21 ms·

A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

311 points by dynm 5y ago

austincheney 5y ago
Conscientiousness is by far the least popular but has the highest income. That is not at all surprising. Objectivity, right and wrong as reflected by a balance of measures, is a rare and unpopular innate personality trait that allows for making micro-decisions many people might find abhorrent, more typically based upon evidence.
- kijin 5y ago
  According to the same chart, conscientious people also seem to perform significantly better in college than everyone else. In the modern world, better GPAs are usually correlated with higher income. Interestingly, those people don't seem to do particularly well in the SAT. Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest only after they get into college and get a chance to make independent decisions.
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    > Interestingly, those people don't seem to do particularly well in the SAT. Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest only after they get into college and get a chance to make independent decisions. Or maybe the SAT is just a shitty test.
    - maxqin1 5y ago
      For whom? The real problem is that not all valuable paths can come to the same bottleneck. Med student? Well, the SAT might be a good indicator of how successful you'll be at completing a medical program in the US. Same thing for law. Are you the creative type? Then the SAT probably won't be as indicative of your future success.
      - austincheney 5y ago
        I have around a 148 IQ but scored only 1060 on the SAT. Clearly those two measures are not linked. This has not prevented me from earning a 4 year degree or becoming a software developer. I find writing software to be easy while many of my peers seem to struggle. In reflection personality and practice are all that have mattered. IQ isn’t a significant consideration of comfort/confidence in writing software, a skill.
        maxqin1 5y ago
        > I have around a 148 That's rather impressive, but I would double-check those numbers. For example, which IQ test? Was it recently updated? IQ tests are adjusted by as many as 10 points every 10 years [1]. Have you double verified with another test? How did you prepare for each? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
        austincheney 5y ago
        I am not that concerned. The number is as important to me as my exceedingly unimpressive SAT score.
        saiya-jin 5y ago
        well then it shouldn't be used as main point of your argument
        austincheney 5y ago
        I think you are confusing a relevant but worthless data point for something of value. I guess there are people that attach emotional significance to such things, but it’s just some number that made a valid argument. If I don’t care and it’s my number why do you or anybody else care? Why should I not use this number to make a valid argument?
        deleted 5y ago
  - the-dude 5y ago
    > Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest My impression is conscientious people work within the system and don't toe the line. edit: disclosure, I am highly unconscientious, didn't finish uni etc.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      “Toe the line” is pretty much a synonym to work within the system.
      - the-dude 5y ago
        Ah, right! Not a native speaker, got that wrong-way-round and double-up. Thanks.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        No problem. I am a native speaker and it seems a weird expression to me as well (so much that I had to look it up to be sure). I’d expect it to mean what your original usage was. Don’t get me started on “flammable vs inflammable” vs “accurate vs inaccurate” ;)
        the-dude 5y ago
        Just for the record : I would put my toe over the line. A bit.
      - DangitBobby 5y ago
        My understanding of the phrase "toe the line" was to express that someone is technically within limits but is intentionally testing the boundaries of their limits, but apparently this is not accurate. TIL.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Perhaps the SAT is more like an IQ test (where a "quick wit" is advantageous), and college grades are based more on sustained performance, planning, meeting deadlines etc. These are very different things.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Getting good grades is a grind. Being 'sufficiently smart' - plus - being organized, diligent, applying yourself consistently, will probably get you better grades than being a disorganized genius. If everyone had the same IQ, then University grades would be actually a really, really good measure of raw conscientiousness.
    - paulpauper 5y ago
      but some courses are easier than others though
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Grades are shockingly dependent on completing busywork on time, so I am not at all surprised that conscientiousness beats intelligence there.
- jollybean 5y ago
  I would say that's almost more disagreeable than conscientious. Conscientious can almost be better described as 'consistent', 'doing what you say you're gong to do', 'being responsible'. I think you might be hinting at the right thing ... .. but 'weighing evidence in a very highly deliberative, judicial fashion' - might not be the best example of that. Extolling the Judgment, might even land on the disagreeable side. For example, the Judge who finds a supposed murderer 'not guilty' even with the mobs of people chanting 'guilty' outside the courthouse. I don't think 'disagreeableness' is necessarily even the right word, it's more like 'will have their own opinion even if it makes them unpopular'. I almost think that those Big 5 could be reoriented in a way that divides people as those inclined towards populist outcomes vs. those inclined towards judicial, principled, truthful ones.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  Conscientiousness isn't a measure of objectivity, it's a measure of reliability, the capacity to work diligently and adhere to rules. It correlates with income well because we're living in a very institutionalized society that rewards people who adhere to rules and follow expectations. In the US it's basically what upper middle-class WASP culture is and it sustains a large share of income because it's very good at reproducing itself and managing organisations, it's all the lawyers, and bureaucrats, politicians and administrators and so on, it's all the people who're really good at making schedules.
paulpauper 5y ago
not personality trait obviously, but in terms of success IQ probably matters more than big 5. I think personality can be improved or changed though effort but intelligence cannot. Someone who is introverted can make an effort to be extroverted in situations where it matters.
- deleted 5y ago
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- austincheney 5y ago
  Is there data on that? Perceptions of intelligence are variable to practice and preparation if the measure is nonrandomized convergent standardized tests, which is not IQ but is the more accepted assessment of intelligence. IQ only seems to matter up to 135 after which other factors become more dominant in determining success.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligence https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligen... I look at it like this, for creative, intellectually demanding work IQ is a necessary but perhaps insufficient condition. You need to be smart to achieve success cause you are competing with other people, so smarter people will have an edge. Google is not hiring people with 90-110 iqs. So having a high IQ is needed to at least be sufficiently proficient in coding, to be considered for a good paying job, but not guarantee you will be hired, but being smart sure helps.
    - the_dune_13 5y ago
      > high IQ is needed to at least be sufficiently proficient in coding, Should I even bother on what's the source of this claim?
