:58it encompasses um the the work the the really valuable work you can do through psychometrics testing uh so the the four d's are destiny drama deliberation and development and using these four you can tell the story of a of of a human life and and how it's unfolded the way it has and what kind of person this is let's put this in the context let's say of a job interview or you're

19:31interviewing somebody to be a prospective partner could even be a romantic partner what are the four things you'd really like to know most about them well here they are number one destiny what is it about this person that can't be fixed what is it about this person that is a given and that would be their dna and to and to some extent uh their personality or certainly the the underlying temperament temperamental basis for a person adult personality because as we know uh childhood temperament predicts adult personality um but of course you know it unfolds it is in its own way

20:08uh for for for that person so the uh so and the other elements of destiny because of the place of birth and time of birth and the childhood milieu and so on so then some people then spend the rest of their life trying to run away from their destiny but these are stuff that you carry with you so you always want to know when the person's standing in front so what's the what is this person carrying that i need to know about uh and what effect is that going to have in in the workplace or wherever you you may happen to be so that's so that's where that's where i think the testing regime really uh

20:40has a huge amount to to contribute and i use i use uh test myself in in all of my work um the second is the drama now life is continually unpredictable we like to pretend it's unpredictable it is predictable but it is it's not i mean we live lives of punctuated equilibrium so we have we have periods of stability and then drama upsets the apricot but even in the micro moments of every day uh you you know i mean i'm i play tennis and uh you know where the ball's going to go and where

21:15and what the next thing is going to be i mean and it's it's the stuff of life we love that unpredictably it makes life fun but it also makes life dangerous and difficult for us at times and of course then big events happen the big dramas that happen somebody close to you dies or you get fired or you get a job or you get something good happens to you win the win the lottery you know these dramas then are things that that you you adapt to and of course that process of adaptation is one of often chasing the game but what are you chasing the game with what's the and it's

21:49the this is where the destiny comes in is your personality one of the reasons why personality tests are predictive is because they're quite good at figuring out what kinds of reactions you may have as an individual to some of these dramas that may happen now that would leave us something buffeted between these two forces but the third one deliberation is is the free will point is the point so which you can stop and say wait a minute i don't want this life i mean a lot of my students you know their

22:20mid-life mid-career people very successful lawyers and accountants and people who they they they reach the the top of their their their profession and they and they want it and they've they've made some choice so to say wait a minute i'm going to get off this bus and and see where else i might go um and they come into my into my class uh and that's that's the beginning of the conversation that we're having is you know is kind of why are you here and what are you looking to do and of course

22:51what they're trying to do the most important thing they're trying to do is to change the narrative and the deliberation is often around as dan mcadams would would would say is around the narrative uh what's the story you're telling about yourself and your own future because that that will be quite determining and then of course there's the fourth point is the development point which you you you can't stop learning stuff you can't or i mean some of the learning is is bad learning people learn for example to be very mistrustful if that if they've had bad experiences i spent a lot

23:24of time in my one-to-ones with with people discussing trust issues and how to repair them uh because that seems to be very critical but but you know you you do eventually acquire wisdom and so on and the stories that my that i i get told in in the classroom amaze me in in in in the the the ways which people have actually uh recovered their lives um after after things that you think uh would would would would would destroy less than somebody uh uh would could be could be destructive to a person

24:01but people don't actually people are very resilient and very adaptable so i for me individuality is a story of creation and a story of adaptation mostly well nigel so i i was lucky enough to receive an advanced copy of of your book and um of course i didn't have enough time from whenever i received it to to actually read the entire thing before we started this but i didn't get through quite a bit of it and of course there's a lot of thought

24:32provoking uh uh you know material in that book that people can can you know seek for themselves but there were two sentences in your book that particularly piqued my interest and i quote you are an embodied mind you could flip this over and say you are an in-minded body a beast being that is stuck with the mind that is capricious and apt to get you into needless trouble that's i i love that but can you expand on that and what you mean by it okay um so so my analysis of of of individuality

25:10says okay well so we we have i i take the the concept of beast being actually the beast i would say anil seth into the neuroscientist i read uh something he wrote a book which called being you which he talks about us as beast machines which is what descartes the philosopher descartes the french philosopher descartes said uh descartes famous for dualism he because descartes said oh we are beast machines but then we have this divine spirit well now we can we can put

