Do you have any cites for the rigidity assertion? (Seems like they’re logically separate questions; it’s not obvious how malleable non-genetic contributors would be.)
I have kept an eye out for Conscientiousness interventions for the past 2 or 3 years, searched on occasion, and have seen nothing ever suggested except possibly stimulants like amphetamines. Possible instances like military experience generally turn out to be selection effects. As well, the Duckworth paper linked in the sibling comment, extensively discusses the numerous correlates and versions of Conscientiousness before adulthood stretching all the way back to early infancy.
So, as much as I’d like there to be some easy environmental intervention to boost my own Conscientiousness, I haven’t found any.
Given the research that you cited, I have updated my probability estimate – that Conscientiousness is indeed rigid, higher from my original estimate of 75%. Wikipedia provides very accommodating definitions of Conscientiousness, inclusive of many behaviors such as being efficient and systematic, elements such as self-discipline and thoroughness, aspects of industriousness such as productivity and work ethic, and finally a strong association with procrastination.
The following are popular posts that try to understand and promote ways in which we can optimize some of the multiple facets of Conscientiousness listed above :
If it is not obvious by now, the following questions have me deeply conflicted:
Is it a waste of time for most, to invest into these sort of posts, because Conscientiousness is rigid?
If these sort of posts are not a waste of time, and you can optimize certain facets of Conscientiousness
via the many methods provided, then is Conscientiousness still rigid?
Perhaps Conscientiousness is boost-able, but on the low end? Perhaps the efficacy of these posts are over estimated?
Is it a waste of time for most, to invest into these sort of posts, because Conscientiousness is rigid?
I think you should first ask, what is meant, statistically, by the results we’re describing as ‘rigid’. If ~50% of population variance is genetically linked, what does that mean in practice?
Second, one should then ask, is there such a thing as ‘being efficient with Conscientiousness’? Somewhat like willpower—are there better or worse ways of deploying willpower? What would this even mean?
Good question. I assume you ask because conscientiousness is highly correlated with a number of positive life outcomes?
Conscientiousness is temporally stable, that is, in the average individual, it does not much change over time.
Conscientiousness is linked to a number of other personality traits—e.g. self-regulation, perseverance, etc.… These traits can be trained; and according to a quick skim of the study below, training those traits in turn effects conscientiousness, at least in children.
In adults, the trait is more temporally stable (sorry, no citation off hand), but there are hacks—e.g. self-control strategies like mental contrasting, implementation intentions, learned industriousness, etc… can partially achieve the same effect as having more conscientiousness.
This is a good question though… I will investigate some more.
I have very slowly become a lot more conscientious over the course of my life. It feels like I made a deliberate effort to do so by eg leaning hard on calendars, todo lists and such, but it may simply be ageing.
This is my own thought and not backed up by any citations, but …
Since Concientiousness is usually measured by self-reporting, you could find a Concientiousness survey and turn all the questions into affirmations, and recite these affirmations daily. “How often do you forget important deadlines?” → “I rarely forget important deadlines.” I would hypothesize that eventually you might come to believe these discrete facts about yourself. Directly, this would lead to much higher scores on future Concientiousness surveys.
I’ve read that the only “cure” for true personality disorders is to fake it until faking it becomes second nature. For example, narcissists pretend to care about the needs of others until they sort of start to automatically care about them. So my idea here is that by pretending to have higher Concientiousness, you might actually change.
I’ve read that the only “cure” for true personality disorders is to fake it until faking it becomes second nature. For example, narcissists pretend to care about the needs of others until they sort of start to automatically care about them.
Yes, this is the “fake it ’til you make it” idea. It is controversial though, because there’s an enduring implication that, e.g. the narcissist does not really care about others, they’re just pretending to do so.
Heckman and Tough just wrote a whole book claiming that there are cheap ways to increase conscientiousness of children, though probably only at the low end.
