Dr. James W Pennebaker

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] This is episode 11, a conversation with Professor James W. Pennebaker.

[2] You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon or by finding the link in the description.

[3] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found at self -authoring, So today I'm talking to Dr. James W. Pennebaker.

[4] He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the executive director of Project 2021 aimed at rethinking undergraduate education at that university.

[5] His cross -disciplinary research is related to linguistics, clinical and cognitive psychology, communications, medicine, and computer science.

[6] He and his students have explored natural language use, group dynamics, and personality in educational and other real -world settings.

[7] He has demonstrated that physical health and work performance can be improved by simple writing or talking exercises.

[8] Dr. Pennebaker has received numerous awards and honors, has written or edited more than 250 scientific articles, as well as nine books, including, more recently, expressive writing, words that heal, and the secret life of pronouns.

[9] He also happens to be one of my favorite psychologists.

[10] Welcome, Dr. Pennebaker.

[11] I'm very much looking forward to talking to you.

[12] Well, it's nice to be here.

[13] Thank you.

[14] Great.

[15] So, as you may know, because I think we've talked about this a little bit before, I developed some computer, online computerized writing programs with my colleagues, one of which we call future authoring, one's past authoring, one's present authoring.

[16] They're a suite of writing programs, and they were heavily influenced in their design by your research.

[17] My lab's been interested in narrative for a long time, and also in clinical work, and also in the application of psychology in the real world setting, in the practical setting.

[18] And I spent a lot of time developing tests to help employers screen for employees, and we got pretty good at that.

[19] But while I was doing that, I was constantly bombarded with questions from managers, of middle managers, usually, of medium -sized and large corporations telling me that it was all well and good if they could hire better employees, but they wanted to know what they could do with their poor performing employees, because that was a continual and intractable problem.

[20] And I thought, well, you don't have that much interaction with them.

[21] And it's not that easy to solve people's problems.

[22] So there's probably not a lot you could do.

[23] But I kind of got sick of telling people that over and over.

[24] And so I scoured the literature.

[25] And it was at that point probably about 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, that I came across your research on expressive writing.

[26] So maybe you can start by telling us what you learned and how you went about it.

[27] Okay.

[28] A little bit of background.

[29] I'm a social psychologist by training.

[30] So I don't have any clinical training.

[31] Most of my career has just been stumbling upon one idea after another as opposed to approaching anything with a clear set of where I was going.

[32] I have been looking at mind -body issues.

[33] I've always been interested in how psychological factors influence physical health and mental health.

[34] And I came across a finding years ago that just bugged me. And that was people who have had a major traumatic experience in their lives that were much more likely to get sick than people who had not.

[35] Now, that was an old finding.

[36] But as I dug in more deeply, what I discovered was people who had a trauma and kept it secret were far more likely to have health problems than people who had the same trauma, but who talked with others about it.

[37] And it made me wonder, what if we brought people in the lab and had them actually write about it some kind of trauma, ideally one they hadn't talked to other people about, would that influence their health?

[38] And that was really the underlying idea.

[39] So the very first study was done in 1983, and we brought in about 50 people.

[40] Some of them were asked to write about the most traumatic experience of their lives.

[41] The other half were asked to write about superficial topics.

[42] I'm simplified in study some.

[43] And they wrote for four days, 15 minutes a day.

[44] And they also gave us permission to track their student health center records.

[45] These were college students.

[46] And this was at a private college where the student health center was right next to the dorms.

[47] Well, what we discovered was that those people who were asked about traumatic experiences ended up going to the student health center at about half the rate as people in our control condition, the ones who had written about superficial topics, over the next three to six months.

[48] and this was a really studying finding.

[49] It was, you know, what I kind of hope would occur, but I never, I was so thrilled that it actually worked.

[50] And then we did another study that was very similar, and here again, we had half the people write about traumas, half write about superficial topics, and they just, they wrote about trauma or superficial topics.

[51] By a flip of the coin, we decided which are the two topics they'd write about.

[52] And this time we drew blood before we assigned them to condition, again, after the last day of writing, and then six weeks later.

[53] And the blood was assayed by a group of people at Ohio State looking at immune function.

[54] And again, we found that writing about traumatic experience was associated with enhanced immune function and also reductions in doctor visits.

[55] and this now takes us to about 1988 and by then other labs started to see what we were doing and the whole technique started to take off and then over the years more and more labs including my own found generally positive effects not always but generally that writing about upsetting experiences had this salutary effect that influenced both health physical health and markers of mental health And then later, various labs found it to be related to all sorts of things associated with increased memory, cognitive functioning, and so forth.

[56] So if I remember correctly as well, when you were doing the earliest studies, you were also influenced by Freud's idea of catharsis.

[57] And that was the idea that if people had a traumatic or unpleasant experience, if they were encouraged to express, the emotions that were associated with that experience that that would be curative that was that was partly Freud's hypothesis but you well it was a it was a little bit it is important it's it is absolutely consistent with with Freud's initial idea and what was interesting is because most people listening to this podcast will hear catharsis and they will think that catharsis means blowing off steam right venting and that's not actually what Freud actually meant and it's interesting in Europe catharsis has a completely different meaning than it does in North America so in North America we view it as venting Freud and the Europeans view catharsis as connecting emotions and thoughts and that is actually what I was doing I really I had assumed that Freud meant venting and we had found actually that people who just blew off steam who just expressed emotions actually didn't show any health improvements.

[58] Right, you did a linguistic analysis, right?

[59] And that was one of the things that was really fascinating about the research.

[60] So maybe you could tell us a bit about that too.

[61] Well, I wasn't initially, again, I had never been interested in psychotherapy.

[62] And here all of a sudden I was doing a study that was essentially glorified psychotherapy, which got me speaking to clinicians.

[63] And then the question was, why does writing about an upsetting experience bring about these changes?

[64] And that's not a, it's a straightforward question, but there's not a straightforward answer.

[65] And my lab and others started looking at all sorts of possibilities and looking at markers of inhibition, you know, that people holding back were more prone to illness and what this did was to loosen them up.

[66] We didn't find good evidence for that.

[67] Other people had other hypotheses.

[68] And at some point, I started looking at what people were actually saying.

[69] And I got groups of people, students who were in clinical psychology, to rate the essays that people wrote on all these different dimensions.

[70] And what I found was that relying on people to read these essays and come up with some kind of deep understanding or even predicting if a person would benefit or not just didn't work.

[71] It was too hard.

[72] the stories were really traumatic.

[73] They actually depressed a lot of the people who were reading the essays.

[74] So it occurred to me, it would make much more sense to come up with some objective marker of reading these essays.

[75] And a computer program would be what I needed.

[76] Well, it turns out back then, this was now the early 90s, there was no such program.

[77] And fortunately, I had taken a little computer science in college.

[78] And one of my graduate students, Martha Francis, had actually done her undergraduate degree in computer science.

[79] And so I asked Martha to essentially help me do a computer program that could go through and analyze the language of an essay.

[80] And the idea behind it is really quite simple.

[81] You have the computer go in and look at each word and you would compare each word in the essay with some master list of words.

[82] So we would, let's say we're looking for anger words.

[83] We want the computer to count up all the words associated with anger.

