Jordan Peterson: Pay gap (if there is one)

so let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games and if you're very agreeable then you're gonna bargain harder on my behalf then you're gonna bargain on your own behalf whereas if you're very disagreeable you're gonna do the reverse you're gonna think I'm in this trading game for me and you are gonna take care of your own interests we're an agreeable person is going to say no no at best this is at worst this has to be 5050 but I'd like to help you every way I can okay now the credit you kind of understand that now the advantage to being agreeable then is that you're good in teams and you're very much likely to give other people credit the bad the downside of being agreeable is that you're not very good at putting forward your own interests and so one of the things that predicts salary across time for example is agreeable to us and it predicts it negatively and so it's part of the reason why women get paid less than men and this is something for the women in the class to really listen to because you how you get paid across time depends on a very large number of things right it depends on your skills and your abilities and your position and your social network and all of that but the other thing it depends on is whether or not you actually go ask for money or maybe that you don't even ask because actually you don't ask for money you tell people that you need to be paid more or something they don't like will happen and I don't mean as a threat I mean that you have to be willing when you're negotiating to have an alternative you go talk to your boss who isn't going to give you money because everyone wants money right it's a competitive game you're gonna have to be you're gonna have to go there and say look here's what I do here's why it's useful here's why you have to give me more money and this is by opportunities if you don't and then you're not taking your boss's money anyways because it's very seldom very frequently the case that he's working for a whopping big company but he needs an excuse to give you money because everyone's asking for money all the time and so you have to put your case forward powerfully and disagreeably know you don't want to do it too disagreeably because then he's gonna think that you're a son of AB and maybe he's not gonna give you anything and maybe you'll get fired for being mouthy and all of that and that certainly happens to people who are too disagreeable you got to get the balance right but it's definitely the case and the other thing that happens to women that's also worth noting and this is probably because their higher negative emotion is they tend to underestimate their own utility in business settings right because if you're trying to evaluate what you're like and you're more tilted towards negative emotion then the things that you do that are wrong are going to stand out more more on the foreground than the things that you do that are right so if you go into a negotiation and you're uncertain already because you have self doubts and then you're agreeable in the negotiation what's going to happen is that you're not going to win as often and winning in a business setting or in a career development setting means more opportunity for promotion and more revenue generated now the downside of that of course is as you climb the business hierarchy is that you also have to take on more responsibility and that responsibility is sometimes unpleasant as well especially to people who are agreeable because you're not necessarily liked if you're in a position of authority and agreeable people really like to be liked it's their primary motive motivator because they're concerned about the maintenance I would say of intimate positive relationships and that also makes them conflict avoidant okay so now you guys can think about this but but I'll tell you why I think the personality differences between men and women exist now these are speculative hypotheses but they're reasonably well documented by by the relevant literature so let's let's think about it the first thing we might think about is what's the difference between men and women well how do they differ well the first thing we might observe is that if you look at personality differences between prepubescent boys and girls they're not very large boys and girls don't differ in terms of their their trait neuroticism for example what happens is that when puberty kicks in women's trait neuroticism Rises and it stays higher than men for the rest of their life and this is why you see this reflected in the different kinds of psychopathology that we set the two sexes so men are over-represented in alcoholism drug abuse antisocial personality and a host of learning disorders as well as that attention deficit disorder and women are over-represented in depression and anxiety primarily that seems to be tightly associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism because maybe it's if you're at the 95th percentile or higher let's say in trait neuroticism there isn't much different than difference between that and being somewhat prone to depression and anxiety and because the curves overlap you know the curves aren't identical the normal distributions are identical for men and women you tilt the one to the to the right to the women's curve to the right towards higher levels of neuroticism you go out you look for the person in xx who has the highest levels of negative emotion it's much more likely to be female than male okay so let's see if we can figure out why so we're gonna tell you some things basic differences between men and women and you can tell me what you think about it if you or if you agree or disagree okay first size differential emerges between men and women at puberty right because boys and girls are roughly the same size and roughly the same strength but men get bigger at puberty when the testosterone kicks in and more importantly not only do they get taller and heavier but their upper body strength is much higher and that's a real issue for for combat because human beings punch there's other animals to do that kangaroos do that too way so we're not the we're not the only people that punch but we have clubs on the ends of our arms so that's interesting so okay so there's a boy there's a body size difference that's important to strength differential that's important next thing I think so let's assume that the reason that women are higher in sensitivity to negative emotion is because the world is actually more dangerous to women I think that woman's nervous systems are not adapted to women I think woman's nervous systems are adapted to the mother-infant dyad and because you are not the same creature when you have an infant not at all you're way more vulnerable and it's partly because you have to express their vulnerability of the infant and you also have to care for it right so you think about an infant especially under nine months so let's say