    - rkk3 5y ago
      Google hires no one within 1SD of the Avg IQ? This I find hard to believe.
Reimersholme 5y ago
I guess “emotional stability” is an inverted rebranding of neuroticism as it’s usually known?
- anbende 5y ago
  Psychologist here. Yes, that is correct. Without the inversion, it is sometimes also referred to as "emotionality" or even "negative emotionality". "Neuroticism" sounds pejorative to many.
guerrilla 5y ago
It's impossible to take this seriously when it's using profiles of random famous people as if that means anything. If that wasn't done by actually interviewing them, then however it was done, the methodology diverges and is already invalid but even worse, it was just third-person subjective nonsense. Edit: Why would Reimersholme's comment be buried? Neuroticism is what it's usually called in Big Five. [1][2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
- kijin 5y ago
  They probably inverted the neuroticism scale in order to make it consistent with the other four traits, most of which have positive connotations unlike neuroticism. One might argue about the labels, but there's nothing wrong with inverting a scale for convenience of presentation. The personality traits of famous historical people are well established and widely available online. I have no idea how accurate they are, but they do fulfill their role as easily recognizable stereotypes. In any case the author probably used a publicly available dataset and didn't just make it up.
hawthornio 5y ago
The premise of this article is ridiculous. Your personality doesn’t cause you to be autistic. The personality traits are almost certainly caused by the “outcomes” the author is assessing, or both are caused by some other hidden variables. Personality tests are just reading the tea leaves of self-reported questionnaires.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  I thought the article was quite clear it was about correllations, not causation.
- sideshowb 5y ago
  I thought this too but on looking again the author never mentions "outcomes", that's just the title on hn
analog31 5y ago
Granted this isn't a peer reviewed paper, but still, a blog that gives personality scores for historical people like presidents can't be based on data. If IQ is important, maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests.
- anotha1 5y ago
  > maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests Also why ADHD meds, prescribed legally, are rampant on college campuses.
  - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    While it seems that we're not in a position to discuss this issue, I am extremely interested (and worried) about the rise of prescription stimulants specifically as it relates to meritocracy and credentialing.
    - SneakyTornado29 5y ago
      Valid point but I heard if you don't actually have ADHD, then the meds won't work as intended
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > If IQ is important, maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests. What even is intelligence? I know that IQ is what IQ tests measure, but what is intelligence? People say my dog is intelligent, but only in response to her displays of obedience to my commands, I've noticed. I silently translate their comment about intelligence to mean "your dog is obedient." Does an IQ test measure what makes good employees? Does an IQ test measure what makes good employers? Does an IQ test measure what makes good entertainers? Does an IQ test measure what makes good leaders? Does an IQ test measure what makes good entrepreneurs? Does an IQ test measure what makes good spouses? Does an IQ test measure what makes good neighbours? Does an IQ test measure what makes good friends? If an IQ test could measure some factor that leads to happiness, I might consider that factor to be "intelligence". But the things that make people happy vary on an individual basis, as well as over time and circumstances, so how could that be encapsulated in one static test for everybody?
nbardy 5y ago
I’d lay the blame on the increasingly narrow and industrialized education system.
jawns 5y ago
I think a lot of this analysis is tautological -- meaning that when you boil it down, you're just saying that things are as you have defined them to be. For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition. If that measurement includes questions such as, "Do others find you easy to get along with?" then of course there's going to be a negative correlation with loneliness, because you've essentially defined it that way. I am the author of Correlated.org, which commits many different types of statistical errors for humor's sake, so this leaps out at me. By the way, for a surprisingly vast number of things, agreeableness is quite predictive. Food preferences, public policy positions, and even willingness to answer poll questions :)
- HPsquared 5y ago
  My (lay) understanding is that personality data tend to be clustered such that it's best explained by five factors, with the names of the factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, etc.) having been added later.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Wikipedia states it pretty well, "When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person." [1] The Big Five are a statistically-derived groupings of phrases that are reasonably stable when measured from different angles. I think it would be fair to call it a "modest initial result" if compared to the physical sciences, or "wildly successful" if compared to basically anything prior that came out of the social sciences. There are some quite reasonable critiques listed on the wikipedia page, such as a lack of modeling theory, or only accounting for a portion of personality differences, or arguments for a slightly different number of factors, etc. That said, it seems to be one of the first actually solid findings that ever came out of the social sciences. It's like the whole field has been flailing around, swept down a river in the dark, and for the first time we found a stone that has a bit of purchase, even if it's covered with moss and slippery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
deleted 5y ago
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Wronnay 5y ago
I can't read a text based on the Big Five seriously. My personality changed in many ways over the years. It's kinda like your political position changes over the years. Someone fresh from college might be introverted and on the left political spectrum because he has no money, but to be successful he might get extroverted and when he has much money, he might get more on the right political spectrum. How can something which basically assumes that people don't change get so popular?! People change all the time, personality changes all the time.
- anbende 5y ago
  Hi there, psychologist here who has done research in personality including looking at the Big Five. It's not my personal favorite set of constructs, but I have great respect for the body of work supporting it. Modern personality theory in no way assumes that personality doesn't change over time. It finds instead that personality tends to be "somewhat stable over time" which means that personality doesn't vary massively from week to week or month to month but can definitely shift across the lifespan. In fact, here's a large study looking at exactly that (though cross-sectional which means that many effects could be a function of age cohorts rather than actual change). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ Regarding your hypothetical introverted recent college grad, these kinds of shifts can and do happen, but massive shifts in personality appear to be quite rare. What's more, modern work in the area has found that "within-person" variability is much greater than "between-persons" variability meaning that as individuals we express a wide range of behaviors. For example, I might be more extraverted at work and more introverted among friends or vice versa, showing internal variation. That said, we can talk about a person's average level of a trait like extraversion and that average is meaningful and predictive. As to your point, both kinds of change can and do happen, but changing our behavioral approach to life tends to be gradual and slow for most people.
