All right, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. My guest today is Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen. Hi there.
Hi. We just had lunch, and your book The Age of Selfishness has been hugely popular. Are we selfish?
I suppose we're a bit selfish. If you judge it by how much discussion this book has stirred up, then yeah, we're probably a bit selfish. But have we ever - was there ever a time when we weren't selfish?
There has been, but these things vary. The ways people live vary. We've had selfish eras before too, and these cultural shifts don't move forward in a straight line - you could say that, in the end, people never really invent anything new; it truly just spins like a wheel and starts all over again.
Throughout history there have been many earlier periods when selfishness gained the upper hand. We're talking about phenomena like Machiavellianism. What's different now is the globality of it - the fact that with these digital tools and the ability to interact, we've gotten a completely different kind of...
...unified culture in this sense - because when you look back at these periods of individualism in history, they've always been small isolated pockets, and they've never spread across an entire culture the way it does now. Mm. I was thinking about this a bit through attachment theory - sometimes that gets pushed on me too - like, isn't it still, as my daughter once put it, that if you convince yourself you're this independent person, couldn't there still be [unclear]
...something good in that. Selfishness and independence are two completely different things.
Yes, they really are different things. [clears throat] It's hard to see anything good in selfishness at all. We talk about healthy narcissism, or we attach good-sounding words to disorders, but individuality is one thing, psychic strength and ego strength are another, and then selfishness - which stops a person from noticing other people - is something else again. And that's exactly where the difference lies: a person absolutely can be
highly individual, and still value other people, and still be able to share common goals and be altruistic. So we don't really have such a thing as healthy selfishness.
We have healthy trust in ourselves, and then we have selfishness.
Right. Now, this is a scholarly book, but as you say yourself, you don't drag the reader through footnotes - I was really drawn, back in the day, to this [unclear] developmental theory, and a lot of this is really about how a child becomes a healthy individual - someone who isn't selfish, but is still independent and part of a community. So is narcissism specifically tied to that? Not narcissism as such, exactly, because
narcissism is a disorder. [scoffs] I used narcissism to describe the fact that a real change has taken place - so that it doesn't stay at the level of me just claiming, 'I believe this.' Because if I tell you that this kind of behavior, this kind of value system, would still have gotten you a diagnosis of a character disorder in the 1980s, then that
wakes people up. That's when it hits home that a real change really has happened. [scoffs] This is also useful in the sense that raising narcissism as this kind of example works quite well, because in a child's development there's a developmental task. Psychology talks about developmental tasks - we could just as well call them developmental stages, but a developmental task means the point at which the brain is ready for
learning something. The brain, in a sense, hands the person a task to develop in that area. That's why we talk about developmental tasks.
[scoffs] We have a developmental stage that's called primary narcissism, where it's all me, me - hedonism is the starting point for everything, and your own needs, and everything gets looked at through the lens of what's in it for me - and the whole point is to grow out of that into an adult. So in that sense, narcissism gives us even more tools for understanding the change that's happened in our culture.
Right. My friend, back in psychology class in high school, used to joke about this - when we were studying the blank-slate theory - about how much is built-in biological machinery in a person, which just blossoms on its own through the different developmental stages, and how much is the influence of upbringing and community - nature versus nurture, so to speak. So in a way, at some point the individual becomes mature enough that they start changing themselves.
So how much of this developmental arc is down to the parents' credit or fault? That kind of thinking - crediting or blaming the parents - isn't presented that way anymore. It was presented that way when I was a student; they even gave percentages, this much is hereditary, this much is the parents. We're completely away from that now, because [scoffs] it's very hard to see the line between what's
hereditary and what's cultural. When we talk about a person's character, the further research goes, the more we understand the biological significance of it, and the more strongly it comes through. But there's another thing I wanted to bring out in this book, which is that I'm not actually talking about human beings changing. And
that's - even though I emphasize it in lectures, I notice it's not that easy to get across - people haven't changed at all, and these laws of human development haven't either; but a person has a certain strength that can also turn into a weakness, namely that we don't have a species-typical way of living. Instead, how we interact with each other - well, to some extent we do, but it's considerably
less species-driven than it is in other animals.
And in that sense, how we express ourselves, how we relate to other people, and how we live this life - we live according to whatever we're told is good for us. And we can change our way of living very quickly if we're told this is good for us. If we're told everywhere, on every side, that a person is happy when they don't think about themselves, but
think about others and are altruistic - then we act that way, and we're satisfied.
If we're told that a person's duty is to make a project out of themselves and constantly think about their own well-being, then it clicks - 'oh, right, of course' - and they live that way, and they're satisfied.
And that's the message of the book - that I'm not talking about how the environment or biology directs people, but specifically about the power culture has to tell us, 'this is how you should live.' Right. But then, on the parents' role and how they shape character and behavior - you said that nowadays narcissistic behavior, or selfish
behavior, which would earlier have been classified as a conduct disorder, is now completely normal in society - so does that come from this helicopter-parenting phenomenon, breaking down the natural growth processes where a person learns to tolerate uncertainty and disappointment, and instead we're always offering alternatives and boosting this sense of independent agency? That's certainly one factor in this
whole picture, because on one hand upbringing shapes culture, and on the other hand culture tells parenting - tells you how parenting has to happen. What's interesting here is that I'm not out to find fault with the parents - to some extent, yes, some blame - because parents have never invented a single parenting model themselves; it's always been handed to them by professional educators, psychologists,
through the voice of the culture in one way or another, saying 'this is the good way,' and they've gone off and put it into practice. And right now, in our parenting ideology - in how parents are guided to raise children - there are plenty of elements you could describe this way: they're guiding people to raise children into selfishness.