25:43the divine spirit into this into what freud called the psyche and put the psyche into the beast being and that's what we carry around with us we are this animal with our own carapace of of flesh and blood and our own mental processing uh so a lot of which is mysterious to us and that is that is your your your beast being uh and it it will go its own way well it has its primitive uh uh its appetites and it has its own its own ways and john hite also made made made a similar point in his writing

26:19uh now what we have in addition to that is something to help us to a control system so we have we have the conscious ego uh which is the which freud called a slave but actually it's more than a slave because it has its own wants and needs and we can say more about that later um uh and uh and the ego has to has to has to listen to to these the appetites of the beast and to some extent to feed them but also it entertains the the concept of self and here following william james you know

26:54who just he said you know the ego is the i uh you know the me and the uh and the self is the me is is the you know the distinguishing with the i and the me uh and of course the self as dad mccallum says is the bit that carries the narratives and those narratives are very important now we need to balance uh what what these the different forces that are coming from these and if we don't if we don't take if we're not aware of the ways in which we can fool ourselves we'll end up in big trouble

27:27i mean i've seen traders for example um getting swept away financial traders getting swept away with beliefs that they could control markets um because they because of positive feedback loops between what they do and what they see on their screens and then they suddenly think they're masters of the universe and the until the universe uh comes and blindsides them and give them a kick up the butt you know so uh which could happen um so uh our minds are not under our control we we we are we are we

28:03you know like what we're doing now is an interesting example and none of this is written down we're all making this up as we go along but we're doing it we're doing it in a kind of controlled way but at the same time we're capable of being a little bit surprised by what we say and by what we hear and then how how we act react that's that's the joy of life but but it's it's that that it's also a process that needs to be that needs to be managed and that is there's a kind of a struggle there i think for for people um i mean within that i mean i think um there are there are all these

28:42different moving parts need to be taken care of um the poor ego for example uh that has to do all all that is processing all this data i mean your ego is getting the data from your body telling you how you'll feel you've maybe got a slight headache you're feeling a bit tired you know uh and your your and from yourself your your idea about about where you are in the world and what's what's going on um and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to achieve and has to and the ego has to

29:12then get to work and make sure you you uh you do the right things to get the things you need and want to survive and prosper now as we as we know uh from again from personality testing and from and from neurological research uh that this this is kind of the dopamine circuit business you know where we are getting we spend our lives striving for things and we're programmed to do that that's part of our evolutionary heritage but some people do it far too much some people spend their whole lives

29:46you know chasing um chasing success chasing stimuli chasing uh friendship chasing this and that um and i call that t-link after the the greek you know for for for going towards uh um something and we need to step out of that and of course we we do we have the paratelic states which is um uh often the in neurological terms it's called the default mode network which is when the brain is at apparently at rest when you're relaxing enjoying life and so on of course and it's a completely

30:22different set of circuitries and that that is you need that but of course too much of that's a bad thing too because people get depressed sitting around thinking about themselves and they need to get out and do something so you know those are the kinds of things that we need to do in this you know embody we you know the mind only exists for the sake of the body that that's the put when i say you and and in uh and in minded body what i'm saying is the body has got this mind for

30:52to to look after itself let's and we tend to we tend to often think about it the other way around we reverse put the cart before the horse almost and say oh you know the body is just a it's just a useless piece of flesh that we have to drag around whilst we and it gets in the way of you enjoying life i'm afraid it's i mean that is the wrong way around yeah nigel it occurs to me in this discussion one of the topics that comes up to us a lot concerns this notion of the true self or the

31:24sort of authentic self uh and it seems like based on your discussion that you have this point of view that um you know maybe that there's some true self that exists but it's sort of unknowable a lot of the time that we spend in our lives interacting with other people to your to your fourth point or the the sort of connection that we're having other people is spent managing our impression and not really being some true self whatever that might be or that's if that's an id or or whatever that that uh sort of true self might be would you agree with that or what's your take on this notion

31:58of a true self well i i think it's very dangerous actually to to talk to assume there is a single true self that is unvarying i mean i think you you certainly have you have a mental architecture and you have mental processing uh and it it is it's fluid it's not it doesn't stand still but it does operate within parameters you can't suddenly flip and become something completely different and you don't flip and become so you get to know yourself imperfectly and you get to know

