Are some people just nicer?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.

Nick Haslam: Hello and thanks for joining us again on PsychTalks. We're thrilled to be back unpacking the latest research in psychology and neuroscience. I'm Professor Nick Haslam here with my wonderful co-host, Associate Professor Cassie Hayward.

Cassie Hayward: Thanks, Nick. And I think what we are exploring today is really going to fascinate many of our listeners at home, particularly anyone who's ever completed an online personality test or done one in a doctor's office magazine.

We're looking at what many psychologists in the field call prosocial personality. Our guest today is Professor Luke Smillie, who's a leading researcher in this area and whose work has been very diverse, ranging from understanding the structure of personality to its role in well-being and its neural underpinnings. So, let's dive in.

Nick Haslam: Welcome, Luke. So what do we mean by prosocial personality?

Luke Smillie: Well, prosocial personality is an umbrella term to capture a range of individual differences in, in our personality traits or psychological characteristics that are in some way other-regarding, so regarding others. People vary in how other-regarding they are. So some are more willing to help others or cooperate. Uh, they're more moved to feel empathy for a person. And these differences are relatively stable over time.

Um, for many people, prosocial personality is a bit of an uncomfortable notion. We want to believe deep down that all people, we're all the same and we're all fundamentally good or decent. And that may be true to some extent, but at the same time, we recognise people aren't interchangeable. I find it hard to imagine that anyone would struggle to identify someone in their life who was exceptionally kind or helpful or generous or empathic. And if we can single out such individuals, then we acknowledge that people differ in their prosociality.

Nick Haslam: Cassie's like that. I'll just say, um, I'll single her out here. But yeah, I mean, this idea that people differ in their concern for others or in their, um, moral goodness. I, I think it is pretty intuitive for most of us, but it's also been a controversial idea within our field, right? Um, so you'll know the famous study by Hartshorne and May, where they got a bunch of kids, um, almost a century ago, uh, and found that those who are honest in one context weren't necessarily honest in another.

And their work's been used to challenge the very idea that there is such a thing as moral character. So what's the evidence that we do have consistent differences in how prosocial we behave?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, that's right, the results of the Hartshorne and May study, um, prompted some debate that lasted well into the late 20th century. But much of the debate over its implications really came down to how that data could best be analysed and interpreted. One issue was that they had analysed individual pairs of behaviours, but we now know that we need to sample across many instances of behaviour before you can estimate consistency very well. And later studies that did this, including using Hartshorne and May's data, found much stronger evidence for consistency.

The other issue was that psychologists had a pretty simplistic understanding of the idea of consistency, and thought that anything short of perfect stability implied no stability at all.

Nick Haslam: Right, I hadn't realised there were so many criticisms. What about the modern evidence then?

Luke Smillie: Well, the modern evidence comes from a variety of areas within and beyond psychology. So beyond psychology, in economics, behavioural economists have found stable and systematic differences in how people behave towards others in controlled experiments of cooperation, generosity, sharing, and so on.

In psychological science, essentially every model psychologists have put forward of personality traits, uh, include one distinctly prosocial trait. People are likely to be familiar with the Big Five. This is really one of the success stories of 20th century psychology in terms of robust and replicable findings. The Big Five is a framework for organising the many, many, many different ways that people differ from one another.

Um, you could think of it as like a latitude and longitude of personality space, if you like. So whereas latitude and longitude are just two dimensions, the Big Five are 5 dimensions that try to capture all the important psychological characteristics that vary between people. The Big Five includes a trait called agreeableness, which essentially describes how cooperative and compassionate and respectful a person generally is.

And in clinical psychology, psychologists have long recognised personality disorders marked by antisocial tendencies, um, such as antisocial personality disorder in the DSM and psychopathy, uh, which is assessed in clinical but also forensic settings. These are traditionally studies as categories, so you either have the disorder or not, uh, but as you would know, Nick, uh, the field is moving towards more dimensional models based on the evidence that people don't really differ according to these categories, we differ by degree.

Cassie Hayward: So Luke, with all of those examples, it's kind of looking at prosocial personality as if it's a single thing. Is it unitary or are there different ways of being prosocial?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, as I said at the beginning, prosociality, we could think of it as a broad umbrella construct. And there's many distinctions we could make within that broad space. So if we take agreeableness that I just mentioned, that can be divided into politeness and compassion. Um, and there are some interesting distinctions between politeness and compassion.

Often people have assumed, uh, interpreted a finding in terms of compassion, and it turns out to be driven by politeness. Um, so one example from my own work concerns particular moral judgments that people make about the, the wrongness of a, of a moral action. There was a literature that suggested that these were primarily driven by people's compassion.

