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Personality And Its Transformations
Psychology 230H is a course that concentrates to a large degree on philosophical and neuroscientific issues, related to personality. It is divided into five primary topics, following an introduction and overview. The first half of the course deals with classic, clinical issues of personality; the second, with biological and psychometric issues. Students who are interested in clinical psychology, moral development, functional neurobiology and psychometric theory should adapt well to the class. An intrinsic interest in philosophical issues is a necessity.
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1998
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3700 people want to read
About the author
Jordan B. Peterson
37 books16.5k followersJordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, self-help writer, cultural critic and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.
Peterson grew up in Fairview, Alberta. He earned a B.A. degree in political science in 1982 and a degree in psychology in 1984, both from the University of Alberta, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1991. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow for two years before moving to Massachusetts, where he worked as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University. In 1998, he moved to the University of Toronto as a full professor. He authored Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief in 1999, a work in which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide.
In 2016, Peterson released a series of videos on his YouTube channel in which he criticized the Canadian government's Bill C-16. He subsequently became involved in several public debates about the bill that received significant media coverage.
Peterson grew up in Fairview, Alberta. He earned a B.A. degree in political science in 1982 and a degree in psychology in 1984, both from the University of Alberta, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1991. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow for two years before moving to Massachusetts, where he worked as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University. In 1998, he moved to the University of Toronto as a full professor. He authored Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief in 1999, a work in which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide.
In 2016, Peterson released a series of videos on his YouTube channel in which he criticized the Canadian government's Bill C-16. He subsequently became involved in several public debates about the bill that received significant media coverage.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 25, 2022
What a great introduction to psychology this series of lectures is. I listened to some of Peterson's audiobooks - they are great as well - but he's on his best when he is allowed to improvise, point out connections to related fields, go off-the-road, deep into all kinds of rabbit holes and then miraculously get back on track- almost like a jazz musician. In that respect, he's as much of an artist as a scientist. High in orderliness AND openness, as he would say.
Another aspect I love is how he constantly applies his concepts to real life, without ever leaning towards self-help, nor sacrificing on the depth and nuance of the subject. Talking about the matter as well as about 'what matters'.
Highlight in this series IMO - and the view count on YouTube seems to agree - is his psycho-analytical discussion of The Lion King. This episode is the obvious candidate for a single release, to continue the music metaphor. Of course, listening to the entire album is still the real thing...
As of now, there are three volumes of this lecture series on YouTube: 2015, 2016 and 2017. I listened to the 2017 version, as I thought this one to be the best camera and sound wise. Don't expect a high-end, five-camera HD production though. The nice thing about this is that you can just listen to it while running/cycling/cleaning, as long as you take a short break to look at your phone whenever an important visual comes along. Highly recommended.
Another aspect I love is how he constantly applies his concepts to real life, without ever leaning towards self-help, nor sacrificing on the depth and nuance of the subject. Talking about the matter as well as about 'what matters'.
Highlight in this series IMO - and the view count on YouTube seems to agree - is his psycho-analytical discussion of The Lion King. This episode is the obvious candidate for a single release, to continue the music metaphor. Of course, listening to the entire album is still the real thing...
As of now, there are three volumes of this lecture series on YouTube: 2015, 2016 and 2017. I listened to the 2017 version, as I thought this one to be the best camera and sound wise. Don't expect a high-end, five-camera HD production though. The nice thing about this is that you can just listen to it while running/cycling/cleaning, as long as you take a short break to look at your phone whenever an important visual comes along. Highly recommended.
July 20, 2018
the missing manual to the homo sapiens brain
everyone should listen to this. EVERY ONE
everyone should listen to this. EVERY ONE
February 21, 2020
Beneath the fundamental presuppositions and the underlying preconditions and other seemingly redundant double-emphasized compound words, the precision, eloquence, rhythm, and meter of JP’s words are as impactful as they are mesmerizing despite his grating strained voice that somehow covers the gap between beseeching and berating with its gravelly bridge. It is true that if you’ve heard one JP lecture you’ve probably heard them all, and it is also true that I am left a bit saddened by the level of repetition that has clearly gone into the perfection of his masterful command over scientific language. Yet there is a comforting quality of consistency and familiarity that comes with this pattern of speech. More importantly, once the aura of the poetry has worn off and your brain can finally get down to those variables that haven’t changed over the many lectures, you begin to access the dense information-packed cloud that the words encapsulate. I say begin because there’s another layer of mesmerism that involves your narcissistic poser part of the brain revelling in the thought of simply memorizing the strings of words in an attempt to sound as impressive, without actually parsing through the, as JP would say, fundamental underlying truths. Still, over the course of many casual listens, this might be the first time I’ve actually attempted to abstract out some observations, so here goes.
He follows up many complicated scientific sentences that have my attention kind of drifting away because it is too difficult to comprehend with a very attention grabbing line either commenting on its importance ‘that’s an unbelievable fact’ or even higher attention, its emotional significance ‘that’s an unbelievably frightening idea or dangerous idea’ or sparking interest through wanting to disagree with his personal judgment ‘that’s an unbelievably foolish notion’
He is very compelling as a doomsayer, I am never paying more attention than when he says things like ‘you will, without fail, go through a catastrophic event that will totally destroy you’
Myths, archetypes, symbols: underground, unknown, unconscious – death, initiation, rebirth. Jonah and the whale, Pinocchio and the whale,
Horus: Peak purpose of human intelligence isn’t rationality but attention. Horus the eye. Balance between the strong structural culture of Osiris (ossified) with the attentive revolution of Horus.