32:30your foibles and flaws imperfectly um and uh i'm very fond of the word zemblanity zemblanity is invented by a novelist um william boyd and he used the word to be the opposite of serendipity serendipity is good stuff that happens to you by accident uh zemblanity is bad stuff that happens to you because you made it happen okay because this is you being you again i think you know oh my when i've lost my keys or i've lost my something it's me again i know you know this is

33:04what i do uh this is one of my zemblanities is to is to is to is to let my mind wander and not and get and lose it losing things um and you we we learn to we learn to live with them and and being inauthentic to some extent is generally construed as meaning you can tell people about that that you that you have these these foibles but i in the in the book i talk about my experience is going to uh to see to talk to children and teachers and in a school for autistic kids um and neurodivergence

33:40is is very interesting we're all a bit neurodivergent i certainly know i am um you know but in the sense that um uh it's it's much easier for some people to be authentic than others i mean some people can give a nice straightforward account of themselves and be broadly trusted to do so but for other people and we all know the profiles anybody listening who who who looks at personality profiles will know there are people who are more consistent within within the dimensions than others and they're and

34:12they're they're people who are fairly easy to read for themselves and for other people but there are other people who within any given dimension they've got peak scores going in opposite directions and so on and these are these are apparent contradictions that are reconciled within the compass of the personality that's how personality operates personality is actually as jung said is the integration of these opposites but these but these but unlike you but i'm saying these are very

34:43specific to you uh and so what authenticity means to you is not the same as it means to the person standing next to you and don't presume it is it's much much easier for some people to tell their stories some brothers well nigel you just taught me a new word um i'm gonna use zimplanity every time my wife loses her keys and that will probably happen later today but i digress so uh in one chapter of your

35:17book you talk about uh the ui2 of relationships or i don't know if that's ui squared yeah okay there you go and how human beings are biologically wired to connect with each other uh can you explain a little bit more why that's the case i think this is the fourth law you mentioned earlier it is it is well um uh as uh joe henry pointed out in his wonderful book the secret of our success um human culture has

35:51has been some such a miraculous story of development because of our status as animals who learn from each other i mean you just watch a baby in a room uh with uh you know put a chimpanzee and a baby in the same room where the chimpanzees or humans or whatever uh the chimpanzee will do its own thing but the baby will always if somebody knew what walks into them the baby will immediately look at the person study the person will always you look at the what what what young children are

36:26doing they're continually looking at other other members of their own species and trying to figure out what's going on uh and this this is the uh he calls us self-domesticating animals which i think is rather nice um but this so this this connection with others i mean it's also comes up in economics in ricardo and adam smith you know that the different we find people who have complementary assets to our own so we can combine and do something completely new so ui squared means that your love and

37:03my love are completely different things or your partnership and my partnership are different things they they are and they stand on their own four feet um in either in their own way um so uh and of course friendships and relationships i mean we could talk about family separately because i've done a lot of work with families and family business as as you mentioned but um of course you know in um what friendship does one one of the most i think friendship is very interesting as a

37:38phenomenon uh because friends enlarge your world i use the concept of umwelt which i borrowed from uh ecology where they use it to talk about how different species live in their own worlds to some extent constructed worlds well each of us how it lives our own constructed worlds as well so i can talk about our umwelt our own world in from the german um and um when you when you form a friendship your world expands enlarges and of course the breakup of friendships the breakup of

38:10relationships is is so painful because a part of your world has been taken away from you um but there's also an animal level there's the beast level and again in the book i talk about beast to beast connections and i think none is more powerful for a lot of people than their relationship with a dog i mean dog the dog human relationship is one of the most interesting long-standing relationships we have with any other species 18 000 years i believe we've been domesticating dogs or longer probably um but uh you feel that oh and i and i i talk in the book about

38:49how when my dog died and i had this very strange feeling about something had been taken away from me and i couldn't figure out what it was because it wasn't like a person dying where i could say oh i'd lost this this this part of my umwelt you know but i had lost something and this this bond this connection so i i like all this resonance i think we resonate we resonate with each other you know the concepts of resonance from physics and even music is is an interesting one every material has its own pitch of resonance um so you have you know there you have your own unique resonances

