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i'm adam grant i'm here with brian little who teaches at cambridge he's
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also a senior fellow here at the wharton school he's a personality psychologist and the
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author of me myself and us a wonderful new book and it's not every day that i actually get to interview my
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mentor on camera brian for starters tell us about your book the book actually grew out of experiences you and
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i had uh which were at harvard a few years ago i had stumbled upon the opportunity of teaching a class and
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as the class sort of went on after a few days it got bigger and then bigger and i thought oh isn't
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this wonderful all the students are coming but in fact it was the ex-boyfriends of some of the
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students in the class were coming because there seemed to be something that touched their
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their hearts and let them think that there was something of value here beyond the classroom that may actually
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influence their lives and then it started to happen that the parents would come and and
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belligerent uncles and things like that and so i thought in about the year 2000 that it would be a good eye
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it would be a good idea to write a book that would engage with those people who weren't taking personality
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psychology as an academic course but as a way of illuminating their lives and understanding the people
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they love and work with i remember sending every one of my roommates actually forcing them to take
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your course and everything i remember that too i i of course got repaid for that by them
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coming back and diagnosing all of my problems and pathologies which i suppose i deserved
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but one of the most interesting things we learned about in the course was this idea of free traits
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talk to us about that thank you i think the the the setup to this is that right now the study of traits is
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in the ascendancy as as you know there was a time when trait psychology was was in deep trouble and it was uh as a
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result of walter michelle's 1968 book uh personality and assessment where uh he drew the the conclusion that
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stable traits of personality were non-existent he's modified that position more recently but at the time it dealt
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quite a blow to the to the field in the um in the ensuing years trait psychologists
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those who study the big five dimensions of personality gained regained ascendancy
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and it's become i think certainly the most active field of personality research
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but i have some concerns about it let me let me tell the essence of my concerns about about traits
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um the big five dimensions um spell out the acronym ocean openness conscientiousness extroversion
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agreeableness and and neuroticism and many who study traits believe that we can be adequately and effectively
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described by our status on those five dimensions and i think there's some truth to that
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and i lecture as you know um about these in in the book i uh spend a couple of chapters
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talking about these relatively fixed traits of personality and perhaps the most um topical
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and hot topic is is that of um extroversion largely the result of our mutual friend
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susan kane's uh book quiet and um one of the which i strongly recommend your viewers to to read except for
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chapter nine because chapter nine is about the uh machinations of a strange little
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canadian uh guy who taught at harvard for a few years uh who used to hide from the
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students in the washroom and um i and i explained that behavior i guess it's somebody very similar to me
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and um it i explained that behavior by invoking the notion of free traits i am and this surprises my students um
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a very introverted person i'm off the bottom of the scale as an introvert but because of something
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that matters dearly to me which is a personal project to professing with passion
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and alliterating in a public place i i will act as an extrovert when i'm lecturing i'll speak
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loudly as as you do when you're addressing a class at the beginning i'll gesticulate wildly i hope not too
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wildly wildly because i think we need to not to be overbearing when we're professing
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but we need to keep students awake at eight in the morning and so i act like that and i'm engaged
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in what i call a free trade um and much of me myself and us the book deals with how free trait behavior
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differs from trait behavior or fixed trade behavior and the free trade of in my case
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pseudo extra version plays out by advancing my core project which is engaging with my students whom
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i love um and and it advances that core project in ways that will redown to my benefit
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but there are potential costs i'm not rare many people act out of character through free trades
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there are highly agreeable people who for all of the month of march act out of character because they're
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trying to get a better place for their mother in a care home and they have to bash down the doors of
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administrative um resistance and an advance a project take care of mom that enjoins that
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person to act in a disagreeable way we can do this it's called professionalism it's also called
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love but we may pay a price if we act protractedly act out of character um for uh for a long period the the
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empirical evidence on that is still growing i'd say right now it's mixed but uh
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there is growing evidence that acting in ways that go against your first nature as i call it may um may be problematic
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at the same time as it advances our well-being so when we take this into the workplace
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one of the things that you touched on is this idea that we all have personal projects
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these commitments that we make to courses of action that matter deeply to us how can an understanding of the personal
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projects the people i work with enable us to work more effectively together well i think it it offers an explanation
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for their action in ways that simply monitoring or attending to their their outward invisible behavior would
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not um i think we can watch a person who is engaged in a pattern of behavior that
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makes us say that person is neurotic um and therefore i may write that person down because