  - mettamage 5y ago
    What do you think about psilocybin's effect on openness? Are there other studies that produce such marked changes in personality?
colechristensen 5y ago
The question behind all of these theories of personality is "Does the measured quantity have any underlying form?" That is, are you measuring something "real" or just coming up with arbitrary classifications. "How you answer this survey correlates this well to outcomes" is perhaps useful, but binning answers into personality types with common names is questionable. It all seems to be a little bit too far down the road of searching for things to name and classify.
- pishpash 5y ago
  To the extent that PCA of survey results exhibit dimensionality, that is real. The underlying basis might be modes of social dynamics or clusters in genetics or language. It would be surprising to find that totally unconstrained random processes generated patterns like this.
doggodaddo78 5y ago
I need more emotional stability (inverse of neuroticism) and less conscientiousness. Fine-tune your agreeableness to suit income or popularity, as needed. I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :)
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
  >I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :) Unfortunately, that's a "chose 2" situation. :)
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
    Pretty much any sort of artist that has to consistently produce long term could fit this. Examples that come to mind are the writer for Garfield comics, the South Park guys, etc.
- bloqs 5y ago
  Concienciousness and Openness(creativity) can co exist, but they conflict with each other. Two classic historical examples are Picasso and I believe, Hitler.
periheli0n 5y ago
Are these personality types really scientifically grounded? I once was sort of compelled to take a Myers-Briggs test and I found it utterly flawed. So much of one’s personality depends on the contact and environment, yet Myers-Briggs wants to force you into one type. Making things way too simple. But maybe simple is what was sought here rather than really resolving personality.
- clairity 5y ago
  it's claimed that myers-briggs is reliably repeatable, but my personal experience contradicts this, with a flip-flopping of 3 of the 4 attributes over time. it doesn't seem too reliable to me.
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    Yes, my experience exactly. I could imagine myself in different situations suiting different answers, and therefore having different personalities. That might even make sense but then it’s not a description of personality, but of context-dependent behaviour. Only useful within a defined context.
- anbende 5y ago
  That's a good question, and your reaction to the Myers-Briggs is justified! It is not evidence-based and is roundly rejected by modern personality psychology. The work the author of this piece was describing on the other-hand is one of the most well-researched phenomena in the history of psychology. It is based on a massive amount of research looking at clusters of personality adjectives found in dozens of languages that tend to cluster along five dimensions. And the same five clusters are found in virtually all languages (sometimes to include a 6th cluster often called "honesty/humility"). And to your point about types, this system doesn't assign types to people, but instead places them on a continuous dimension that is considered to be much more useful. And to your point about complexity, the 5 dimensions are higher level structures. Within each dimension is a branching tree of complexity that is where the current work lies. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
stephc_int13 5y ago
I have a really hard time taking this kind of "analysis" seriously. It does not seems rigorous or scientific at all, and I don't understand how it can be visible here on HN, to be honest...
- emdubbelyou 5y ago
  If you’re going to post a comment of skepticism, please try to support your argument with actual criticism. Currently, all I have is your opinion on the article, which is in contrast to the # of people who upvoted the post. I can easily say that I DO think the article is rigorous and scientific but then we’d disagree without any insight into what we disagree on.
  - stephc_int13 5y ago
    I did that on purpose, simply to voice my opinion. Let's say I vote to see less article like this one on HN. This is merely annoying, not enough to warrant a full debunk.
  - hawthornio 5y ago
    In my view, an article that makes claims in the natural sciences published on “some person’s blog” is not really worth considering as a scientific work.
pishpash 5y ago
Side note, maybe as technology removes barriers to access to resources that used to be gated by social graces, extroversion and agreeableness are changing in importance. In other words, in a world where machines outcompete humans, what used to be successful traits among humans aren't going to be always the fittest in the new environment.
de_keyboard 5y ago
Anyone done a correlation analysis of Big-5 traits and favourite programming languages?
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  Or Emacs and Vim users....
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massysett 5y ago
"Broadly speaking, they are more happy, successful, intelligent, creative, and popular." This reads like an extrovert's life wish list - particularly "popular," but even "happy" and "creative." I disagree that someone who exhibits these characteristics is somehow "better" or is living a better life.
- SneakyTornado29 5y ago
  Completely agree here. As an introvert, wouldn't one be happier being around _less_ people? More so, I'd beg to argue creativity isn't a uniformly measured trait. An introvert expressing their creativity (i.e. through a personal project for their own satisfaction) is way different than an extroverted person running a business to express their creativity.
johnwheeler 5y ago
i suspect this is horseshit off the top of this guy's head.
planet-and-halo 5y ago
The book "Personality" by Nettle gives the best layman's summary of the Big 5 model I've found. What I particularly like about it, beyond the summary of each aspect, is the way he frames it in terms of evolution and why being on one end of the scale for a trait is not "better." Agreeableness is probably the easiest one to understand from an evolutionary perspective. If you worry a lot about other people's needs, you're more likely to make them happy and reap the benefits of reciprocity, but you're also less likely to directly pursue your own needs. So it goes with the other traits too: being on different parts of the spectrum come with advantages and disadvantages from a reproductive standpoint. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism are the two traits most correlated with financial success in the modern world, but they had downsides in an ancestral environment and even in our modern world can have negative effects e.g. on personal happiness and wellbeing.
hyko 5y ago
we can infer that we’re at an equilibrium point with no real advantage either way We can do no such damn thing! This analysis completely conflates natural selection and sexual selection, and ignores the role of genetic drift.
m0llusk 5y ago