39:25people and places and things that were that that you respond to actively um and and it can be negatively as well you can have you can realize when something it really isn't isn't your isn't your flavor so i think of course the other thing is as again as sociologists pointed out 100 years ago nearly coolly and people like this we also learn about ourselves in relationships but it's part of the exploration of the of the parts of ourselves that we don't know or the unknowable

39:59the unconscious are discovered through relationships when you see how other people react to us and when they tell us about what what they think we're doing i mean that that's that's so hugely important i think in human affairs nigel i'm kind of curious on this you know i mean i think you and i are totally aligned here in thinking about you know that a huge portion of our lives is spent connecting with other people social interaction is where the interaction is to quote bob hogan but uh i i wonder

40:31to what extent people can live i mean your book is titled unique you so and we're talking about connections and these sorts of relationships that people have but to what extent can people sort of live uh independent solitary disconnected lives and to what extent is that psychologically healthy or unhealthy and what are the sort of ramifications of say a modern world you touched on this a little bit earlier where maybe people feeling are feeling less connected than than before well i do yes

41:01with this you made a couple of points there um in a previous book i i quoted admiral stockdale who spent seven years in solitary confinement under the viet kong um and survived by by by thinking about the uh the the stoic philosophers the roman seneca and people like that which he had read and keeping himself separate so to some extent you're never alone in a sense because you've always got the world in your head and you've got people in your head you've got relationships i mean people have

41:33relationships with books and tv i mean people imagine i think people like soap operas because to some extent they are a kind of a they give people the simulation of relationships that are that that are not theirs but they could feel they're part of um so and but again as we know it's part of the law of you are have unique individuality is that we're all vastly different and there's some people can't exist without without being online and communicating with other people other people

42:06then there are nothing better than to be left on their own projects um it's it's good i think i think being an only child for example may may influence something like that but it's also it's it's also part of is one of the the basic uh elements of of personality uh and temperament is is is people's desire to to be with others but i think as you say uh a lot of these interactions are very fleeting and

42:37very insubstantial and now we've got this sort of catfishing issues and people out there who who aren't what they seem to be and people are desperate to connect and it's the easier it is to connect the more risky it is and the more fallible the connections are um and i always say no matter how many virtual meetings you have get get together personally and get to know each other i mean i like using zoom and teams and so on it works quite well for you but only but it works when you when you've

43:08already met them much better than if you haven't met them in my in my experience um i sort of a little reflection on groups though here because i think that one of the things that happens in in in and is part of it's this is psychology 101 is that you put somebody in a group and there is immediately a norming tendency of people wanting to conform and wanting to belong and wanting to fit in of course again ui rules some people don't want to fit in but most people generally speaking are prepared to

43:42submerge their individuality uh for the sake of the group and indeed that's one of the story part of the human success story is people being able to do being able to do that um but that's not always as we know that's not always good for the outcomes because we know that over normed groups make bad decisions and sometimes highly risky decisions and sometimes disastrously conservative ones um my love family business is partly because they kind of are like that they go you know they've they've learned

44:15to disrespect each other enough to speak the truth to each other and to assert themselves and so on um and uh you know my approach to families business has always been the unique family you've got unique people who are uh tethered together into in this enterprise and then you know you could say it's it's it is it there's a lottery a genetic lottery as to whether any given family is capable of running a business and not not tearing the business apart or not tearing the family apart

44:45you know nigel you know one thing i i noticed in the book while i was i was reading through it you know is that people seem to have an internal conflict between their their pre-wired unique individuality and the cultural influences imprinted on them by external forces how does that battle play out and is one stronger than the other yes but again you see you have to take you have to take a uniqueness uh perspective uh uh to to to to get at that point because uh people's relationship with

45:21we're all culture carriers you know we we're from the moment of our birth uh culture is is all around us um and you take it and it's very much taken for granted um and uh we we you know there's there's an old joke an australian joke i think about two young fish swimming through the water and they meet an old fish and the old fish says says to the young fish uh hey boys how's the water and and they they say okay and then one of the young fish one of these parts says what's water you know

45:57because you don't realize you're swimming in it um we are so uh ingested with with culture that that we take it for granted um but the relationship with culture is is high as you grow then you then you you may start to rebel and say wait a minute i i don't really take this for granted why why does it say i have to do this and why why do these norms exist and that starts in the family of course teenage rebellion is all is is about is exactly about this this this uh cultural conflict for for some people