I think there are a couple ways to go about answering this question. If you go about it by seeing whether people who are related and people with a few life experiences that you want to track score high on a conscientiousness test, you’re not really answering the question “what training would work?”
I don’t have a direct answer to that, but I do have several bits of information that would be very useful for a person who would like to try and solve this:
Dabrowski did research on morality also. His theory is that there are certain traits called “super sensitivities” that predict moral behavior. There may be a way to increase these—perhaps with drugs or life experiences designed to make your nervous system more excitable.
See also Jane Elliot’s brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. I don’t know whether they did these formally, but they observed that when the situation was reversed (the situation was that kids with a certain eye color were told they were better and became abusive) the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the “better than” role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior.
I researched violent crime one day and discovered that the main thing that was connected with violent crime was high testosterone. In theory, treatment using existing drugs could make a very big difference. That would probably require some kind of training intended to explain to the violent criminals that their problem was chemical, and convince them to take the drugs. This would be difficult because if they’re chemically imbalanced it may not be easy to get that through to them. To an ordinary person, it’s a no-brainer, but to them, it’s probably not. Some type of educational program designed to get them to wake up and realize they need testosterone reduction treatment may go a long way.
This doesn’t exactly qualify as training, as I’ve gone up to a meta level, but this kind of thinking could potentially make a very big difference:
We need to consider the role of perverse incentives. There are a lot of perverse incentives in life, and a lot of them are improperly checked and balanced. For instance, diagnosing a person with a mental disorder can be devastating to that person and to come up with an accurate diagnosis can take some time. However, psychologists are pressured to diagnose on the first visit because they can’t get paid by the insurance company without it. Take a good person and put them into a bad situation, and they may react as if they were a bad person because they need to in order to survive. Identifying and changing perverse incentives might really change not only the way that a large number of people behave, but would also redirect the selection pressure on humans such that the good ones are more likely to survive and reproduce, helping to “train” our genes in the right direction, rather than just our behavior.
I’d guess the GP was asking about conscientiousness as in the Big Five model, which is more about work ethic and motivation and not so much about morality. Anyone highly motivated and organized would be considered “conscientious” under this model, even if they were a criminal.
I’d never thought about why people are conscientious, but I can think of four sorts of reasons. In order to accomplish a task-related goal, in order to lower their own stress by making accidents less likely and less damaging, in order to not impose costs on other people, and possibly because it just feels right.
I’m guessing though—I’m only sporadically conscientious. Would conscientious people care to talk about how consientiousness feels from the inside?
Most effects of testosterone are permanent; do testosterone blockers reduce crime? Probably, since aggression and high sex drive are among the temporary effects.
Way too little is known about large hormonal alterations. What is known is that hormone replacement therapy can make people very happy, which vaguely suggests that giving T blockers to most men could make them miserable. (Then again we’re not suggesting adding estrogen, so the comparison doesn’t hold.)
In the early days of LW there was an eunuch who wouldn’t shut up about how great T blockers were. N=1 study powered by selection bias.
Castration works very well to reduce violent behavior based on the research I read. I didn’t spend months researching this, but I went through a lot of information, and reducing testosterone was the most effective thing they had tried.
which vaguely suggests that giving T blockers to most men could make them miserable
Or could help them in the event that their testosterone is ten times the level of non-violent inmates, which was the case in one of the studies I read. It was so effective that I wonder why they’re not using it. One bottleneck that has been proposed is that people perceive testosterone reduction as unhealthy or as a thing that would depersonalize a man by reducing his manliness. In light of this, it’s interesting that you reacted to my comments about high testosterone and chemical imbalance with the idea that giving testosterone blockers to most men would make them miserable. That’s irrelevant because most men don’t need them. Only the ones who have such unusually high testosterone that it significantly raises the risk of criminal violence, or for some other health reason qualifies as excessive / qualifies as a chemical imbalance should be prescribed testosterone blockers.