That these situations are making judgments about triggered concern and empathy, uh, but it turned out in our work at least that they were driven primarily by politeness, which is more about a person's etiquette or respectfulness, the degree to which they adhere to salient social rules and norms.

Cassie Hayward: So which is better? What should I teach my kids to do, have empathy or just have good manners?

Luke Smillie: That's a hard question and it seems unlikely that one is better than the other in all ways. Also depends on what you mean by better. Both have features and consequences we might feel are good things. People intuitively probably feel compassion is more desirable.

Um, but there's some really interesting ideas about how compassion can be undesirable in unexpected ways. I'm thinking of work by Paul Bloom, the American psychologist, who suggested that compassion and empathy is something we often feel more readily for any particular targets. It's easy to feel compassion for somebody like your kids, but maybe a bit harder to feel compassion for people very dissimilar to you. So Paul Bloom argues that compassion can actually be, somewhat parochial at times, um, and not always a good thing.

Nick Haslam: So can being prosocial be boiled down just to compassion and politeness then, or is there more to it?

Luke Smillie: Uh, no, there are many more distinctions we could make. Um, one that I'd highlight from a different personality model to the Big Five, it's a trait called honesty-humility. Um, it's got this kind of awkward hyphenated, double-barrelled name.

Um, Another simpler term for it is sometimes integrity. This describes the degree to which a person is straightforward and non-manipulative, not motivated to put themselves ahead of others, and that predicts many outcomes that we care about, such as lower likelihood of engaging in criminal behaviour or even infidelity, unethical decision making, and a range of socially consequential outcomes. But all of these constructs we're discussing are still relatively broad.

There are many more specific traits that we could zoom in on like trust, modesty, perspective taking. And interestingly, some traits that don't seem inherently concerned with prosocial behaviour can have prosocial implications. So people might have heard of a trait called openness to experience, which predicts concern for animals and the environment, for example.

Cassie Hayward: And Luke, your work really has clarified those personality traits that underlie being prosocial, but it's also revealed how these prosocial traits are related to real world behaviour. Can you give us some more examples of that real world behaviour research?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, I mean, people have looked at a range of outcomes that these traits might predict, including how much they volunteer or donate to charity, um, decisions that they might make in terms of, for example, whether they pursue a career that enables them to do more good in the world, um, what they want to happen after they die, uh, for example, in the case of posthumous organ donation.

So one example from my own work, we recently published a meta-analysis on personality predictors of philanthropic behaviour, looking at charitable donations and volunteering. And we're really excited to get this meta-analysis out there because the evidence with this kind of often murky real world data was quite mixed, um, but overall, what we found was that agreeableness is the strongest trait predictor of real world charitable giving, more, more agreeable people give more money to charities.

And interestingly, it was extroversion that predicted volunteering. This might not necessarily suggest that extroversion is a particularly prosocial tendency, maybe it says something a little bit more about the kinds of situations in which volunteering occurs. It's often very, a very social, um, outgoing activity to engage in. And I'd say that these effects were fairly modest statistically, but perhaps important in practical terms when you aggregate across uh to the population level.

Another example is a recent study where we looked at um factors that predict people's attitudes to social justice issues, so things that are really topical at the moment, um, attitudes towards diversity, inclusiveness, initiatives, attitudes towards gender diversity, things like the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and so on. And we found that some of these same traits predicted people's attitudes towards those social justice concerns, traits like agreeableness.

Cassie Hayward: Yeah, and some of those issues are very politicised, of course. Do, do the prosocial traits like agreeableness predict them over and above people's political orientations, or are some orientations just more agreeable on average?

Luke Smillie: No, we found for those highly politicised outcomes, um, it's political attitudes that are usually, um, more important predictors, and this makes sense. Political attitudes capture by definition, how one thinks about political issues.

Whereas personality traits are these much broader descriptions of what a person is like in general across many contexts. But having said that, there's an interesting model that came out of New Zealand that suggests that personality traits predict these politically salient outcomes via our political attitudes. So the idea is that someone, for example, who is more agreeable and more open to experience, they might be more likely to cultivate liberal or progressive political attitudes.

Which in turn are the um primary drivers or or strong predictors I should say, of how they think about politically salient issues like diversity and inclusiveness.

Nick Haslam: So one topic you've done some work on recently is how prosocial personalities related to diet and especially vegetarian or vegan diet. Can you tell us about that work?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, so we've been interested in predicting adherence to specifically, uh, um, ethical vegetarianism, um, so people who have decided to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet for ethical reasons, which we think of as another kind of prosocial behaviour.

