By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 7
I grew up watching my grandmother pull out her astrology books every time me or my sisters mentioned someone we were interested in. She had charts, tables, the whole setup. By the time she finished reading the their sign, she had usually already decided we were doomed. And to her credit, we all eventually broke up. So I brought this to Dr. Lisle for Episode 7 of the podcast. Why is the whole world so obsessed with personality? Why are there a thousand quizzes telling us what kind of person we are? And what does the actual science say about where our differences come from?
Dr. Lisle’s answer was not what I expected.
Why We Are All Obsessed With Personality
Dr. Lisle explained that humans are more expert on the human personality than Eskimos are on smell. We spend our entire lives trying to figure out who to trade with, romance with, befriend, and avoid. So we pay intense attention to what he calls individual differences. Personality, in his words, is literally the study of individual differences between people. That is why a Facebook quiz will always get clicks and why the astrology section survived the arrival of the internet.
But popular does not mean accurate. Astrology, Dr. Lisle said, is utterly and totally worthless. It survives because of something called Barnum statements, studied in the mid twentieth century and popularized by the University of Minnesota psychologist Paul Meehl. A Barnum statement sounds specific and discerning but actually applies to everyone. Things like, “you are careful in your judgment,” or “there is some conflict on the horizon in your romantic life.” Everyone nods. Everyone feels seen. And the horoscope keeps paying for itself.
The Answer Nobody Wants to Hear: Personality Is Genetic
Here is the finding that should have changed everything but mostly did not. In 1985, researchers at the University of Minnesota demonstrated that personality is overwhelmingly genetic. Adopted children do not take on the personality characteristics of their adoptive parents. If the adoptive father is aggressive, the adopted child is no more likely to be aggressive than the average person. If the adoptive mother is brilliant, the adopted child gets zero IQ boost from growing up in her home.
This is one of the great findings in the history of psychology, and Dr. Lisle pointed out that most people, including many working psychologists, still behave as if it is not true. It contradicts what he calls a tenacious delusion, the belief that your personality is shaped by your experiences. The science says otherwise. Your experiences shape what you know. They do not meaningfully shape who you are.
The Big Five Plus One: OCEAN
Dr. Lisle then walked me through the model that actually has the evidence behind it. It is called the five-factor model, or the Big Five, and it spells OCEAN.
O — Openness to experience. How many illegal drugs you want to try, how many sex partners you want to have, how many bungee jumping trips you want to book. Most people are in the middle. The extremes are rare for a reason.
C — Conscientiousness. How meticulous, orderly, and reliable you are. On one end, the accountant with a perfect tie and a spotless calendar. On the other, the guy who has quit six jobs and forgotten to pay rent twice.
E — Extroversion. Not shyness. Shyness is extroversion combined with the bottom trait, neuroticism. Pure introverts simply prefer less stimulation and fewer people. They can be perfectly confident. They just would rather be somewhere quieter.
A — Agreeableness. How much you give ground in a negotiation. Agreeable people trade at 40-60 in the other person’s favor and feel that is fair. Disagreeable people trade at 70-30 in their favor and still feel cheated.
N — Neuroticism. How excitable your nervous system is. Dr. Lisle prefers the word excitable. Stable people shrug things off. Excitable people get fired up, for better and for worse.
Plus intelligence, which Dr. Lisle treats as a sixth dimension that lives next to the other five. Intelligence does not tell you much about preferences. It tells you about horsepower.
Dr. Lisle gave me the rabbit bell curve to explain why every one of these traits has a distribution. Imagine rabbits near their hole. The ideal distance to forage might be 100 yards. Most rabbits will go that far, a few will venture 200 yards and sometimes get eaten, and a few never go past 50 and miss out on food. The bell curve forms itself. Openness in humans is the same thing. Conventional stays close. Adventurous goes far. Most people are in the middle because that is what the environment has optimized for.
Steve Jobs and the Power of Extremes
I asked Dr. Lisle if anyone is extreme on every trait. He immediately went to Steve Jobs. Extremely bright. Extremely open. Extremely conscientious. Extremely extroverted. Extremely disagreeable. Extremely neurotic. Not one trait anywhere near the middle. That is how you get the most valuable company on earth. It is also how you get a human being who was nearly impossible to live with.
The Esteem Dynamic and Why Compatibility Is Genetic
This was the part that really landed for me. Dr. Lisle has a framework he calls the esteem dynamic. Two people can only sustain a real relationship, romantic or friendly, when their profiles are close enough on these traits that esteem can flow both directions. A pretty smart student and a brilliant professor can generate that flow. A failing student and the same professor cannot. A 95th percentile openness person who has been to Everest base camp and a person who has never left Bakersfield cannot sustain it either. They have nothing to admire in each other.
Dr. Lisle calls this range the esteem trading range, and it is narrow. He said he personally sits in the 80th to 90th percentile for conscientiousness and genuinely cannot tolerate a 50th percentile partner, no matter how pleasant. That is not a preference he chose. It is his genes.
This is why, he explained, arranged marriages are a worldwide disaster. You cannot force yourself to esteem someone whose personality sits outside your trading range. You cannot talk yourself into liking cilantro, and you cannot talk yourself into a relationship with the wrong personality match.
There is one exception. Agreeableness is the single dimension where opposites actually attract. A highly disagreeable person paired with a highly agreeable person can reach equilibrium because each one’s sense of fairness matches what the other is willing to offer. Every other trait, people seek similarity.
The Sucker Triad
The most practical takeaway of the episode was Dr. Lisle’s concept of the sucker triad. If you are high in intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeableness at the same time, you are a magnet for exploitation. Your intelligence solves problems, your conscientiousness finishes them, and your agreeableness lets anyone talk you into starting them. Dr. Lisle said these are the people who end up carrying the burdens of the world on their shoulders.
If that sounds like you, his prescription is not to try to change your personality, because you can’t. The prescription is to learn a set of techniques for what he calls “how to get out of it,” and he has a video called Success Forces on esteemdynamics.com that walks through how conscientious, agreeable people can push back against pushy ones.
How to Beat Your Genes on This One
You cannot change your personality. You can, however, understand it. And once you understand it, you can stop fighting fights you were never going to win, stop trying to turn the wrong partner into the right one, and stop saying yes to things that always fall on your plate.
As Dr. Lisle put it, people are basically recipes. Six ingredients. Many many combinations. Your job is not to rewrite the recipe. Your job is to read it honestly.
Listen to the Full Episode
This is Episode 7 of the Beat Your Genes Podcast. Dr. Lisle covers everything in this post in much greater detail in the audio.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beat-your-genes-podcast/id1137772216
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6TsmRx1vmGL88ORlcXd3PV
beatyourgenes.org: https://www.beatyourgenes.org
Have a question for Dr. Lisle? Submit it at beatyourgenes.org and it may be answered on a future episode.
Beat Your Genes is an evolutionary psychology podcast co-hosted by Nathan Gershfeld, D.C. and Dr. Doug Lisle, PhD. It applies the science of evolutionary psychology to everyday questions about happiness, relationships, motivation, and self-esteem. Dr. Lisle trained at Stanford and the University of Virginia and has over 30 years of clinical experience. Nathan Gershfeld is the founder of Fasting Escape.