[84] So we'd have this dictionary of anger words.

[85] And to get that dictionary, we had to make that ourselves.

[86] We had to look in dictionaries, the sources.

[87] We had to have students generate anger words.

[88] And then we had all these rules of what makes for an anger word versus not.

[89] But once you have that list, you go through and you have the computer look at each word, compare it with a master list.

[90] And any time it finds an anger word, it just adds it up.

[91] And at the end, it adds up all the anger words, divides by the total number of words, and it produces the percentage of total anger words in the essay.

[92] And we did this now for not just anger words or sad words, guilt words, negative emotion words in general, but we did positive emotion words.

[93] And then cognitive words, words that suggested cause and effect, like cause, because, effect, rationale, words such as that.

[94] And then as long as we were doing it, we added more and more dimensions.

[95] We, you know, we had pronouns of prepositions and articles, et cetera, et cetera.

[96] We ended up with about now that there's probably 80 different dimensions.

[97] But when we went back and started looking at essays, we found that certain dimensions of writing really predicted health improvements.

[98] Now, we found that use of positive emotions was associated with health improvement.

[99] So if you can write an essay about the worst thing in your life and still use positive emotions, it's a marker that you're going to show health improvements.

[100] The effects are pretty small.

[101] Negative emotion words, using a moderate number of negative emotions is weakly related to doing better as well.

[102] But what turned out to be far stronger was use of cognitive words, words like because, cause, effect, words like understand realize no these are words that we now know are markers of people working through a problem so let me ask you a question about that because i thought a lot about that i thought that was really an interesting idea so this question has to do with this the function of memory so it's it's pretty obvious that we don't and can't store what's the equivalent of a videotape of the entire domain of sensory experience when we're interacting with people.

[103] And it is obvious as well that that isn't how memory works and that memory is modifiable across time.

[104] And so here's a hypothesis for you and tell me what you think about this.

[105] It seems to me that the purpose of memory is so that you can remember the good things that happened to you in the past and how they occurred and duplicate them in the future and remember the bad things that happened and figure out why and change your course of life and your pathway in the future so that they occur less frequently.

[106] And so the cause and effect analysis would be something like the adjustment of a pathway map.

[107] And it sort of reminds me of the work that was done with rat memory because the hippocampus seems to store something like cognitive maps.

[108] And maps almost by definition are representations of ways to get from one.

[109] place to another.

[110] And so you could think maybe that you go from one place to another and you fall into a hole.

[111] And that's very traumatic.

[112] And so you, you remember the pathway and how you got there, analyze it, and reconstruct a different potential future causal pathway so that you don't have to fall in the same hole twice.

[113] Now, I don't know what you think about that.

[114] But, Well, I think that actually, I think that works is true, both the way you describe it, but also on a much broader metaphorical level.

[115] So, for example, a person who falls into an emotional hole, that their life is going well and then their girlfriend dumps them and they go and get drunk in a bar and wreck their car.

[116] that experience is incredibly incredibly complex and unlike the rat what the human mind has to figure out what in the world went on with my girlfriend why did she leave me what did i do why did i go get drunk have i been drinking too much and if to process that requires tremendous cognitive capacity and what happens is if it's something we're humiliated about we're really reticent to talk to other people about it and we so we and language is a really efficient way to process complex issues yeah so what shared language you know that's right well so what i found in my clinical practice very frequently is that i i think with with people who are traumatized they often encounter this is something else i wanted to ask you about they often have an encounter with malevolence as well as as a as an encounter with just catastrophe so it's not only that something bad happens to them, it's often something bad that's been consciously directed at them by another person.

[117] And they have a really hard time mapping that, especially if they're somewhat naive people.

[118] But then the other people who are detrimentally affected by such things that can't recover are those who have no one to listen to them.

[119] Because people, it seems to me, that most people think by talking.

[120] And unless you have someone to talk to, you actually don't get to think through it and draw the appropriate, let's call them causal lessons.

[121] So, and then you also made this comment about, you know, let's say the classic example I like to use is that, you know, maybe you're a pre -med student and you write the medical, the gene, what is it, what's the one for medical entrances?

[122] In -Hat.

[123] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[124] So, you know, you construe yourself as a pretty solid student.

[125] And that's a core element of your, like it's a predicate of the multiple, you know, maps of your life that you use and then you write the MCAT and you end up with 20th percentile scores and so then what happens is that not only is your map of the future now rendered null and void but so is your map of you as a predicate for present actions and also everything about yourself that you thought held true in the past has to be reexamined and so it's something like the the degree of trauma is proportionate to the amount of the area of map that's disturbed by the, by the unfortunate, unexpected, and sometimes a malevolent event.

[126] And so then the other thing I was thinking about with regards to this, and I think this is more germane to the immunological element, is so it's obviously very, very difficult for the mind to compute how dangerous the environment is, because the environment in some sense is infinitely dangerous.

[127] And you never know when something small happens to you, the harbinger of something that's terrible.

[128] So, because an ache in your side can be the cancer that kills you.

[129] So you might ask yourself, given the complexity of framing in an unexpected event, how do you ever manage it?

[130] And so part of it's temperamental.

[131] So if you're higher in neuroticism, things hit you harder.

[132] And part of it is based on your observed competence.

[133] But the other part, I think, is something like, it's something like the brain computes, the proportion of times that you failed in the past compared to the to the times that you've succeeded and calculates like a mean danger index and then it raises up your average cortisol levels in correspondence to how dangerous the general environment has been because that puts you on alert more and the problem with the advantage to being on alert is that well if anything else negative happens you're more ready to act but The negative consequences is that cortisol is toxic in high doses across time.

[134] And it also suppresses immunological function.

[135] And it also tends to suppress prefrontal functioning as well because the prefrontal cortex is more involved in medium to long -term planning and less in short -term like emergency preparation activity.

[136] So I'd also like to know, do those ideas ring a bell?

[137] So they do.

[138] There's an interesting, so there's another dimension that ties into this, and that is sleep.

[139] So we know that sleep is intimately related to cortisol, it's related to depression, is related to immune function, it's related to, you know, all of these systems are intercorrelated.

[140] And the person who is dealing with an upheaval that they're trying to understand, but they don't have somebody to talk to, end up not sleeping as well.

[141] And part of it is they're trying to process all this additional information, and this ties into the idea of working memory, that they have less working memory.

[142] They're not sleeping as well.

[143] Cortisol is higher.

[144] And they are also worse friends.

[145] So when you talk to them, they're distracted.

[146] They're not paying attention.

[147] and so all of these things are working together to undermine the person.

[148] Now, the cortisol hypothesis is a wonderful hypothesis.

[149] The killer problem is that the studies that have been done with cortisol and its linked to writing and trauma have been, you'd have to stand back and look at the overall studies and kind of squint, and there's a weak evidence to support it.

[150] but it's not as clean as I wish it were.

[151] Of course, this has been the problem with the writing research, but it's also the problem of all clinical research.

[152] That there is, you know, once you start getting real data, and this is not just self -reports of clients saying, oh, yeah, that was really great.

[153] When you start to get objective, hard data, everything is kind of off the table that the effect sizes are very, very modest.

[154] By the way, that's true of medical outcome.