It's other-regarding, the others in this case are just non-human animals. And again, this kind of real world data, the findings have often been quite inconsistent and messy. But we did some research recently where we combined multiple samples across Australia, New Zealand and the US. We found that agreeableness was a fairly consistent predictor of adherence to a vegetarian or vegan diet. But also that trait I mentioned before, openness to experience.

Cassie Hayward: So does that suggest that dialling up those traits can increase someone's propensity to take a vegetarian diet? Like a, a, a, you kind of hear people talk about personality being fixed, and we can't change it, but can you point to research that says you can kind of dial up and down those areas?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, so some of these findings are definitely interesting for people who study personality change, and it's, um, it is really a persistent misconception that personality can't be changed, that it is fixed in some way. When you think about it, it would be quite mysterious if there was something that was entirely fixed, you would then have to ask, well, how is it fixed? Is it some mysterious essence within the person?

Um, but these, uh, personality traits, these psychological characteristics, they change and develop over time, they can be changed for intervention. Um, they might change as a result of a significant life experience, for example, a traumatic experience that, um, profoundly changes somebody. And there are research areas called personality change and personality development that have been around for decades, so this persistent idea that personality is fixed is, a little puzzling to me sometimes.

Having said all of that, I don't want to give the impression that personality is limitlessly malleable, that anyone can be whoever they wanna be, provided they get the right nudge or they buy the right app, for example. I think that's a common message you see in the pop psych space, uh, but I don't think it's very much in touch with the evidence. Um, indeed my hunches of the prominence of that message in that self-help space might be a reflection of the fact that change is not so easy.

The other thing I'd just add with applications is that we should be careful to assume that psychological stability is not practically useful to know about. So in many instances, maybe the most helpful thing is for a person to really understand the kind of person that they are and learn how to, for example, regulate their behaviours or emotions or identify more appropriate goals for them as an individual.

Rather than tackle the possibly more difficult task of trying to change who they are. And that's the focus of a fascinating area of research called self-knowledge, um, and in this area, the, the goal is to study how well people know themselves, um, learn whether we can improve our self-knowledge and whether there are benefits of doing so.

Nick Haslam: Uh, I mean, Luke, is there any evidence that if you just practise prosocial behaviour, it does change your personality? Do you become more agreeable by practising compassion or practising um adherence to social justice values?

Cassie Hayward: We hope so, because that's what we do with kids, right?

Luke Smillie: There's there's some evidence, not so much with these pro-social traits, but there's some evidence that by expressing high levels of a trait, uh, you often see the consequences that are usually associated with that trait. So the one that's best studied and that my colleagues and I have done some work on as well concerns extroversion, and extroversion is a trait that predicts, um, many measures of well-being, and it turns out that if you get people to enact prototypical expressions of extroversion, so getting them to be more talkative, more social and outgoing, they experience at least temporary increases in well-being. But the question is whether by doing that you could affect longer term sustained increases, um, that's, that's still probably an open question.

Nick Haslam: So Luke, being prosocial is obviously good for other people. Is it also good for ourselves? Does it improve our own wellbeing?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and literally just yesterday I was reading about some work by a former University of Melbourne student, Jessie Sun. Ah, that suggests the answer to that is yes, um, that people who are perceived by others as more, um, morally good people, actually, more so than prosocial, they report higher levels of well-being themselves. So it may be that being, more other-regarding, uh, is also beneficial to the individual in terms of their overall happiness and satisfaction in their lives.

Cassie Hayward: So Luke, what are some of the exciting applications of research into prosocial personality?

Luke Smillie: So there are a few that I think are are really interesting. Um, one is the idea of targeted or tailored interventions. So if you think about that finding from the meta-analysis I mentioned, uh, showing that agreeableness predicts higher levels of charitable donations. So one possibility is that campaigns and messaging that tries to increase, uh, to get people to donate money to charitable causes is appealing primarily to people high in agreeableness. So one possibility is that we're, we're kind of missing a big sector of the population, and through some kind of tailored, more precision, sometimes called intervention, we could try to uh identify messaging that would be a bit more effective for people lower in agreeableness.

An alternative approach would be to just double down on the most receptive audience. So some of the work we've done on this idea of ethical vegetarianism, we did a recent study looking at how different people respond to persuasive appeals to not eat animals. And there are some characteristics that predict just really not being persuaded by any ethical argument at all. Um, so those people may be unreachable through, uh, an ethically framed appeal to adopt a plant-based diet.

