I’m curious how you would contrast this with the personality trait of conscientiousness. Grit was another term that was being used to point to something very similar to here. When tested, it was found that Grit couldn’t be functionally differentiated from conscientiousness. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re pointing to the same cluster of traits.
Another interesting thing is that it actually seems quite hard to shift your conscientiousness. I had a project trying to shift a particular subset of my conscientiousness and the first part was to see if anyone had found any interventions that could reliably make someone more conscientious—I couldn’t find any. This doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s possible, I’ve made huge strides in my life in being conscientious, and more since I started that project—but it does mean that you should recognize you’ve taken on a hard task, and perhaps make some plans for how to be virtuous without an abundance of conscientiousness.
I think if anything can train conscientiousness, it’s probably living in an environment that encourages meditating all day like MAPLE. However, another equally plausible explanation is the type of people who are drawn to and survive in that environment are those with high conscientiousness.
Some things that have helped me:
Noticing the things that hold my attention, and trying to build my life around doing good through those things (instead of learning to focus my attention on things I don’t enjoy.
Creating and finding cultures that have accountability and structure built into them, instead of trying to create the structure by myself
Taking psychedelics.
Self- help. Particularly seven habits of highly effective people, Atomic habits, The Now Habit.
There’s some overlap with conscientiousness, but dependability doesn’t include being organized, being efficient, caring about achievement or perfection, being hardworking, being careful, being thorough, or appearing competent.
Grit seems important for trying and follow-through in particular!
I believe that you have pointed at a subset of conscientiousness, the question is if the correlation between all the parts of conscientiousness is so robust that talking about a subset of it apart from the whole is basically indistinguishable from talking the whole on a population wide level (as was the case with grit).
When I was working on this, I was working on a part of conscientiousness that I was calling awareness. A set of skills that would simultaneously allow me to stop locking my keys in the car, be more aware of how my split second decisions affected a group, and be more detail oriented in my art.
What I found was that as I worked on specific parts of this, I magically took on many of the other traits of conscientiousness. Conversely, as I got further in the skill, I found that I needed other traits of conscientiousness that I originally thought I wouldn’t need.
As a simple example, you state that dependability doesn’t include being organized. However, once you have the desire and will to be reliable, the next step is having the skills to be reliable. This involves being organized enough with your time and commitments that you make sure you don’t commit more effort than you have, make sure you show up where you say you will be, etc.
The Big 5 have robust data for a reason—the traits are correlated because they bolster each other in non-obvious ways that are self-reinforcing. It may be a useful frame to think of this project as a general conscientiousness raising project, and experiment with other traits that are outside of the ones listed in this post.
I’m curious how you would contrast this with the personality trait of conscientiousness. Grit was another term that was being used to point to something very similar to here. When tested, it was found that Grit couldn’t be functionally differentiated from conscientiousness. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re pointing to the same cluster of traits.
Another interesting thing is that it actually seems quite hard to shift your conscientiousness. I had a project trying to shift a particular subset of my conscientiousness and the first part was to see if anyone had found any interventions that could reliably make someone more conscientious—I couldn’t find any. This doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s possible, I’ve made huge strides in my life in being conscientious, and more since I started that project—but it does mean that you should recognize you’ve taken on a hard task, and perhaps make some plans for how to be virtuous without an abundance of conscientiousness.
I think if anything can train conscientiousness, it’s probably living in an environment that encourages meditating all day like MAPLE. However, another equally plausible explanation is the type of people who are drawn to and survive in that environment are those with high conscientiousness.
Some things that have helped me:
Noticing the things that hold my attention, and trying to build my life around doing good through those things (instead of learning to focus my attention on things I don’t enjoy.
Creating and finding cultures that have accountability and structure built into them, instead of trying to create the structure by myself
Taking psychedelics.
Self- help. Particularly seven habits of highly effective people, Atomic habits, The Now Habit.
Allowing frequent breaks—Daily with pomodoros, weekly rest day, quarterly recovery weeks.
There’s some overlap with conscientiousness, but dependability doesn’t include being organized, being efficient, caring about achievement or perfection, being hardworking, being careful, being thorough, or appearing competent.
Grit seems important for trying and follow-through in particular!
I believe that you have pointed at a subset of conscientiousness, the question is if the correlation between all the parts of conscientiousness is so robust that talking about a subset of it apart from the whole is basically indistinguishable from talking the whole on a population wide level (as was the case with grit).
When I was working on this, I was working on a part of conscientiousness that I was calling awareness. A set of skills that would simultaneously allow me to stop locking my keys in the car, be more aware of how my split second decisions affected a group, and be more detail oriented in my art.
What I found was that as I worked on specific parts of this, I magically took on many of the other traits of conscientiousness. Conversely, as I got further in the skill, I found that I needed other traits of conscientiousness that I originally thought I wouldn’t need.
As a simple example, you state that dependability doesn’t include being organized. However, once you have the desire and will to be reliable, the next step is having the skills to be reliable. This involves being organized enough with your time and commitments that you make sure you don’t commit more effort than you have, make sure you show up where you say you will be, etc.
The Big 5 have robust data for a reason—the traits are correlated because they bolster each other in non-obvious ways that are self-reinforcing. It may be a useful frame to think of this project as a general conscientiousness raising project, and experiment with other traits that are outside of the ones listed in this post.