Women are chaos, nature, unknown. From the unknown is born order, form. Chimp females don’t have strong preference for the dominant male, it’s just that he chases all other males away so mates with all the females. In humans, females have strong preference for dominant males. Most of us will be unsuccessful, all females will bear children, we all have twice as many female ancestors as male. Through our evolution, they have been gatekeepers, tyrannical nature. Our view of nature has gone from abject fear and oppression to one of power and contempt to now one of compassion and guilt over the power while forgetting the stage of abject fear
Piaget’s equilibriated state: one that takes least energy to maintain and be productive in, like a happy family. Knowledge isn’t a set of facts but a process of distilling known from the unknown by interacting with the environment
Positive emotion when you have a problem and encounter tools, and negative emotions when you encounter barriers.
Nietzsche thought god was dead and we’d have to create new value system but Jung understood god to be a manifestation of deep-rooted psyche (archetypes) and that this would just need to be rediscovered in a new form
Antidepressants theoretically should only work if your brain is acting as if you’re much lower in the dominance hierarchy than you actually are, but if it is correctly perceiving you to be in a very low place, then antidepressant won’t fix it. We are wired to make losers lead inescapably miserable lives. Is the only way to escape this to refuse to play, to refuse to send signals to the brain about our accurate place in the dominance hierarchy by becoming reclusive?
Jung’s Persona (mask) the face you present to others, in ideologues the ego and the mask get too closely identified and farther away from the shadow. That’s why psychoanalysts press ideology-driven patients not on the thing they love but what that means they actually hate, because that’s the driver. George Orwell’s essay on socialists not loving the poor but hating the rich.
Notice when looking at cartoon facial expressions, they aren’t really faces but the archetypal abstractions of all faces and all expressions, that’s why you know what the lion is feeling/thinking
Zazoo is the king’s eyes, separate from the body and able to see wider, and importantly the king is not a tyrant so he pays attention to what is seen. Horus.
Rafiki the shaman is the embodied transformative guide of the new-born psyche within the self.
When the light shines on Simba, the new hope of the psyche, a spontaneous feeling of awe overcomes us, helped along by the crescendo of music signifying grave importance, all the animals can’t help but bow.
Such a shocking difference between the emotive quality of the cartoon and the remake. Cartoon: Giraffe steps clearly into the light. We get a birds-eye view of Zazoo as he flies over the herds. Mufasa is clearly happy to see Rafiki, who radiates a shamanic aura. Animals shown separately in their crazed reactions, as different parts of the personality. Sun shines clearly on Simba, and the animals spontaneously bow. What terrible clarity and emotional impact we sacrifice in the name of realism, is this why cartoons are so much more archetypal, not because they’re stupid but because we see more clearly? Paintings v/s photos? A nuanced view of rationality vs a black&white one?
Beautiful rant on ADD: We designed schools in such a way that makes excitable curious children sit quietly and pay attention, as a consequence we pathologized ADD. It isn’t all socially constructed of course, some kids are high on extroversion and openness and disproportionally ‘suffer’ from ADD so give them Ritalin, an amphetamine that will help them focus. Rats that are not allowed to engage in social rough play have under-developed PFC. What makes them decrease the will to play? Ritalin.
Freud was rare in that his ideas got assimilated into mainstream during his time. This is a double-edged sword because it so rapidly became part of discourse that he was instead remembered specifically only for his mistakes, things that didn’t get assimilated!
Behaviorist vs Ethologist (studies behavior in natural environment – Lorenz, Goodall, DeWaal.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are considered great psychologists of the 19th century because all their predictions about the state of society in the 20th century came to pass, even radical ones.
Nietzsche sussed out that when you understand a theory you also understand the process of theorizing, you’re able to abstract out the thought as a separate object. Then this gets evaluated based on something, and that’s why science started beating religion, it isn’t a self-evident result.
Dostoevsky had epilepsy brought on by the trauma of being fake-executed. Gave him visionary experiences before the seizures and even he suspected them to be the source of his inspirational genius and wouldn’t trade them for a normal life
Herd behavior as seen in worst human tragedies like Nazism isn’t entirely useless or evil. Asch test about which line is larger has us agreeing with the consensus not because we’re stupid but because we’re humble enough to assume either everyone is wrong or we’re wrong, and there’s value in that humility.
Astonishing case written in ‘Satan’s silence’ where paranoid schizo mothers anxious about their kids in daycare quiz them with leading questions and induce nightmares and false memories that results in police asking other kids leading questions leading to more false memories and a total mess. Kids learn by reading adults expressions of interest and feedback, constantly modeling the reality that they are being presented.
Hitler did the same thing, putting out many statements and then ratcheting up the ones that he could see from the reaction were really working. Jung said Hitler really embodied the shadow of the German people.
Heidegger was one of first to point out phenomenology was a gap in Western philosophy which had long ignored or denigrated the value of personal experience as opposed to Eastern philosophy.