What may be more interesting are the correlations between personality types and occupations. For example, teachers tend to have a high level of empathy. That seems like it could be more interesting and rewarding to investigate. Similarly, pilots, cops, and soldiers all tend to have high levels of aggression. Arguably most interesting is the beer industry where brewers tend to be extremely open to a fault while distributors tend not to have much openness and score high on other factors. Taken together this tends to indicate that the overall life outcome correlations are as usual as likely to mislead as inform. What makes more sense is to see how individuals match with roles and tasks and how diverse individuals can cooperate to make the most of each of their best talents.
justnotworthit 5y ago
Author claims ENFJ is opposite of ISTP in MB. I thought it was the groupings (first two, second two, and/or/? combination) that formed opposites, not the individual letters.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Taking the individual letters' opposite is pretty common. The interpretation of the resulting opposite differs somewhat by system. (This is getting into what's known as four-letter Jungian type, not specifically MBTI) There are also temperament groups, which are NF, SP, NT (HackerNews' audience...), and SJ. Generally you don't want streams to cross here with the type of information people of each temperament want to consume and the time perspective they prefer (past, present, future), though there is some overlap. Some would say it's a good idea to get at type opposites by mirroring the functions, e.g. ENFJ (FeNiSeTi-FiNeSiTe) would be functionally opposite to ESTJ (TeSiNeFi-TiSeNiFe). So these two type groups would tend to want to repress' the other's perceptive and decision-making functionality. The same would not necessarily be as true, or true in the same way, with e.g. ISTP and ENFJ, which some would consider a potentially lovely pairing due to shared function-valuing, meaning that these two opposites will naturally develop toward the other over time, from a developmental perspective. I think Isabel Briggs-Meyers had her own view of the first four functions' order, which you can read in her book "Gifts Differing". This would also yield a different type of opposite.
rogers18445 5y ago
Big Five is an atheoretic construct, derived through factor analysis. Given names after the fact. Similar to IQ in that way - the difference being is that IQ ended with a single factor rather than 5. Attacking the big five would be a fruitless endeavor, the tests have obvious substance and are reducible to 5 factors, can't do anything about that.
rawgabbit 5y ago
I stopped reading when the mentioned Meyers Briggs over and over again. Might as well throw in horoscopes and skull measurements.
- jokoon 5y ago
  I agree. What's worse is how the article tries to look at financial success, happiness, popularity, reproductive success, etc. Those things are rather subjective, and depends on philosophy and politics. It only looks at shades of good or bad. There is no nuance. Comparing people and putting them in categories is pointless.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Of all of the personality traits I have attempted to change over the years, my introversion has remained the most stubborn. It's a shame, too. I can briefly emulate extraversion, at an enormous cost of mental energy and feel like a dog walking on its hind legs. Nor do I seem to be able to extract the purported benefits of it. And the list of approaches I have exhausted is, in retrospect, more than a little shocking. It's the one area where "fake it until you make it" seems to have failed me utterly.
- WhompingWindows 5y ago
  What methods have you tried to emulate extraversion? A friend of mine used improv and acting to help them "act" more extroverted, YMMV. Me, I'm still emulating too.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    First, just going out and doing things, namely concerts. Hundreds upon hundreds of concerts. I'm very good at going to concerts (obtaining tickets, optimal parking, getting everything ready) but I still do not enjoy myself. Various combinations of medications, prescribed and self-selected, have failed. It wasn't exhaustive exactly but I would say that it was a good survey of the field. Memorizing quite a lot of detail about people helps in making you seem engaged, but there's a fine line (past a certain point, if you confess to remembering whatever counts as "too much," it becomes "creepy"), and it still hasn't affected the base. Self-talk, acting, improv -- it increases the fidelity of the emulation but it's still emulation. At the end of the day, other people say "hello" and I have failed the initiative check, and am pondering what exactly do I say back to them, and they've already gone by. A remarkably stable trait for me.
    - owlninja 5y ago
      Regarding concerts, do you enjoy music?
      - at_a_remove 5y ago
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jl2718 5y ago
Is there a way to ‘train’ for emotional stability?
- asperous 5y ago
  Yes, you can go to a professional mental health therapist and receive CBT
- bloqs 5y ago
  Its very difficult to do, but possible. Requires outside help and a lot of dedication. Factors that can help on a daily basis actually include routine sleep and diet as well. No carbohydrates in the morning, only fats and proteins.
roenxi 5y ago
The author is making a subtle mistake; evolution doesn't mean like-parent-like-child. Evolution is likely selecting for, eg, people who have children at a certain ratio of introverted-extroverted. Introverted, disagreeable, high-contentious types make, for example, great scientists. A population (call it A) that produces a reasonable number of such people is at a huge advantage compared to the alternative that only produces extroverted agreeable types (call them B). Population B will be more competitive at breeding, but population A will win any conflict with B because they'll have a bunch of weirdos in the back room producing a lot of high quality science (a classic stereotype with some foundation in truth). Note that men are much more likely (something like 4x) to be "completely homosexual" compared to women [0]. I'm betting this is because having a few men who opt out of the race to pass on their genes and focus on other stuff is a massive advantage to the society that hosts them. Look how much of a force gay men have been in culture for example. Locally catastrophic for breeding, globally optimal for society. The equilibrium isn't for all offspring to maximise their chance of breeding. The optimum is for the community to thrive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orienta...
- edejong 5y ago
  I came here to say essentially this. But what is the name of this process where groups of people select for variety instead of optimal individuals?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    I'm confident that it is evolution. People don't evolve, populations evolve.
    - dTal 5y ago
      You're confident, but evolutionary biologists largely don't agree with you. I strongly recommend you glance over some of the reasons why at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection In a nutshell - "The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution... a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse."
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kuroguro 5y ago
Just did the test for kicks. Looks like I'm "all red". Oh well.
aerojoe23 5y ago
The author is over simplifying evolution. A trait maybe passed on to children even though the parent isn't displaying it. The easiest example of this across many species is homosexuality. As it seems obvious that it would reduce an individuals chances of having offspring. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths-natural-selection-cannot-explain-homosexuality/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths... There is the added complexity that some positive traits are tied to negative traits. Meaning if the gene stops getting selected the positive trait goes away with the negative one. And then there is culture. It is clear humans have become the dominant species of our planet (at least for now) and it is our culture and the technology it supports that enable this.