[155] as well for medical disease.

[156] Of course, yeah, yeah.

[157] So, okay, so, well, the downward spiral that you sort of described there, too, could also account for, could also account for the negative health consequences post -trauma.

[158] I mean, so you can imagine a lot of the things.

[159] First of all, is that the traumatized person is going to be more reactive to additional trauma, but also that as they, as the effects of their failure cascade, say, across their friendship, interfere with their educational function, interfere with their sleep.

[160] The quality of their life overall is going to decline, and that should also produce multiple small stressors that are going to compromise, including, say, the decreased sleep and maybe also alterations and appetite, and those might accumulate across time and produce the negative health consequences as well.

[161] Yeah, and don't forget that they'll smoke more, drink more, take more drugs, stop exercising.

[162] yes kids out there when you have a trauma take care of yourself right right right yes yes well yeah well i mean the first thing i do with my clinical clients generally speaking is make sure that they're getting enough sleep yeah and try to re -regulate their sleeping and also to make sure they eat breakfast at least because that that without those two things it's very difficult for someone to get themselves back on the straight and narrow so so now when we designed the cell authoring program, I think I had read, I think it was research by Laura King, but I don't remember.

[163] Somebody had taken your writing exercises and applied them to the future, had people write about the future instead of the past and found similar effects.

[164] Was that Laura King?

[165] Do you remember?

[166] Yeah, that's Laura.

[167] And what was interesting was that study, you would think having people write what she thought was she'd have people write about the past versus right about the future versus both and her idea was that having them write about both would be best because in the way therapy sometimes works in that way so let's work through your issues and what are the implications for the future she found that writing about both actually wasn't very effective that having them write about the future was beneficial or just the past was beneficial and since then there have been a lot of other studies looking at having people write about just positive effects or just negative and what is generally found is that writing about positive effects is also beneficial for health but what it kind of indicates is that thinking is beneficial for health I think that's true and it's also you know the best studies as I stand back and look at the kind of the broad panorama of research is giving people instructions to write really loosely in the sense of here you write about the most traumatic experience of your life but you know a lot of people who haven't had traumas or maybe you've come to terms with traumas but write about those topics that are weighing upon you the most right now they may be positive they may be negative they may be most or a little bit of both and essentially that's what I encourage people to do is to if you're having trouble sleeping, you know, set aside 15 minutes and just explore your thoughts and feelings about issues that are weighing on you.

[168] Maybe something that you don't want to talk about or something you don't really want to address.

[169] Yeah.

[170] Yeah.

[171] Well, when we set up the future, I'll run you by the latest research on the future authoring program because you won't know about all of it.

[172] So basically what we've done with the future authoring program, which is the one with which now we've administered to thousands of university students in different locales with very, very stable results, and the results are quite remarkable, I think.

[173] So the way the thing is structured is we first get people to consider six important dimensions of their life.

[174] So we're kind of construing the individual as something that's distributed across dimensions, practical dimensions.

[175] So those are intimate relationship, friendships, family, career, education, time spent outside of work, and use of drugs and alcohol, because that's a rabbit hole people can really go down.

[176] And having at least an idea of how you should handle intoxicating substances is better than just going into it blindly.

[177] So the first thing we get people to write about and loosely following that idea, It's like a free association idea in psychoanalysis, right?

[178] It's like, but it also, I think, frees people up to make mistakes because they get uptight if they have to do it right.

[179] You have to say, look, you don't have to do it right.

[180] You can do it badly.

[181] It's better than not doing it at all.

[182] So we have them right about to envision what they would like if they could have what they wanted on each of those domains.

[183] It's like, okay, it's three to five years down the road.

[184] imagine you're taking care of yourself and as if you were someone you cared about and that things were set up optimally for you hypothetically what would that look like and what i found in my clinical practice very frequently is that people are afraid of specifying their future because they're afraid of hope but also there's an avoidance element which is that once you specify your criteria for success you've also specified your criteria for success you've also specified your criteria for failure and if you keep things vague and ill -defined then you can stumble along without ever really noticing that you're lost and it's a really bad strategy in the medium to long term but but i think it's it's effective as a means of well it's self it's effective self -deception in the short term anyways they do that first and then we get them to write for 15 minutes with with no concern for spelling or grammar which i think we took directly from your research And just to sketch out what life could be like three years down the road if they had what would be good for them.

[185] All right.

[186] And so now that also gives them something to aim for, right?

[187] And so one of the things that we've been thinking through with regards to having something to aim for is the fact that the systems that utilize dopamine, the incentive reward systems, which basically produce most of the positive emotion of the kind that people really like, only respond in relationship to a specified goal.

[188] So you feel an incentive reward kick when you're moving towards a value target.

[189] So if there's no valued target, there's no positive emotion in life, except in consequence of direct pleasures, say, but there's no ongoing excitement or enthusiasm about tackling hard problems, for example, because there's no evidence that those are related to a valued destination.

[190] And it's the entire dopaminergic system that responds to that.

[191] And that's, of course, the system that cocaine and drugs like that effect.

[192] And so then we do something else, which we've introduced more.

[193] recently, which is we say, okay, now, look, you specified the positive poll, and that gives you something to run towards.

[194] Now, we want you to think through the ways, the faults that you have and the resentment and anger that you hold for whatever it is that you're angry about and resentful about and unhappy about, and to consider your bad habits, and imagine where those could drag you three to five years from now if you let them take the upper hand.

[195] And so people write about that for 15 minutes.

[196] And we think, well, that gives them a negative pole to run away from, like a hell to run away from and a heaven to run towards.

[197] And there's some good evidence from the animal literature that animals that are running away and running towards at the same time are run faster.

[198] They're more motivated.

[199] And then in the second half, they lay out a well articulated.

[200] long -term implementable plan.

[201] And we try to get them to deeply articulate it, say, well, you know, Drake it into eight goals, rank order the goals.

[202] If you attained goal number one, why would that be good for you?

[203] Why would it be good for your family?

[204] Why would it be good for broader society?

[205] What would you do if obstacles arose?

[206] Okay, so that's the pattern.

[207] And now, at the University of, at But Rotterdam, at the business school there, so it's the Rotterdam School of Management.

[208] I've been working with Michaela Shippers there and her colleagues.

[209] We've run about 7 ,000 people through that now, and the research indicates, there's a bunch of interesting things.

[210] Overall, it's raised grade point average about 20%, the dropout rate about 25%, which is absolutely phenomenal.

[211] It was far larger effects than we would have imagined.

[212] But the effects are quite interesting because, you know, with most interventions, if there's a distribution of performance, you intervene and you raise the higher performing people, even higher.

[213] You know, absent a ceiling effect.

[214] But this has the opposite effect.

[215] It raises the lower end up.

[216] And so at Rotterdam, the students that were most positively affected were the ones who were performing the worst.

[217] And there, we divided them up by gender and ethnicity, so male, female, obviously, but then we divided them into ethnic hollanders, so mostly Caucasian natives, and then non -Western ethnic minorities.

[218] So the males were underperforming the females.

[219] And then it was female Dutch natives, male Dutch natives, female non -Western ethnic minorities.

[220] minorities, male non -Western ethnic minorities.

