← Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Dr. Kathleen O'Toole Discusses Self Authoring for High School Students with Dr. Daniel Higgins
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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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B
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12hillsdale.edu. Today we hear a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Dr. Daniel Higgins. Dr. Higgins is one of the founders of the self authoring and Understand Myself programs. Along with Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Robert O. Phil, he's also president of ExamCo. Here is Dr. Kathleen O'. Toole.
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A
Well, I'm so pleased today to be joined by Dr. Daniel Higgins. Dr. Higgins has a PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard, an Ms. In civil engineering from MIT, and and a BA in civil engineering from Trinity College Dublin. His work focuses on the science of measuring personality, cognitive ability and performance, and on the use of structured narrative writing and goal setting to promote personal growth. Thanks for joining me, Dr. Higgins.
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C
Thanks for having me here. It's a great pleasure.
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A
Yeah, nice to be with you. We've been longtime fans of your work, longtime adherents of the the UnderstandMyself.com website and the self authoring suite. So it's nice to hear some words from the person who's behind all that.
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C
A little inside baseball.
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A
Yeah, that's right. That's right. So you studied experimental psychology in school. Tell me about that.
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C
So I was sort of waltzed into psychology graduate studies thinking that it was going to be a whole bunch of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. And then I got there and they dropped me into a statistics class and it was statistics basically all the way down. Sometimes it seemed like that. And so I quickly reoriented myself to the fact that we were dealing with a quantitative science, which I like to compare it to physics, because in physics physicists don't spend a huge amount of time talking about what is the true nature of science because the so the subject domain is so well defined, whereas in psychology you can really go off on a tangent. And so psychologists are much more concerned about scientific method than people in other domains might might imagine. And so you have you learn to become very careful about the way you think about what you're talking about and what is it going to look like in the lab and how you're going to come up with protocols for producing, for producing reproducible results. And so that's what experimental psychology is essentially trying to create a knowledge base in such a way where the things are well defined enough so that they can be measured and reproduced in various contexts.
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A
Yeah, it's fascinating. I studied political science in school. And in political science, we're constantly, constantly varying between trying to understand human behavior, human nature as a science, and in the modern sense of the term science, measurable through experiment, and doing something more like what Aristotle did, just kind of commenting on human nature through what we observe, what we see.
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C
It is interesting because Aristotle kind of approaches human behavior as a naturalist. I love the way that he says only a fool would disregard common opinion. What do the wise men say about the way we should live? And so on. So he's really interesting as a philosopher compared to. It's interesting to listen to modern day people refer to either Plato or to Aristotle. And you always feel like the difference is the people who love Plato almost feel like they wish they could attain esoteric knowledge, whereas the people who are interested in Aristotle kind of think that we have our hands full trying to understand the world that's right in front of us. And so that's wild. And it's very interesting that Hillsdale is so interested in Aristotle as a guiding principle through much of the. Well, that's the way it appears from the outside, actually. I think I've seen several busts of Aristotle around the place, so I don't think I'm making that up. Right.
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A
Yeah, we love Aristotle, we love classical philosophy here. And your comment makes me laugh because my husband and I both studied the same thing in graduate school, classical political philosophy. But he did Plato and I did Aristotle. And I think that what you say about Plato people and Aristotle people is true based on that experience.
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C
Great.
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A
It's a funny thing. Well, one of your areas of focus is personality.
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C
Right.
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A
And it's interesting to think that personality can be measured.
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C
Right.
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We can know things about something concretely, about something as subtle, variable and complex as human personality.