311 points by dynm 5y ago

Conscientiousness is by far the least popular but has the highest income. That is not at all surprising. Objectivity, right and wrong as reflected by a balance of measures, is a rare and unpopular innate personality trait that allows for making micro-decisions many people might find abhorrent, more typically based upon evidence.

kijin 5y ago
According to the same chart, conscientious people also seem to perform significantly better in college than everyone else. In the modern world, better GPAs are usually correlated with higher income. Interestingly, those people don't seem to do particularly well in the SAT. Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest only after they get into college and get a chance to make independent decisions.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  > Interestingly, those people don't seem to do particularly well in the SAT. Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest only after they get into college and get a chance to make independent decisions. Or maybe the SAT is just a shitty test.
  - maxqin1 5y ago
    For whom? The real problem is that not all valuable paths can come to the same bottleneck. Med student? Well, the SAT might be a good indicator of how successful you'll be at completing a medical program in the US. Same thing for law. Are you the creative type? Then the SAT probably won't be as indicative of your future success.
    - austincheney 5y ago
      I have around a 148 IQ but scored only 1060 on the SAT. Clearly those two measures are not linked. This has not prevented me from earning a 4 year degree or becoming a software developer. I find writing software to be easy while many of my peers seem to struggle. In reflection personality and practice are all that have mattered. IQ isn’t a significant consideration of comfort/confidence in writing software, a skill.
      - maxqin1 5y ago
        > I have around a 148 That's rather impressive, but I would double-check those numbers. For example, which IQ test? Was it recently updated? IQ tests are adjusted by as many as 10 points every 10 years [1]. Have you double verified with another test? How did you prepare for each? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
        austincheney 5y ago
        I am not that concerned. The number is as important to me as my exceedingly unimpressive SAT score.
        saiya-jin 5y ago
        well then it shouldn't be used as main point of your argument
        austincheney 5y ago
        I think you are confusing a relevant but worthless data point for something of value. I guess there are people that attach emotional significance to such things, but it’s just some number that made a valid argument. If I don’t care and it’s my number why do you or anybody else care? Why should I not use this number to make a valid argument?
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- the-dude 5y ago
  > Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest My impression is conscientious people work within the system and don't toe the line. edit: disclosure, I am highly unconscientious, didn't finish uni etc.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    “Toe the line” is pretty much a synonym to work within the system.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Ah, right! Not a native speaker, got that wrong-way-round and double-up. Thanks.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        No problem. I am a native speaker and it seems a weird expression to me as well (so much that I had to look it up to be sure). I’d expect it to mean what your original usage was. Don’t get me started on “flammable vs inflammable” vs “accurate vs inaccurate” ;)
        the-dude 5y ago
        Just for the record : I would put my toe over the line. A bit.
    - DangitBobby 5y ago
      My understanding of the phrase "toe the line" was to express that someone is technically within limits but is intentionally testing the boundaries of their limits, but apparently this is not accurate. TIL.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Perhaps the SAT is more like an IQ test (where a "quick wit" is advantageous), and college grades are based more on sustained performance, planning, meeting deadlines etc. These are very different things.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Getting good grades is a grind. Being 'sufficiently smart' - plus - being organized, diligent, applying yourself consistently, will probably get you better grades than being a disorganized genius. If everyone had the same IQ, then University grades would be actually a really, really good measure of raw conscientiousness.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    but some courses are easier than others though
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Grades are shockingly dependent on completing busywork on time, so I am not at all surprised that conscientiousness beats intelligence there.
jollybean 5y ago
I would say that's almost more disagreeable than conscientious. Conscientious can almost be better described as 'consistent', 'doing what you say you're gong to do', 'being responsible'. I think you might be hinting at the right thing ... .. but 'weighing evidence in a very highly deliberative, judicial fashion' - might not be the best example of that. Extolling the Judgment, might even land on the disagreeable side. For example, the Judge who finds a supposed murderer 'not guilty' even with the mobs of people chanting 'guilty' outside the courthouse. I don't think 'disagreeableness' is necessarily even the right word, it's more like 'will have their own opinion even if it makes them unpopular'. I almost think that those Big 5 could be reoriented in a way that divides people as those inclined towards populist outcomes vs. those inclined towards judicial, principled, truthful ones.
Barrin92 5y ago
Conscientiousness isn't a measure of objectivity, it's a measure of reliability, the capacity to work diligently and adhere to rules. It correlates with income well because we're living in a very institutionalized society that rewards people who adhere to rules and follow expectations. In the US it's basically what upper middle-class WASP culture is and it sustains a large share of income because it's very good at reproducing itself and managing organisations, it's all the lawyers, and bureaucrats, politicians and administrators and so on, it's all the people who're really good at making schedules.

paulpauper 5y ago

not personality trait obviously, but in terms of success IQ probably matters more than big 5. I think personality can be improved or changed though effort but intelligence cannot. Someone who is introverted can make an effort to be extroverted in situations where it matters.

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austincheney 5y ago
Is there data on that? Perceptions of intelligence are variable to practice and preparation if the measure is nonrandomized convergent standardized tests, which is not IQ but is the more accepted assessment of intelligence. IQ only seems to matter up to 135 after which other factors become more dominant in determining success.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligence https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligen... I look at it like this, for creative, intellectually demanding work IQ is a necessary but perhaps insufficient condition. You need to be smart to achieve success cause you are competing with other people, so smarter people will have an edge. Google is not hiring people with 90-110 iqs. So having a high IQ is needed to at least be sufficiently proficient in coding, to be considered for a good paying job, but not guarantee you will be hired, but being smart sure helps.
  - the_dune_13 5y ago
    > high IQ is needed to at least be sufficiently proficient in coding, Should I even bother on what's the source of this claim?
  - rkk3 5y ago
    Google hires no one within 1SD of the Avg IQ? This I find hard to believe.