46:29culture is a refuge uh and uh others it's a toolkit it's really helpful it may be a springboard to take you somewhere else yeah for some people it's a prison or uh you're being brainwashed um or even an illusion and the only way you know is is when you step outside the culture the first time you go abroad maybe um or you meet somebody from another culture who then shakes your presumptions or you read something so i'm not sure it is a battle because in a sense it's it's if it is a battle it's a battle

47:06within within the self it's not a battle with the culture this is a battle within the self about how much am i going to surrender to what i to what i've been taught or what what i believe or what i've been taught to believe uh and how and and how i feel about about about what is happening to me i think it's a very dynamic and interesting relationship and i'm i've spent a lot of time in previous years my work on transition studying uh expats and and how they adapt and of course

47:36what you see is people adapt in very different ways some people find it very take it like a like a fish to water and they they they jump in and they they feel very at home in these new cultures for other people it's much much more more difficult and then of course the big shock is when you go home again that's the biggest shock often because you see your own culture through new eyes now your umwelt has been has been transformed by by your experience of being in another culture and then you go back and you say i can't i can't accept that anymore the things that i used to accept in my home

48:12i can't i can't take them anymore or you may have the opposite you may say oh i love my culture i love you know coming back to america after being in europe and you know the all that you see all the good things um so again i'm afraid you know you have to you have to say that the ui principle is very important um and that the you know because some people are socialized much more intensely than others some people are brought up in very strict households but it doesn't last it often doesn't

48:44last very few people are are very uh the disciples of their parents so it doesn't seem to happen very much in my experience well well nigel i think again this points to this sort of uh you know tension that comes up quite a bit which is this notion of you know when doing a personality assessment there's this concern you brought up the topic of faking earlier there's this concern that somebody might be faking and i and i think one of the things that you're you've observed here is that

49:15despite our sort of pre-wiring whatever pre-wire we might be genetically disposed with from the moment we're born there are cultural influences impacting us shaping our behavior shaping the way that we think uh shaping the way we approach the world and these external forces are just as much a part of us now one could argue that you know you're you're faking you're not being your true self you're not being uh you know who you were pre-wired to be um and it but but i i think for me uh my

49:49perspective is that that's happening to all of us all the time and so you know who we are the sort of reputation that we make i i don't know how that ties in with your concept here of unique you um is is the combination of not just your pre-wiring but also uh the the choices that you've made the sort of uh impact that you've tried to have through those social connections i i don't know again how you feel about that that sort of uh that that that that topic of uh you know pre-wire you know the sort of

50:22combination of pre-wiring versus cultural connections it's you've made a very good point and uh of course the the pre-wiring is just a starter pack right it's it's just it's just a starter pack because uh because immediately the the culture starts to work and you and you absorb the culture you assimilate the culture um in your own way i mean as piaget distinguished in simulation and accommodation and he said accommodation is when you what you assimilate changes who you are

50:53in a sense changes your perspective and that's and and much of that early learning is about accommodation how the culture changes you but of course you were you are as you ingest it you are changing it yourself it's like the pill you take or the alcohol we were discussing earlier you know you you you absorb culture you ingest culture and you make it your own um so uh you come back to the point that that it is a conversation with the most important conversations you ever have

51:26are conversations with yourself so the way we resolve these things is by saying you know okay so maybe that's maybe i don't maybe what i believed there wasn't quite true and maybe i should i should go in a new direction now i should try something different or maybe i should go and see what it's like on the other side of the hill you know um so i think this this is what makes life such an adventure is that is that in a sense it is a

51:58toolkit we've got it with us uh and um we shouldn't let it imprison us uh because i think part of the the discovery of your i'd prefer rather than saying you know returning to as it were to some base condition that you were born with i'd rather go in the direction of maslow and talk about self-actualization although maslow got slightly confused about self-actualization and he didn't really i think fully say enough about how different that process is for everybody and to to to find to to find the

52:35way your own potential the things that are right for you is a lifelong process and you do you're doing it all the time um but so i i and culture play plays an important part of that because it it provides a set of mirrors and a set of benchmarks and things that you could that you can say that you can say this this fits me or it doesn't fit me this suits me or this doesn't suit me um

53:07and for some people it's it's it's a really tough it's a really really tough process um but in my certainly in my classroom the the executives and and who i and who i've worked with the leaders i've worked with you know transitions are so important in this process and you can't stop transitions transitions are going to happen to you transitions in your biology transitions in your relationships transitions in your work and each transition uh it has the potential to be