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C
Right. Well, you could divide up the world of studying personality into two camps or two potential ways of looking at. One of them is called ideographic, where you look at each individual and you look at them in the context of their own lives. And another way is to try to strip away the individual and to try to arrange people in a measurement space according to reasonably well defined and again, reproducible structures. And the big five Personality Inventory came about essentially Leveraging off the fundamental idea that if it's relevant to, for personality, people talk about it, and if people can talk about it, it's captured in the language. And so what they did was they combed the language for every adjective that relates to people and they then got through an involved process that took time, had people rate themselves about how anxious they feel and so on, and then ran that through a procedure that basically says, well, this item is always correlated with this item and this item is always correlated with that item. And they use a procedure called factor analysis to try to find out in the semantic space how many different dimensions do you need to capture enough of the, enough of the variance in the personality scores to generally represent all people. And so really these factors are kind of like, they're sort of like pointing in the direction in space that people may vary along. But the interesting thing about it is, is that everybody gets, there are only five factors, but everybody gets tested on each of the five factors. So you might be extroverted, but if you're extroverted and you're high in neuroticism, you're going to be a different animal than if you're extroverted and you're low in neuroticism. So now once you start doing that, and even if you just look at it as high, low, or let's say high, average, low, if you have one factor, you have three categories. But if you have two factors that's at 90 degrees to that, you've got nine. And then if you raise another one that's perpendicular to that, like hypothetically in space you've got 8. I'm failing the math, you've got 18. Anyways, the point is, is that there is a lot of different places in a five dimensional space to arrange people and think about it that way. And that's the thing that makes it a little bit different than some things like the Myers Briggs where there are categories of people. And so the five factor model allows for a more sort of nuanced view of the person as long as you're willing to think about the different factors at the same time. For example, if you are high in extroversion and low in neuroticism, you're just going to have a great time all the time, you're not worried and you love people. And if you are low in extroversion and low in neuroticism, you're going to spend most of your time alone and be really happy about that. Whereas if you're high in neuroticism, in Both of those situations, the experience is different. You're going to be a sort of a nervous socialite versus a possibly withdrawn, shy person. Then you can add agreeableness to that, which is. Agreeableness is such a fun factor because everybody presumes that everyone wants to be high in agreeableness. They want to be liked, and they want to like people. But being low in agreeableness in a polite society is kind of a little bit like a superpower you're no longer susceptible to. A lot of people will use the basic rules of politeness to essentially manipulate you into doing things that they want you to do. Those salespeople who arrive at your door and you don't want to shut the door in their face. That doesn't work with people who are low in agreeableness. They just think you can go pound sand, and it's sort of a superpower. So there's all kinds of fun things to think about in the five factor model.
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A
Yeah. So for people who aren't familiar, who haven't visited understandmyself.com yet, what are the big five? Let's maybe go through each of them just quite briefly to kind of summarize.
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C
Okay. So at Understand Myself, we use a variant of the big five, which is the big five aspect scale. And for that, we separate out each factor into two sub factors. So now you've got 10 little dials that you can think about that. There's another version which uses like six or eight facets on each. But I think that gets too hard to think about. It sort of breaks. It breaks our capacity to reasonably combine these things. So when people go on Understand Myself and they do the understand myself assessment, they get a report which is broken down in the five main dimensions. Five main factors and two aspects under each. So neuroticism is. Neuroticism breaks down into volatility and withdrawal. And the volatility aspect is how reactive you are to social situations. Are you likely to blow up or get frazzed out and so on. And withdrawal is more. How do you deal with those with that stress? Are you just. I think I'll just stay at home. I think I'm going to stay out. I'll keep my views to myself, sort of a thing. And so the next one would be extroversion. Extroversion is probably the personality trait that is the most prominent. It accounts for, like, the most. You could almost think the big two in the five factor model is neuroticism and extroversion. Extroversion breaks down into assertiveness and enthusiasm. So enthusiasm is the, yeah, let's go get out there and. And have some fun. And assertiveness is. It's a desire to lead people out there to have some fun. Openness is a very interesting trait because it is related to intelligence. There's a correlation between openness and intelligence, but it is not the same. It's not an ability, it's a tendency or a trait. It's a. A proclivity to engage in certain activities. So openness breaks down into intellect and aesthetics. And aesthetics is a love for beauty and intellect is an attraction to ideas. And so it's easy to see how the confusion about if you're low in intellect, it doesn't mean you have low cognitive ability. It just means that you're not particularly interested in discussing Proust, which is not too bad, you know, it's not the worst thing in the world. Agreeableness. Agreeableness has two subcomponents. It has politeness and compassion. Now the compassion is aspect of agreeableness is the type of thing that you want the mother of your children to have towards their children. Empathy, caring, and so on. Politeness is different. And politeness is kind of an unfortunate name because it doesn't mean. And it doesn't mean rudeness or an absence of rudeness. Politeness means deference towards social norms. So you can have very disagreeable people, people who are very low in politeness, who behave, who know exactly how to behave in a. Polite. In a. They have good manners, but they're not going to do something just because you want them to do it. They're going to do it if they want to do it. And that's kind of like the superpower that I was referring to earlier. And the final one is conscientiousness, which in some ways unfortunately is. You kind of have it or you don't. You know, it's a desire to. The subcomponents of conscientiousness is orderliness and industriousness. So orderliness is a desire to keep all of your pencils lined up on your desk. And industriousness is an interest in working hard. But these traits are tendencies. They're not descript, they're not even abilities. It's not like you're very low in conscientiousness, therefore you'll never work hard. And so it's. But what it does is if you are high in conscientious, if you're high in orderliness and you're working in a lab, that's supposed to be sterile, you're having a good time all the time. And if you are low in industriousness and you're working in a busy office, you're maybe not having a great time. If you are a lawyer and you're high in agreeableness, depending on the kind of law you're doing, you may not be very happy. But if you work in health, in health, health care services, you might. And so it's almost like a match to things rather than some kind of a. An outcome. But it does reflect, it does tell you a lot about how you're going to experience yourself when you're taking on these roles and engaged in these activities.
