LIES and B.S. | Jordan Peterson Destroys the Self Esteem and Emotional Intelligence Concepts

here's some things i think don't exist so if you're going to predict anything in the real world here's some things not to use i don't think self-esteem exists i think there were yeah 25 000 published papers on self-esteem figure 10 grand of paper which is you know a comparatively conservative estimation so you can do the math 25 000 times 10 000. so that's the total amount of research funding it's gone into looking at self-esteem it's like well what's self-esteem it's a word actually it's two words right but you know and it's sort of something you think you might have or not have but but that's a figure of speech that's not an empirical phenomena and so most of your honesty most of extroverts most of extroversion is just neuroticism as it turns out it's like if you have a lot of negative emotion you don't feel that good about yourself well isn't that a surprise you have a lot of negative emotion you know and if you want to fix it up a little bit then you can also subtract positive emotion from that because if you have a lot of negative emotion and you don't have a lot of positive emotion so that's neuroticism minus extraversion then your self-esteem is even lower you know and then maybe over time conscientiousness starts to make a bit of a difference right because if you're conscientious and you work hard you can start to see that that's paying off and tafarati's done some work that seems to sort of indicate that but you know the first thing that happened is everybody went on a self-esteem bender even though the measures were pretty appalling and even though you could you know model it with the big five and then one of the things that happened as a consequence of that was that the whole california school system started to teach students self-esteem it's like a what makes you think you should have high self-esteem like maybe you're a miserable little worm god only knows right it's not the case that you should have a good opinion of yourself in every bloody situation you know what if you're a bully who pounds people out in the schoolyard bullies by the way do have higher self-esteem than normal so they're because it's not like they're feeling bad about themselves when they pound you they're feeling bad about you and the best work that you know the low self-esteem equals bully hypothesis lots of people believe that but if you read dan always who's the world's leading authority on bullying and who's actually done something about it what he says is that bullies have inappropriately high self-esteem which is why they think they're in a perfectly good position to pound you out if you happen to be on the playground so it's not like they're suffering from you know neurotic weakness of self-image it's quite the contrary so anyways in the california school system they tried to teach kids self-esteem and you know there's no evidence that you can do that first because neuroticism is actually quite hard to shift so and if we knew how to treat it well hooray everybody would be thrilled about that but it's not easy and second there are people like uh gene twenge used to be a student of roy ballmeister's who claims that all that self-esteem training has just you know made younger people like you guys more narcissistic yeah because the self-esteem becomes disconnected from the actual accomplishment because you might hope well you'd sort of feel good how good should you feel about yourself well you know you might say well you should grant yourself the right to exist like you do everyone else you know that's sort of like a basic human right as a human being you're valuable and then maybe you should sort of think you're about as valuable as other people roughly think you are that seems about right right so the right amount of self-esteem would be your perception of your value within the context of a group it's got to be something like that you know so there should be a concordance because like maybe you need to improve could well be you know and are you going to improve if you're feeling really good about yourself well the answer to that is well we don't know how much misery about yourself do you have to have before you're motivated to improve yourself none well that doesn't seem right but we also don't know whether it's shame or guilt or anxiety or pain or you know these negative emotions that motivate you now it's clear that if you have enough negative emotion that can paralyze you but that's like depression and and and you know psychiatrically high levels of anxiety that's not like low self-esteem so that's a problem i don't believe that working memory and executive function are distinguishable from iq especially g our research we've done a lot of it i've factor analyzed a battery of 10 dorsolateral prefrontal tests done given to 3 000 people it's a very big sample we haven't published this for a variety of reasons but one factor comes out you know when carol's rule for iq was you take cognitive tests a bunch of them you factor analyze them you pull out the first factor that's fluid intelligence it's like well that's basically what we found and so if you look at the correlation between each of the single tests and the first factor it's only about 0.3 or 0.4 but that's also what you find in iq tests you know each individual test only correlates with the aggregate at about 0.3 but if you aggregate enough of them you get fluid intelligence and it's just as solid as a rock so um emotional intelligence ha not only does that probably not exist because it's agreeableness it you know how you always hear you need emotional intelligence to to thrive in the workplace it's like turns out that's exactly backwards disagreeable people do better as managers in the workplace so it's actually if you lack emotional intelligence you're more likely to be an effective manager so an emotional intelligence is a great you know indicator of sort of pathology and psychology because it was invented by a journalist you know you can't just have some word invented by a journalist and then go make a whole bloody you know enterprise out of it you got to find out if it if it's really there and there's not a lot of evidence that it is and what does it mean anyways emotional intelligence what what does that mean i can infer what you're feeling well is that iq like are smart people better at that or like am i mirroring you in some way or do i care for you like maybe i can figure out exactly what you're feeling and i just don't give a damn you know is that still emotional intelligence well i don't know right how would you separate that from sympathy or empathy and what and what if you're over sympathetic to someone is that emotional intelligence like maybe you feel way too sorry for your children so it's like you're all empathetic and all that but you're not doing them any good or sometimes you would be but sometimes you should say you know quit whining go the hell outside because that's the right response sometimes so these things are not straightforward at all and of course emotional intelligence is generally measured with questionnaires and we know the rule for questionnaires what's the rule for questionnaires it's measuring one or more of the big five either well or badly okay so and as far as i can tell that doesn't mean that personality has a five-dimensional structure i'm not making that argument because who the hell knows i don't think it does likely although it's very difficult to say but what the big five theorists have really demonstrated as far as i'm concerned is that if you factor analyze questionnaires what you get looks a lot like a five factor structure and you can do that cross-culturally and so i think we sort of nailed the question of how are questionnaires structured so you can't just invent some new thing and term at something and then pretend it's something new without testing it against and i would test it against iq because that bloody thing we know for example iq eats up most of the variants in disgust sensitivity scales you'd think