[221] There was a big gap between the Dutch females and the non -Western ethnic minority men.

[222] Within two years of completing the program, the non -ethnic Western minority men passed the Dutch women.

[223] Very cool.

[224] Also increased a little bit.

[225] Yeah.

[226] And then we replicated that more recently in Canada at a little college called Mohawk College.

[227] And we found there that men were underperforming women again.

[228] and then we divided them into how well they were doing in high school before they came into college.

[229] And the worst performing males were the ones who were doing poorly in university before they hit college.

[230] Sorry, the males who were in high school and who had the worst grades were those who improved most with the use of the future authoring program.

[231] And they did the whole thing in an hour badly in one.

[232] session before you had to call it.

[233] That's very impressive.

[234] Could you send me a copy of that?

[235] I'd love to see that.

[236] No problem.

[237] I can't send you a copy of the Mohawk paper yet because it hasn't been released, but I can send you, I'll send you the rest of them.

[238] But yeah.

[239] That's fabulous.

[240] Because these are the issues, of course, I'm dealing with right now here at the University of Texas trying to find out, you know, and most of the interventions that we are looking at is essentially aiming at lower social class kids who are coming to college for the first time who face so many obstacles that the upper middle class students aren't even aware exists.

[241] See, we're trying to think through why this works, you know.

[242] And so part of it is I think, and I've talked this through a lot, part of it is I think that the schools before college never require, really require kids to make a decision, and they don't teach them how to make decisions.

[243] never teach them that their life is theirs to master, let's say, and that they have to make a plan, but that the plan has to serve them.

[244] We also have a suspicion that maybe men won't work unless they have their own plan.

[245] Maybe that's associated with trade agreeableness, although we're still investigating that.

[246] But there is no doubt that these, at least as far as our research is shown, that these interventions, the future planning interventions seem to have a more salutary effect on men, but the men are underperforming, you know, so for some reason the women don't have the same problem, but it's something like males won't work unless they have their own reasons to, which wouldn't surprise me, given that males are more disagreeable than females, so it's certainly possible.

[247] But, you know, the effects on dropout at Mohawk college were walloping, about 50 % decrease in the first semester.

[248] And of course, that's when kids always drop out.

[249] So there's something about having a plan.

[250] So we are thinking too that what's happening is, and this kind of goes back to your comments about both positive and negative emotion, it seems to be something like uncertainty reduction.

[251] And so that reduces the effect of doubt, let's say.

[252] And also tagging, you know, having the person design a future, they also want, tags success with positive emotion.

[253] And that carries them forward potentially through obstacles.

[254] So, yes.

[255] It'd be very interesting to analyze the essays that these people wrote using our computer program.

[256] Yeah, well, you know, I think we may have done that.

[257] If I remember correctly, we may have done that with the Rotterdam study, but I have to look, because we've used your LIWC a couple of times to look for the same sort of phenomena.

[258] We've also done that to look at whether or not we could extract out big five traits from for writing samples and that's also possible so so i'm less less uh sanguine about uh the big five approach because language and self reports are really really different animals yeah well well i'd like to talk to you now if you would about um about you now you you did the computer analysis of words and that got you interested in different categories of words correct and That's correct.

[259] You wrote a whole book on pronouns.

[260] That's right.

[261] Part of the reason I want to talk to you about pronouns, apart from the fact that I'm interested in is I've been embroiled in a political controversy in Canada for the last five months.

[262] There's been legislation here formulated at the federal level.

[263] It's already in place in the provincial level, mandating the use of what have been called preferred pronouns.

[264] And I don't know if that's come to the University of Texas at Austin or not yet, but the idea is that people of non -specific gender, let's say, have the right to choose the pronouns by which other people will address them.

[265] And that's actually being mandated in Canadian law, which is something I've been objecting to vociferously, because I don't believe the government should mandate language content.

[266] I think it's a massive error.

[267] But anyway, so I have a specific interest in pronouns, and I know also that pronouns are in a closed linguistic category.

[268] So they don't change that frequently.

[269] But you wrote a whole book describing why pronouns were so significant from a psychological perspective.

[270] Right.

[271] And it's more, it's not just pronouns.

[272] It's a whole class of words called function words.

[273] And if you look at any text or you listen very carefully, most of what we convey are what we call content words.

[274] These are nouns and regular verbs and adjectives, most adverbs.

[275] and they're the guts of what we're talking about but we have all these little words articles A and the prepositions two of four pronouns he she they it etc and in English there's only about 180 common pronouns now the average person has vocabulary of 100 ,000 words but only you know less than one half or one percent of those words are these function words yet they account for 60 % of all the words we use.

[276] They control how we talk.

[277] And what they are specifying is how we connect with one another and how we connect with our topic and how we think about ourselves and our group.

[278] And by analyzing these function words, you get a really good sense of who a person is.

[279] And that's the underlying theory of the work I've been doing for the last several years using this computer program, which is linguistic inquiry word count L -I -W -C which I pronounce Luke.

[280] And the Luke program is really just a dumb program that mostly is looking at these function words.

[281] So tell us some things that you've found with specific words.

[282] So let's start off with the most commonly used spoken word, which is the word I. I tells us so much about people.

[283] And if you go into your email you're going to see that you use i sometimes sometimes in an email you won't so for example people who are depressed use the word i more than when they're not depressed people who are suicidal use it even more so one of our first studies was looking at poets who either committed suicide or didn't and we analyze their poetry the suicidal poets did not use more negative emotion words they didn't make more references to death they used the word i more and why because prone nouns, including I, tell us where we're paying attention.

[284] If you use the word I, you're self -focused.

[285] And you know as a clinician that one of the theories of depression is that it's a disease of self -focused, that people are so ruminative and looking inward so much.

[286] So let me ask you a question about that.

[287] So that seems related to the psychometric finding that self -consciousness is a facet of neuroticism.

[288] So let me ask you one other question, along with that.

[289] But so because self -consciousness seems to load with the negative emotions.

[290] But also, one of the things that I often recommend to my clinical clients who are socially anxious, because I've watched how they interact.

[291] And because they get self -focused, they don't look at other people.

[292] They don't look at their face, for example.

[293] And they're busily thinking about how other people are looking at them.

[294] And they're busily thinking about what they're going to say next.

[295] And so what happens is they stop looking at the face of the people that they're talking to or listening to them.

[296] And so then they're extraordinarily awkward.

[297] And so what I've done is instead of telling people to stop thinking about themselves, I've said when you enter a conversation, really, really focus on the other people, push your attention outward.

[298] because that seems to activate their unconscious and automatized professional, let's say, socialization skills, and then they can flow with the conversation.

[299] That's exactly right.

[300] And to build on this, the idea of people who are leaders and status, if you look at the two people, you can tell with remarkable accuracy who's the higher status by the person who uses fewer eyes.

[301] The high status person doesn't use the word I much, the lower status person doesn't, because the high status person is looking out at the world, and the lower status person, as you're pointing out, is looking inward.

[302] And you can take this to the bank.

[303] Go look at your emails, and you'll see when you're writing to someone of higher status, you tend to use I more, and when you're writing to someone of lower status, you use I less.

[304] So it's, so.

[305] Okay, so let me tell you another observation that I've, had.