But that's not the parents' own invention - it's just one manifestation of this selfish culture of ours. You mentioned helicopter parenting there. That's actually not so much a problem specific to Finnish culture, because helicopter parenting means helping the child too much for their age, hovering around them like a helicopter, and doing things for them. And
this isn't our parenting problem - our parenting problem is that we're losing childhood. We no longer grasp what a child actually is and what a child needs. [scoffs] Psychology, after all, brought about a revolution when it introduced into general thinking what childhood actually is. And that happened clearly back in the 1920s, when people started saying that
a child can't work in mines, can't take responsibility for their own upkeep, and so on. Work was done on that front, and now we find ourselves in a situation where, especially in Finland, we again have to spell out what a child's brain is actually capable of, what childhood is. And the fact that we so gladly embrace this - helicopter parenting is, again, part of our culture, where we think a child has to
manage earlier. Then there's another concept: curling parenting, and that's a problem for us - curling parenting means giving the child the decision-making power so that they won't be disappointed. You constantly ask the child what they want, and you sort of soften everything, do everything
for them that way - you cushion every disappointment and setback, and as a result they never develop this thing that's now being loudly demanded of them: resilience.
Right. And I got the impression that maybe emotion isn't your favorite word - that you'd rather talk about temperament. Well, it's true that emotions aren't tolerated, especially negative emotions, and people just want to shovel them away so everything stays idyllic and so on - and that surely breaks down the self. It does break down the self a bit, but it breaks it down in a way that I'd like to
clarify a little - I said a moment ago that childhood is disappearing, and, well, our conception of childhood has never actually matched what research tells us about childhood - it has always been shaped according to adults' needs. In other words, depending on how the child burdens or benefits an adult's life, accordingly
a certain conception of the child gets built. And I'd argue that in the 1980s, our cultural conception of the child was closest of all to what science tells us a child actually is. Back then people understood what a three-year-old can do, what you can expect from a four-year-old. And since then, as we've moved forward with these various ideologies, we've drifted further and further away. And as we've drifted further away,
we've also lost our grip on what a child is. And it's quite interesting now - how this has actually happened - as we lose our grasp of childhood, it's happened largely by our giving the child adult rights: self-determination and decision-making power over many things. We've started emphasizing children's rights - that they have the same rights as adults. But
we haven't stopped to think that this conception of the human being, this conception of the child, of course also has to include adult obligations. And we've already smuggled a lot of that in, and in doing so we've chipped away at childhood - the child ends up having to decide on things they're nowhere near ready to decide on. We talk a great deal about how we need to lower the age of criminal responsibility. We're already building something like a
halfway house between a placement home and a detention facility, with somewhat different rules. We've already let in - crept in - this flip side of the coin: if a child is actually capable of deciding their own affairs, then they can also be held responsible for those affairs. This is exactly what psychology set out to change a hundred years ago. Right. And, in passing, referring to this
Jonathan Haidt book, The Anxious Generation - I suppose we'll get to the differences between girls and boys later, which are large, and to social media - but there was a bit at the end, some recommendations, and it sort of sounded like the old-fashioned Finnish way of doing things: create a genuinely safe space where the child gets to take risks and fail, and sort of experiment and search for those limits - somehow that sounded really nice, so isn't your solution kind of a
return to these methods that at least used to work at some point? Well, yes, methods that worked at some point, but I'd rather put it this way: methods in line with the newest knowledge - because then we wouldn't just be going back, as it happens, to methods that were common before, but we'd be going back to what today's brain research tells us about a child's brain, what it's capable of, and what
you can expect from it - so it's really the same return, and it can also be justified with the very latest research findings.
Right. And then, I've never really been a fan of temperament, or these personality-profiling things, because I always figured it's kind of an individual's own choice to shape those and be different depending on the situation - like even the idea of extrovert versus introvert feels a bit artificial to me, because I'm an extrovert in some situations and an introvert in others.
But you had quite a lot to say about introversion and extraversion, and how that too has shifted over the ages - specifically at the expense of introversion. Well now, this - [clears throat] - you just mentioned that a person can change, and they can vary, and so on. This is exactly the idea that temperament is the biological part of a person's personality that comes ready-made. And this comes from
the current understanding, or what research shows, that a child isn't born a blank slate. Everyone knows that little babies are different. Anyone who's seen babies knows there are huge differences among them right from the start. And then the environment starts responding to those differences, and gradually a personality emerges from that.
So these temperament traits are, you could say, neuro- - neurochemical behavioral responses. A person can't change them. But this idea that 'sometimes I'm introverted, sometimes I'm extroverted' - that's actually in line with the theory.
It doesn't contradict the introvert-extrovert way of thinking at all. First of all, there's an error in it - there's no such thing as 'an introvert' and 'an extrovert' as fixed types. That's a misunderstanding. It's not on/off - rather, there's just one single continuum, and all these temperament traits form a distribution, and we all have exactly the same temperament traits, it's just their strength that varies. And extraversion is one continuum, where
at one end are the traits we consider to belong to extraversion, and at the other end is the absence of those traits, and that absence has come to be called introversion. And that means that, since this distribution follows a bell curve across the population, most people are neither one nor the other - they're somewhere in between.