how are you going to be wired up if you're going to optimally care for an infant under nine months and I'm saying under nine months because women generally do the bulk of childcare for infants who are under nine months old and part of the reason for that there's a whole host of reasons but part of the reasons for that obviously is that they breastfeed but imagine what you need to be wired up biologically in order to care for an infant first of all they're very demanding right because they're completely helpless and they're demanding 24 hours a day and it's right it's quite it's quite a emotional load and an infant under nine months is never wrong right what you do to an infinite nine months is when they're in distress you always respond you never tell the infant get your act together and stop whining right which you can do say to an int to a child that's 18 months old you can start having that sort of conversation but under nine months it's like nothing is the infant's fault it's surrounded in an extraordinarily threatening world and you have to be responsive to what it needs regardless of what you want and you have to be very sensitive to the threats that emerge in the environment and so I think the price that women pay for that ability to have an intimate relationship with infants in the very earliest stages of development is that their nervous systems are actually wired so that they can perform that role optimally and the disadvantage to that is that having a temperament like that doesn't work that well when you're dealing with adult men especially when you're dealing with them in a business environment because it's not the same thing not at all it's a competitive environment so okay so agreeable people are compassionate and polite what are disagreeable people like they're tough minded they're blunt they're competitive and they won't do a damn thing they don't want to do so it isn't exactly that they're aggressive although they will push you the hell out of their way if you're in the way they're not they're not like volatile like you are if you're high in in neuroticism it isn't defensive aggression it's more like predatory aggression its dominance behavior and so for someone who's high who's high highly disagreeable they look at the world as a place in which they can compete and win and I'll tell you a story I have a friend I gave him my personality test the big five aspect scale that Colin DeYoung developed in my lab and I knew he is a disagreeable guy and by interacting with I mean he's even rude to people sort of spontaneously on the street I actually liked him quite a bit he's very very funny he's also very conscientious so you can trust him but it's disagreeable as hell and so I gave him this test because I thought it would be funny and he came out as the most disagreeable person in 10,000 so reasonable in compassion about 30th percentile but like point zero zero one in politeness so he's extraordinarily blunt and he'll just say absolutely anything no matter how horrible it is and he was often brought into corporations to sort of clean them up so if a corporation was tilting and not doing well they'd bring him in to find out who the useless people were and fire them and I talked to him about that because I've had the missed opportunity to have to not have graduate students in my lab for example that weren't performing well and I'd find it very very difficult to you know dress someone down and certainly difficult to fire them I just hate it because I'm actually quite an agreeable person much to my chagrin and I asked him about that and I said well what do you do you have to fire people all the time how do you handle that he says handle it I enjoy it and I thought wow that's so interesting that someone would have that response I said well what do you mean you enjoy it he said look I go into these companies and I analyze the performance of groups of people right and there's in those groups there are people who are really striving really trying hard and working themselves really hard and being productive and then there's these people that are just doing nothing they're completely in the way they don't carry their weight at all they take advantage every chance they get and they're always whining about why they can't work it's like I find out who they are I call them into my office and I tell them exactly what they've been doing it's like hit the road buddy you've had your you've had your run of it and I thought oh yeah okay fair enough you know well I can tell you you know I've had situations in my lab where I had underperforming graduate students and one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really hard on the high-performing graduate students you know because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing you know and that's exactly right and so this is also why there's there's a conscientiousness trait and it agreeable this trait cuz conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments right they don't give a damn about your feelings not a bit it's like are you doing the work or not whereas agreeable people think well you know your mother's sick and you know you've you've got a bunch of family problems and and we all have to take care of each other and it's no wonder that you're having a rough time and like you can't say that one of those attitudes is correct and the other isn't correct you can't say that there wouldn't be those two dimensions if there wasn't something correct about both of them but you can certainly point out that often they conflict you know and so the demand for for inclusiveness and unity and care and the demand for high-level performance in a hierarchical structure there are very different orientations in the world and so it's complicated for people who are agreeable and conscientious and actually I think often that large corporations and large large institutions of any sort run on the unheralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness and they're disproportionately women and my experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately no not appropriately if you want to hire someone to exploit productively you hire middle-aged women who are hyper conscientious and who are agreeable because they'll do everything they won't take credit for it and they won't complain

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 103,647

Rating: 4.9165535 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, pay gap, wage gap, men and women, Essential Truth, bite-sized philosophy, philosophyinsights, Ocean of Freedom, manofallcreation, TheArchangel911, psyche matters, M Czerna, Intense 5, Ramble, Transliminal, Evan Carmichael, The Rubin Report, Jocko podcast, H3 podcast, PowerfulJRE, StevenCrowder, 50 stars, mulligan brothers, agreeableness, personality traits, personality quiz, Myers-briggs, MBTI, ideacity, MagiCal HD, Sorting Myself Out

Id: aINDG7AI-4o

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018