12.5 the first trial

now i am starting to dictate a ted talk here.

what an intriguing group of individuals you are to a psychologist. i've had the opportunity to over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And i think it is fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms i would like to discuss today. And i thought you might like to know who you are. But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, i thought i would tell you a few facts and stories in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself. I am in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science, which spans the full spectrum, from neutrons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense how each of us, each of you, is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people, and like no other person. Now, already, you may be saying of yourself, "i am not intriguing. i am the 46th most boring person in the western hemisphere." or you may say of yourself, "i am intriguing, even if i am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit." But it is your self- diagnosed boringness and your inherent "twitiness" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so. One of the most influential approaches in personality science is know as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and this describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So O stands for "open to experience",versus those who are more closed. C stands for "conscientiousness", in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. E-extroversion, in contrast to more introverted people. A- agreeable individuals, in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And N- neurotic individuals, in contrast to those who are more stable.All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious, and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, i find intriguing, with my class, i sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: i tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow. Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they had successfully licked the elbow of the person next to them. Those are the extroverts. Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what i call our three natures.