Ambiverts. [clears throat] Well, that's a perfectly good word, even though people have sometimes laughed that we always have to invent new words - but it captures exactly this: that people who are clearly introverts, those extreme cases, are extremely rare, just as the bell curve shows. But then, once a person starts actually behaving, their behavior always adapts to the situation, so that they behave in a more introverted style in some situations and more extroverted in others - that's exactly what the theory
predicts happens. Right. And here's a follow-up question - there used to be this idea of the tragedy of the gifted child, there's even a book by that name, where sort of a well-behaved child, fighting their own inner demons, overachieves and does well in school precisely because they behave so well and properly and introvertedly. Whereas nowadays the ideal is this great all-rounder who scores maximally on the Big Five across every good trait. And society rewards
that latter type these days, apparently, with better grades in school and in working life, and better pay - so I got the impression you don't think that's fair. Well, actually, fairness isn't really my point - it's that it's simply against the research entirely. And right now, in the US, there's already been a shift of thinking on this in economic matters too, and also on these
psychological matters - there's a discussion now that once you get this kind of valuation model, like the one we now have, where certain personality traits are considered better than others, completely regardless of whether they actually produce the outcomes we assume, or whether they correlate at all with competence, ability, and so on - the question is now being raised of what connection these have to poor economic performance,
to bad hiring decisions. That's the real question - because sure, there's also a fairness angle to this, but honestly, that doesn't concern me all that much. What I care about specifically is: if we end up with this completely delusional idea about something, and society starts acting on that delusional stereotype, then what are the consequences? Right. Well, let's come back to that -
it's actually interesting too - I think the most interesting finding in the comparative research was that Finns, apparently of all countries in the world, are the least likely to try to earn their parents' respect or pride for themselves - did I phrase that right - but that just sort of sounded true to me, that we really don't try to please our parents.
Right, that was quite striking. It was this World Values Survey - this kind of [deep breath] research report where you can find almost anything you could think to look for, about how countries around the world differ from each other. There's one page in particular where you have Europe broken down, then the Middle East, then the Global South, the North African states, and there was a question that was put to young people -
thousands of young people in every country - a statement like, 'my greatest goal, or an important motivation for me, would be to make my parents proud' - that was the statement. And once you got outside Europe, 100% of young people responded that yes, this is a major, important motivation, 'I want to act this way.' Then when
you get to Europe, in Southern Europe it's something like 90%, and then it dips a bit as you move up to the Nordic countries, or further north, but it still stays around 70%. And then there's one complete outlier: Finland - it was 24% in Finland, when the next-lowest jumps straight to 60%. That's a result that really makes you think. Right, a couple of thoughts came to mind. One
is - since I'm a bit of a right-winger at heart - that socialism has gone too far here, that the state has taken over the parents' role, so to speak, and as a result no value at all is placed on this kind of tribal or parental dependency, because the social-welfare cushion is such a nice substitute for a parent. [scoffs] We certainly have to go looking for something like that behind it, at least, because it doesn't seem to work in our culture the same way it does
elsewhere, supporting the bond between parents and children - and I'd say we have more of this attitude that when something bad happens, we call for the parents to be blamed, saying, look how parents just aren't raising their children - but we should be asking what kind of support is actually given to parents, and I don't mean financial support.
I mean, how important are parents seen to be in a child's life - and the answer is, not very important, because there's this constant talk about how at risk a child is if they don't get to be raised by proper professional educators, as opposed to being stuck with their own parents for far too many years in childhood.
Right, it almost sounds infantile, in a way - like the shame of embarrassing parents has become stuck at this infantile level. Or maybe, on the other hand, the parents themselves want their child to become the bird that flies the coop and never looks back, soaring off like an eagle, independent and self-sufficient out there in the world. I don't know, but personally I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. It's not necessarily good, no, because it's already been shown to have all sorts of consequences, because these parent-child
relationships are still the foundation of one's sense of self, the foundation of identity, the longest-lasting relationships in life - and if they're given no significance at all, it's not easy to find substitute relationships for them.
So we really are building a world of lonely people, and then we act surprised that loneliness has become such a huge problem.
Right. And going back to that Anxious Generation book - there was a lot in there about this collapse of psychological well-being, that quite simply something has broken in us - at the very least, our emotions, our selfishness, and our ability to function as part of a group.
And of course we might sound like terrible pessimists here, but at the very least we can say that there's never been a time before in our written history where psychological problems have been this massive - at least the reported ones. In that Haidt book, it said that people now openly declare themselves to have all sorts of disorders, and it's even worn as a badge of pride - 'I've got a touch of ADHD,' on the milder end,
and then full-on autism at the other end, or whatever - so in a way there's probably a diagnostic problem baked into this too, that maybe the measurement and the self-perceived state get a bit mixed up. Well, that's often how it's put, and there's probably some truth to that problem too - but given that it has consequences, does it really matter?
Whether it's 'real' - because if the consequences are still burnout, sick leave, broken relationships, does it really matter all that much whether it's real in air quotes, or whether it's just something manufactured, when the consequences are already visible? Well, sure - but one consequence could be that we change the culture, so someone isn't stuck moping in bed instead of coming to work, that this
isn't some kind of excuse for not showing up to work on a Monday.
This [laughs] - this is interesting, exactly this: what does the culture reinforce? Does the culture reinforce victimhood, or does it reinforce pushing through problems regardless? That's really the core question. Right. And this idea of victimhood as something positive, I think that's just awful - I really don't like this trend of somehow rewarding it. [scoffs] I think being a victim can be - I mean, if you're genuinely a victim, that has to be
respected, but this kind of self-appointed victimhood put up on a pedestal just sounds really pathetic to me. [scoffs] It's quite interesting, actually - we've now turned what you might call gritting your teeth and getting through it, the old way, into - well, of course you still have to grit your teeth and get through it, but it's been turned into something negative these days, and then the question becomes more about how society functions further down the line, and then this
thing that Freud emphasized back in his day - even back then you find this same emphasis on what constitutes a person's mental health.