53:44transformational by by taking your life in a new direction you know nigel at hogan we talk a lot about the dark side of personality yeah so i saw one of the chapters is titled uh the ui dark side dealing with our demons i i i had to dive into this uh it's kind of a three-part question here so one where does our dark side come from how does it differ from person to person and how can we suppress it yeah uh well i i i don't

54:19advise you suppress it i'm with jung on this one who jung said uh we have to we have to face the the the dark side and um and uh and try to integrate it into our lives because otherwise we'll be blindsided about it you know so you have to let the light in i think um that is that is much more challenging for some people than others and again we have the the ui principle uh the uniqueness perspective uh comes in here that everybody has a dark side but the dark side for each person is a different shade of dark and

54:56and and also a different different sizes for some people they have much more difficult demons than others um and we should we should never presume uh that that that people are uh are what what they what they seem on the on the the surface um i mean they come you say where does it come from well part of it comes from your beast inheritance and if you think about the way the brain functions uh we we have some very primitive uh appetites uh for sex for acquisition for a dominance and all sorts

55:35of things that sometimes can be can be very ugly and they're part of your evolutionary heritage and that you share with a lot of other species and certainly with uh with with your other kind and then we have the we have the rational the higher or the uh the more considered and we're so uh as this there is there are contradictions and conflicts going on between the different parts of of of of our own brains and our own identity continually even between the left and the right hemisphere of the

56:09brain um they're they're doing different things paying attention to different things and you know daniel karnaman wrote his book thinking fast and slow you know that we have these different circuitries that are trying to do different things that are useful to us and occasionally they come and interfere with each other um and we also as as other people have pointed out we also kind of we are designed to be hypocrites we're designed to blind to to to to have you know what's the phrase

56:43deniability uh that they use in politics um to have you know so so you could say oh i didn't know you know i didn't realize i was doing something bad um because we can act selfishly and then and but not realize we're acting selfishly then we've dressed it up as being rather high-minded so uh so so so i think it's beholden upon us to understand that because if we don't understand it then other people may understand it before you do uh and may then label you or deal with you in a way

57:19that you you don't want so you're you're better off managing your own uh uh dark side than than than letting it trip you up and and so suppressing it it is is not is not the answer the answer is to say identify it figure out what it is and turn it into something more harmless like a zemblanity to turn it into something you can say well you know this is this is me and fine and and hopefully people who love you will tolerate you and help you um it always seems to be astonishing and and very human

57:55to see how uh people are forgiven for for things that are um often uh very very challenging nigel that reminds me of a comment you made at the outset which was i think your point number two which is that uh people are strangers to themselves and it seems like part of one of the goals perhaps of life is to become less of a stranger to yourself and maybe part of that is by getting some understanding of these potential dark sides would you agree with that or what do you think

58:30no i completely agree with that and i think you know and the hogan dark dark triad uh work i think is is terrific in this regard i think it's very helpful to know this um not in a sense to kind of label yourself or to beat yourself up or have to marginalize yourself but to say look these these are things that that that that i have to live with um i was at a conference and i met a woman who said to me oh i'm adhd so i said oh really what and what's that involve and she started reeling off the symptoms

59:01so i said oh i have most of those so i've come to the conclusion i'm mildly adhd myself um and learning to live with it and in my case i know it means my being impulsive or being irritated and interrupting people or talking too much of the things that i'm possibly doing now but you know um uh but you learn to deal with it and you learn you learn to manage yourself and if if if you don't then uh then i think you you you can you can become open to uh the kinds of categorizations that i think are

59:36very damaging and uh unnecessary um i i'm waging a war in my book against categorization really and i think the purpose of of measuring people by any psychometrics test is not to label people um but to help them manage a dynamic process of being who they are oh i love that that's that's a great way to put it and you know nigel i think the the the elephant in the room for a lot of people right now or at least

1:00:11one of the hot topics in the world is is ai uh it's arguably the hottest topic in today's world that's right and that's that's definitely saying something based on current global affairs um i'm curious how do you see ai affecting our ui and uh what are some of the positives and negatives of this new technology and what it has in store for us yes um well i in the book i say uh ui is our last line of defense against ai uh in the sense that what what what artificial intelligence does is brilliant