[306] Do you tell me what you think about this?

[307] I'm going to tell you about an observation from animation first.

[308] So I've done some very in -depth analysis of various Disney movies, including the Lion King.

[309] And the Lion King involves a child and then an adolescent lion who matures.

[310] And so, and the animators also represented his father.

[311] Now, his father has a very interesting face because it looks like this like it's it's it's focused forward and kind of staring almost you might think of almost predatory because a predatory gaze is locked on someone else but and then the the adolescent lion who's kind of naive and imbecilic in some sense is like this all the time and so it seems to me that there's a relationship between immaturity and and self -focus and maturity and outward focus.

[312] And in the Lion King, when the adolescent lion undergoes this initiation right, his face changes into one like this, into one of determination.

[313] And the other thing that seems related to this is that, you know, when people are speaking in front of a group, they often get self -conscious.

[314] And they feel all the eyes on them.

[315] And that makes them self -conscious.

[316] And one of the things that I've recommended to people who want to speak to groups is never to speak to the group, just to look at one individual and then another individual and then another individual because that, well, that seems to foster communication, but it also blows out the probability of becoming self -conscious.

[317] That's exactly right.

[318] In fact, I have recommended to teacher trainers.

[319] So here's what you do at my university for teacher training.

[320] You give a practice lecture and you have the camera is in the audience looking at you.

[321] That's the wrong way to do it.

[322] The way that you should train teachers is put a camera behind the teacher at the audience and point out afterwards, look, that guy's not paying attention to you.

[323] That person is.

[324] In other words, not making yourself focus, making you that if you're training a teacher, training a public speaker, exactly what you're saying, you should give them the view of what the audience looks like and not what you look like.

[325] That's the exact wrong training.

[326] You know, okay, so tell me what you think about this.

[327] When I'm lecturing, I pay attention to the people who are paying attention.

[328] Now, I mean, most of the time, most people in my lectures are paying attention, at least a reasonable proportion of them, but the ones that aren't, well, I don't know why they're not.

[329] But there's lots of reasons.

[330] They might have had a bad night.

[331] They might be overtired.

[332] They may have taken the course by mistake.

[333] I mean, God only knows.

[334] But if I'm paying attention to the students that are paying attention, then I can read off their faces how the audience is thinking, especially if I glance around.

[335] But it's that intense communication from individual to individual that seems to make a lecturer or an interview or a conversation really compelling.

[336] That's exactly right.

[337] And I think that's the secret to.

[338] to one of the secrets to being a good teacher and a good speaker is really being able to watch.

[339] And also to judge when all of a sudden you're starting to lose them.

[340] Yeah, right.

[341] You know, you're also doing little experiments the whole time.

[342] You know, one of the things that people who are relatively new is they start to lose people and then they start speaking more quickly, which of course is precisely the wrong thing to do.

[343] And they start paying less attention because they get self -conscious.

[344] want to hide from the audience and then they get into a loop yeah and and things just go you know the worst speakers i've ever seen stand at the front of the of the audience with their head down and mumble at their feet it's just painful i mean okay okay so that's very interesting so okay so you talked about i you talked about dominance what else have you learned about specific works.

[345] Well, a couple more things about eye mixed with some others.

[346] One is, is honesty.

[347] So the ability to detect deception versus honesty as a function of how people talk.

[348] And what we find is that we've done many studies where we induce people to lie and tell the truth and then we look at the transcripts of the two.

[349] But what we find is when people tell the truth, they tend to use eye more.

[350] They're owning what they're saying.

[351] And the person who is lying, is psychologically distancing themselves from what they're saying.

[352] And then there's another feature is when you're telling the truth, you tend to use more words that are, we used to call them exclusive words or differentiation words, where you use words like except, but without exclude, words where you're making a distinction between what's in a category and not in a category, that these exclusive kind of words are, you're being more honest, because you're saying what you did, but also what you didn't do.

[353] And that's a really complex cognitive task.

[354] Whereas if you're lying and you didn't do any of it, to say what you didn't not do is just beyond the capabilities of most people.

[355] So both eye word usage and these exclusive words together do a pretty good job.

[356] And another one is also focusing on details.

[357] So can you do that with political speeches?

[358] Oh, yeah.

[359] And there's been some nice research on that as well.

[360] Jeff Hancock, for example, who's now at Stanford, has played with this idea quite a bit when he was looking at all of the rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction during the Bush administration, that what he found was administrators were using deceptive language prior to the U .S. to work before prior to I were going to war so oh so so that opens up the whole completely appalling and interesting scenario it's like I mean increasingly people are using computer programs to analyze personality and that sort of thing by by analyzing people's behavior on the web that's exactly right and we've been done been doing this a lot with with political figures and In fact, one of my graduate students and I, Kayla Jordan, we have a website that's called Word Watchers.

[361] It's wordwatchers .orgers .orgpress .com.

[362] And by going there, you can see our analysis of Trump and actually this whole election.

[363] From my perspective as a scientist, this has been a phenomenal electoral season.

[364] As a human being, not so much.

[365] So I'm going to get you when we're done here.

[366] I'll email you and you can give me some links, okay, that I can put in the description here where people can go look this sort of thing up.

[367] You bet.

[368] So that's interesting.

[369] So can you actually rank order politicians in terms of the probability that they're telling the truth?

[370] So we have a, yes, I could, but I'm not sure I'd trust it very much.

[371] because one of the interesting issues about deception is you've got some people who are deceptive, but they honestly believe they're telling the truth.

[372] And I think Trump actually falls into that category.

[373] I think he actually believes what he says, and he might say just the opposite 10 minutes later, and he'll believe that as well.

[374] Yeah, so do you suppose that, okay, so that's interesting, because I've seen.

[375] seen in poorly written undergraduate essays, you commonly see, I think about it as fracturing at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy.

[376] So, you know, if you listen to a schizophrenic speak, they're actually fractured at the level of the phrase.

[377] And then if you listen to a manic speak, they're more like fractured at the level of the sentence or the paragraph.

[378] They can say a whole paragraph, and then in the next paragraph, they'll say something completely different that contradicts the first paragraph, but there's no awareness of the contradiction.

[379] And in poorly written undergraduate essays, there'll be a claim made on page one, and then a claim made on page two that are completely antithetical.

[380] And, you know, it isn't self -evident that you become conscious of paradoxes in your thinking unless you act out both propositions simultaneously, and it produces a conflict.

[381] Because you can hold paradoxes of information without ever known.

[382] knowing it.

[383] And so maybe what happens with someone who does that sort of contradictory speech is that temperamentally they're very confident.

[384] So they might be assertive, for example.

[385] That's right.

[386] And maybe also low or high in stress tolerance.

[387] So they're not anxious people.

[388] They're assertive and they don't really care so much what other people think.

[389] So they come across continually as confident.

[390] And so that would be more like temperamental confidence.

[391] which is a form, it's a funny thing because it's not exactly the same as telling the truth, but it is something more like believing what you say or believing in what you say.

[392] That's right.

[393] And what I think the text analytic approach is better at is when a person knows damn well, they're telling a lie.

[394] And that's when our tells do better.

[395] There's another phenomenon, it's called a performative, that's one of my favorites that you can, you hear.