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A
Yeah. So as you were describing these aspects, my mind naturally went to my children, and I would think my son is extroverted and low neuroticism. He just. He's never had a bad day.
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C
Yeah.
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He's just ready to go all the time.
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C
Right. Exhausting, I bet.
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Oh, he's so fun. But yeah, he's always got a black eye.
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C
Wow.
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A
And he's always happy.
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C
Yeah. Right.
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A
He's fun to be around. Are these aspects stable over the course of a person's life? Do you display these when you're a child? And do they stay consistent as you grow up?
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C
So the thing that's the most stable is people's relative rankings. So if I'm more extroverted than you, in 20 years, I'll likely still be more extroverted than you. But. But they do change over the course of the, of the lifespan. So I think they. They're relatively less stable when they're younger, but they stabilize when people are teens. And then as they get older. I mean, I could just ask you, as you get older, do you become more or less agreeable? You. Why don't you throw out a guess for that?
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More agreeable.
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C
More agreeable. Conscientiousness.
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More conscientious.
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More conscientiousness. So there are patterns that we all know because we are so good at reading people and understanding people that we immediately can figure these things out. So it's stable in the sense that if you're more agreeable than I am, you will probably continue to be more agreeable, even though we're way more agreeable than we used to be 20 years ago.
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A
I've always been fascinated by personality assessments, but I've also always felt a little bit like they weren't. They were a little bit cheap or too easy, like they were trying to categorize people into categories that were too Neat and tidy. But what you were saying previously captures something that I've kind of sensed about the Big Five. It's perhaps because of how it's. How it was created, it's a little bit more sensitive to. To reality, it's a little bit more nuanced and it's not trying to put people in a box and say, because you are wired this way, you ought to do these things.
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C
A lot of people when they do an assessment. So there's a YouTuber who took the understand myself assessment. His name is Michael Malice. And he said that he loved it because he took the assessment and he found that he was high in openness and low in agreeableness. And suddenly he felt like, oh, that totally makes sense. It was immediate insight. But he didn't somehow become any less than that. It just gave him a framework for thinking about some events in his life. And then once you start to think about that with regards to yourself, it's a very useful framework for dealing with other people. If you have somebody in your sphere who's very low in introversion and, you know you're dragging them to the third party of the day, they're going to be worn out. And it's. It. I actually think that it more opens up our understanding rather than boxes it in.
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Yeah, it's. I found it that way myself. Right now we've been. We've been working together a little bit, our office and exam corps, on trying to figure out if there are some common threads, common personality features in people who work successfully in K12 schools.
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C
Right.
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What have we, what have we noticed so far about the people who lead successful K through 12 schools? Is there a certain set of personality traits that seems to equip someone to do that?
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Well, that. That's a hard question because again, you have to. You have to separate out their ability to perform in a role and how they experience that. So if you have somebody who's high in extroversion and that person also has the conscientiousness and the. The ability to do the job, and if they're a leader, they're going to have a blast. Whereas somebody who is not high in. In extroversion will find it rewarding, but maybe they won't be like, they won't be thinking, this is a blast. So I would really say it depends very much on the particular aspects of the work that you're considering. If you're dealing with a situation where you have to wrangle people and get them to do what you want, it's Very good to be lower in agreeableness, because high agreeable people get beaten up when they trying to wrangle people to do things that they need to do better. So that's a useful thing to have. And high in conscientiousness is essentially associated with higher performance across the board for everything. And, you know, if they're involved in establishing setting curriculums, for example, you want them to be open, you want them to love aesthetics and to be interested in ideas.