That the person is capable of functioning. That they're able to work. Freud famously defined it this way: being able to love and to work. Being able to form relationships and being able to do work. And what's interesting is, if people back then were able to work and were able to form relationships, then on what grounds can we claim that they -
if they didn't shout all their feelings out loud - that they gritted their teeth and got through life. That's the interesting question to me: how boldly we go looking for faults in previous generations' way of life, simply because we imagine we've now invented something new. And yet, if we think, say, about Freud's definition, these people of the past - even if they gritted their teeth - by that
definition, were actually healthier. Right. And then, given that the rate of mental-health diagnoses has now risen - correlation isn't causation, of course, but it has risen in some kind of correlation with the rise of smartphones and social media - so let's get into girls and boys and smartphones - how much of this is actually the phone's fault, or social media's fault? Well, there is causation in there too,
as well. We've had social media around long enough now that we can get these before-and-after setups where you can actually see the causal link show up. Now the question becomes: would social media have had this big an effect, would it have turned into this, if we hadn't already had this culture - this individualistic culture that polarizes people, that gives
room for intolerance, that feeds all this? So in that sense, we're blaming social media wrongly, in that social media was the thing that detonated these problems and, above all, provided the opportunity.
But if we'd had a culture where norms of good behavior prevail, and respect for other people prevails, and shared goals, the common good prevail, would this impact have been this large?
Mm. And then this comes back to - is a child just a small adult? More and more, even to younger and younger kids, we say, go ahead and surf wherever you are, even if you're on TikTok for seven hours a day, and the content there just isn't remotely suitable, especially for a young girl. And then I guess we get into these differences between the sexes, where boys can take a hit from social media too, but if it's directed toward things like gaming and porn, that's less dangerous than
girls' sort of total collapse of their social networks, and bullying. There are, well, there are shared effects that are independent of gender, and one is this erosion of social skills, and that's been such a surprising finding that people in the US are now genuinely worried about it. Here, we're really not - if anything we still encourage this kind of social
-skills weakness. We still have this culture where you have to go looking for problems in people, and if they're not exactly the way I want them, sharing exactly my values, then, well, tough luck, satisfy every single one of my demands, full stop, end of discussion. We don't have that kind of culture where we're worried that people simply can't get along with each other anymore and that normal relationships have become a burden. In the US
they're already worried about this, and social media has had quite a large effect on this erosion of social skills too - but then there are certain things where this gender difference shows up. For example, in things like at what age these effects are the biggest, and then there's also
been shown that for girls, this comparison with others increases anxiety and increases depression. Boys don't show the same thing. For boys - or to a much smaller extent - it can be shown that social media increases anxiety less than it does for girls, but for boys there are instead these other negative phenomena. It's been shown that they identify more strongly with these kinds of, you know, truly
negative idols, negative role models.
Violent behavior. A completely distorted view of sexuality.
[unclear] and sexuality get tangled together, and then this kind of contemptuous attitude toward the other gender - all of that negative posturing. This has been shown - shown specifically as a risk factor, a risk trajectory, for boys aged around fourteen to fifteen who spend a lot of time on social media. Right - I personally think that when
-the biological need for variance in men is, after all, because sperm cells number in the millions while there are only so many egg cells, so biologically it makes sense for the carrier of the cheaper sex cell to take on more risk and seek out more variation, and also to be found more at the extremes of that distribution - whereas for the female sex, risk-avoidance and social acceptance become more important instead. So maybe this is just
some kind of a repeat of this same phenomenon. You certainly can't deny that - if you go back through history, we've had these power structures pretty firmly taken for granted, where power belongs to men. You can't deny that at all. And equality, gender equality, sure hasn't come about on its own - it's come about through
work. And if these arrangements have been this firmly entrenched for so long, then of course there's some kind of - well, there's some kind of biological readiness that we're then working against with civilization. Right. Personally, I - well, some people argue that the internet and smartphones were just a preliminary stage for the age of AI, that it trained us into this kind of compulsive bonding with, or merging into, machines, and that
that same mechanism is now underway with AI.
Personally, I really like using AI, but I train it kind of like you'd train a junior employee, or even a child - I build it a memory, good practices, tell it 'no, that's not a good source,' and 'since you got that wrong, next time answer like this' - and I keep building these routines into it, and to me that feels a lot healthier than doom-scrolling Instagram or TikTok in this totally monotonous way, just chasing that dopamine hit
- I don't know if you've had the chance to look into this AI impact yet, or whether researchers in general have. Yes, yes, researchers have gotten into it - and just when was it, actually, yesterday probably, I was looking for - asking for suggestions from some AI, necessarily - well, AI of course raises a great many moral and ethical
questions, but this idea that a person could gradually be replaced by some kind of robot - which has been raised as one fear, [laughs] - well, we do have to remember that humans are pack animals, humans have the brain of a pack animal, humans have an enormous need to bond with other people - specifically with people - and, well, this idea that
AI could replace that - human brains don't change all that quickly. I wouldn't necessarily see that as a huge threat. It only becomes a threat if a person, at a certain developmental stage - childhood, adolescence - misses out on those experiences: what satisfaction comes from compromise as a social skill, what satisfaction comes from making compromises, what
satisfaction and happiness a person gets from another person's touch, physical touch, and how important a role facial expressions and gestures play. And if these experiences are missing, then, sure, it's possible that a person simply won't miss them, and a robot will be enough for them. But the significance of these biological needs is so great that I don't see this as some huge negative
worry. Right - personally I see it going this way: as robots' or AIs' cognitive abilities keep growing, they'll naturally become part of workplace communities, at the very least, and then people will supplement, say, the weaknesses in their own memory structures with them, which is a really important skill for me even now - being able to store, instead of a notebook, these structures out there in an AI for an employee - but, going back to something in your book, there was a chapter on this
working life - it maybe had a bit of a leadership-critical angle to it, that we don't really know how to lead these selfish people, or that leaders themselves might be a bit selfish too.
