Jordan Peterson on Conscientiousness: Life Satisfaction, Depression, and the Paradox of Guilt

Conscientious individuals experience greater life satisfaction but also heightened vulnerability to depression.

### Conscientiousness: A Paradoxical Trait
* 🧠 **Conscientiousness**, unlike other personality traits, lacks comprehensive theoretical models across various fields (neuropsychological, psychological, pharmacological, and animal models).
* 🐕  While some animals exhibit industriousness, it's debatable whether they possess true conscientiousness, as their behavior may stem from enthusiasm rather than a sense of **moral duty**.
* 📈  **Conscientiousness** is positively correlated with life satisfaction and happiness over time, primarily by reducing misery rather than increasing happiness.  This is because individuals have a greater capacity for negative emotions.
* 📉 However, conscientious individuals are also more prone to **depression**, especially when unemployed, as they tend to internalize failures and judge themselves harshly.
* ⚖️  Conscientious people often take full responsibility for their actions, even if only partially at fault. This can be advantageous for self-improvement but detrimental if overdone.
* ⚖️  The difference between conscientious and unconscientious individuals lies in how they attribute blame: conscientious individuals tend to blame themselves while unconscientious individuals blame others.
* 😞  Conscientious individuals experience guilt less frequently but are more sensitive to it, potentially leading to self-regulation to avoid guilt.
* 🤔  Guilt and shame, closely linked to conscientiousness, remain poorly understood in terms of their underlying neurological mechanisms.

In this video, Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about conscientious people and how they experience life.

Now, there are some other things about conscientiousness that are pretty interesting. I think they're kind of

revolutionarily interesting. So, well, the first thing I told you was that overall, especially for industriousness, we have no theoretical

model, no neuropsychological model, no psychological model, and no pharmacological model. I could add to

that, no animal model. So that's pretty damn weird because pretty, pretty almost always when you discover something psychometrically and it's

stable, you can start connecting it to other things that you've discovered. Like, you know, extroversion is associated with

incentive reward, and neuroticism is associated with the anxiety systems. And you know, stability looks like it's

associated with higher levels of serotonin, and openness looks like it's associated with decreased latent inhibition. And like we, you know, we've

got some insight into what's going on at other levels of analysis with regards to these traits. Conscientiousness,

no, except for this connection between orderliness and disgust. Yes. So, is there like a conscientious animal? Well, that's a good question. Are there

conscientious animals? You know, that's a tough one. You might say yes because sled dogs and that sort of thing and

like Australian blue heelers. First of all, they're super intelligent, so that is something to take into account, but they

also really seem to like to work. But I would say they're probably more enthusiastic than conscientious, you know,

because they love to work. They're out there wagging their tail. It's like that's not what you're doing when you're

doing telephone sales, you know. So, yeah, but like it's also it seems like, like sort of like this idea of some kind of

Value more legitimate embedded in the idea of content is so I mean I don't think animals have this kind of like

moral. Well, it's not obvious, like because if you look at chimpanzees, for example, um, the chimpanzees and other primates

they have pretty stable dominance hierarchies; they're actually hereditary, and the top primates

are pretty rough on the bottom primates, and a lot of it looks like contempt. So, you know, because what else would it be, exactly?

You know, but by the same token, it's not that easy to generate an animal model of disgust. That's another problem. Well, I

mean, they think about dogs; those bloody things, they're not disgusted by anything. You know, they're enthusiastic about lots

of things that no nothing in its right mind should ever be enthusiastic about. So, anyways, okay, okay, so

all right, so overall, if you're conscientious, you're going to be more satisfied with your life, especially as

you progress through time, and you're going to be more, more happy; you're going to be happier, which is funny because, of course,

happiness is basically extroversion. So you might ask what does that have to do with conscientiousness? But what it seems to

happen is that because you're conscientious, across time your life actually stabilizes and gets better, and

so even though you might not be more happy, you'll be less miserable. And I'll tell you, if you give people a choice between

less miserable and happier, they'll take less miserable because it's really painful to be miserable, but it's only so

it's only moderately good to be happy. Like, we have a much bigger capacity for negative emotion than for positive

emotion. So it's positively related to life satisfaction and happiness, but it's also positively related to depression.

Conscientious people are more likely to get depressed now, so there's part of the reason why there might be some variation in

conscientiousness. So you might say, well, conscientious people do really well when they're fully employed,

but if you fire someone who's conscientious, they do not have a good time of it because

the judgmental part of their personality starts to wreak havoc with themselves, you know, because their attitude is, if

you work hard, you can get ahead, right? And so that's an index—your success is an index of your moral value, essentially.