So, animal advocacy groups might be more effective if rather than sending messages that are gonna fall on deaf ears to target the people who are going to be the most receptive. And at a broader level, research into prosocial personality could potentially help intervention designers think more carefully about what the behaviour they're seeking to promote entails for an individual.

Um, people aren't these interchangeable data points waiting just dutifully to receive whatever intervention we have in mind. Any intervention is going to potentially cut with or against the grain for different people.

This was the focus of some work I did with a former student of mine, Reb Rebele, and Reb wanted to get the message out there that that intervention design tends to overlook the fact that an intervention is going to entail different things for different people. So for a highly prosocial person, the way to get them to engage in prosocial behaviour might be relatively simple, a simple nudge or reminder.

But for a less prosocial person, it's possibly going to need something more, because what you're trying to do is potentially, you're potentially trying to get them to act in a way that's counter dispositional or at the very least, not as familiar or routine. So these are really different cases and perhaps the one size fits all approach we see in the behaviour change literature, we often see in the behaviour change literature, overlooks a fundamental fact about human beings, which is which we differ.

Cassie Hayward: Just on that, Luke, with the increased ability to target people through online advertising, so these groups might be using, you know, different social networks to target different ads about becoming plant-based or whatever the, the information, the whatever the the campaign is.

Do you think that they can get a read of someone's personality at this sort of level from their kind of online presence to be able to do that targeted messaging, that you're kind of outlining here?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, there there's been some really impressive demonstrations of that, one primarily in the consumer marketing space actually, where essentially an algorithm provides an estimate of personality traits based on a digital footprint, uh, for example, Facebook Likes.

And that is then used to select different forms of an advertisement for the same product. So, there's some research by Matz and colleagues, uh, about 5 to 10 years ago, I think, showing that by actually presenting different people, the different forms of the same advert, uh, that translated into much higher sales. So that's in a marketing context, um, you could see that uh, same logic being applied in the case of trying to promote prosocial behaviour.

Cassie Hayward: And I think in some of our other episodes we've seen how much those algorithms know about us, so it's not beyond the scope of their targeting to, to get us on personality.

Luke Smillie: There's definitely a scary side to that work that um that yeah, we, we should also keep in mind in terms of the ethicality of, of using those algorithms.

Nick Haslam: But let's not close on a pessimistic note. Uh, I think it's just uh such interesting work, Luke, and just showing how taking human variation seriously uh, really enlightens us about prosocial personality. So, can you tell us where your work's going next?

Luke Smillie: One project that I'm working on at the moment that ties in nicely with something we talked about earlier, that Hartshorne and May study, which was about cheating and honesty and children. Uh, so where my colleagues and I are doing some studies on both the personality and situational predictors of lying.

We were actually trying to find an interaction between the situational factors and the personality factors. We don't find those interactions, but those studies are showing us that honesty-humility that I mentioned before is a very important predictor. And a range of situational factors such as if you want somebody to behave more honestly in our studies, uh, the best way to do so is to ask them to take an oath or pledge to be honest.

Nick Haslam: Well, I said we'd end on an optimistic note, but I'm now gonna prove myself a liar. Um, little provocative question to close out our episode. So, your work implies that people differ a lot and how much they care about other people's welfare. So should the more idealistic among us give up their belief that deep down, everyone is good?

Luke Smillie: Yeah, it's funny to think how uncontroversial this question would be if we swapped out prosocial or good for another trait like extroversion, introversion. I imagine few people out there ah have a firm cherished belief that deep down everybody is extroverted, um, and that's a bit of a joke, but if we put aside some of those ambiguous and hard to define words like fundamentally good, um, these value laden concepts.

Um, I'm not sure we can defend the idea that anyone is fundamentally good, let alone all of us. Uh, that's just really difficult philosophical territory for me. Rather than believe that everyone is fundamentally good or equally nice, I think what I'd encourage is a desire to find and bring out the best in others, and that may take multiple forms like compassion or politeness as we've talked about.

But we should also recognise that not everybody is gonna share our values or be the person we can depend on. And while it's uncomfortable, it's probably better for us to recognise such differences than pretend they don't exist.

Cassie Hayward: Fascinating stuff, Luke. Thank you for your time today, and I'm going to go home and make my kids take a pledge of honesty and see if that works.

Luke Smillie: That sounds good.

Nick Haslam: Well, that brings us to the end of another edition of PsychTalks and a huge thank you to our guest, Professor Luke Smillie. This episode was produced by Carly Godden with production support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound engineering was by Jack Palmer. Bye for now.