[396] And that is, performatives are used in linguistics, and they're usually a phrase, and they might be something like, let me assure you, or as I've said before, or believe me when I say.

[397] And if you have a performative, it makes the entire sentence, you're not able to detect if it's true or not.

[398] So you can't establish the truth value.

[399] let me assure you that this is a glass of water now is that true or not well it's yes actually it is because i want you know i want to assure you it's a glass of water it's true because i want to assure you that that it is even though it's not right and what happens is consciously we don't know we do this but it's almost so our brain it's kind of trying to protect us and we throw these up And there's, I have another web page that has a number of performatives that you see in president after president where the president says something that at the beginning sets it up, such a performative.

[400] And then the second half, sure enough, it is a line.

[401] Yeah, well, so do you suppose that, okay, that's interesting.

[402] So do you suppose that, so is the performative a marker for deceit?

[403] I think it is.

[404] Yes, I think it is.

[405] And in fact, in fact, Trump's great, his best would is, believe me. So I know more about the army than the generals, believe me. Right, right.

[406] He's quite interesting.

[407] He is, and it's a form of performative, which is, he's really saying, please believe me that I know more he doesn't place it that way but that's what it essentially is well it kind of makes you wonder if he thinks that if people believe him that makes it true yeah exactly because it's a funny thing because there is some truth to the idea that true things are what other people believe now obviously you don't want to go too far down that road but there is something I mean because for example a contract holds no truth unless there's consensus around it.

[408] So whenever the reality is dependent on everyone agreeing to do the same thing, then consensus is actually a very good marker for truth.

[409] You know, because there's lots of situations where you say, well, if we agree on all this, then it's going to be true.

[410] That's what a contract is.

[411] So it's almost as if using words like that is an attempt to establish a contract where no contract can genuinely be established.

[412] I mean, we can't have a contract about whether or not Iran has weapons of mass destruction, but we can certainly have a contract about whether or not we'll go to war over it.

[413] Yeah, yeah.

[414] So what else have you brought with regards to interesting words?

[415] Because that was fascinating.

[416] There's a whole, we could go for hours on this, actually.

[417] So another one that I've been quite interested in is using these groups of words, and looking at how two people connect in terms of these function words.

[418] So what we could do is we could actually calculate the percentage agreement we have in our use of pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and so forth.

[419] And we call this language style matching.

[420] And the closer two people are in their use of these words in any given conversation, the more they are in tune with one another.

[421] Wow, so that's being on the same wavelength.

[422] That's exactly right.

[423] And it's not necessarily liking one another.

[424] It's being absolutely paying attention to one another.

[425] So two people in the midst of an argument tend to entrain really closely, just like two people madly in love.

[426] Now, we've done analyses of transcripts of speed dates, and what we find is we actually can predict who will go on a subsequent date at rates somewhat higher than the people themselves.

[427] So what's happening is the rapid establishment of mutual imitation.

[428] That's exactly right.

[429] And that's exactly what happens from the Pijeretian perspective when two children start to play.

[430] That's exactly right.

[431] And we've looked at one that I particularly like was we studied, we looked at 86 dating couples.

[432] These were freshmen in college and freshmen in college are in notoriously unstable relationships, which from my perspective is perfect for research.

[433] And to be in our studies, they had to do instant messaging at least daily with each other and to give us 10 days of their IMs, which they did.

[434] And what we did, and we also asked them, how good is your relationship, how likely will you be together in several months?

[435] And what we found was that we did a shockingly good job at predicting who'd still be together.

[436] Those people who were, if we just averaged, got their style -matching score, their average entrainment score and we just got the top half 80 % were still together three months later if they were in the bottom half only 50 % were still together wow wow and and and self reports people's self reports about their relationship was absolutely unrelated to whether or not they were still together so so that's like dancing it is I've always thought this as a dance that's exactly right yeah yeah because so so what that really means in some sense is that think about it this way is that the two people come together and the two of them it's as if they're making something they make something jointly that they're both acting out so that they're uniting into something central that then you might think too that in order for that to happen they have to be paying close attention to each other that's right right and so you can't entrain with someone unless you pay close attention to them And certainly one of the best markers for the utility of a relationship is going to be whether or not the people pay attention to each other, right?

[437] Yes, that's exactly right.

[438] That's why children are so absolutely desperate for adult attention.

[439] That's their currency.

[440] Yes, that's exactly right.

[441] Wow, that's really cool.

[442] Well, if you got another one?

[443] Oh, gosh, I've got another one.

[444] A few, three or four years ago, I started working with my.

[445] much bigger data sets.

[446] So this was with about 25 ,000 college students who have been admitted to my university over four years.

[447] And I got their admissions essays.

[448] And these essays are people explaining why they want to come to the university, you know, how they have overcome a difficult time or something like that.

[449] So each person wrote two essays.

[450] And we went through and started to do some kind of a general analysis of word use focusing on these function words and found that there is a central dimension to language.

[451] This is a fundamental dimension and it's what I'm calling it is analytic versus narrative thinking.

[452] People high on analytic thinking are using high rates of articles and prepositions.

[453] At the other end of this dimension are people who are using high rates of pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, negations, and so forth.

[454] It is a coherent.

[455] apparent dimension and that any text can be put along this continuum.

[456] And in fact, it's like a fingerprint.

[457] People who, you know, use words at this level tend to do so in other, in other, if it's emails, other emails or natural conversation, et cetera.

[458] So are the narrative people using more metaphors?

[459] Yeah, they probably would.

[460] So tell me the difference.

[461] Tell me how you would tell the difference if you were.

[462] Well, let's listen, before we get into metaphors, metaphors are going to take us down a rabbit hole.

[463] So before we fall down the hole, let me just point out, this analytic thinking was so cool about it is we were able to track these students' grades over the next four years of college.

[464] And the higher they were on analytic thinking, the better they did in college.

[465] And in terms of grades, it was correlated about 0 .2.

[466] And it did matter if they were physics majors or fine art majors, if they were in engineering, psychology.

[467] music, social work, that this, you could take this to the bank.

[468] The more analytic a person is in their essay, the better they do in college.

[469] And part of it is college is based on analytic thinking.

[470] Right.

[471] But it's also correlated with intelligence.

[472] It's correlated with SAT.

[473] At that level.

[474] Probably about 0 .3, Oh, yeah, that's pretty good.

[475] That's pretty high.

[476] Yeah, it is really quite striking.

[477] And what's interesting is that we can now use this as kind of a remote sensor to get a sense of how smart somebody is.

[478] So if we're analyzing...

[479] Man, you're a dangerous man. I'm a dangerous man. That's for sure.

[480] Yeah, yeah.

[481] So that's another one.

[482] And we've been playing with many other things.

[483] We've been doing a lot of work on author identification.

[484] So we published a cool article, one of my graduate students, Ryan Boyd, and I have been focusing on a lost play or a play that, was attributed to Shakespeare, but people didn't know if it was or not.

[485] And we were able to do some really smart analysis showing pretty clearly that it was written by Shakespeare, probably co -authored with another guy, John Fletcher.

[486] And we've looked at some other manuscripts that have been called into question that have come out of the 17th century.

[487] So we know we've been taking this work in all of these different directions.