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A
I was interested to learn that of the Hillsdale leaders who have taken the survey, they're not high in extroversion as a whole.
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C
Right.
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And I haven't taken it yet because I. I don't know why I should take it. Maybe you can just. Maybe you can just see it without me taking it.
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Well, you know, if you want to have a little bit of fun, we do a couple's report on Understand Myself, where two people who are in a romantic relationship, they both take it, and then the accounts can be linked so that you get your own report, but you also get a report of you and your romantic partner.
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Oh, my husband and I should do that.
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So you guys can do that. And then you can. It'll be a little bit more fun than just doing it on your own.
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Yeah.
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And then.
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Yeah. I don't. I mention it, though, because I don't think of myself as being extroverted, but I am around people all the time, and I love being around people, but I like to be kind of an observer when I'm around people. And that's a good. That's a good way to be if you're running a school, I think, because you have to be able to. You have to enjoy the people, but you have to be able to see everything that they're doing. Always.
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C
Yeah. Yes. Which you probably can't do if you're in center stage all the time.
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Right?
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Yeah.
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Right. Yeah. So anyway, we're kind of getting interested in these trends, and one of the things we're starting to think about is is there a profile of a teacher? Is there a certain combination of personality traits that could indicate that? I guess this would be the way of saying it could indicate that you would be very happy and thriving as a teacher in a school.
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C
So there are. There. There would be two different questions in that. One of the question would be how much of a good time would you have if you're a teacher and according to these personality traits and what personality traits would be. Would make you an effective teacher in the classroom?
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I see.
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C
So you'd want to break it down into those two, two aspects. First, and I would imagine a teacher, teachers who are high in openness and high, well, probably medium in agreeableness. It depends on the age. You probably don't want to be too agreeable as a teacher. If you're high in conscientiousness, you won't mind grading papers. You know, and you don't. Nobody really, nobody really enjoys being high in neuroticism. If you want to hire somebody to run a nuclear power plant, you want somebody who's high in conscientiousness and high in neuroticism because that guy's just going to be worrying about it all the time. But you don't want to be that guy.
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Yeah, right.
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But then when it comes to what would you. From the student's point of view, what would be best for a teacher? I would say that a teacher can only embody one position in the personality space. And if you have a bunch of kids in a school, I think that you're going to want a mixture of teachers. I don't think you're just going to want the one profile. They need models for low agreeableness and they need models for high agreeableness. They need models for introversion. And you know, so I would say that there is. That there are probably different profile types for people who would find. I could. Okay, so let's do something that's a little bit easier. Let's see if we can speculate what kind of personality profile would not enjoy being a teacher. Okay, so I don't know. Let's think about this. High in neuroticism, low in conscientiousness. Let's say you're high in agreeableness and high in neuroticism. That's not going to be a fun combination if you've got kids there that you. That are. That depending on. On, you know.
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A
Low in openness is not a good.
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Low in openness isn't good. You're not going to be interested in.
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The curriculum or the students ideas about the curriculum.
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Right, right. But for the rest of the important. So get. But getting back to what's more important is the impact on the students. It's really important to remember that these different aspects of our personalities all have roles in different contexts. Nobody particularly enjoys being high in neuroticism, but it has a role to play. Somebody needs to be worried about what might happen if things go wrong. Low agreeableness and high agreeableness are important aspects to have. And so in order to have a cohesive team or a cohesive social structure, you need to have a mixture of people from across the board. You don't want everybody to be high extroversion and low neuroticism. It'll be party all the time. But you're not. It's not a enriching environment.
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A
Yeah, fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. Well, understand myself.com is a. Is a really valuable resource. And whether you're in the K through 12 space or just interested in human beings, I commend it to you for yourself and your spouse, perhaps. And just as a kind of true and not limiting way of starting to understand human behavior, the human mind, a little bit more deeply. There's another piece to your work which is the Self Authoring Suite.
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C
Right.
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And you gave a. You gave a great presentation to our leaders this morning about the way in which story has this kind of outsized power in shaping the human mind and how we can use that, that attraction that we have to stories to give ourselves an account of ourselves.