Well, so then you lose your employment, what the hell are you supposed to conclude? Well, you could conclude that the whole

system is rotten, but you're very unlikely to do that if you're conscientious because you're sort of a

patriotic type, and you know, you identify quite strongly with the structure of the system. And plus,

you know, conscientious people are very concerned with justice, and they might think, well, if I'm going to have this

attitude towards other people who failed—you know, who are unemployed, let's say—I have to have the same attitude towards

me. And so what you see with conscientious people, if they're having, you know, maybe they've got laid off at

work really through absolutely no fault of their own, they're just torn up by it because one of the things they do that's

different for an unconscientious person—everything is always someone else's fault—but for a conscientious person,

it's the opposite: everything is always their fault. Well, the problem—there's an advantage to that—a because if you take

responsibility for your situation, then there's a possibility that you'll make whatever changes you can to improve

Your situation, you know, so even if you're only ten percent at fault, if you take responsibility for that,

then you can fix that ten percent and maybe things will work out better for you. So you know, there's some advantages

to overestimating the degree to which you're at fault. And if you say, 'Well, it's the system,' well, okay, good, fine, go fix

that. Like, it's not going to happen, so it's not a very effective means of coping, but

in psychotic depression, for example, which is a very, very extreme form of depression, what you often see is that

the depressed person erroneously concludes—it's like a metaphysical conclusion almost—that their faults are integrally tied to the

you know, to everything that happens that's bad in the world, and so they take on all of the guilt

for everything that's gone wrong. And obviously, that's—there's a point at which that's a relatively

counterproductive conclusion, you know, and especially because often when bad things happen to you in life, there's a random element

and you know, you can't really treat yourself properly unless you take that random element into account. Now you can

overestimate it, which is what you do if you're unconscious, and you could—you could overestimate it if you're unconscious

and underestimate it if you're conscientious, and there's going to be times when you pay for both of those

attitudes. So anyways, conscientious people don't do very well when they're—when they're not doing very well

because they—they judge themselves very harshly. So that's partly what—and it's related to guilt;

it's not—it's a funny thing because there's an element of guilt that's associated with conscientiousness, too. So

Conscientious people feel guilt less often, but they're more sensitive to it. So then you think, well, that's kind

of paradoxical. It's not exactly paradoxical. If you're sensitive to guilt, you might arrange things so that you

have nothing to feel guilty about, and that's what conscientious people seem to do. And so guilt,

guilt and shame seem to be emotions that are integrally associated with conscientiousness, and they're kind of

difficult to disentangle. And you know, maybe they're not even really separate things. But shame seems to be something

that you feel when you fail, perhaps in the eyes of others, and guilt is something that you feel when you fail

according to your own standards. And I know that that's kind of a messy definition, but conscientious people do

seem to be more prone to shame and guilt, and those seem to be, in principle, mediated by different systems than these

systems that mediate anxiety and emotional pain. But we don't know what the systems are. Thanks for watching.

Conscientiousness Vs. Unconscientiousness People | Jordan Peterson

THE BESTS

Lack of Understanding of Conscientiousness

There's a lack of theoretical, neuropsychological, psychological, pharmacological, and animal models for conscientiousness, particularly industriousness.

The only known connection is between orderliness and disgust.

The existence of conscientious animals is debated, with examples like sled dogs and Australian blue heelers showing work ethic but possibly more enthusiasm than conscientiousness.

It's unclear if animals possess the same moral values embedded in conscientiousness.

Difficulty in creating an animal model for disgust is highlighted due to the lack of disgust in animals like dogs.

Consequences and Correlations of Conscientiousness

Conscientious people tend to be more satisfied with their lives over time and happier, although happiness is linked to extroversion.

Conscientiousness is positively correlated with life satisfaction and happiness but also with depression.

Conscientious people thrive when employed but struggle with unemployment due to self-judgment and a belief that success reflects moral value.

Conscientious individuals tend to take responsibility for their situations, even if only partially at fault, which can be both advantageous and disadvantageous.

In extreme cases like psychotic depression, individuals may erroneously link their faults to all negative events, leading to overwhelming guilt.

Guilt and Shame in Conscientious Individuals

Conscientious people judge themselves harshly, linking this to guilt.

They feel guilt less often but are more sensitive to it, proactively avoiding situations that could cause guilt.

Guilt and shame are intricately linked to conscientiousness, possibly not distinct emotions.

Shame is linked to failing in the eyes of others, while guilt is linked to failing personal standards.