Actually it wasn't leadership-critical - but, all in all, I do have very strong criticism of the current unscientific [scoffs] recruitment practices. But this conception of leadership - I'm not against that at all, and if anything I'd be much more forgiving toward leaders, toward managers, because of what's currently
expected and demanded of a leader, and what they're imagined to be capable of. I'd almost say, if you find a leader like that somewhere, bring them to us at the institute - because that would already be a fairly miraculous creature, one that's not exactly easy to find. But that's a slightly different matter from what my criticism is actually aimed at - the current talk about leadership just doesn't match
these kinds of psychological truths. Right, right. So this recruiting thing - the issue is that if, on Big Five criteria, someone is extroverted and not neurotic and very open and generally a great personality, then they get picked from the pool using those traits, even though their actual ability to do the job might be pretty average.
So was that the core of your critique?
That's part of it, but not just that. It's more that these ideas about what neuroticism means, what extraversion means - they're completely off from a research standpoint. That's the criticism. Right. Because if it really were true that neuroticism led to the workplace outcomes we imagine it does, or that extraversion or introversion led to what we assume they lead to, then I don't know if it could well be justified as
at least an addition alongside actual competence. But that's not what's happening - what's happening is that we bypass competence and experience with prejudices, stereotypes with absolutely no grounding whatsoever, in these made-up ideas, and that quickly turns into an economic question. Are we hiring good people, or do we think we are, when we're actually hiring bad ones? That's
my criticism here. Right - personally, I solved this by setting up a kind of work test - a presentation describing the actual work, which the candidate gets to do on their own time, say over two weeks, and then presents. Now AI is muddying this a bit, of course, because it's so easy to outsource this work task to AI these days.
But yeah - so, in trying to be objective about it, I also noticed that I had a lot of, since I went to what I consider the best business school in Helsinki, this kind of narcissistic mirroring going on, where I assumed everyone else from there was just as good an employee. But then at some point I noticed that it doesn't really matter that much, that you find really good people from all kinds of schools, so I just opened it up so anyone could apply - but you do notice that
there's a lot of narcissism in job-hunting too - I noticed it in myself, at least, that I generalized a lot from myself, in that I was, in a way, looking for people like me.
Yes, that's true - but that's certainly not necessarily a bad thing on its own, because we know - when we know how to use information correctly, we can use all kinds of information in a positive way. For instance, we know that when we use personality tests and go looking for this suitable, quote, good type, without anyone actually being able to define what that is, we have
this very strong intuitive feeling, this uncanny sense, of what a good type is. But at best, a person's personality traits predict maybe five to seven percent of their job performance and success - and that's actually a pretty good result if these tests can get us there - so then it's worth asking, if 93% comes down to other factors, how much is it really worth
paying for that seven percent? Is it worth that much? But the fact that a person really does choose people like themselves, even unconsciously, I wouldn't necessarily even call that narcissism - it's completely natural. It's entirely subconscious.
If a person really is doing their best, in a certain sense, then of course they think that other people benefit too from that kind of behavior. We know this: when we go to recruit someone, the single most important choice is who gets put in charge of carrying out that recruitment - above all, the interview - and specifically when it's an unstructured interview, because the interviewer's own personality explains over 80%
of the outcome. That's how large the effect is - that a person picks people like themselves. Well, you could actually flip that around: when a really good employee retires, and has to pick their successor, you could tell them, pick someone you like. Pick yourself. That's actually good for the company.
[laughs] It depends entirely on how this information gets used - but right now we use recruitment data almost like superstition, the way we use stereotypical assumptions and prejudices, instead of being able to use this existing knowledge in a positive way too.
Right. But then, more broadly in society, there's this ideal of tolerance, which - if it's understood as universality, or equality of opportunity, that everyone gets to play by fair rules - I'm fine with that, but personally I'm not such a fan of equality of outcome, because ability does matter, after all, and so does willingness, and effort, and things like that - society can't just decide in advance that everyone has to end up in those positions, just because we happen to like
that kind of society - but this tolerance thing, and in a way the selfishness built into it, I think that's also completely skewed - what society values and how it reacts to people and opinions. Personally, right now, I'd actually say we're lacking tolerance. We keep preaching tolerance constantly, and then we beat each other over the head with the gospel of tolerance, because this is a very strong, very deep-rooted
demand for tolerance, but instead it's turned into more of an attack - it goes pretty far in this direction, that you're supposed to tolerate absolutely everything I say, but whatever you say offends me. That setup is very clearly - the person who demands tolerance from others turns out to be extremely quick to see offense in whatever is simply the other
person's individuality. And tolerance, as a concept, has really just kept narrowing and shrinking in our public discourse. Right, and, well, on my own end, we're closing in on 400 episodes now, so I really like this term, the Overton window - the same way you'd want to gradually desensitize children and good citizens, I think society as a whole needs to be built up and desensitized by widening this window of permissible topics of discussion, and be able to bear
hearing, 'ugh, that person's saying things completely against my values, they should be silenced' - that's just foolish, because it's actually good that it comes out, whatever's wrong with those, in your or my opinion, class-hatred views or whatever they are - but if it's not allowed at all, and it gets suppressed and confined to some back room, that's really dangerous for society, because it just calcifies and becomes really brittle. But this is all completely true, and above all, we
really need this kind of - [sighs] - a conversation that's actually warranted, [clears throat] about how much a person, when they experience, say, intolerance or perceived offenses, how much right they have to turn that into actual behavior. That's the discussion topic we ought to raise first right now - what do we even mean by tolerance, or, as it's often tied to, freedom of emotional
expression? What does that mean? Does it mean I get to say at work, 'yeah, that upsets me'? Or does it mean I get to turn that into actual behavior?