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C
Right. So the basic idea with that is that because we spend almost all of our time with people, our environment is composed of people. And the question is, we evolve to have to be social animals living with other people and dependent on other people. Does it not make sense that we. That we evolved cognitive equipment that helps us deal with thinking about people and what people are like? And the. So then it's almost like an inversion. We use words like narrative and story, where we are talking about products, artifacts of human activities. I made a story, I wrote a story, I created a narrative. And it's almost like those things are. That we create this vocabulary for these artifacts that are outside of us. And then we interact with these artifacts in an effortless way. We can watch a movie for hours without any difficulty. And it's almost like we had to project the story out of us into the outside, into these artifacts like plays and movies, and then play them back to us. And in the process, once they were out there, we missed the fact that we. Well, the possibility that maybe the fundamental way that we conceptualize ourselves and our world, the way that we think most comfortably about who we are, what we did and what we're going to do is essentially story like. And so the Self Authoring suite, essentially, it's easiest to think about with the past authoring, because with the past authoring, we invite our users to think about, to write about, experience that they had in the past throughout their lives. And the hope is that by writing these things out, they are able to. I don't want to say reconceptualize, but I do want to say reintegrate them into their own current conception of who they are and where they're going. And so we do it through writing, first of all, because we're hearkening back to the work of James Pennebaker, who pioneered experimental work in the health benefits of expressive writing. But also, even if we write badly, our thinking while writing is probably better than our thinking when we're thinking badly. So even if you write quickly, it helps. Has this sort. It sort of gives it a more structured quality than just rambling in our mind. And so the hope is that people will, by revisiting episodes of their past explicitly, that they are able to incorporate them more into their current character, the current way that they see themselves vis a vis the world and the future. Authoring does that with respect to the future, asking people. I guess many people have never really thought of themselves as the protagonist in their own drama. And so one of the things that Jordan used In his book 12 Rules for Life, he has a chapter which is treat yourself as somebody that you are responsible for taking care of. The idea is that most people will take better care of their dogs than they'll take care of themselves. And so along those lines, a lot of people don't really seriously think about their future aspirations in this kind of a serious way. We probably spend more time thinking about our children's future than we do about our own future, which makes sense. But the future authoring is a means of getting people to do that through this writing exercises. And. And it's essentially leaning into us as humans that experience the world in a narrative structure.
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A
Yeah. And there's some. You shared some powerful evidence that the simple act of sitting down, writing about your present circumstances and then writing about what you want your circumstances to be in the future has a profound effect on your ability to get to where you want to go.
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C
Right. Right. Yes. We've done a couple of studies where at universities, as people who are struggling, when they did the future authoring, they had their. They increased their. Their academic performance and greatly reduced dropout rates. And the effect is. It's not surprising. The effect is most dramatic for people who are struggling. The thing is, is when you're successful academically, there's. It's hard to improve. Other aspects of their lives may improve. But if you're already getting an A all the time, all your classes, but for the people who are struggling, it really had a dramatic effect in improving their performance and reducing the likelihood of Them dropping out.
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A
Yeah. It's amazing. It's such a simple act. Sit down, make a plan. And by making the plan, the plan is more likely to happen.
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C
Yes. And there's a little part of me that's thinking that part of the effectiveness is that the person just kind of went, oh, I am important.
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Yeah, I am important. And my ideas about what I want exist. And now I've put them together and I can see them together. Start acting toward all of them at the same time in some kind of organized way.
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C
Right, right. And also, you know, there's also a commitment. You write it out now, it's like telling somebody it exists. Or you're like, I think I might go on a diet, but I'm not going to tell anyone in case I fail. But then you tell somebody, and now suddenly you're in a different place. Now somebody knows. Now you know that they know that you're supposed to be not having another cheeseburger.
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A
Yeah, yeah. You've added some accountability. People use the word manifesting. Manifest it. You know, and I think that's kind of a silly way to talk, but there is something to it.
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C
Yes. There is certainly something very powerful to accountability.
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A
Yes. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, we saw what was going on with self authoring.com and we thought this would be a really useful thing for K12 students to do. One of the things that we are very proud of in our schools is that there is a plan for the students. When you enroll your child in one of these Hillsdale Classical schools, the school can tell you in detail. And honestly, this is what's going to happen to your child over the course of your child's time at this school. But of course, that initial conversation, the kindergarten conversation, is between the parent and the teacher, or the parent and the school. And the student could feel, perhaps the way many of us feel going through school. It's happening to us.