[488] Cool.

[489] Okay, so let's close this off by, why don't you tell us something about what you're doing with regards to revamping undergraduate education at the University of Texas and what you and what your aims are and also why it was that you were hit for chose to do this exactly it all gets into my analysis of language I was doing all of this work trying to understand could I get a say a group of initially two people but then as many of five people to interact with one another on the computer and if so, could I track how they are interacting with each other and get a sense of how the group was working?

[490] And working with some computer scientists, we were able to come up with a really slick program to do that.

[491] And then it occurred to me, wouldn't it be interesting to do that in a large class?

[492] Because I taught a large introductory psychology class with a colleague of mine, Sam Gosling.

[493] And we had 500 students in the class.

[494] We had them bring a laptop to class one day.

[495] and we were able to break the class into small groups of five each they could interact with each other and we were able to track how they were interacting and we could give feedback to the group trying to get the group to work better so we're using the style matching we could tell people whether or not people of the members of the group were paying attention to each other or if someone was talking too much we could ask them to not talk so much and so forth and it worked the next semester we realized you know we could use this idea and revamp the class from top to bottom where we got rid of the textbook so all readings were online we'd have a quiz at the beginning of every class we would have break the class into interactions more frequently in other words started to rethink the class from top to bottom and then we moved it into an online class so that we were able to broadcast out and we switched the format of the class that was like a TV show.

[496] So we were behind a desk.

[497] We'd have fake news.

[498] We'd have, or at least one of us would be in front of a green screen here in some other place.

[499] I'm not sure that that's appropriate.

[500] No, no. It used to be, people used to know what I meant, but I now, as soon as I said that, I realized I can't use that anymore.

[501] But this idea of one of us would be on, on it, in front of a scene, somewhere on earth.

[502] You know, so one of us, you know, I would say, Sam, where are you?

[503] It looks like you are in a balloon today.

[504] And, you know, so it looks like he's in a balloon and so forth.

[505] In any case, the point was we turned this into a television show.

[506] And what we found was that by broadcasting this out to 1 ,500 students, we sent it up because there was testing every day that students were in class every day.

[507] They were focusing more on the material.

[508] They were more engaged, and it turns out that their average performance went up compared to when we taught it in the past.

[509] And more impressively, people who took our online class did better in the other classes they were taking that semester.

[510] Oh, yeah, that's impressive.

[511] And the classes they took the semester afterwards.

[512] What kind of improvement did you get?

[513] It wasn't huge.

[514] which was like a difference between a 3 .1 versus a 3 .25.

[515] And we reduced the disparity between upper middle and lower middle class students in terms of their performance.

[516] So that historically we found one letter grade between the upper middle and lower middle class students.

[517] And now we had reduced it to 0 .4 letter grade.

[518] Okay, that's big.

[519] That's big.

[520] So that's kind of analogous to what was happening with the future authoring program.

[521] That's right.

[522] So how do you account for that?

[523] Why do you think it had that differential effect on the lower performing students?

[524] Well, it turns out we came across some previous research that had found similar effects, but it deals with frequent testing.

[525] The idea is kids who come from lower middle class backgrounds, by and large, went to crappy high schools.

[526] And in these high schools, by the way, our kids are all smart.

[527] they're always most of them in the top seven percent of their high school class but if they were at a crappy high school they learned to get by by memorizing because the tests were memorization tests and so these kids were great at memorizing and then they come to a real university where you're not tested on memorization you have to think conceptually right right and historically when we taught those classes we had this usual three or four tests over the course of the semester I would always get students in my office, walking in after the first test saying, I have never made a B in my life and I just failed your first test.

[528] That's impossible.

[529] How is this even possible?

[530] And I would say, how did you study?

[531] Well, I had flashcards.

[532] I did this.

[533] I memorized this.

[534] And I said, I told you memorization doesn't work.

[535] You have to think conceptually.

[536] And that doesn't mean anything to these kids.

[537] But now you've got to test every day and you fail that first test, pow.

[538] You fail the second test, pow, and all of a sudden you're realizing, wow, it's true.

[539] Memorizing doesn't work.

[540] I see.

[541] Okay.

[542] So you think what's happening is that they're learning that memorization doesn't work faster.

[543] That's exactly right.

[544] That's really funny.

[545] That's really funny.

[546] And they use these skills in their other classes because they realize memorization is not working in the other classes either.

[547] So how do they catch on to the, okay, so now they know that memorization doesn't work.

[548] How do they interesting moving to the online world we create all of these videos which basically there's a video on how to take how to study and there's another video on how to take a test and another video on you know how do you manage your time in other words now we we understand the problem a lot better than we did before and so students are taking advantage of these resources and end up doing better that's cool so how long have you been doing that so after so we started the class the first year in 2011 and then in the years afterwards i started talking to people at the university of texas and elsewhere about kind of the big picture of education which was what the hell are we doing in education right now you know the world's changed that i've been asking myself i know but the world's changed why do we have three -hour course is there's no logic for a three -hour course.

[549] Why do we have a semester that goes from the 1st of January to sometime in May?

[550] There's no reason for that.

[551] Why don't we have a half -hour course?

[552] Why do we have a seven -hour course?

[553] In other words, why do we put things together the way we do?

[554] And it turns out there's really good reasons because in the early 1900s we need a standardized way of talking about credit and so forth.

[555] and then we built computers to program this in and we built buildings that we knew how to use time and space and location and so that your computer will tell you this class is going to be in this room at this time and your final exam will be at this place and this place we don't need all that yeah well that's all it's analogous to the conservation of a physical structure and evolution that's exactly right And we don't, and what's interesting is the University of Texas computer that the registrar uses can't make a half hour course.

[556] Right.

[557] It can't, it can't change this semester.

[558] It can't do any of these things.

[559] And a modern student information system computer costs an unbelievable amount of money.

[560] And so what I'm doing is I am working with the university and the entire infrastructure to start to rethink everything?

[561] What should be the curriculum?

[562] We don't need all these required courses that we used to have.

[563] It makes no sense.

[564] You know, a lot of our requirements made a lot of sense 50 years ago, and a lot of our classes were flunk out classes.

[565] We don't need flunk out classes anymore.

[566] And we can come up with really brief classes, half -hour classes, to learn a basic skill.

[567] For example, we have a requirement.

[568] You have to have a statistics course to take upper division psychology classes.

[569] Do you really need the statistics score as well?

[570] Most of it you don't.

[571] And if I ask the people teaching statistics asking them, do the statistics you're teaching, are they relevant to today?

[572] And they all say, oh, not at all.

[573] I mean, I don't use analysis of variance.

[574] I don't use T test.

[575] I use linear regression.

[576] I use this.

[577] I use that.

[578] But we can't teach that.

[579] And my view is, if you're going to take my upper division class, you better know correlations.

[580] and you're going to know correlations up and down.

[581] I can teach a correlation course that would be a 0 .7 hour course.

[582] And download it and take it any time.

[583] I don't care when you take it.

[584] Yeah, well, I mean, I've been using YouTube a lot for the last three years, you know.

[585] That's right.

[586] I started putting my lectures online just taped with an iPad, you know.

[587] And by the beginning of 2016, I'd collected about a million views.