well why why would iq be related to disgust sensitivity it's inversely related by the way the smarter you are the less sensitive you are to disgust now i don't know if that's because maybe your cortical inhibition of underlying like limbic motivational systems is better who the hell knows we don't know why but we do know that it's a major predictor orderliness also predicts but the thing about iq is that it predicts things that you'd never expect so you should validate your scale against iq and against the big five and not some trivial little ten item measure of the big five either because then if you use two questions per trait you're going to have a lousy measure of the big five and if your stupid questionnaire predicts over and above that all that means is that you didn't test it against you know you didn't set it up for a good challenge you set it up for a week challenge there's a problem with the measurement of self-esteem and that actually matters because self-esteem is a psychological concept a scientific concept if you like and you have to get the measurement right and you can predict self-esteem almost perfectly by measuring someone's extroversion and subtracting from that their negative emotionality or neuroticism so it's actually just a combination of big five traits and so people who are extroverted who feel a lot of positive emotion and who are and who don't feel a lot of negative emotion score high on scales of self-esteem okay so conceptually it's a non-starter because you're not going to move people's levels of neuroticism let's say by trying to get them to feel good about themselves okay now having said that that doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage people right now there's this psychologist named jerome kagan who's quite a great psychologist developmental psychologist uh i think he's an emeritus at harvard at the at the mo at the moment he studied temperamentally inhibited children uh you can so they're basically kids who are high in eroticism probably low in extroversion and he found that if those children you can identify them as early as six months right very very inculcated in their temperament um he found that if you encourage them in the world you could shift them into a more stable personality configuration and what you basically did was when they were manifesting signs of distress instead of encouraging them to withdraw and retreat which is what they might be attempting to do you encourage them to go out and explore so for example if you have a temperamentally inhibited child and you go to a playground and there's kids out there like if you have an extroverted emotionally stable kid three years old as you put them on the ground their feet are already moving right like a puppy over water and you let them go and they just run to the to the kids and they're there and then you have to drag them away but if you have a temperamentally inhibited child the child will sort of stand around your legs and sort of peek out you know and then what you do is wait it out let them watch encourage them to move a little bit forward encourage them to take their steps out into the unknown and the strange land and don't let them withdraw like you can do it you have they're slower to warm up they'll warm up they'll habituate and if you continually expose your inhibited child to the things that make them anxious in measured doses then you can transform their psychophysiological temperament now you're probably not going to shift them way the hell out onto the extroverted emotionally stable end but you can make a big difference that's very different than making them feel good about themselves which is such a you need to curse you need to curse when you discuss that concept right so it isn't improved their self-esteem it isn't how you feel about yourself right it's how you act effectively in the world and how you're trained to do that so okay now then you were talking about negotiation right and you said well don't you said something like don't people who feel good about themselves aren't they able to negotiate better and it's it's i know that's a poor paraphrase excuse me but um negotiation is actually a practical issue to some degree like the first thing is that you have to figure out what you want because you were saying well it's not merely rational it's like yeah yeah that's for sure you have to bargain from a position of authority let's say not power authority is a better word but you don't have authority unless you know what you're talking about and unless you can bring some unless you can bring some let's say force it's not that's not the right word you can't negotiate without with anyone unless you can say no and you can't say no unless you've set yourself up with alternatives so when you go to your boss and you negotiate for a raise you need to have this sort of cv that enables you to go find another job and you have to have your cv prepared and you have to have looked for another job and you have to be able to get one because then you can go in there and say um i'm not as productive as i could be at my current level of remuneration it's not reflective of what i'm able to do and uh i want this and this is what will happen if you give me this this will be the good things that will happen and what do you think of that and the person is going to know even by the way that you hold yourself while you're having the discussion whether or not you're someone with options and you can't fake that while you can but it's not helpful like it just doesn't work for very many iterations you have to it's it's it's not rational you're preparing yourself for battle that's what you're doing and you can't be weak when you prefer prepare yourself for battle because if the person says no i'm not giving you a raise which is exactly what they should say because what are they going to do just like sprinkle the money around you need to be able to say okay then there will be consequences that you don't like and that's what it means to say no to someone no means if you continue to push this things will happen that you don't like now in that case it'll be all depart and take my talents with me and if they don't care well then you're in the wrong business or you don't have any talents to begin with right which is so in in order to negotiate properly and then this is more difficult for people who are agreeable for example and because they tend to be more conflict diverse you have to put yourself in a position where you can you can push back as hard as you're going to be pushed on and that means you have to open your you have to open up your space of available options because otherwise the person says no and that's it you're done well you lose then it's it's as straightforward as that now with regards to the self-esteem part is practice on small things because you build the skills forget about the self-esteem it isn't about being confident or feeling confident or any of that it's about knowing bloody well how to negotiate start with small things you know so you'll notice that there are things in your relationships in particular that aren't the way you want them to be and that you could see how could be improved it's like figure out how they can be improved negotiate with your partner make the incremental improvement keep doing that you'll get better and better at it and then you'll be able to go out and have a harder negotiation in the world so it's a set of skills there's an attitude behind it you know and it's easier for some people than others but fundamentally it's a set of skills

Channel: Pursuit of Meaning

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Keywords: motivational speech, motivational video, jordan peterson responsibility, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson, jordan b peterson, motivational speech for success in life, self esteem, self esteem problems, emotional intelligence, wisdom talks, success chasers, jordan peterson clips, jordan peterson anxiety, jordan peterson self esteem

Id: ZjGT074oQow

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021