Reimersholme 5y ago

I guess “emotional stability” is an inverted rebranding of neuroticism as it’s usually known?

anbende 5y ago
Psychologist here. Yes, that is correct. Without the inversion, it is sometimes also referred to as "emotionality" or even "negative emotionality". "Neuroticism" sounds pejorative to many.

guerrilla 5y ago

It's impossible to take this seriously when it's using profiles of random famous people as if that means anything. If that wasn't done by actually interviewing them, then however it was done, the methodology diverges and is already invalid but even worse, it was just third-person subjective nonsense. Edit: Why would Reimersholme's comment be buried? Neuroticism is what it's usually called in Big Five. [1][2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

kijin 5y ago
They probably inverted the neuroticism scale in order to make it consistent with the other four traits, most of which have positive connotations unlike neuroticism. One might argue about the labels, but there's nothing wrong with inverting a scale for convenience of presentation. The personality traits of famous historical people are well established and widely available online. I have no idea how accurate they are, but they do fulfill their role as easily recognizable stereotypes. In any case the author probably used a publicly available dataset and didn't just make it up.

hawthornio 5y ago

The premise of this article is ridiculous. Your personality doesn’t cause you to be autistic. The personality traits are almost certainly caused by the “outcomes” the author is assessing, or both are caused by some other hidden variables. Personality tests are just reading the tea leaves of self-reported questionnaires.

michaelcampbell 5y ago
I thought the article was quite clear it was about correllations, not causation.
sideshowb 5y ago
I thought this too but on looking again the author never mentions "outcomes", that's just the title on hn

analog31 5y ago

Granted this isn't a peer reviewed paper, but still, a blog that gives personality scores for historical people like presidents can't be based on data. If IQ is important, maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests.

anotha1 5y ago
> maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests Also why ADHD meds, prescribed legally, are rampant on college campuses.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  While it seems that we're not in a position to discuss this issue, I am extremely interested (and worried) about the rise of prescription stimulants specifically as it relates to meritocracy and credentialing.
  - SneakyTornado29 5y ago
    Valid point but I heard if you don't actually have ADHD, then the meds won't work as intended
wombatmobile 5y ago
> If IQ is important, maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests. What even is intelligence? I know that IQ is what IQ tests measure, but what is intelligence? People say my dog is intelligent, but only in response to her displays of obedience to my commands, I've noticed. I silently translate their comment about intelligence to mean "your dog is obedient." Does an IQ test measure what makes good employees? Does an IQ test measure what makes good employers? Does an IQ test measure what makes good entertainers? Does an IQ test measure what makes good leaders? Does an IQ test measure what makes good entrepreneurs? Does an IQ test measure what makes good spouses? Does an IQ test measure what makes good neighbours? Does an IQ test measure what makes good friends? If an IQ test could measure some factor that leads to happiness, I might consider that factor to be "intelligence". But the things that make people happy vary on an individual basis, as well as over time and circumstances, so how could that be encapsulated in one static test for everybody?

nbardy 5y ago

I’d lay the blame on the increasingly narrow and industrialized education system.

jawns 5y ago

I think a lot of this analysis is tautological -- meaning that when you boil it down, you're just saying that things are as you have defined them to be. For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition. If that measurement includes questions such as, "Do others find you easy to get along with?" then of course there's going to be a negative correlation with loneliness, because you've essentially defined it that way. I am the author of Correlated.org, which commits many different types of statistical errors for humor's sake, so this leaps out at me. By the way, for a surprisingly vast number of things, agreeableness is quite predictive. Food preferences, public policy positions, and even willingness to answer poll questions :)

HPsquared 5y ago
My (lay) understanding is that personality data tend to be clustered such that it's best explained by five factors, with the names of the factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, etc.) having been added later.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Wikipedia states it pretty well, "When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person." [1] The Big Five are a statistically-derived groupings of phrases that are reasonably stable when measured from different angles. I think it would be fair to call it a "modest initial result" if compared to the physical sciences, or "wildly successful" if compared to basically anything prior that came out of the social sciences. There are some quite reasonable critiques listed on the wikipedia page, such as a lack of modeling theory, or only accounting for a portion of personality differences, or arguments for a slightly different number of factors, etc. That said, it seems to be one of the first actually solid findings that ever came out of the social sciences. It's like the whole field has been flailing around, swept down a river in the dark, and for the first time we found a stone that has a bit of purchase, even if it's covered with moss and slippery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

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Wronnay 5y ago

I can't read a text based on the Big Five seriously. My personality changed in many ways over the years. It's kinda like your political position changes over the years. Someone fresh from college might be introverted and on the left political spectrum because he has no money, but to be successful he might get extroverted and when he has much money, he might get more on the right political spectrum. How can something which basically assumes that people don't change get so popular?! People change all the time, personality changes all the time.

anbende 5y ago
Hi there, psychologist here who has done research in personality including looking at the Big Five. It's not my personal favorite set of constructs, but I have great respect for the body of work supporting it. Modern personality theory in no way assumes that personality doesn't change over time. It finds instead that personality tends to be "somewhat stable over time" which means that personality doesn't vary massively from week to week or month to month but can definitely shift across the lifespan. In fact, here's a large study looking at exactly that (though cross-sectional which means that many effects could be a function of age cohorts rather than actual change). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ Regarding your hypothetical introverted recent college grad, these kinds of shifts can and do happen, but massive shifts in personality appear to be quite rare. What's more, modern work in the area has found that "within-person" variability is much greater than "between-persons" variability meaning that as individuals we express a wide range of behaviors. For example, I might be more extraverted at work and more introverted among friends or vice versa, showing internal variation. That said, we can talk about a person's average level of a trait like extraversion and that average is meaningful and predictive. As to your point, both kinds of change can and do happen, but changing our behavioral approach to life tends to be gradual and slow for most people.
- mettamage 5y ago
  What do you think about psilocybin's effect on openness? Are there other studies that produce such marked changes in personality?