1:00:48mimicry and uh simulation so it can make you think there's a real person and in fact in that chapter i reproduce a conversation a very realistic conversation i had with uh with an american woman who was a a bot um in the company of a futurist patrick dixon and um we had this very interesting conversation and um but of course you know what what when you when you stop and think there are the interesting thing is that that computers and ai can't even begin to simulate

1:01:25a single element of human thought processes uh i mean all our perception is is a controlled hallucination i think as as has been said by um neuroscientists you know we we construct the what we what we see of the world is a mental construction uh we're actually predicting what what the stimuli that we that we see in in the moment um and our thought processes are full of randomness

1:01:56and chaos and things that come from from left field and uh the the way the way we improvise in our speech and so these are things that that uh ai can't can't come come close to so we have we have supreme gifts of uh quick exotic uh strangeness and creativity and um relatability i've got a whole list of the things that that they that machines can't do however they still represent uh both a threat and

1:02:31an opportunity and i would say that the threats are probably there are three major threats i think psychologically anyway i don't i'm not talking about losing jobs or things like i'm talking about the cycle number one is laziness and i think that there is a real risk that we allow machines to make decisions that we should be making uh the second is gullibility is of of we we like to believe things that are nice and we like to believe when people massage us with the positive you know i

1:03:06notice any interaction i have with with um with this with an ai engine always starts off by saying oh what a nice idea that was nigel or something what an interesting thought that was i mean of course it doesn't think my thoughts are interesting at all doesn't have any thoughts about my thoughts but it says those things but we are very easily seduced by that by by those things and that's that's also part of our nature and the third stress i think is powerlessness is that we become fatalistic

1:03:37because we say i mean if a machine can predict that you're not going to win a race and indeed one of my informants uh toby velt in the in in in my book is doing research just on this i mean he has data that can show you what the limits to an athlete's performance well you can see the feedback loop there could be very could be very damaging you say well i'm what's the point of competing you know if i can't win what's the point um and uh you can see how people may may may may surrender

1:04:10but on the positive side um we have we have the opportunities i i mean i think we are now i think we're living in an age of ui as well as an age of ai i really believe my i hope my book is is is part of part of a process ushering in a new world of of uh respect of a new new new way of thinking about the individual because we can now personalize in so many different ways using intelligent um technology

1:04:41uh there's huge opportunities for learning and uh and to way to improve the way we make decisions i mean i found it very helpful in my in my writing my book to use to use these these technologies to help me find things and help me out uh to to to to delve into into certain kind of questions but most but i would never let it write a word for me i may say and for that extent then it extends your

1:05:12capability and i think again that's the great the great promise of of well-managed uh ai is to is to extend your capability but in terms of material threats the real biggest threat is some crazy people getting using ai to to destroy uh the fabric of our of our lives and societies and that that is a real that's a real threat um so uh but i'm i'm i'm no soothsayer so don't ask me what's gonna happen in the future but i do believe i i think that the the recognition of ui as being

1:05:49something really to be reckoned with in the in the in the context of of the of the techno revolution is is absolutely central well nigel i don't want to ask you to predict the future here but i do have a sort of a question that's related uh to that that concept which is you know particularly thinking about ai and this concept of you know human or individual uniqueness yeah there's been for a long time there has been attempts and discussions about cloning i remember when

1:06:22they cloned a sheep and you know is that sheep exactly the same and is this exactly the same person if they were clones what about this notion that and you know i've seen some people say well i've created an ai agent who who just does my task does work for me attends meetings for me does right this notion that we could create an ai agent that replicates perfectly the uniqueness that makes up us do you think that's even in the realm of possibility or is that absolutely not absolutely

1:06:55not because for the reasons i've just i've we spent this time talking about i guess is is is the level of complexity and development and and you know let's just take the simple example of the self-concept um just thinking about yourself in a different way changes everything in a way that you can't imagine an artificial intelligent system doing it's not capable of thinking about itself in a different way

1:07:25it doesn't it doesn't have a concept of itself it just it just does you know um and um and i so i think this is really uh uh you know i mean i i in i've talked to identical twins um who who to some extent have the same starter pack in terms of dna but they diverge from the very beginning uh and they diverge because their experience is not identical uh they might be identical to this