[588] And I thought, oh, that's a whole different thing than I thought it was.

[589] I thought YouTube was for cute cat videos.

[590] And then I started thinking it through and I thought, oh, no, look, here's the situation, man. For the first time in human history, the spoken word has as much staying power and reach as books.

[591] No, more reach.

[592] You could publish faster.

[593] And it can be broken up and communicated in all sorts of chunks.

[594] like this is absolutely revolutionary.

[595] That seems to me that while your universities are in a race against time.

[596] That's exactly right, because this is the new world order, and it's, you know, it's like every other part of our world right now, where we're dealing with the future of AI and the future of everything, that this really messes with the world order because so much of what we can teach.

[597] can be put up there and it you know because correlations haven't changed a hell of a lot in the last hundred years you don't need to update your lecture on correlations right there's something one really good lecture on correlation exactly of them or 10 ,000 of them that's also very frightening that's exactly right and but then we do need you know you know we're talking now 15th century we do need a guild's mentality if you're going to become a therapist, a scientist, or this or that, you need to have some serious lab experience.

[598] You need to have some serious experience doing things in addition to learning how to think and to get some smart feedback on how to think, how to come up to get up to the level to understand what's involved in trying to make new science to make new advances.

[599] It's an incredibly exciting time, and I'm working with all parts of the university.

[600] I have 200 people working with me. I've got various, you know, we're dealing with a development studio, working on new ways of thinking of online and other technologies.

[601] I've got a big research and methods group trying to find out what even works.

[602] We don't even know what works and what doesn't.

[603] We're having to deal with extended campus in terms of how we can push out our classes.

[604] our information to the world in a way that has some kind of financial value to the university.

[605] So we, and this office that I'm doing.

[606] Have you guys been thinking about accreditation?

[607] Because it seems to me that the problem is the big issue.

[608] Well, the thing is, is that the ability to disseminate valuable information was once, that university in some sense, had a hammerlock on that.

[609] That's gone.

[610] No more hammerlock.

[611] That's right.

[612] the thing that the impediment to mass education at the moment, in some sense, is the problem of mass accreditation.

[613] And the university still have a hammerlock on that, but there's no reason that they need to.

[614] So I'm curious, when you're thinking about the mass distribution of educational material, what have you been thinking about in relation to accreditation?

[615] The problems and the complexity of this are unbelievable.

[616] So some of it is the nation.

[617] bureaucracy.

[618] So there are accrediting agencies that don't know how to use deal with fractional credit, don't know how to deal with a variable calendar.

[619] We've got financial aid issues because they're based on these old systems as well.

[620] We're dealing with intellectual property in terms of who owns the IP of a class.

[621] Is it the instructors?

[622] Is it the university?

[623] Can the university resell it?

[624] How do we rethink this?

[625] You know, the idea of having free, open classes is great, but it's not a very good business model.

[626] And this is one of the problems with Coursera and EdX, and you're putting your videos online for free because the reality is, it costs I'm using Patreon, you know?

[627] You know about Patreon?

[628] No, I don't.

[629] It's really interesting.

[630] It's a platform that was developed because of the difficulties that creative people were having and monetizing their production.

[631] And so with Patreon, people can voluntarily buy a monthly subscription.

[632] If they find that the content that you're producing is worth supporting, then they can donate monthly to your Patreon account.

[633] And they can either do that on a monthly basis or they can pay you a donation per video that you put up.

[634] And that's been a very, you know, I thought with my YouTube content, because I wanted to professionalize what I was doing to some degree to hire a film crew and to increase, improve the audio, and all of that.

[635] And I threw up a Patreon account online last April when I found out about the technology, just out of curiosity.

[636] And I got about, I don't know, 60 or 70 people subscribing in the first month.

[637] So that was kind of interesting.

[638] And it's enabled me to hire a film crew and that sort of thing.

[639] But it's quite interesting because the Patreon people, although there's some perks they get, like I send the higher donors a signed copy of one of my books, for example, but mostly they don't get access to any content that everyone doesn't get access to.

[640] But people have a strong sense of reciprocity, and they're not completely comfortable with the idea of getting something for nothing.

[641] And that the Patreon account has been extraordinarily useful to me. Very interesting.

[642] Yeah.

[643] Well, and these are what we're doing now, for example.

[644] You know, and these are issues that we're struggling with at the university in terms of how do we do it.

[645] Because to do one of our courses is really quite expensive and, you know, talk, you know, $10 ,000, $30 ,000.

[646] And trying to figure out the model for it, the one thing that we can do is we can give university credit.

[647] So that's one hold that we have.

[648] but it you know it really does deal with a broader issue in our society which is is knowing the material and knowing what and knowing how to think sufficient to get by in the real world or do you need the official credential and right yeah well you hopefully we need both yes or you know if it was a just world just knowing the material would be would be sufficient.

[649] Yeah, well, the problem is it gives you no rapid way of telling the charlatans from a real thing.

[650] That's the big issue.

[651] Yeah, it's a big issue.

[652] And then another problem is that as the credential becomes more important, the knowledge becomes less important because you can use the credential to what, to play the system.

[653] That's right.

[654] That's exactly right.

[655] So these are the kind of things that I've been dealing with and I'm you know, trying to change a giant bureaucracy turns out it's not real easy.

[656] Yeah.

[657] Well, you said why.

[658] It has all these built -in assumptions that are part of the structure, not only part of the cognitive apparatus, but actually built right into the infrastructure.

[659] That's exactly right.

[660] And what I've found is the people at the university have been very supportive.

[661] I thought for sure I would run into major obstacles.

[662] Faculty, students, administrators, even the legislators, because this is a public university, are all really supportive.

[663] And even though I've got support all around, it's still just like swimming through molasses because there are all of these rules and regulations that have been there sometimes for 100 years that's no longer serve a purpose.

[664] Well, you know, maybe you know, maybe you don't know, but the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years.

[665] And the typical family fortune, three generations.

[666] and it's for the reasons that you just described is what happens is that the structure itself becomes so anachronistic that not even the people within it can change it yeah and so if something comes along that's that's younger and that's built on different presuppositions it just takes it out and the probability that that's going to happen to the universities in my opinion is overwhelmingly high because because of exactly the sorts of things that you described it's it's structural it's built for a different century.

[667] It might be built for the late 1800s.

[668] Well, it is.

[669] And actually, if you think about it, university started in the 1400s, and it's amazing that they have survived as well as they have.

[670] Yeah, that's for sure.

[671] That's for sure.

[672] Well, look, it was really good talking to you.

[673] I've enjoyed this myself.

[674] I've been a great admirer of your research, and I don't say that lightly because there's a handful of psychology.

[675] that have had a profound effect on me, and you're certainly one of them.

[676] And I would also say you're a spectacular rarity among social psychologists in my estimation.

[677] So I know that's a nasty thing to say, but being partly a social psychologist, I guess I'm allowed to say it.

[678] I would also like to talk to you again at some point in the future, maybe, you know, six months down the road or something, because you have all sorts of things that people need to know about.

[679] And this is a really good way of telling people about them.

[680] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon.

[681] on page or purchase the self -authoring programs at self -authoring .com.

[682] The links are in the description.

[683] Thank you for listening.