If I'm upset, do I have the right to just leave work for three weeks and go on sick leave and have someone else do my job? That's the discussion we'd need - what are the consequences of what gets called tolerance, or whatever else it's called at any given moment, of these things moving around in someone's inner emotional landscape, what
follows from them. Do they stay in your head, or do they carry straight over into working life? Right - and I have no sympathy for that kind of behavior either, again - except in a special situation, if someone's mind is genuinely broken in some way, then that has to be understood too. And mental-health problems are of course a completely different matter - but if you offend me, well, how is that actually dealt with? Yeah, personally I struggle with this. I'm
maybe a bit thin-skinned that way - I don't really like criticism.
I haven't quite figured this out about myself over the years - whether the criticism was justified or not, I get a pretty strong pushback reaction to it. Easily. I can usually control myself pretty well, though. But somehow I've thought about this - this sense of fairness - that when I do try to run this kind of analysis on myself, whether the criticism was actually fair, then if it feels unfair, I actually recognize this reaction in myself, that this feeling of unfairness then triggers
a counter-reaction in me. But these feelings are kind of problematic, in that for every inner state you could call some kind of emotion, and I'm not really sure - do researchers even manage to find some fixed number of basic emotions? Because right now this is - this is still a debated question. Back when I was studying, it was a debated question. Back when I was studying, they used to say that
there are somewhere between five and seven basic emotions, and they were considered culture-free - but right now that's been strongly called into question. It's up for debate whether there are any basic emotions at all, and whether we even need any basic emotions in the first place.
The more important question is why a person has so many emotions in the first place, and how they developed, and what causes them, and where they lead us. And the fact that we have so very many emotions - well, that has to have some kind of purpose. And that's exactly where we've currently lost track of what emotions actually are. Emotions, first of all, are tied to a situation. They arise in a situation.
situations arise, and they always carry some kind of informational value, and we ought to be able to understand where a given emotion comes from, and we ought to be able to act on it. An emotion signals that we need to do something, take some action despite the anxiety, go and do something, and it's through that action that the anxiety disappears. But now we've developed this strange idea that emotions - that emotions are somehow
self-contained, as if they existed for their own sake, and something we just sort of stew in - that we get stuck circling around in these emotions and processing them, when what we should really be doing is learning to read the emotion, regulate it, understand where it comes from, and actually do something about it. So right now we have this kind of - this misunderstanding that's taken hold around emotions, and that goes a long way toward explaining why
emotions have become, for instance, one of the biggest, thorniest issues in leadership at work - because they just spill over into everything, and then, given that every single person has their own emotions, this demand that emotions be taken into account - well, whose emotions? We can't take sixty people's emotions into account. And in this way, it's
through these kinds of misunderstandings that we've ended up with a world that, if anything, causes people more harm than this supposedly growing mental health.
Right, I agree. In my own book on negotiation, I actually treated emotions, as part of the negotiation process, in a kind of binary way - a bit like in particle physics, when you measure a photon, the act of measuring changes its behavior - it's a bit like that with emotions too, that the point is the change in behavior, not the emotion itself - so it was really simply that you have
some kind of optimal operating state, which could be, say, eustress combined ideally with some kind of flow state - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a classic in the field. So in a way, you're gliding along there on the optimal operating edge in that situation and not thinking too hard about what's going on inside, because inside it actually feels really good and capable - and then there's this getting anxious, or eustress - no, sorry, distress position - that clearly, like a stone weight, drags down and impairs your behavior,
and you somehow need to get yourself out of that. I don't know if a model this genuinely binary really resonates with you at all. [laughs] Yes, yes, yes - this is, well, it's phrased a bit differently, but it matches quite closely what current research also emphasizes. Because now that we have this idea that emotions get pondered over and mulled over, and even - a person can actually generate emotions for themselves that don't even exist, if you keep steering yourself to constantly go digging for what
might be in there - we've ended up with another interesting phenomenon these days, called a meta-emotion, and it means having an emotion about an emotion. That never used to exist, because it wasn't needed. And it means, for example, being anxious about becoming anxious - already pre-worrying, 'will this exam make me anxious?' - and this kind of thing starts to build up, this
feeling that if some other emotion arises - and this is a good example of how a person's mind has, in some way, been steered off course.
I think it's quite useful here to look not only at this kind of written history, how people used to live, but also at other cultures existing in this same era - because right now we have extreme differences in what we consider, say, good and effective emotional expression, emotional regulation, and what that
actually really is - and the differences lead to entirely different levels of mental well-being, or, alternatively, different styles of emotional expression can lead to similar levels of well-being. Whereas we, right now, are absolutely convinced that we've found something - that we've freed ourselves from the burden of emotions, from gritting your teeth, from holding it in and just performing even though things felt awful inside. We're convinced that it's
wonderful that people talk about their feelings - nobody stops to ask what's necessarily so wonderful about it, or in what way. It's just wonderful that feelings get expressed and talked about. And we're certain this leads to mental health, when in reality it's led to an explosive rise in these very emotional problems - anxiety, social panic, depression. At the same time we have, for example, this Polynesian culture, which
has been used a lot as an example, where expressing emotions is absolutely forbidden across the board, precisely because a person has no right to burden someone else with their emotional expression. That's the starting point, because that culture is so strongly collective. Above all, negative emotions may not be expressed, because it would offend the other person. And a child is taught from a very young age
to find ways not to express - not to express negative emotions - but instead to process them within their own mind. We've kind of forgotten that a person has a mind, and that they can process emotions quite effectively within it. Converting them into cognitions, that is, into words, translating them onto a cognitive level and expressing them there, isn't necessary. Regulating emotions is necessary,
but there are many ways to do that. Things really are handled completely differently in, say, the Polynesian islands, in Indonesia, and cultures like that - and are those people unhappy? We go there because they seem so sunny and cheerful and happy, and their rates of mental-health problems are a small fraction of Western mental-health problems.