colechristensen 5y ago

The question behind all of these theories of personality is "Does the measured quantity have any underlying form?" That is, are you measuring something "real" or just coming up with arbitrary classifications. "How you answer this survey correlates this well to outcomes" is perhaps useful, but binning answers into personality types with common names is questionable. It all seems to be a little bit too far down the road of searching for things to name and classify.

pishpash 5y ago
To the extent that PCA of survey results exhibit dimensionality, that is real. The underlying basis might be modes of social dynamics or clusters in genetics or language. It would be surprising to find that totally unconstrained random processes generated patterns like this.

doggodaddo78 5y ago

I need more emotional stability (inverse of neuroticism) and less conscientiousness. Fine-tune your agreeableness to suit income or popularity, as needed. I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :)

ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
>I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :) Unfortunately, that's a "chose 2" situation. :)
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  Pretty much any sort of artist that has to consistently produce long term could fit this. Examples that come to mind are the writer for Garfield comics, the South Park guys, etc.
bloqs 5y ago
Concienciousness and Openness(creativity) can co exist, but they conflict with each other. Two classic historical examples are Picasso and I believe, Hitler.

periheli0n 5y ago

Are these personality types really scientifically grounded? I once was sort of compelled to take a Myers-Briggs test and I found it utterly flawed. So much of one’s personality depends on the contact and environment, yet Myers-Briggs wants to force you into one type. Making things way too simple. But maybe simple is what was sought here rather than really resolving personality.

clairity 5y ago
it's claimed that myers-briggs is reliably repeatable, but my personal experience contradicts this, with a flip-flopping of 3 of the 4 attributes over time. it doesn't seem too reliable to me.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  Yes, my experience exactly. I could imagine myself in different situations suiting different answers, and therefore having different personalities. That might even make sense but then it’s not a description of personality, but of context-dependent behaviour. Only useful within a defined context.
anbende 5y ago
That's a good question, and your reaction to the Myers-Briggs is justified! It is not evidence-based and is roundly rejected by modern personality psychology. The work the author of this piece was describing on the other-hand is one of the most well-researched phenomena in the history of psychology. It is based on a massive amount of research looking at clusters of personality adjectives found in dozens of languages that tend to cluster along five dimensions. And the same five clusters are found in virtually all languages (sometimes to include a 6th cluster often called "honesty/humility"). And to your point about types, this system doesn't assign types to people, but instead places them on a continuous dimension that is considered to be much more useful. And to your point about complexity, the 5 dimensions are higher level structures. Within each dimension is a branching tree of complexity that is where the current work lies. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

stephc_int13 5y ago

I have a really hard time taking this kind of "analysis" seriously. It does not seems rigorous or scientific at all, and I don't understand how it can be visible here on HN, to be honest...

emdubbelyou 5y ago
If you’re going to post a comment of skepticism, please try to support your argument with actual criticism. Currently, all I have is your opinion on the article, which is in contrast to the # of people who upvoted the post. I can easily say that I DO think the article is rigorous and scientific but then we’d disagree without any insight into what we disagree on.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  I did that on purpose, simply to voice my opinion. Let's say I vote to see less article like this one on HN. This is merely annoying, not enough to warrant a full debunk.
- hawthornio 5y ago
  In my view, an article that makes claims in the natural sciences published on “some person’s blog” is not really worth considering as a scientific work.

pishpash 5y ago

Side note, maybe as technology removes barriers to access to resources that used to be gated by social graces, extroversion and agreeableness are changing in importance. In other words, in a world where machines outcompete humans, what used to be successful traits among humans aren't going to be always the fittest in the new environment.

de_keyboard 5y ago

Anyone done a correlation analysis of Big-5 traits and favourite programming languages?

thinkingemote 5y ago
Or Emacs and Vim users....

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massysett 5y ago

"Broadly speaking, they are more happy, successful, intelligent, creative, and popular." This reads like an extrovert's life wish list - particularly "popular," but even "happy" and "creative." I disagree that someone who exhibits these characteristics is somehow "better" or is living a better life.

SneakyTornado29 5y ago
Completely agree here. As an introvert, wouldn't one be happier being around _less_ people? More so, I'd beg to argue creativity isn't a uniformly measured trait. An introvert expressing their creativity (i.e. through a personal project for their own satisfaction) is way different than an extroverted person running a business to express their creativity.

johnwheeler 5y ago

i suspect this is horseshit off the top of this guy's head.

planet-and-halo 5y ago

The book "Personality" by Nettle gives the best layman's summary of the Big 5 model I've found. What I particularly like about it, beyond the summary of each aspect, is the way he frames it in terms of evolution and why being on one end of the scale for a trait is not "better." Agreeableness is probably the easiest one to understand from an evolutionary perspective. If you worry a lot about other people's needs, you're more likely to make them happy and reap the benefits of reciprocity, but you're also less likely to directly pursue your own needs. So it goes with the other traits too: being on different parts of the spectrum come with advantages and disadvantages from a reproductive standpoint. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism are the two traits most correlated with financial success in the modern world, but they had downsides in an ancestral environment and even in our modern world can have negative effects e.g. on personal happiness and wellbeing.

hyko 5y ago

we can infer that we’re at an equilibrium point with no real advantage either way We can do no such damn thing! This analysis completely conflates natural selection and sexual selection, and ignores the role of genetic drift.

m0llusk 5y ago

What may be more interesting are the correlations between personality types and occupations. For example, teachers tend to have a high level of empathy. That seems like it could be more interesting and rewarding to investigate. Similarly, pilots, cops, and soldiers all tend to have high levels of aggression. Arguably most interesting is the beer industry where brewers tend to be extremely open to a fault while distributors tend not to have much openness and score high on other factors. Taken together this tends to indicate that the overall life outcome correlations are as usual as likely to mislead as inform. What makes more sense is to see how individuals match with roles and tasks and how diverse individuals can cooperate to make the most of each of their best talents.