Now I’m wondering if the reason people don’t use testosterone blockers might be because people are, for some reason, afraid that it would be prescribed to most men.
I wish I had known there was a place where people appreciated this type of nerdy-yet-un-credentialed dip into subjects. I’d have made a site similar to Gwern’s. Alas, my research findings are not written up and my citations are scattered throughout things like bookmark backups from old OS installs.
it’s interesting that you reacted to my comments about high testosterone and chemical imbalance with the idea that giving testosterone blockers to most men would make them miserable
I said that because I didn’t know how large the difference was, or whether the idea was to target a class of particularly high-T violent criminals or to douse anyone in prison regardless of previous T levels. I’m also slightly afraid that the implementation will tilt toward the latter.
One bottleneck that has been proposed is that people perceive testosterone reduction as unhealthy
Screwing around with hormones is risky. The pill has a lot of health risks, so do T injections, supplementing menopausal women turned out to be a terrible idea. But that just points to “test it and see what happens”.
or as a thing that would depersonalize a man by reducing his manliness
Well, duh. It’s the point.
This ties into a deeper fear: you can fine me, jail me, whip me, send me to the mines, but I’ll still be me. (Inasmuch as the distinction between personality and environment is valid.) When you start controlling mood-affecting chemicals, you’re taking away my freedom of thought in a very real sense. I do think that the human rights infringement to social benefits ratio is better than for prisons, but it’s not a negligible cost.
As selfish castration anxiety analogues go, I don’t know if “We, not you, decide to mess with your hormones” and “You don’t really need T” outbalance “Messing with hormones is normal” and “All hormones in moderation”.
the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the “better than” role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior
I don’t think it works that way especially much in the real world, though specific examples would be in mindkiller territory. I suggest that the unusual thing about the brown eyes, blue eyes experiment was that being abused only went on for a short time, and the abusiveness was framed as a bad thing by the teacher.
How trainable is the trait of Conscientiousness? Is it as rigid as I.Q?
Conscientiousness is fairly rigid; it is, however, about as hereditable as IQ or less, from the 2 studies I have on hand:
“Genetic and environmental effects on openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness: An adoption/twin study”%20-%20Genetic%20and%20Environmental%20Effects%20on%20Openness%20to%20Experience,%20Agreeableness,%20and%20Conscientiousness-%20An%20Adoption%3ATwin%20Study.pdf), Bergeman et al 1993: 29% of variance
“Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study”, Jang et al 1996: 44%
Do you have any cites for the rigidity assertion? (Seems like they’re logically separate questions; it’s not obvious how malleable non-genetic contributors would be.)
I have kept an eye out for Conscientiousness interventions for the past 2 or 3 years, searched on occasion, and have seen nothing ever suggested except possibly stimulants like amphetamines. Possible instances like military experience generally turn out to be selection effects. As well, the Duckworth paper linked in the sibling comment, extensively discusses the numerous correlates and versions of Conscientiousness before adulthood stretching all the way back to early infancy.
So, as much as I’d like there to be some easy environmental intervention to boost my own Conscientiousness, I haven’t found any.
Given the research that you cited, I have updated my probability estimate – that Conscientiousness is indeed rigid, higher from my original estimate of 75%. Wikipedia provides very accommodating definitions of Conscientiousness, inclusive of many behaviors such as being efficient and systematic, elements such as self-discipline and thoroughness, aspects of industriousness such as productivity and work ethic, and finally a strong association with procrastination.
The following are popular posts that try to understand and promote ways in which we can optimize some of the multiple facets of Conscientiousness listed above :
Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge
My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination
Ugh fields](http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/
Defeating Ugh Fields In Practice
Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination
If it is not obvious by now, the following questions have me deeply conflicted:
Is it a waste of time for most, to invest into these sort of posts, because Conscientiousness is rigid?
If these sort of posts are not a waste of time, and you can optimize certain facets of Conscientiousness via the many methods provided, then is Conscientiousness still rigid?