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he appears to be anxious when dealing with clients but in fact that person may be engaged in a personal project
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that um is entirely explicable by no by noting what that core project is that core project
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may be that i've got to pick up my kid um he's waiting outside in the cold um
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i know i'm a little distracted and i may give the appearance of not understanding what's going on in
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this financial meeting once you understand what a person's core projects or even ask a
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person how's it going david it puts us in a position where we can actually treat
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humans as humans and that to me is going to pay enormous benefits in the long term
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now you sort of take a stand in the book about some more effective and less effective ways of thinking about
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personality and one of the more popular ones of course is the myers-briggs type indicator
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which you've been observing for almost half a century now yes um where do you
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stand on that as an assessment instrument um i in the in the book i i take a few
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whacks at the mbti um but then i i come back and and look at um the the function that it serves of
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getting people to talk about individual differences in personality and that's good
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i think that it opens up a way of thinking about each other uh and thinking about ourselves the
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validity and reliability leaves a lot to be desired from a hard-nosed psychometrist perspective but
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i think it does serve a purpose and so unlike some of my students who would totally castigate it
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i would say that there is a room for that but we need to be cautious and the best example is by invoking free
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traits again that people who walk around with a i am an extrovert or i'm uh an intuitive
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introvert um sometimes reify it so much that they actually think that there's a kind of
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neurological circuit in the brain that declares itself as i am an extrovert or i am an introvert
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and that is palpably false and i think by cordoning ourselves off from refutation
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by claiming as a core sense of our identity that i am an extrovert we or any of the other myers-briggs
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designations i think we reduce our degrees of freedom to be fully human adam let me just use a random name maybe
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quite introverted but he could act out of character and advance the core projects that matter to him such as his
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students at wharton and and all that is is important but if he just walked around
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with i am an introvert on his forehead the degrees of freedom would be severely curtailed
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probably my favorite chapter in the book was the one about self-monitoring which
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i think captures some of the the fundamental questions around when do some people essentially end up
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adapting to the situation whereas others choose to say this is who i am yeah talk to us a little bit about
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what we should know about self-monitoring self-monitoring um boomed in the in the
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70s with mark snyder's work and i sort of revisited and tried to cast it in terms of
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of the whole issue of fidelity to to our beliefs and um and and authenticity and the current
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debate about authenticity um high self-monitors are those who will adapt themselves to the uh
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to the to the current situation so at a party they will act party at a funeral they were
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act funeral um and um and those who are low self-monitors will shape their behavior
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to accord the high self monitors will shape their behavior to accord uh to the situation
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the low self monitors will act on the basis of their own um beliefs and their own personality traits and so
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if they're feeling particularly funerial at party a low self-monitor says well
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that's the way i am i like to be glum at a party uh the high soft monitor would say good
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god it's a party why are you standing by the coffin staring at it i mean um you've got to shape yourself up by
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adapting to the situation to which the low self-monitor says i don't get it why
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people who are stand-up chameleons have no character and those who are high self monitors
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will say those who are rigidly themselves have no humanity because they're insensitive to the needs
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of others and so the conclusion i reach after giving a bunch of the research in this area is that i think on balance
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high self-monitoring is very adaptive as long as it doesn't blend itself into what's called aesthetic character
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disorder where you are so imbued with the um with the demands of the situation or
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the delights or the aesthetics of the situation that you will act in ways that go
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against your core values and there have been some politicians who have been accused of having
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ascetic character disorder and i think that it in turn blends into a kind of insensitivity that can be downright
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downright dangerous in closing we often think that great leaders are great teachers
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and i think it would be great to hear a little bit of wisdom on what we can learn from
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one of the true great teachers you won canada's highest award for university
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teaching you were the one of the favorite professors of the harvard class every year you taught there
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um what can leaders learn from the way that you teach in the classroom oh first thank you um i've been giving a
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lot of thought to this recently um and part of it was stimulated by by your own work uh and by the
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evidence that uh introverts can be good are good listeners and that balance between
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talking and listening asserting and reflecting and the capacity to shift between them
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seems to be really critical so i don't think that there is a one size fits all personality type for
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leaders i think there's a there are diverse set of factors the key aspect of which is the ability
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to choose select and empower the most virtuous forms of your own personality the capacity to listen the capacity to
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say i've listened i must act the capacity to show alacrity moving in and dealing with the
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situation instead of puzzling and all hamlet-like and not being sure but overdoing one or the other i think
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leads to to problems uh both personal and and political thank you brian thank you
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adam you