Phenomenology proceeds by assuming your experience is truth and is all that is true. There are categories, like dreams that are truths only I have access to, and experience of wind that others also have access to. They don’t claim it’s true, but proceed with articulating the problem of reality assuming this is true.
Conscientiousness can be further broken up into industriousness and orderliness. Ind is highly correlated with academic achievement but so far we have no idea what it manifests as, since none of the tests with varying types of tasks have shown industrious people scoring higher. Then how are they classified as industrious? Not sure.
Orderliness has a dark side, Hitler was OCD about bathing and cleanliness, but bodily purity manifests also as moral purity. Didn’t think of Jews as scary beasts but as filthy vermin. Judgment, contempt, disgust are all more strong with highly orderly people, as is tendency to favor authoritarianism and strong leadership.
Lovely finding that there is a strong correlation (even stronger than gold standard which used to be 0.5 viz IQ vs achievement) between presence of morally conservative right-wing thinking in places with high rates of infectious disease
Solzhenitsin 2700 pages of screaming at top of lungs, like a rat that sees a cat and emits ultrasonic screams for the human equivalent of 3 weeks.
Female cat without hypothalamus acts normally, aggression response, curiosity, seems conscious. But male cat not the same.
Stress response when anything out of the ordinary. Then learned behavior about good and bad extraordinary. This defines the level of generation of negative emotion in response to a negative simuli. Competence also decreases the negative response.
Reducing stress response is about taking the minimum possible action towards the right direction when analyzed at the lowest possible level and highest possible resolution (so don’t generalize to huge problems).
Novelty. Model descreases the novelty, start making a map of the things that absorb the anomaly. This model resultantly decreases anxiety.
Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness than libs, need more order, but then would also expect to be higher on neuroticism because this generates a higher negative response to any deviation from the norm. Instead it is libs who are more neurotic.
Cons and Libs might have same agreeableness but this is because it evens out between two subtypes, cons higher on politeness and libs higher on compassion. This made me think about the general smug superiority cons seem to have against rude emotional libs, insisting on the high moral ground of having a dignified conversation. This calls to question the validity of their smugness being based on their implication that all cons are polite, when instead it looks likely that all polite people are cons.
Why exactly does disgust exist? Would fear not do the job? His theory is that engaging in behavior that disgust warns against reduces one’s place in dominance hierarchy which then reduces ability to regulate negative emotion. Maybe this indirect effect is what differentiates from fear, where it keeps you from immediate harm, and is actually mediated by the reduced regulation of negative emotion that comes from the lower serotonin of a dominance defeat. But disgust at rotting meat or faeces isn’t about reduced dominance, it’s about harm, though not immediate. Then thinking about danger causes anxiety but not disgust, why? Because disgust is clear and present. Then why does thinking about faeces cause disgust and not anxiety? Then what about shame? Reduction in status, which can be fatal for my offspring but not me.
Price Law: sqrt(X) of X academicians have 50% of all papers. X has 0, x/2 has 1, x/4 has 2 etc etc. These inequalities are fractal! So if 256 people have 1000. Then 16 people have 500, then 4 have 250, 2 have 125. This is same as Lotka’s Law (X^n*Y=C. Has a Wiki page, unlike Price law!), a variant of Zipf Law!
If the argument isn’t that gender isn’t socially constructed, but that it’s not only socially constructed (a genetic component that may even be dominantly causal), why isn’t the liberal argument not changed from arguing against science about the acceptance of social constructivism, and instead stating the scientific consensus about a combination of genes and environment since there’s no disagreement on that, and then go on to say let’s ignore the genes and at least address the environment since that’s the only thing in our control and its impact is non-zero
Boys play with thing-toys, girls play with people-toys. Is this socially constructed, then why have experiments on Rhesus monkeys show the same result.
If egalitarian societies like Scandinavia have more pronounced gender differences than ‘patriarchal’ ones, is it necessarily true that he concludes that these gender differences are not socially constructed? If 50% is the desired number, say of female engineers. If Scandinavia is at 35 and US at 40, maybe engineer differences aren’t social, unless Scandinavia used to be at 25 and rose to 35. The only way Scandinavia can be measured for egalitarianism impact is versus its own non-egalitarian past, unless assuming Scandinavia is otherwise socially like US, which then lumps every social characteristic in one bucket and just egalitarianism in the other, which seems a very dire assumption.
Why is there zero correlation between IQ and conscientiousness if we believe prefrontal cortex regulates behavior? Because there needs to be a separation between thought and behavior, otherwise you won’t be imagining/abstracting/dreaming, you’d be acting out all your thoughts.
What to do about 10% of population that is below IQ 85 and unsuited for pretty much any task.
If disgust comes from importance for omnivores to stay away from poisons/toxins, which is why we don’t like bitter tastes, and parasite-infested rotting meat/faeces. Individuals lower in dominance hierarchy have a higher rate of infectious disease (maybe because higher stress and lower immunity?) and therefore provoke disgust? Won’t this be true even for females low in dominance hierarchy? Do 2 ugly people in a couple really find each other attractive or just forced to be together?
Monogamy seems like a sweet deal for men rather than women - otherwise 20% of males get all the women, this way you remove the females’ right to choose the best mates and instead apportion them out. Redistributive social justice.