Perhaps Conscientiousness is boost-able, but on the low end? Perhaps the efficacy of these posts are over estimated?
I think you should first ask, what is meant, statistically, by the results we’re describing as ‘rigid’. If ~50% of population variance is genetically linked, what does that mean in practice?
Second, one should then ask, is there such a thing as ‘being efficient with Conscientiousness’? Somewhat like willpower—are there better or worse ways of deploying willpower? What would this even mean?
Good question. I assume you ask because conscientiousness is highly correlated with a number of positive life outcomes?
Conscientiousness is temporally stable, that is, in the average individual, it does not much change over time.
Conscientiousness is linked to a number of other personality traits—e.g. self-regulation, perseverance, etc.… These traits can be trained; and according to a quick skim of the study below, training those traits in turn effects conscientiousness, at least in children.
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/publications/EisenbergDuckworth_ConscientiousnessOriginsinChildhood_2012.pdf
In adults, the trait is more temporally stable (sorry, no citation off hand), but there are hacks—e.g. self-control strategies like mental contrasting, implementation intentions, learned industriousness, etc… can partially achieve the same effect as having more conscientiousness.
This is a good question though… I will investigate some more.
I have very slowly become a lot more conscientious over the course of my life. It feels like I made a deliberate effort to do so by eg leaning hard on calendars, todo lists and such, but it may simply be ageing.
This is my own thought and not backed up by any citations, but …
Since Concientiousness is usually measured by self-reporting, you could find a Concientiousness survey and turn all the questions into affirmations, and recite these affirmations daily. “How often do you forget important deadlines?” → “I rarely forget important deadlines.” I would hypothesize that eventually you might come to believe these discrete facts about yourself. Directly, this would lead to much higher scores on future Concientiousness surveys.
I’ve read that the only “cure” for true personality disorders is to fake it until faking it becomes second nature. For example, narcissists pretend to care about the needs of others until they sort of start to automatically care about them. So my idea here is that by pretending to have higher Concientiousness, you might actually change.
Yes, this is the “fake it ’til you make it” idea. It is controversial though, because there’s an enduring implication that, e.g. the narcissist does not really care about others, they’re just pretending to do so.
Heckman and Tough just wrote a whole book claiming that there are cheap ways to increase conscientiousness of children, though probably only at the low end.
I think there are a couple ways to go about answering this question. If you go about it by seeing whether people who are related and people with a few life experiences that you want to track score high on a conscientiousness test, you’re not really answering the question “what training would work?”
I don’t have a direct answer to that, but I do have several bits of information that would be very useful for a person who would like to try and solve this:
Dabrowski did research on morality also. His theory is that there are certain traits called “super sensitivities” that predict moral behavior. There may be a way to increase these—perhaps with drugs or life experiences designed to make your nervous system more excitable.
See also Jane Elliot’s brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. I don’t know whether they did these formally, but they observed that when the situation was reversed (the situation was that kids with a certain eye color were told they were better and became abusive) the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the “better than” role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior.
I researched violent crime one day and discovered that the main thing that was connected with violent crime was high testosterone. In theory, treatment using existing drugs could make a very big difference. That would probably require some kind of training intended to explain to the violent criminals that their problem was chemical, and convince them to take the drugs. This would be difficult because if they’re chemically imbalanced it may not be easy to get that through to them. To an ordinary person, it’s a no-brainer, but to them, it’s probably not. Some type of educational program designed to get them to wake up and realize they need testosterone reduction treatment may go a long way.