This gives you some perspective on just how flexible the human mind is, and in how many different ways we can live, and how we can be absolutely convinced that we've found something that's the right way, even while the related problems keep growing at the very same time.
Right, that's true. That does sound healthier, in a way. So, I had Pekka Tölli as a guest, talking about his new book How to Be Me, but honestly I liked his previous book a bit more - I Saw You - because, well, for instance, Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen, this was an excellent book once again, and you've earned every bit of the positive commentary you're getting, and you're doing great work for Finnish society by bringing this stuff out - so, I don't know, personally, I think this kind of...
-whether it's related to emotions or not, but somehow the oppressive side of being Finnish is that things just don't get said out loud - I don't know, praise, or whatever you call it, positive feedback, ought to get bumped up a notch, at least, and personally I think that would boost mental health.
Well, that's certainly something that in our culture has been a bit... on the sparse side - and there are two angles to that, too - there's always this thing where there's a healthy level, and then there's too much or too little, and that's where problems start creeping in. We do have a culture where
we hold the view that you can live on the compliment of a cat's purr, so to speak, that no thanks are needed at all. I mentioned there are two angles here. One is that thanking someone feels good, it's polite behavior, and if you thank someone, it doesn't cost you anything. And producing pleasure for someone else is, of course, an unambiguously good thing. But then, if we go a bit further with this, there's actually a second
angle too - this Finnish way of thinking isn't entirely to be condemned, because a person's development is supposed to include a shift from external reward to internal reward. That means that a small child, since they have no standard of their own for what's good, for when they've succeeded, relies on external praise, external reward. They need to be
praised constantly, and you really can't over-praise them, and they can also clap for themselves if no one else does. But then part of a person's psychological balance is this shift toward internal reward, where they set their own criteria for themselves - this is what I want to achieve, learn, do. And they get an enormous
amount of satisfaction from being able to study, perform, and do this demanding thing they've set for themselves. And at that point they no longer turn around to see who's clapping for them - they reward themselves. There are a lot of good things in this. First of all, it frees you from being dependent on other people's feedback - that's a step toward independence. And another thing that matters a lot is
that this way, there's a ceiling on the achievement - you can say, 'now I've succeeded.' But as long as a person stays hooked on external praise and external reward, then that praise ends up feeding the hedonism inside them, in other words, the pleasure principle.
Not so much the accomplishment anymore, but the pleasure principle. And that's where the problem lies - you can never praise the pleasure principle enough, because there's always this lingering sense that you could be a little better, and then you'd get praised more; and then a little better still, and get praised even more - and that becomes one of the real problems of our extreme individualist society: a person's permanent, ongoing sense of inadequacy.
Right, that - well, is that related to internal locus of control at all - but anyway, in this book you actually introduced me to a new name, this Avshalom Caspi - since you mentioned him a few times in the book - doesn't he have exactly this marshmallow-test line of thinking - but am I reading this right, that you really respect his and his colleague's work? Well, he's certainly one of...
...one of the most respected personality-psychology researchers in the world, no question. Everyone respects him.
Right. But personally I hadn't - I mean, I thought of him as pretty well-versed in psychological theory, but I'd never even heard of him. What kind of research does he have out there? You'll find all kinds of things from him, because - well, developmental psychology research in general on exactly this - and Caspi was actually the first, for example, whose research showed that social media, instead of building
social skills, actually takes them away from children. And if he'd been a completely unknown researcher, that finding would have just been shrugged off, laughed off even - but his reputation meant it got taken seriously right from the start, with plenty of surprise, sure, but taken seriously - because it was supposed to build social skills, not take them away - but he's had exactly these kinds of, say, marshmallow-test-style findings, so
those specifically capture this shift of things into an internal reward - that by delaying immediate gratification, by working toward something, you get more satisfaction from that than from getting some immediate pleasure and a lot of praise. But this starting point - that a person should be thanked - it's polite, it
produces pleasure, but then there's this somewhat broader background to it - our current problem, one of the problems in working life today, is exactly this: that we live extremely strongly on this pleasure principle, hedonism, and if that gets too strong, then you get exactly this feeling that a person is never listened to enough, because the fact that I haven't
been heard - well, that's come to mean, these days, that no one really knows whether they've been listened to and heard, but the world just doesn't work the way I shout at it to work. I haven't managed to make the world work my way. So then, anything that strongly rewards acting out that hedonistic pleasure principle steers a person to act more according to these earlier developmental-stage
principles rather than adult ones. Right. And going back to where you started, with your happiness book - the Finnish happiness research - that long-running series continues. I've also been reading Juhana Torkki's latest book, Rational Happiness, in praise of Stoicism, and I have to say, as a bit of a basic dude, I'm quite drawn to this Stoic philosophy - but then, on the other hand, rational happiness - I don't
know if this Finnish happiness research is actually rational, or whether it's some kind of illusion. Personally, I think it's actually pretty sound, in the sense that this word 'happiness,' or 'well-being' - if you look at the actual questions asked, they don't really have much to do with happiness as such, and none of them even ask directly, 'are you happy' - what it's really measuring is something more like societal stability,
the possibility of happiness - these kinds of life circumstances, conditions on top of which a person can then go on to build a happy life. There's a lot of trust in public institutions built into it, and things like the existence of some kind of order in society, and so on.
