Thank you, Todd. This explains why I felt so invaded and frustrated with all the hundreds of emails and texts I received from political groups wanting constant contributions. It had the opposite effect. I contributed to one candidate and not three seconds later the same campaign wanted more money. It’s lessened somewhat now; however, it’s still happening and I still feel under attack. I wonder how many other people felt that way? Great piece!
Helpful and informative Todd, Thank you. One thing I think can help navigate this issue more constructively is making an effort to distinguish character from personality. People are fairly good at getting a quick relatively accurate assessment of people's personality dispositions from their behavior, but much less good at getting a sense of character, and I think we tend to infer bad character from disagreeable personality dispositions. The two are not entirely distinct but there are a lot of people who we consider to have a good character who are also high in various "dark core" traits. And people with very low "dark core" traits can end up contributing heavily to very bad things in spite of being "agreeable" and "open" and so on. Reminding ourselves that personality traits are not character reminds us to treat our quick impressions as data to be curious about rather than conclusions about the person's worth or virtue. Just the way I like to think of it.
Thank you, Todd. This explains why I felt so invaded and frustrated with all the hundreds of emails and texts I received from political groups wanting constant contributions. It had the opposite effect. I contributed to one candidate and not three seconds later the same campaign wanted more money. It’s lessened somewhat now; however, it’s still happening and I still feel under attack. I wonder how many other people felt that way? Great piece!
Another great read—thanks Todd—I look forward to the next Provoked issue. :-)
Helpful and informative Todd, Thank you. One thing I think can help navigate this issue more constructively is making an effort to distinguish character from personality. People are fairly good at getting a quick relatively accurate assessment of people's personality dispositions from their behavior, but much less good at getting a sense of character, and I think we tend to infer bad character from disagreeable personality dispositions. The two are not entirely distinct but there are a lot of people who we consider to have a good character who are also high in various "dark core" traits. And people with very low "dark core" traits can end up contributing heavily to very bad things in spite of being "agreeable" and "open" and so on. Reminding ourselves that personality traits are not character reminds us to treat our quick impressions as data to be curious about rather than conclusions about the person's worth or virtue. Just the way I like to think of it.
This is a complex breakdown. I know Robert Cloninger has built a career trying to separate temperament from character.
Thank you, I’m reading Cloninger now and it was a very helpful pointer. His person-centered therapeutics concept has a lot of relevance for me.
I don’t know why he doesn’t get more attention. Maybe I’ll write an ode to his work
Thank you for this very informative piece!