1:07:56but their experience is not identical then they may become very close but they'll never they'll but they they never become replicants of each other and you know a clone of you or clone of me would very quickly diverge because it would have different experiences so that that's the you know that's the philosophical or the theoretical point if you like i mean having somebody who who having a gopher who who kind of functions for you as an ai assistant well yes i'm sure we're going to get

1:08:29there so robotics live i i might and i and i'm sure they'll be used and misused um i think there is a more troubling aspect is is about tinkering with the human genome and uh i don't know what i think this is where governments and regulation are going to try to control but at some point they the things will evade the controls and people will there will be frankenstein experiments that go on and and will have uh and will have probably um some some nasty consequences but it kind of

1:09:04it doesn't really work in the same way as eugenics never really worked i mean they people thought you know you could breed a master race the nazis thought that um and it was practiced in other in other places as well but of course that was based upon a faulty reading about stock breeding they were they're totally ignorant about what really happens in in in genetic reproduction and things and things like epigenetics and so on which which are all kinds of subtle and unknowable

1:09:37effects so um i don't i don't think that i don't think those uh that i think those those kinds of experiments are going to be are going to be fraught with difficulty and will become probably a legal and a moral battleground and and and by the way i just want to conclude on on a note because i will i i don't want people to think at the end of this podcast or indeed at the end of reading my book if you do read the book um this is not i'm not here as an advocate of selfish individualism this is absolutely

1:10:11not the thrust of of of of the idea of ui of a unique individuality um in fact quite the contrary if you think about my four laws each of those four laws of of ui has a moral imperative the first one is to be yourself the second one is be humble and be forgiving um the third one is reach out to other people and resonate with them the fourth one is find the find the find the best way of connecting with people all of those things are very pro-social so my hope is that this takes us in the direction

1:10:47more of of genuine community genuine communality of people with diversity diversity is is is the key this is the real i'm talking here about the real meat of diversity instead of the tokenism of race and gender and so on you know those are very crude categories the real diversity is is the diversity that exists between any any two people in uh in the in their makeup and uh and their orientation to the

1:11:18world well nigel this has been such a great conversation i think our audience is going to love it but i do have one last question and it does involve you predicting the future so you know uh and that is how do you think the study and our understanding of ui will evolve in the years and centuries to come well um i i in terms of uh and i find i i find this a difficult question to answer i i i'm very interested

1:11:50in the concept of meta trades which i don't think have been properly has been properly tackled i think we could get a greater level of complexity in psychometrics by thinking about meta trades um i'm specifically it's always intrigued me when i because i i test myself once a year pretty well just to see what's going on you know um and it always intrigues me the things that move and the things that don't move and um and i always say this to people you know some of

1:12:21these some of your scores will change and some of them won't and i can't tell you which will and which which won't um and uh you know so so i think there is there are other levels of of analysis that we we could draw from this my hope is also that it becomes that does become tied to something that also encompasses uh people's lived experience uh in a biographical sense because the the and the narratives and some integration between between these concepts and and what dan

1:12:57mccannams talks about between psychometrics and and and and the analysis of the narratives that that people carry um and uh uh so so um but my but but i think for me that the real the real prize is that people will read my book and say oh this is a new way of seeing the world i'm i'm i'm gonna stop thinking about people in simplistic categorical terms and try to understand who they really are well nigel i just want to say thanks so much for joining us for this episode uh this is

1:13:33a fantastic topic uh one that we've not dug into i mean you you at the outset you mentioned gordon alport and um you know i i it's a topic that again i don't think anybody's mentioned his name and in all the years that we've been doing this podcast so i i really appreciate the perspective on uniqueness and talking about how that is so important in our lives particularly you know again on this this podcast about personality it's sort of amazing you know the point that you made at the outset that we've really avoided this topic but i also want re our listeners to to know where

1:14:08they can get a copy of your book and i believe by the time this episode comes out it should be available and pretty much all the places where you can commonly get a book uh published by hogan press and i believe if some of our listeners want to get in touch with you you're available on linkedin is that true absolutely yeah i'm very pleased to to support anybody's interest in this field well nigel i really appreciate you coming on i know ryan does as well and our audience is going

1:14:40to love this one so thank you so much for joining us well thank you blake and thank you ryan for for a wonderful discussion i really appreciated it and i hope your audience did too and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 144 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and 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.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time