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C
Right.
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We're doing the things that are required of us, but we're not really in the driver's seat.
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C
Yeah. We're patients. We're not agents.
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A
Right, right. And, you know, good teachers know that learning is an activity that resides in the student. If something is going to be learned in school, it's the kid that's going to do it.
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C
Right.
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And we will tee it up for them and explain it and help them and encourage them, but they're doing it. And that's really what great teaching is all about to us is getting. Getting the kid in the driver's seat or Helping them understand that they are already in the driver's seat and then getting them to take action.
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C
But you build a car for them first, though. It's not. You just don't put a bunch of kids into a room and say, all right, go be learners.
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A
That's right. That's right. The course. Cause we see if we can do this with a driving metaphor, but the course is predetermined or. And basic directions of the course. But they're not on a commuter bus. So we thought maybe there are some times in a child's K through 12 years when it's especially important to sit down, take stock and make a plan. And so tell me, to what extent has this tool been used with young people? And do you have any ideas about phases in a child's life when it might be especially important to go through the future authoring exercise?
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C
So we've been using the future authoring with college kids, and we have also used it with older people. We get a lot of people who are like 60, 70 or 80 years old thinking, I really didn't think. I thought I was past all this, but this really helped me a lot. So it goes across the age range. And more recently, we've developed a version of it for high school students. And we're going to start piloting that. Hopefully will be able to run some pilots with you and Hillsdale K12 and see what impact it has. The interesting thing about it is that it will be a chance for these students to think about what they are going to do and why they want to do it, as opposed to what. What I'm supposed to do next. Because this is what's. This is the, this is the flow of my life that's been constructed for me. And so that's really exciting. We just developed it and we're putting it into. Into a software form and we're going to try to see if we can run some pilots and see if it has the same kind of impact as it has with. With college students. And it'd be useful if you could find us some failing students, though, to make the study just a little bit easier.
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A
We'll go elsewhere for those kids. We don't have any.
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C
That's right.
- [35:56]
A
What kind of impact have you seen with the college students?
- [35:59]
C
With the college students, the greatest impact with them has been for the people who are struggling. We can immediately measure that difference. And in general, the impact of the future authoring is just an increased optimism for the future for people. The past authoring is a little different in the sense that the past authoring probably has the greatest impact on people who had the worst past. So it's harder to talk about. It probably has a greater impact on people, but the number of people that it's going to have a great impact on is going to be proportional to the number of people who have had lousy experiences when they were younger.
- [36:47]
A
And I think I've heard Jordan say that it's not a good idea to go through the past authoring experience unless you have some trauma that you're trying to reconcile with because he. He feared that it would do damage.
- [37:00]
C
No. No.
- [37:01]
A
Is that not the case?
- [37:02]
C
No, I don't think so. So if you, the only, the only thing is, is that. So the. If you don't have a lot of stuff in your past, you fix. Because some people have had an idyllic childhood, you know, they've had a good time, they might be better off just. Just going straight to the future authoring program. But anybody who has stuff in their past that they think that they'd like to deal with, they might start with the past authoring program. The, the, the thing that, about the past authoring program, though, is it's kind of like the descent into chaos before climbing the mountain, if you like. The, the initial reaction to it can be negative. People often have of an unpleasant time while they're doing it, and then after, after a short time that resolves and they. And because I really do think that they have a lot of integrating work that they have to do which is going. Which is not going to be fun. But, but then after that initial period passes, people feel better about it.
- [38:05]
A
I see. So I stated that's too strongly. It's a, it's a valuable tool, but it's also not a pleasant process.
- [38:13]
C
It's not. If you have, if you have. The more you need it, the less fun it is.
- [38:17]
A
Yeah, I see. And then tell me about present authoring.