justnotworthit 5y ago

Author claims ENFJ is opposite of ISTP in MB. I thought it was the groupings (first two, second two, and/or/? combination) that formed opposites, not the individual letters.

themodelplumber 5y ago
Taking the individual letters' opposite is pretty common. The interpretation of the resulting opposite differs somewhat by system. (This is getting into what's known as four-letter Jungian type, not specifically MBTI) There are also temperament groups, which are NF, SP, NT (HackerNews' audience...), and SJ. Generally you don't want streams to cross here with the type of information people of each temperament want to consume and the time perspective they prefer (past, present, future), though there is some overlap. Some would say it's a good idea to get at type opposites by mirroring the functions, e.g. ENFJ (FeNiSeTi-FiNeSiTe) would be functionally opposite to ESTJ (TeSiNeFi-TiSeNiFe). So these two type groups would tend to want to repress' the other's perceptive and decision-making functionality. The same would not necessarily be as true, or true in the same way, with e.g. ISTP and ENFJ, which some would consider a potentially lovely pairing due to shared function-valuing, meaning that these two opposites will naturally develop toward the other over time, from a developmental perspective. I think Isabel Briggs-Meyers had her own view of the first four functions' order, which you can read in her book "Gifts Differing". This would also yield a different type of opposite.

rogers18445 5y ago

Big Five is an atheoretic construct, derived through factor analysis. Given names after the fact. Similar to IQ in that way - the difference being is that IQ ended with a single factor rather than 5. Attacking the big five would be a fruitless endeavor, the tests have obvious substance and are reducible to 5 factors, can't do anything about that.

rawgabbit 5y ago

I stopped reading when the mentioned Meyers Briggs over and over again. Might as well throw in horoscopes and skull measurements.

jokoon 5y ago
I agree. What's worse is how the article tries to look at financial success, happiness, popularity, reproductive success, etc. Those things are rather subjective, and depends on philosophy and politics. It only looks at shades of good or bad. There is no nuance. Comparing people and putting them in categories is pointless.

at_a_remove 5y ago

Of all of the personality traits I have attempted to change over the years, my introversion has remained the most stubborn. It's a shame, too. I can briefly emulate extraversion, at an enormous cost of mental energy and feel like a dog walking on its hind legs. Nor do I seem to be able to extract the purported benefits of it. And the list of approaches I have exhausted is, in retrospect, more than a little shocking. It's the one area where "fake it until you make it" seems to have failed me utterly.

WhompingWindows 5y ago
What methods have you tried to emulate extraversion? A friend of mine used improv and acting to help them "act" more extroverted, YMMV. Me, I'm still emulating too.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  First, just going out and doing things, namely concerts. Hundreds upon hundreds of concerts. I'm very good at going to concerts (obtaining tickets, optimal parking, getting everything ready) but I still do not enjoy myself. Various combinations of medications, prescribed and self-selected, have failed. It wasn't exhaustive exactly but I would say that it was a good survey of the field. Memorizing quite a lot of detail about people helps in making you seem engaged, but there's a fine line (past a certain point, if you confess to remembering whatever counts as "too much," it becomes "creepy"), and it still hasn't affected the base. Self-talk, acting, improv -- it increases the fidelity of the emulation but it's still emulation. At the end of the day, other people say "hello" and I have failed the initiative check, and am pondering what exactly do I say back to them, and they've already gone by. A remarkably stable trait for me.
  - owlninja 5y ago
    Regarding concerts, do you enjoy music?
    - at_a_remove 5y ago

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jl2718 5y ago

Is there a way to ‘train’ for emotional stability?

asperous 5y ago
Yes, you can go to a professional mental health therapist and receive CBT
bloqs 5y ago
Its very difficult to do, but possible. Requires outside help and a lot of dedication. Factors that can help on a daily basis actually include routine sleep and diet as well. No carbohydrates in the morning, only fats and proteins.

roenxi 5y ago

The author is making a subtle mistake; evolution doesn't mean like-parent-like-child. Evolution is likely selecting for, eg, people who have children at a certain ratio of introverted-extroverted. Introverted, disagreeable, high-contentious types make, for example, great scientists. A population (call it A) that produces a reasonable number of such people is at a huge advantage compared to the alternative that only produces extroverted agreeable types (call them B). Population B will be more competitive at breeding, but population A will win any conflict with B because they'll have a bunch of weirdos in the back room producing a lot of high quality science (a classic stereotype with some foundation in truth). Note that men are much more likely (something like 4x) to be "completely homosexual" compared to women [0]. I'm betting this is because having a few men who opt out of the race to pass on their genes and focus on other stuff is a massive advantage to the society that hosts them. Look how much of a force gay men have been in culture for example. Locally catastrophic for breeding, globally optimal for society. The equilibrium isn't for all offspring to maximise their chance of breeding. The optimum is for the community to thrive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orienta...

edejong 5y ago
I came here to say essentially this. But what is the name of this process where groups of people select for variety instead of optimal individuals?
- roenxi 5y ago
  I'm confident that it is evolution. People don't evolve, populations evolve.
  - dTal 5y ago
    You're confident, but evolutionary biologists largely don't agree with you. I strongly recommend you glance over some of the reasons why at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection In a nutshell - "The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution... a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse."

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kuroguro 5y ago

Just did the test for kicks. Looks like I'm "all red". Oh well.

aerojoe23 5y ago

The author is over simplifying evolution. A trait maybe passed on to children even though the parent isn't displaying it. The easiest example of this across many species is homosexuality. As it seems obvious that it would reduce an individuals chances of having offspring. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths-natural-selection-cannot-explain-homosexuality/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths... There is the added complexity that some positive traits are tied to negative traits. Meaning if the gene stops getting selected the positive trait goes away with the negative one. And then there is culture. It is clear humans have become the dominant species of our planet (at least for now) and it is our culture and the technology it supports that enable this.