This doesn’t exactly qualify as training, as I’ve gone up to a meta level, but this kind of thinking could potentially make a very big difference:
We need to consider the role of perverse incentives. There are a lot of perverse incentives in life, and a lot of them are improperly checked and balanced. For instance, diagnosing a person with a mental disorder can be devastating to that person and to come up with an accurate diagnosis can take some time. However, psychologists are pressured to diagnose on the first visit because they can’t get paid by the insurance company without it. Take a good person and put them into a bad situation, and they may react as if they were a bad person because they need to in order to survive. Identifying and changing perverse incentives might really change not only the way that a large number of people behave, but would also redirect the selection pressure on humans such that the good ones are more likely to survive and reproduce, helping to “train” our genes in the right direction, rather than just our behavior.
I’d guess the GP was asking about conscientiousness as in the Big Five model, which is more about work ethic and motivation and not so much about morality. Anyone highly motivated and organized would be considered “conscientious” under this model, even if they were a criminal.
I’d never thought about why people are conscientious, but I can think of four sorts of reasons. In order to accomplish a task-related goal, in order to lower their own stress by making accidents less likely and less damaging, in order to not impose costs on other people, and possibly because it just feels right.
I’m guessing though—I’m only sporadically conscientious. Would conscientious people care to talk about how consientiousness feels from the inside?
Most effects of testosterone are permanent; do testosterone blockers reduce crime? Probably, since aggression and high sex drive are among the temporary effects.
Way too little is known about large hormonal alterations. What is known is that hormone replacement therapy can make people very happy, which vaguely suggests that giving T blockers to most men could make them miserable. (Then again we’re not suggesting adding estrogen, so the comparison doesn’t hold.)
In the early days of LW there was an eunuch who wouldn’t shut up about how great T blockers were. N=1 study powered by selection bias.
Castration works very well to reduce violent behavior based on the research I read. I didn’t spend months researching this, but I went through a lot of information, and reducing testosterone was the most effective thing they had tried.
Or could help them in the event that their testosterone is ten times the level of non-violent inmates, which was the case in one of the studies I read. It was so effective that I wonder why they’re not using it. One bottleneck that has been proposed is that people perceive testosterone reduction as unhealthy or as a thing that would depersonalize a man by reducing his manliness. In light of this, it’s interesting that you reacted to my comments about high testosterone and chemical imbalance with the idea that giving testosterone blockers to most men would make them miserable. That’s irrelevant because most men don’t need them. Only the ones who have such unusually high testosterone that it significantly raises the risk of criminal violence, or for some other health reason qualifies as excessive / qualifies as a chemical imbalance should be prescribed testosterone blockers.
Now I’m wondering if the reason people don’t use testosterone blockers might be because people are, for some reason, afraid that it would be prescribed to most men.
I wish I had known there was a place where people appreciated this type of nerdy-yet-un-credentialed dip into subjects. I’d have made a site similar to Gwern’s. Alas, my research findings are not written up and my citations are scattered throughout things like bookmark backups from old OS installs.
I said that because I didn’t know how large the difference was, or whether the idea was to target a class of particularly high-T violent criminals or to douse anyone in prison regardless of previous T levels. I’m also slightly afraid that the implementation will tilt toward the latter.
Screwing around with hormones is risky. The pill has a lot of health risks, so do T injections, supplementing menopausal women turned out to be a terrible idea. But that just points to “test it and see what happens”.
Well, duh. It’s the point.
This ties into a deeper fear: you can fine me, jail me, whip me, send me to the mines, but I’ll still be me. (Inasmuch as the distinction between personality and environment is valid.) When you start controlling mood-affecting chemicals, you’re taking away my freedom of thought in a very real sense. I do think that the human rights infringement to social benefits ratio is better than for prisons, but it’s not a negligible cost.
As selfish castration anxiety analogues go, I don’t know if “We, not you, decide to mess with your hormones” and “You don’t really need T” outbalance “Messing with hormones is normal” and “All hormones in moderation”.
I don’t think it works that way especially much in the real world, though specific examples would be in mindkiller territory. I suggest that the unusual thing about the brown eyes, blue eyes experiment was that being abused only went on for a short time, and the abusiveness was framed as a bad thing by the teacher.