All of those things are genuinely, genuinely good, and if Finland keeps landing at the top of that list time after time, well, there's no need to go picking that apart. Let's just be happy for once and say, good for Finland. But the point is, it doesn't measure any actual happiness - it doesn't measure mood, it doesn't measure any kind of feeling, it's really just measuring trust, that in these Finnish
circumstances, we're able to build a happy life.
Right. So, is there some guiding principle for overcoming this age of collective selfishness that we've been talking about? What should people start doing now, to close with a bit of this normative talk? I turn my gaze toward - people often ask this, what could the individual do? Well, of course the individual can do - the first step is simply waking up to it, because the first thing is that we need to wake up
to, my goodness, these slogans that get set up as guiding principles for life these days - they're actually a recipe book for selfishness. They steer us toward selfishness. Of course, in parenting, there's this idea that my own child will do better if the society around them is safer, and that safer society around them requires teaching exactly this: learning to follow norms and to notice other people. But this whole message of the book, because it really is this -
that we're dealing with a cultural shift, so I wouldn't put changing that culture back, or in whichever direction it gets changed, on the shoulders of individuals. And I wouldn't start, in any case, by pointing the finger at parents first - instead, the first thing I'd raise is institutions, and I'd start from the fact that, for example, schools and early-childhood education are currently systematically raising children into selfishness. That's a
pretty strong statement, and, well, I'm willing to walk it back a little, but I'm also willing to sit down and lay out a long list of reasons why I say this, and where this happens in education - things that people have never even stopped to think about, because when you think about children - take just one example, think of it this way, that
you first teach a child to think, you teach them to be self-directed and critical, so that they'll grow up to become this kind of thoughtful, self-directed, critical adult. And that gets taught in a way where the teacher doesn't just pour knowledge into them - the way it's put now is that the teacher isn't the source of knowledge.
The teacher is just there to help. There's actually no clear, defined body of knowledge handed to the student anywhere - instead, they seek out that knowledge from various sources themselves. What follows from this - an element we've never really thought through - what follows is that shared, common knowledge disappears. Each person builds their own knowledge in their own way, and gets graded differently depending on how they build it. We see this in society, in society's
polarization, in the disappearance of shared knowledge, and these are the kinds of phenomena that, at least, we haven't really thought through at all. It connects to this. You can see it, for instance, already among our university students - when you explain something, saying 'here's this body of information,' and the original idea was that first you absorb certain clear knowledge packages that are grounded in research, and from there
you can go on to build your own views. Just recently, this happened - a couple of weeks ago, a student told me in a lecture that this was complete BS, if you'll pardon the crude word - because they'd built up, from something they'd read, a completely different picture, even though the topic was something as fundamental and undisputed as a core piece of psychological development. They believed they'd read different information somewhere and had built themselves a different understanding of the matter. And this didn't in any way
surprise the other students - to them it was self-evident that even though there's a solid, well-established developmental-psychology theory out there, a student can still build, by gathering their own information, their own understanding of the matter in their own head. And this traces directly back to exactly this - how students, schoolchildren, are taught and guided to go find information themselves, and all information is treated as
equally valid. That was one small example of how, in these unpredictable ways, we first amplify this kind of extreme individualism, which gradually leads to the idea that I don't need to listen to other people, which in turn leads to selfishness. And this is where I would now turn this - toward early-childhood education
-I'd turn toward these very latest ideologies around how children are raised, and point out that these carry certain risks, and in schools I'd go straight to these pedagogical models,
in this same way - for instance, that's where I would start, with institutions, because that's also a way of making it concrete how this change can actually be brought about. Right.
I do have to bring up, though, that maybe this deviant, contrarian student had actually come across the latest replication-crisis research, which showed that even though these prison-experiment-type studies and so on don't hold up, and sure, there is hard scientific ground out there, there are also plenty of tests that can't be replicated - so I'll give a bit of leeway to those
contrarian thinkers, after all. Well, I don't mean it in the sense of giving free rein to just any kind of contrarian thinking that I'd give no quarter to at all - I mean the kind where someone, out of general contrarianism, just says, well, sure, we do have some truths after all, and building your own truth still requires some foundation of knowledge - it can't just happen by taking whatever feeling
feels nice to you and using that to go build your own version of the facts. And take that example you mentioned - that didn't come from someone's opinion, it came from a scientific correction - a second experiment was done, and that's exactly how science naturally works: you run a new experiment, it overturns the old one, then you run enough experiments that you can see which one actually holds up, and that's how science
moves forward - but it moves forward on evidence, not on opinions. Right. And maybe, going back to what you said earlier, that parents pretty much always end up, like lemmings, just adopting whatever parenting model the school and the rest of the system hands them, and there's surprisingly little variance in that - so here's a tip I'd give: it's worth reading these classic psychology books, say, about children's development into adults, instead of always just
grabbing whatever the current era's supposed truth happens to be - in that sense, your book is a good continuation of that, on how to raise better children. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. And for everyone who's watched or listened this far, go ahead and subscribe to the channel, and let's have a short members-only follow-up conversation. I'd propose that we ended up with surprisingly little on one of the huge phenomena of our time, [unclear], and autism, and
ADHD - so let's have a short, brief conversation about those over on the members' side. Does that work? Sure, works for me.