He follows up many complicated scientific sentences that have my attention kind of drifting away because it is too difficult to comprehend with a very attention grabbing line either commenting on its importance ‘that’s an unbelievable fact’ or even higher attention, its emotional significance ‘that’s an unbelievably frightening idea or dangerous idea’ or sparking interest through wanting to disagree with his personal judgment ‘that’s an unbelievably foolish notion’
He is very compelling as a doomsayer, I am never paying more attention than when he says things like ‘you will, without fail, go through a catastrophic event that will totally destroy you’
Myths, archetypes, symbols: underground, unknown, unconscious – death, initiation, rebirth. Jonah and the whale, Pinocchio and the whale,
Horus: Peak purpose of human intelligence isn’t rationality but attention. Horus the eye. Balance between the strong structural culture of Osiris (ossified) with the attentive revolution of Horus.
Women are chaos, nature, unknown. From the unknown is born order, form. Chimp females don’t have strong preference for the dominant male, it’s just that he chases all other males away so mates with all the females. In humans, females have strong preference for dominant males. Most of us will be unsuccessful, all females will bear children, we all have twice as many female ancestors as male. Through our evolution, they have been gatekeepers, tyrannical nature. Our view of nature has gone from abject fear and oppression to one of power and contempt to now one of compassion and guilt over the power while forgetting the stage of abject fear
Piaget’s equilibriated state: one that takes least energy to maintain and be productive in, like a happy family. Knowledge isn’t a set of facts but a process of distilling known from the unknown by interacting with the environment
Positive emotion when you have a problem and encounter tools, and negative emotions when you encounter barriers.
Nietzsche thought god was dead and we’d have to create new value system but Jung understood god to be a manifestation of deep-rooted psyche (archetypes) and that this would just need to be rediscovered in a new form
Antidepressants theoretically should only work if your brain is acting as if you’re much lower in the dominance hierarchy than you actually are, but if it is correctly perceiving you to be in a very low place, then antidepressant won’t fix it. We are wired to make losers lead inescapably miserable lives. Is the only way to escape this to refuse to play, to refuse to send signals to the brain about our accurate place in the dominance hierarchy by becoming reclusive?
Jung’s Persona (mask) the face you present to others, in ideologues the ego and the mask get too closely identified and farther away from the shadow. That’s why psychoanalysts press ideology-driven patients not on the thing they love but what that means they actually hate, because that’s the driver. George Orwell’s essay on socialists not loving the poor but hating the rich.
Notice when looking at cartoon facial expressions, they aren’t really faces but the archetypal abstractions of all faces and all expressions, that’s why you know what the lion is feeling/thinking
Zazoo is the king’s eyes, separate from the body and able to see wider, and importantly the king is not a tyrant so he pays attention to what is seen. Horus.
Rafiki the shaman is the embodied transformative guide of the new-born psyche within the self.
When the light shines on Simba, the new hope of the psyche, a spontaneous feeling of awe overcomes us, helped along by the crescendo of music signifying grave importance, all the animals can’t help but bow.
Such a shocking difference between the emotive quality of the cartoon and the remake. Cartoon: Giraffe steps clearly into the light. We get a birds-eye view of Zazoo as he flies over the herds. Mufasa is clearly happy to see Rafiki, who radiates a shamanic aura. Animals shown separately in their crazed reactions, as different parts of the personality. Sun shines clearly on Simba, and the animals spontaneously bow. What terrible clarity and emotional impact we sacrifice in the name of realism, is this why cartoons are so much more archetypal, not because they’re stupid but because we see more clearly? Paintings v/s photos? A nuanced view of rationality vs a black&white one?
Beautiful rant on ADD: We designed schools in such a way that makes excitable curious children sit quietly and pay attention, as a consequence we pathologized ADD. It isn’t all socially constructed of course, some kids are high on extroversion and openness and disproportionally ‘suffer’ from ADD so give them Ritalin, an amphetamine that will help them focus. Rats that are not allowed to engage in social rough play have under-developed PFC. What makes them decrease the will to play? Ritalin.
Freud was rare in that his ideas got assimilated into mainstream during his time. This is a double-edged sword because it so rapidly became part of discourse that he was instead remembered specifically only for his mistakes, things that didn’t get assimilated!
Behaviorist vs Ethologist (studies behavior in natural environment – Lorenz, Goodall, DeWaal.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are considered great psychologists of the 19th century because all their predictions about the state of society in the 20th century came to pass, even radical ones.
Nietzsche sussed out that when you understand a theory you also understand the process of theorizing, you’re able to abstract out the thought as a separate object. Then this gets evaluated based on something, and that’s why science started beating religion, it isn’t a self-evident result.
Dostoevsky had epilepsy brought on by the trauma of being fake-executed. Gave him visionary experiences before the seizures and even he suspected them to be the source of his inspirational genius and wouldn’t trade them for a normal life
Herd behavior as seen in worst human tragedies like Nazism isn’t entirely useless or evil. Asch test about which line is larger has us agreeing with the consensus not because we’re stupid but because we’re humble enough to assume either everyone is wrong or we’re wrong, and there’s value in that humility.
Astonishing case written in ‘Satan’s silence’ where paranoid schizo mothers anxious about their kids in daycare quiz them with leading questions and induce nightmares and false memories that results in police asking other kids leading questions leading to more false memories and a total mess. Kids learn by reading adults expressions of interest and feedback, constantly modeling the reality that they are being presented.
Hitler did the same thing, putting out many statements and then ratcheting up the ones that he could see from the reaction were really working. Jung said Hitler really embodied the shadow of the German people.
Heidegger was one of first to point out phenomenology was a gap in Western philosophy which had long ignored or denigrated the value of personal experience as opposed to Eastern philosophy.
Phenomenology proceeds by assuming your experience is truth and is all that is true. There are categories, like dreams that are truths only I have access to, and experience of wind that others also have access to. They don’t claim it’s true, but proceed with articulating the problem of reality assuming this is true.
Conscientiousness can be further broken up into industriousness and orderliness. Ind is highly correlated with academic achievement but so far we have no idea what it manifests as, since none of the tests with varying types of tasks have shown industrious people scoring higher. Then how are they classified as industrious? Not sure.
Orderliness has a dark side, Hitler was OCD about bathing and cleanliness, but bodily purity manifests also as moral purity. Didn’t think of Jews as scary beasts but as filthy vermin. Judgment, contempt, disgust are all more strong with highly orderly people, as is tendency to favor authoritarianism and strong leadership.
Lovely finding that there is a strong correlation (even stronger than gold standard which used to be 0.5 viz IQ vs achievement) between presence of morally conservative right-wing thinking in places with high rates of infectious disease
Solzhenitsin 2700 pages of screaming at top of lungs, like a rat that sees a cat and emits ultrasonic screams for the human equivalent of 3 weeks.
Female cat without hypothalamus acts normally, aggression response, curiosity, seems conscious. But male cat not the same.
Stress response when anything out of the ordinary. Then learned behavior about good and bad extraordinary. This defines the level of generation of negative emotion in response to a negative simuli. Competence also decreases the negative response.
Reducing stress response is about taking the minimum possible action towards the right direction when analyzed at the lowest possible level and highest possible resolution (so don’t generalize to huge problems).
Novelty. Model descreases the novelty, start making a map of the things that absorb the anomaly. This model resultantly decreases anxiety.
Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness than libs, need more order, but then would also expect to be higher on neuroticism because this generates a higher negative response to any deviation from the norm. Instead it is libs who are more neurotic.
Cons and Libs might have same agreeableness but this is because it evens out between two subtypes, cons higher on politeness and libs higher on compassion. This made me think about the general smug superiority cons seem to have against rude emotional libs, insisting on the high moral ground of having a dignified conversation. This calls to question the validity of their smugness being based on their implication that all cons are polite, when instead it looks likely that all polite people are cons.
Why exactly does disgust exist? Would fear not do the job? His theory is that engaging in behavior that disgust warns against reduces one’s place in dominance hierarchy which then reduces ability to regulate negative emotion. Maybe this indirect effect is what differentiates from fear, where it keeps you from immediate harm, and is actually mediated by the reduced regulation of negative emotion that comes from the lower serotonin of a dominance defeat. But disgust at rotting meat or faeces isn’t about reduced dominance, it’s about harm, though not immediate. Then thinking about danger causes anxiety but not disgust, why? Because disgust is clear and present. Then why does thinking about faeces cause disgust and not anxiety? Then what about shame? Reduction in status, which can be fatal for my offspring but not me.
Price Law: sqrt(X) of X academicians have 50% of all papers. X has 0, x/2 has 1, x/4 has 2 etc etc. These inequalities are fractal! So if 256 people have 1000. Then 16 people have 500, then 4 have 250, 2 have 125. This is same as Lotka’s Law (X^n*Y=C. Has a Wiki page, unlike Price law!), a variant of Zipf Law!
If the argument isn’t that gender isn’t socially constructed, but that it’s not only socially constructed (a genetic component that may even be dominantly causal), why isn’t the liberal argument not changed from arguing against science about the acceptance of social constructivism, and instead stating the scientific consensus about a combination of genes and environment since there’s no disagreement on that, and then go on to say let’s ignore the genes and at least address the environment since that’s the only thing in our control and its impact is non-zero
Boys play with thing-toys, girls play with people-toys. Is this socially constructed, then why have experiments on Rhesus monkeys show the same result.
If egalitarian societies like Scandinavia have more pronounced gender differences than ‘patriarchal’ ones, is it necessarily true that he concludes that these gender differences are not socially constructed? If 50% is the desired number, say of female engineers. If Scandinavia is at 35 and US at 40, maybe engineer differences aren’t social, unless Scandinavia used to be at 25 and rose to 35. The only way Scandinavia can be measured for egalitarianism impact is versus its own non-egalitarian past, unless assuming Scandinavia is otherwise socially like US, which then lumps every social characteristic in one bucket and just egalitarianism in the other, which seems a very dire assumption.
Why is there zero correlation between IQ and conscientiousness if we believe prefrontal cortex regulates behavior? Because there needs to be a separation between thought and behavior, otherwise you won’t be imagining/abstracting/dreaming, you’d be acting out all your thoughts.
What to do about 10% of population that is below IQ 85 and unsuited for pretty much any task.
If disgust comes from importance for omnivores to stay away from poisons/toxins, which is why we don’t like bitter tastes, and parasite-infested rotting meat/faeces. Individuals lower in dominance hierarchy have a higher rate of infectious disease (maybe because higher stress and lower immunity?) and therefore provoke disgust? Won’t this be true even for females low in dominance hierarchy? Do 2 ugly people in a couple really find each other attractive or just forced to be together?
Monogamy seems like a sweet deal for men rather than women - otherwise 20% of males get all the women, this way you remove the females’ right to choose the best mates and instead apportion them out. Redistributive social justice.
March 15, 2019
The knowledge I accumulated from listening to this series has tackled so many issues I've read and was challenged about in a way more detailed depth and very coherent way.
it has shaped my knowledge of the human personalities and made my thinking more articulate.
it has shaped my knowledge of the human personalities and made my thinking more articulate.
September 7, 2020
Taking this course was the best thing that happened to me in a long time. Prof. Peterson has been my mentor for a very long time, and I'm so glad I discovered him.
This course introduced me to many school of thoughts in philosophy; (Existentialism, Phenomenology), and psychology; (Behaviorism, Psychoanalysis.) I also got introduced to many great thinkers of the last 200 years like:
Friedrick Nietzsche (my favorite philosopher as of now LOL), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Carl Jung, and S. Freud.
I also learned quite a lot about The Big 5, which is so fundamental. It helped me understand my fundamental nature, my unconscious implicit values, and ways to direct my good traits towards productivity and deal with my flaws in a sophisticated manner. Most importantly, I learned how to decipher my Shadow.
This course introduced me to many school of thoughts in philosophy; (Existentialism, Phenomenology), and psychology; (Behaviorism, Psychoanalysis.) I also got introduced to many great thinkers of the last 200 years like:
Friedrick Nietzsche (my favorite philosopher as of now LOL), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Carl Jung, and S. Freud.
I also learned quite a lot about The Big 5, which is so fundamental. It helped me understand my fundamental nature, my unconscious implicit values, and ways to direct my good traits towards productivity and deal with my flaws in a sophisticated manner. Most importantly, I learned how to decipher my Shadow.
October 3, 2018
Excelente y relevante, como para oír de nuevo más de una vez (aunque primero oiría sus libros-libros, que esto es más casi un bootleg de una clase).
October 23, 2025
This lecture series concentrates to a large degree on philosophical and neuroscientific issues, related to personality. It is divided into five primary topics, following an introduction and overview. The first half of the course deals with classic, clinical issues of personality; the second, with biological and psychometric issues.
1. Introduction
2. Historical and Mythological Context
Archetypes
Blank slate theories
In this lecture, I provide some historical context for the understanding of personality, suggesting that the clinical theories, concerned with the transformation and improvement of personality and character, are embedded within a classic narrative/mythological structure.
3. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations
In this lecture, I discuss the relationship between the initiatory structure characteristic of shamanism and the process of radical personality transformation, self- or therapy-induced. The basic structure is order/paradise, chaos/the fall, re-establishment of order/paradise. Since all paradises fall, however, the true paradise is identification with the process of transformation itself.
4. Jean Piaget and Constructivism
A constructivist is someone who attempts to answer the question, where does your personality come from?
In this lecture, I talk about the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who was interested, above all, in the way that knowledge is generated and transforms. His analysis of the development of morality in children, which relates early play to social cooperation and competition, is particularly profound.
*5/6. Carl Jung and the Lion King, Part 1 and Part 2
In this lecture, I use Disney's Lion King to further illustrate the basic principles of the personality and clinical theories of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, student of Nietzsche and Freud, originator of analytical psychology, and great interpreter of mythology and archetype.
*7. Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious
In this lecture, I discuss some of the essential of Sigmund Freud's theories, concentrating on his conceptualizations of the dynamic (living) unconscious.
8. Humanism and Phenomenology: Carl Rogers
Honest communication heals.
The client has to want to change.
In this lecture, I begin to talk about Dr. Carl Rogers, a humanist psychotherapist in the phenomenological tradition, and an expert on listening and embodied wisdom. Dr. Rogers offers very profound and practical lessons on the value of truthful relationships.
9. Existentialism: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard
10. Phenomenology: Heidegger, Binswanger, and Boss
In this lecture, I discuss the Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy of Being, interpreted through the eyes of the psychotherapists Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. The phenomenologists were attempting to to reduce the painful separation between object and subject that has as one of its consequence the elimination of meaning from existence.
*11. Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag
In this lecture, I explore the dreadful sociopolitical consequences of the individual inauthentic life: the degeneration of society into nihilism or totalitarianism, often of the most murderous sort, employing as an example the work/death camps of the Soviet Union.
•The correlation between the prevalence of infectious disease in a locale and the degree to which authoritarian beliefs are held in that locale is 0.7. That’s higher than the correlation between IQ and grades.
12. Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5
In this lecture, I begin discussing the development of modern trait theory. Psychologists, expert in measurement and statistics, discovered extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience, and begin the process of delineating their social significance and biological underpinnings.
13. Biology and Traits: The Limbic System
In this lecture, I begin my discussion of the relationship between brain function, at a deep, subcortical level, and the existence of the five traits identified by psychometric researchers.
14. Biology and Traits: Incentive Reward and Neuroticism
In this lecture, I continue my discussion of the relationship between subcortical brain processes and the big five personality traits identified by psychometric researchers, focusing on the relationship between positive/negative emotion and extraversion/neuroticism.
15. Biology and Traits: Agreeableness
In this lecture, I talk about the Big Five trait agreeableness, which is the dimension of the care system, in Jaak Panksepp's terminology. It can be construed as cooperation vs competition, or compliance vs non-compliance, or tender-mindedness vs tough-mindedness.
It is also an important determinant of political belief, being the trait most associated with the body of ideas that has come to be known as politically correct.
Agreeable people tend to view the political world as innocent infant vs reptilian predator. Perhaps this is good for you (although probably not) if you are placed in the innocent infant category, but it is not so good if you are deemed reptilian predator :)
16/17. Biology and Traits: Openness, Intelligence, and Creativity
In this lecture, I talk about Big Five trait openness to experience, which is the dimension composed of an amalgam of creativity and intelligence. I also discuss IQ: how it is measured, what it means, how powerfully it predicts long-term life success, as well as the highly skewed Pareto distribution of creative production.
*18. Biology and Traits:
Orderliness, Disgust, and Conscientiousness
In this lecture, I provide details about trait conscientiousness, the best predictor of life success after intelligence (particularly among managers, administrators and students). Sounds good? But conscientiousness is partly composed of aspect orderliness, along with industriousness, and orderliness is associated both with disgust and with authoritarianism (particularly among those low in openness to experience). Hitler and the Jews? The Holocaust? Orderliness and disgust sensitivity gone mad.
The more parasitic and transmissible diseases in a particular locale, the higher the probability people held authoritarian attitudes.
19. Biology and Traits: Performance Prediction
In this lecture, I talk about the thorny problem of predicting performance: academic, industrial, creative and entrepreneurial); about the practical utility of such prediction, in the business and other environments; about the economic value of accurate prediction (in hiring, placement and promotion)—which is incredibly high.
Intelligence (psychometrically measured IQ) is the best predictor of performance in complex, ever changing environments. Conscientiousness is the (next) best predictor, particularly in the military, in school and in conservative businesses. Agreeable people make better caretakers; disagreeable people, better disciplinarians and negotiators (within reasonable bounds). Open people are artistic, creative and entrepreneurial. Extraverts are good socially. Introverts work well in isolation. People low in neuroticism have higher levels of tolerance for stress (but may be less sensitive to real signs of danger).
Match the career you pursue to your temperament, rather than trying to adjust the latter. Although some adjustment is possible, there are powerful biological determinants of the five personality dimensions and IQ (particularly in environments where differences are allowed to flourish).
Price’s law: the square route of the number of employees produce half the output.
Pareto distribution: the tendency for all resources to end up with a very small proportion of the population.
20. Conclusion: Psychology and Belief
In this lecture, I bring the 2017 Introduction to Personality and its Transformations to its close, talking about the psychology of belief, describing the reality and potential of the individual. Human beings are information foragers, evolved to live on the border between explored and unexplored territory, order and chaos and, symbolically, ying and yang. That's where information flow is maximized, and the meaning that helps buttress us against tragedy is to be found.
1. Introduction
2. Historical and Mythological Context
Archetypes
Blank slate theories
In this lecture, I provide some historical context for the understanding of personality, suggesting that the clinical theories, concerned with the transformation and improvement of personality and character, are embedded within a classic narrative/mythological structure.
3. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations
In this lecture, I discuss the relationship between the initiatory structure characteristic of shamanism and the process of radical personality transformation, self- or therapy-induced. The basic structure is order/paradise, chaos/the fall, re-establishment of order/paradise. Since all paradises fall, however, the true paradise is identification with the process of transformation itself.
4. Jean Piaget and Constructivism
A constructivist is someone who attempts to answer the question, where does your personality come from?
In this lecture, I talk about the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who was interested, above all, in the way that knowledge is generated and transforms. His analysis of the development of morality in children, which relates early play to social cooperation and competition, is particularly profound.
*5/6. Carl Jung and the Lion King, Part 1 and Part 2
In this lecture, I use Disney's Lion King to further illustrate the basic principles of the personality and clinical theories of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, student of Nietzsche and Freud, originator of analytical psychology, and great interpreter of mythology and archetype.
*7. Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious
In this lecture, I discuss some of the essential of Sigmund Freud's theories, concentrating on his conceptualizations of the dynamic (living) unconscious.
8. Humanism and Phenomenology: Carl Rogers
Honest communication heals.
The client has to want to change.
In this lecture, I begin to talk about Dr. Carl Rogers, a humanist psychotherapist in the phenomenological tradition, and an expert on listening and embodied wisdom. Dr. Rogers offers very profound and practical lessons on the value of truthful relationships.
9. Existentialism: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard
10. Phenomenology: Heidegger, Binswanger, and Boss
In this lecture, I discuss the Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy of Being, interpreted through the eyes of the psychotherapists Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. The phenomenologists were attempting to to reduce the painful separation between object and subject that has as one of its consequence the elimination of meaning from existence.
*11. Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag
In this lecture, I explore the dreadful sociopolitical consequences of the individual inauthentic life: the degeneration of society into nihilism or totalitarianism, often of the most murderous sort, employing as an example the work/death camps of the Soviet Union.
•The correlation between the prevalence of infectious disease in a locale and the degree to which authoritarian beliefs are held in that locale is 0.7. That’s higher than the correlation between IQ and grades.
12. Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5
In this lecture, I begin discussing the development of modern trait theory. Psychologists, expert in measurement and statistics, discovered extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience, and begin the process of delineating their social significance and biological underpinnings.
13. Biology and Traits: The Limbic System
In this lecture, I begin my discussion of the relationship between brain function, at a deep, subcortical level, and the existence of the five traits identified by psychometric researchers.
14. Biology and Traits: Incentive Reward and Neuroticism
In this lecture, I continue my discussion of the relationship between subcortical brain processes and the big five personality traits identified by psychometric researchers, focusing on the relationship between positive/negative emotion and extraversion/neuroticism.
15. Biology and Traits: Agreeableness
In this lecture, I talk about the Big Five trait agreeableness, which is the dimension of the care system, in Jaak Panksepp's terminology. It can be construed as cooperation vs competition, or compliance vs non-compliance, or tender-mindedness vs tough-mindedness.
It is also an important determinant of political belief, being the trait most associated with the body of ideas that has come to be known as politically correct.
Agreeable people tend to view the political world as innocent infant vs reptilian predator. Perhaps this is good for you (although probably not) if you are placed in the innocent infant category, but it is not so good if you are deemed reptilian predator :)
16/17. Biology and Traits: Openness, Intelligence, and Creativity
In this lecture, I talk about Big Five trait openness to experience, which is the dimension composed of an amalgam of creativity and intelligence. I also discuss IQ: how it is measured, what it means, how powerfully it predicts long-term life success, as well as the highly skewed Pareto distribution of creative production.
*18. Biology and Traits:
Orderliness, Disgust, and Conscientiousness
In this lecture, I provide details about trait conscientiousness, the best predictor of life success after intelligence (particularly among managers, administrators and students). Sounds good? But conscientiousness is partly composed of aspect orderliness, along with industriousness, and orderliness is associated both with disgust and with authoritarianism (particularly among those low in openness to experience). Hitler and the Jews? The Holocaust? Orderliness and disgust sensitivity gone mad.
The more parasitic and transmissible diseases in a particular locale, the higher the probability people held authoritarian attitudes.
19. Biology and Traits: Performance Prediction
In this lecture, I talk about the thorny problem of predicting performance: academic, industrial, creative and entrepreneurial); about the practical utility of such prediction, in the business and other environments; about the economic value of accurate prediction (in hiring, placement and promotion)—which is incredibly high.
Intelligence (psychometrically measured IQ) is the best predictor of performance in complex, ever changing environments. Conscientiousness is the (next) best predictor, particularly in the military, in school and in conservative businesses. Agreeable people make better caretakers; disagreeable people, better disciplinarians and negotiators (within reasonable bounds). Open people are artistic, creative and entrepreneurial. Extraverts are good socially. Introverts work well in isolation. People low in neuroticism have higher levels of tolerance for stress (but may be less sensitive to real signs of danger).
Match the career you pursue to your temperament, rather than trying to adjust the latter. Although some adjustment is possible, there are powerful biological determinants of the five personality dimensions and IQ (particularly in environments where differences are allowed to flourish).
Price’s law: the square route of the number of employees produce half the output.
Pareto distribution: the tendency for all resources to end up with a very small proportion of the population.
20. Conclusion: Psychology and Belief
In this lecture, I bring the 2017 Introduction to Personality and its Transformations to its close, talking about the psychology of belief, describing the reality and potential of the individual. Human beings are information foragers, evolved to live on the border between explored and unexplored territory, order and chaos and, symbolically, ying and yang. That's where information flow is maximized, and the meaning that helps buttress us against tragedy is to be found.
May 1, 2024
Some people are worth listening to because they're right about the essentials even if they're wrong in the secondary details.
Peterson is worth listening to because he's inspired by a bunch of people who are, IMO, utterly wrong about the essentials, and yet he somehow manages to salvage secondary details from them which he uses to build a significantly pro-human world view.
But in my estimate this would only be useful if you can place his good points on top of an otherwise strong foundation. Otherwise you could potentially end up being pretty confused.
So I would only recommend this if you're at least familiar with History of Philosophy and Introduction to Logic by Leonard Peikoff (both of those courses are way more important than this one).
Peterson is worth listening to because he's inspired by a bunch of people who are, IMO, utterly wrong about the essentials, and yet he somehow manages to salvage secondary details from them which he uses to build a significantly pro-human world view.
But in my estimate this would only be useful if you can place his good points on top of an otherwise strong foundation. Otherwise you could potentially end up being pretty confused.
So I would only recommend this if you're at least familiar with History of Philosophy and Introduction to Logic by Leonard Peikoff (both of those courses are way more important than this one).
April 5, 2022
Now this, was a pretty good book!
Controvercial Statement Alert
I think it was just as good OR BETTER than Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief!
I would recommend if you like how JBP teaches psychology.
4.2/5
Controvercial Statement Alert
I think it was just as good OR BETTER than Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief!
I would recommend if you like how JBP teaches psychology.
4.2/5
July 16, 2018
Talked to my pastor about Mr Peterson. He said NO!!
June 25, 2019
Fantastic synthesis of a plethora of personality psychology schools.
April 1, 2020
Mind blowing
Read
May 22, 2020very Good
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews