Thoughts on the Value and Motivations Behind Human Personalities
Thoughts on the Value and Motivations Behind Human Personalities
Section titled “Thoughts on the Value and Motivations Behind Human Personalities”Author: Ozzie Gooen and Claude
Draft status: This was the result of a short conversation with Claude. I think it’s not very well organized as is, but I also think it has some good points. This subject seems too big for a Facebook post, but I’d like to spend more time with it before making it a regular post. At this point I’m interested in feedback and discussions on the ideas. Note that the structure and many details will likely significantly change.
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I.E. Let’s look at personality through the lens of human utility optimization and signaling.
I’ve been thinking about personality development lately, and wanted to share some thoughts. This is speculative and I’m not an expert in psychology, but I think there are some useful frameworks here.;
(Claude discussion here: https://claude.ai/share/c0a7fd09-6a54-436d-a4b1-bbb7caedf547)
What Are Personalities, Really?
Section titled “What Are Personalities, Really?”I think a lot of developing a “personality” is essentially “acting according to an established or easily-understandable pattern.” This makes it much easier to both know how to approach different situations, and for others to predict your behavior.
There’s a gigantic space of potential behaviors one could take at any moment, especially in social settings. So instead of thinking, “How specifically should I interact with X?” it’s often easier to occasionally choose a decent personality type, then figure out what that personality type would be likely to do.
This feels similar to “choose a fighter” in a video game select screen. You have a few established clusters, based on things popular in the media and in your social circles. Many are poor matches for many specific people. People generally try to select ones that would make them successful.
The Economics of Personality
Section titled “The Economics of Personality”Why are there different personality clusters? Well, like it makes sense for societies to have diversity and specialization in professions, it also makes sense to do so for personalities. In a social group of very serious people, one friend could provide extra value by being the clown of the group. A good sense of humor requires certain effort and costs to gain, and there’s diminishing value to it, so it could make sense for some people to specialize but not others.
Changing personalities is very costly within any social group. First, this is expensive for that social group. Them being able to closely predict the behaviors of each person is very useful (for example, to guess when they might lie or deceive), and a change of personality can force them to relearn how to work with that person.
Also, the more one member changes personalities, the harder their group can predict what directions they might go in the future, if this means they can expect more personality changes. What if they make a long-term promise with a trustworthy friend, but then later that friend changes to a low-trust personality?
One interesting question is, “What does it even mean to stay friends with someone, when they substantially change personalities? Are you friends with the personality, the body that executes that personality, or something else?”
Personality as Technical Infrastructure
Section titled “Personality as Technical Infrastructure”We can think of personality development as similar to brand identity for a large organization. These typically give off a lot of signals, they fall into clusters, and much of the work is about setting the right expectations with clients.
A discount brand has very different strengths and weaknesses as a premium brand. Developing a solid brand presence takes a lot of time and iteration. Clients/customers often dislike significant brand changes (for example, when brands try major redesigns, when premium brands become budget, when the History channel starts getting into reality TV, etc).
The brand both means that clients/customers know what to expect, and they can mean that internal employees understand what they should aim for.
Developing a personality takes a lot of work. In a fighting game, it takes a lot of time to learn the moves of any one character. If you change characters, you largely need to start over. In comparison, a personality typically comes with a great deal of behaviors and nuance that you need to get right.
The Homogeneity of Professional Personalities
Section titled “The Homogeneity of Professional Personalities”I know a lot of people feel frustrated that they have to heavily conform to engage with many professional positions. For example, a lot of companies really seem to value employees being highly uninteresting, personality-wise. From the perspective of an individual employee, this can be suffocating.
But on the flip side, I think that people with boring, and thus predictable, personalities can be highly useful to others. I haven’t heard many people complain that their chefs, lawyers, police department, customer support representatives, bosses, etc, didn’t have very unusual personalities.
Specific unusual qualities like “strong sense of humor” can be appreciated. But clients typically want to make sure that these workers are highly trustworthy, reliable, and predictable. And it’s hard to do that with them also being highly eccentric.
Basically, I think that the specific incentives of our highly-social world would very much benefit, in many sectors, from a highly-uniform population.
Anti-Personalities and Counter-Signaling
Section titled “Anti-Personalities and Counter-Signaling”One aspect of personalities is “anti-personalities” or “I’m trying to signal I’m not X”. For example, I know that some African American women are afraid of being seen as upset/emotional, so become extra reserved.
Tech CEOs and leads are supposed to signal weirdness, as a form of counter-signaling. For many of them, they’re supposed to be weird. But they have limited resources to do so (little time, for instance), so most are weird in specific/common ways. Few will become goths. A lot of tech CEOs, while unlike their staff, are somewhat similar to each other.
Personality Market Segmentation
Section titled “Personality Market Segmentation”Clothing brands often strongly target certain personality profiles. When one buys clothing locally, they often need to choose between things like, “The edgy teen store” vs. “The preppy rich store” vs. “The outdoorsy type who loves the environment”. This is heavily restrictive.
In high school, there are known to be pretty strict clusters (goths/geeks/jocks). Prisons also have clusters (race). Most workplaces seem to discourage strong aesthetics like goths or jocks, in favor of “generic white-collar professional”.
But certain communities like arts departments could favor certain groups. I assume people get spread out - so adult goths would be more clustered, and others would see them less often. This also brings the point that goths are probably a bigger thing in high school than in work afterwards - as the incentives are clearly different.
Personality Politics and Dynamics
Section titled “Personality Politics and Dynamics”There are political battles happening between personality clusters. For example, “being an edgy male” is sometimes seen as positive (e.g., in media like Twilight), but more recently is associated with right-wing incels. This means that people of a personality subtype sometimes fight together to preserve the status of that subtype.
A more straightforward example is goths working on goths advocacy in the media.
This might lead to “personality dynamics,” as certain personality types become more or less popular depending on various trends. This reminds me of fashion trends, which clearly happen. Or terminology trends. I’m sure many deeper parts of personality are similar.
Local Optima and Personality Change
Section titled “Local Optima and Personality Change”I know David D. Burns gave several examples of people with mean-spirited personalities. Some weren’t convinced to do positive things with straightforward arguments. Instead, the first thing to do was to appreciate how their negative qualities were actually useful to them in some important ways. They were stuck in local optima.
Because changing personalities is so costly, I’d assume that many people have chosen sub-optimally, and I’d expect them to live their entire lives accordingly.
On the topic of “Choosing the best personality” - some people obviously have highly toxic or dark personalities. But from that person’s perspective, I think that these often seem like the best bet for them. A dark personality makes you feel better about doing socially-looked-down-upon things. It seems edgy and cool to the right people.
And it’s very possible that all specific seemingly-positive personalities one knows of are just inaccessible. For example, I could imagine an edgy teen where all examples of happy people around them were financially and personally privileged, and are kinda dumb (i.e., Mr. Peanutbutter in the show BoJack Horseman). Again, because it’s so hard to change personalities, this could lead to a lot of negative lock-in.
Personality Menus and Innovation
Section titled “Personality Menus and Innovation”An idea I’ve been considering: Similar to being able to choose the personality of an LLM, it could be interesting to offer a personality menu to colleagues. Like, “Please fill out this form. It says what kind of person I should try to be. Then I’ll do my best to be that sort of person.”
In theory there could be a “personality innovation” department, that figures out how people of different personality clusters can improve their behaviors.
I find it interesting that some personalities go along with very narrow communities. Like, it could seem bizarre for someone not gay to have a flamboyantly gay personality. This might mean that a lot of this personality type is inaccessible to others, even if parts are good.
Fiction and Personality Templates
Section titled “Fiction and Personality Templates”One great thing that fiction does is to innovate upon and showcase different personality options. Like, “Here’s a character who has an unusual personality. You can watch how this personality engages in different situations and environments. Some viewers could take parts of this and incorporate this themselves.”
This both can be useful for people taking on the personality, and to make sure that these personalities are more well-known to others, making it a better draw for individuals who might take it on.
Other clear examples of how others respond to friends changing personalities: Imagine someone who always is in casual clothes changes to full suits one day. Or someone does the opposite. Or someone becomes a huge fitness bro, or a comedian, or incredibly serious, all of a sudden. I think there are a few sorts of personality changes that one’s community would like, but many would be seen as strange and off-putting.
Like, “What happened to the person I knew, developed an understanding of, and made plans around? Now I need to rethink all of that.”
A Rationalist Approach to Identity
Section titled “A Rationalist Approach to Identity”People obviously identify a lot with their personalities. Changing one’s personality can be considered as bad as dying or worse. Obviously, I’d lightly push against this. I think that it can be socially cooperative to not change one’s personality (and thus it could also be seen as cooperative to even hate the idea of changing one’s identity), but I take personality as a very pragmatic/matter-of-fact decision.
On personality as a practicality: I suspect that if people could be sure that certain personality changes would be better for them (and perhaps to their communities), they would frequently feel comfortable changing them. Or perhaps it’s a topic they are uncomfortable with - but if they did change one day and things felt better, they wouldn’t particularly mind.
Personally, I feel like I have a lot of pragmatic attachments with parts of my personality. But I wouldn’t feel too bad dramatically changing it, if a strong enough expected value calculation would show that to be a good idea, and it wouldn’t hurt those close to me much. (The math would work this way if it had large-scale altruistic value).
I suspect that a lot of human values are downstream of personalities. Like, I decide to be an altruistic independent research person first, then that leads me to think that I should be fairly high in honesty, even if it’s hard to do a cost-benefit calculation to suggest that this is the locally-ideal trade-off.
I’ll say, “I care a lot about honestly”, but I might mean, “Given the personality I’ve been able to adopt, I feel most comfortable with this given level of honesty.”
The Quantified Uncertainty of Personality
Section titled “The Quantified Uncertainty of Personality”I’d bet that a lot of people’s actions can be heavily predicted, with a bit of information about them, given how uniform mainstream personalities are. There’s probably some science to the predictability of different people.
The Big 5 are a bit orthogonal to this. I see Big 5 as pre-personality, but it helps provide options of what your personality could be.
One thing that some health books recommend is to focus less on “doing specific healthy things” and more on “identifying more as a healthy person.” From the latter, the former will be dramatically easier.
Closing Thoughts
Section titled “Closing Thoughts”I’d love to see more frank discussion on this topic (i.e., pragmatic discussions of identity, grounded in incentives). I think a lot of people find it off-putting and cold. But it’s also a really important issue for people, and I’d expect that certain discussion could be productive.
I’m happy that there is writing in Psychology around it, but have found a lot of this to be too narrow and avoid the key questions as I see it. I’d imagine that authors like Robin Hanson and Robert Kurzban would do the sort of analysis I’d find reasonable.
What do you think? Do you see personalities as pragmatic investments or as something more essential? How much do you think our personalities are choices versus discoveries?
(I’ll be writing more about this topic on the EA Forum soon with a more formal analysis. If you’re interested in these kinds of quantified approaches to self-improvement, feel free to message me.)