- [38:21]
C
Present authoring has kind of. It's very much like the narrative approach to personality in the sense that what we do is we ask people to identify their traits that are the most salient to them in the present authoring. False. We ask them to think about them in terms of faults. I'm too extroverted or extraverted is a super category and I'm drawing a blank on any individual items. But we ask them to identify the types of things that they do which they consider to be false. And then for each one of those, we have them identify a story where that caused them trouble and how they reacted to that and how they might have reacted to that if they had a little more insight and how they might use that again in the future. And so we do one for faults and we do one for virtues. And I like to tell people that if they're going to do that that they should start with the ones for faults because I have a suspicion that most people find it much easier to identify their shortcomings and how that caused them trouble than it is for people to identify their virtues and how, because we tend not to, we tend to be, we're kind of our, our minds are automatic error detectors. We tend to just see the mistakes that we made. And if, if, you know, like if you have, if you're an employee and you're doing a great job, you never hear anything, but if you're doing a bad job, you hear about it. I think that's the way that our minds work. So people have an easier time with the false analysis and, but they have, they have a harder time thinking about how being disagreeable might actually be a strength or being introverted. In our culture there is a sense that people should be extroverted and they should be agreeable and it should just be flowery all the time. And, and because we get sold that in our culture, people often miss the advantages of being. You know, I'll even go with low, low openness. If you're low openness, you're not going to be experimenting with new ideas, which might be a really good idea if you are a. I was going to say brain surgeon, but I'm not sure that they wouldn't get mad at me about that. Trying to think of anyways anything where you shouldn't be second guessing stuff all the time or experimenting all the time. So even something as odd as that, it has its place. And so people, it's worthwhile for people to think about those aspects of their personality that are useful under useful circumstances because all of the factors, all of the dimensions evolved over time. They didn't just fall out of the sky. There are times when orderliness is an interesting one because people who are high in orderliness are concerned about contamination. And there is a time to be concerned about cleanliness and contamination. And there is a time when that is not so good. Jordan likes to talk about, just to bring this into a very dark place. He likes to talk about Nazi Germany all of the time. Not all the time, but quite a bit. And one of the things that he points out is that it was this sort of disgust sensitivity and an aspect of people's personality that they leaned into to justify the Holocaust and the. You know, by using the sort of. The language of contamination. So that's a time when that kind of thing is really maladaptive. But there are other times when, you know, if things go south and there's a lot of. There's good reason to be concerned about things like that. So everything has its place depending on. Depending on the context of the time.
- [42:31]
A
Yeah, everything has its place. And as a. As a human being with a personality, your life will be happier if you get yourself into a situation that fits your personality or get yourself into a career that puts you in situations where you can.
- [42:47]
C
Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to. This is just my own personal opinion on this, which. So the first thing that you have to do is you have to think about what. What can you do? And then you have to think about what needs to be done. And then as long as you don't violate those things, then you should start to try to look into fitting yourself into a role which is more. Which is more consistent with your personality. Because if you are. If you're in a situation like that just doesn't suit you. You're just going to have a miserable time of it. But again, this is in the. We can't all have our. We can't all be having. Be comfortable all the time. There are things that we can do, and there are things that have to be done. And then within that, you can probably find things that are consistent with what you can, with your own character or personality. And then maybe, you know, if you're really high in agreeableness, maybe don't go into a contentious legal sort of, you know, business or something like that.
- [43:57]
A
Yeah, yeah. Fascinating to think about. So you began this podcast by talking about Aristotle and Plato.
- [44:04]
C
Mistake, I guess.
- [44:07]
A
Well, I don't know. I find myself wondering with a lot of this talk how consistent it is with, say, Aristotle's teaching about virtue and happiness.
- [44:19]
C
I read a little bit of Aristotle, and I'm a little bit suspicious of the possibility that maybe I'm not quite understanding him the way he would have understood himself. I was reading something from Alasdair MacIntyre, and he was saying that the way that the Greeks conceptualized virtue was how. Well, so virtue means excellence. Right. And that's quite different than the way that we think of what a virtuous person is. And so MacIntyre, in his history of Virtues, said that the Greeks had a role to play, and whether or not they were virtuous was dependent on the extent to which they fulfilled those roles in a way that we might call excellent. And so it's interesting to think, when you're thinking about. It's useful to deal with some of his puzzles. For example, he doesn't seem to feel like house servants would be able to attain high virtue. They would be able to attain a level of virtue for themselves that might be, you know, more or less, but they would never be able to achieve the great virtue of the statesman, for example. And so. So it's tied. It's tied up with the roles that. That. That they. That they. That they were engaging in. So with Aristotle, you're always wondering, how close are we to his view of virtue? If he will draw a distinction between magnanimous man and the liberal man and the magnanimous man. Magnificent magnificence. Is it magnificence?
- [46:18]
A
Yeah, the virtue having to do with generosity in large quantity is magnificent, is magnificence. And then liberality is the normal quantity.
- [46:26]
C
Right, Right. The normal quality. And it's sort of interesting because for him, he only, if, correct me, he has like, seven or eight main virtues. He doesn't have that many. And he gives up two of them to these. This distinction.
- [46:42]
A
Yes.
- [46:43]
C
So it was a big deal for him. And I'm scratching my head and I'm thinking, so why are they different? Why aren't they the same? Why is it magnificent to not throw a party where everybody's dressed in gaudy clothing? And I can understand liberality, but the magnificence. And do you recall, is magnificence supposed to be like a higher virtue?
- [47:09]
A
Yeah, magnificence. So I had a professor in graduate school, Mark Blitz, who explained this to me, and I've puzzled about that myself. I think it's 11 virtues. Why are two of them about giving things away?
- [47:22]
C
Right.
- [47:23]
A
And it's, you know, Aristotle is a political thinker, but he means he's concerned with not just how we are in our own inner lives, but how we are with other people, how we treat other people, both in a situation where there's just one other person, and then when we're in a community, political community, with each other. And book five of the Ethics is all about justice, and justice is the most complex virtue. It takes an entire book to explain it. And. And that book itself is quite complex, hard to understand. But in it, he's trying to figure out what does it mean to give others their due? What do they deserve? And I think it's partly because of his concern with justice, that he has these two virtues regarding the giving away of goods. So a normal person with a normal income does have to. You can see why liberality or generosity is a virtue. You don't want to. You don't want to. If someone asks you for money, you don't want to give away everything you own to that person, because then you wouldn't have anything left, and that would be damaging to you. But if they. If they deserve the money and you can really help them by giving them some money, you should do it. It's a good thing to do. You know, it helps the other person and it doesn't harm you. And maybe it does help you by.
- [48:38]
C
Well, that's.
- [48:38]
A
You're recognizing something about what's fitting in that moment.
- [48:42]
C
That's the thing in our modern thinking. We think it's good for other people. And that's where I wonder, are we projecting into what he thought? Because his view is for liberality. You want to have just the right amount.
- [48:58]
A
Yes.
- [48:59]
C
You want to accumulate the right amount of resources, and you want to dispense the correct amount of resources. And so whether or not it's good for other people is really, in the Aristotelian sense, whether or not it comes back to you in honor as you being recognized as being the correct amount of liberality, as opposed to whether or not you can. In our modern way of thinking. Do you sleep well at night? Did you. Did you walk by the beggar without giving him anything?
- [49:38]
A
Yeah. Yeah. There's a statement in there about honor, which is something else that Aristotle talks about, but on the point about magnificence and why it's also there, I think my professor would say that Aristotle. If you have a lot of money to give away, billions of dollars, Bill Gates or someone like that, then the calculation of whether to give the money is more complicated, and it's more of an intellectual activity, because it's not as simple as just look at this person and decide, what can I afford? And what do they need? It's how do I give it? What will they do with it? And the things that they will do with the money. You have to kind of see something about them and the world in which the money will go or to which the money will go in order to understand whether it's a just thing to do. And so it's a higher activity because it's more intellectual and more complex.
- [50:36]
C
I think that's a good point.
- [50:37]
A
Yeah. Blitz, Mark Blitz is very good on this, and he wrote a book on virtue. Our modern thinking of virtue versus the Aristotelian way of thinking about virtue called duty bound.
- [50:48]
C
I'll have to have a look at that.
- [50:49]
A
It's very good.
- [50:50]
C
All right.
- [50:50]
A
Okay. We're very far afield now, but this is fascinating. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you, Dr. Higgins.
- [50:57]
C
Thank you for having me here.
- [50:58]
A
Thank you for being here. Thank you for entertaining the Aristotle tangent. And I'll close by commending to everyone the Self Authoring suite and understand myself.com, two valuable tools for planning your life and understanding yourself. Thank you very much.
- [51:15]
C
Thank you.
- [51:16]
B
That's Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and her guest, Dr. Daniel Higgins, one of the founders of the Self authoring and Understand Myself programs. You can find them@self authoring.com and understand myself. Com. I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio.