Why You Are Who You Are: Investigations into Human Personality – Mark Leary, Ph.D.

Why does a simple incident like a traffic jam affect you the way it does? What makes you act the way you do around your friends and family? Why do you often see the world so differently from the way other people see it? The answer to these questions and more really comes down to one thing: your personality.

Wherever you go in life, you carry with you a large, complex set of traits, beliefs, emotional tendencies, motivations, and values that predispose you to respond to the world in certain ways. Some of these you share with virtually all other human beings; they’re part of human nature. Others, however, differ greatly between one person and another, and they help create the kind of person you are—and the kind of life you lead.

• Are you outgoing and highly social, or quiet and more inclined to spend time alone?
• Do you consider yourself organized or disorganized?
• Do you have more energy in the mornings or in the evenings?
• How much self-control would you say you have?

To understand the roots of personality is to understand motivations and influences that shape behavior, which in turn reflect how you deal with the opportunities and challenges of everyday life. Exploring the science of personality is also a chance to gain new insights that might help you better understand both yourself and the other people around you.

According to award-winning Professor Mark R. Leary of Duke University, “the quality of our lives depends in part on how well we can figure out what’s going on with other people.” And that’s the focus of his intriguing 24-lecture course, Why You Are Who You Are: Investigations into Human Personality, in which you examine the differences in people’s personalities, where these differences come from, and how they shape our everyday lives. Drawing on research in psychology, neuroscience, and genetics, Professor Leary opens the door to understanding how personality works and why. Designed as a fascinating, accessible scientific inquiry, these lectures will have you thinking about personality—your own, and that of the people around you—in a way that’s more informed and that reveals what makes you the kind of person that you are.

What Makes a Personality?

We currently understand more about how our brains work than we ever have before. But understanding personality requires more than knowing what goes on in the brain. Combining information gleaned from psychology, neuroscience, and genetics, Why You Are Who You Are will open your eyes to the myriad ways our traits, emotions, beliefs, values, and behaviors are shaped by many different influences, including the genes were inherited, how we were raised, our environment, early evolutionary processes, and more.

Professor Leary has two overarching goals for Why You Are Who You Are:

• Understanding personality characteristics. You’ll learn about the most important personality variables that make people different from one another. These characteristics help to account for the variability we see among people—those traits, motives, values, beliefs, and emotional tendencies that make you, you.
• Exploring the roots of personality. Why do people end up with the personalities they have? To answer this question, multiple lectures reveal where these personality characteristics come from. You’ll start with the basic biological processes that underlie personality, then go on to the roles played by culture, learning, environment, and personal experiences.

Throughout Professor Leary’s illuminating lectures, five important personality traits come into focus, traits that form the foundation of how psychologists and neuroscientists approach the topic of personality:

• Extraversion. The central characteristic of this trait is sociability. People high in extraversion tend to be more gregarious and enjoy large social gatherings. (They also find it difficult to go for a long time without other people to talk to.)
• Neuroticism. People higher in neuroticism tend to experience negative emotions that are more intense and long-lasting, including anxiety, sadness, anger, guilt, and regret. Some researchers call this trait “negative emotionality.”
• Agreeableness. This trait involves the degree to which people generally have a positive or negative orientation toward others. At the low end are people who are unpleasant and hostile; at the high end are people who tend to be kind and sympathetic.
• Conscientiousness. To what degree are you responsible and dependable? Conscientiousness comes down to whether or not you usually do what you should. Conscientious people are organized and hard-working, and exercise good self-control.
• Openness. The last of the “big five” personality traits, openness reflects the degree to which people are open to new experiences and receptive to new ideas.

Why Do You Act the Way You Do?

Professor Leary expands on notions you may be familiar with (such as the nature-versus-nurture debate), shatters some commonly held myths (that self-esteem causes people to be successful and happy), and introduces you to some of the problems psychologists and other behavioral scientists obsess over as they try to understand personality (such as disentangling the vast variety of biological, social, and psychological processes that affect personality).

Here are just a few of the many ideas and topics you’ll probe throughout the lectures:

• Some aspects of your personality are situation-specific, meaning you consistently behave the same way in the same sorts of situations—but you don’t necessarily behave consistently across different situations.
• The fact that much of our personality operates outside our awareness, and that we can never be privy to these nonconscious influences, explains why it’s often so hard to change our behavior.
• Two foundations of moral judgments—whether or not an action helps or harms another person and whether or not an action involves fairness—are nearly universal across cultures.
• While people can change throughout their lives, in general, personality becomes more stable as people get older (with stability peaking somewhere between age 55 and 65).

An Engaging, Accessible Investigation

Throughout his career, Professor Leary has studied and explored the science behind our emotions, behaviors, and self-views. The author of 14 books and more than 200 scholarly articles and chapters, he has a breadth of experience he brings to every minute of Why You Are Who You Are. Throughout this course, you’ll find yourself in the company of an expert who doesn’t just know the complex science about personality—but who knows how to explain it to you in a way that makes sense.

“Sometimes, it’s really hard to see a difficult person’s redeeming qualities, no matter how hard we try,” Professor Leary says. “But the fact is, whether or not it really ‘takes all kinds,’ they’re all here anyway—us included. And the more we know about all these different kinds of people, including ourselves, the better off we’ll all be.”

The overarching goal of Why You Are Who You Are is to present the concept of personality as a vast, fascinating spectrum that offers a host of different perspectives on the nature and causes of our individual experiences of the world.

24 Lectures                                                                                                                                                                                          

Average 32 minutes each

1. What Is Personality?

In this introductory lecture, ground your understanding of personality in the concept of “proportion-of-variability,” which tells us how strongly related a particular personality characteristic is to behaviors, emotions, or other characteristics. As an example, you’ll consider a case study of the causes of delinquent behavior in teenage boys.

2. Key Traits: Extraversion and Neuroticism

There are five key traits that best help us understand a person’s behavior. Here, explore the two traits that give you the broadest picture of what a person is like. The first: extraversion, or your level of sociability. The second: neuroticism, the degree to which you experience negative emotions.

3. Are You Agreeable? Conscientious? Open?

Examine the three remaining building blocks of personality. You’ll learn about agreeableness, the degree to which you have a positive or negative orientation toward others; conscientiousness, the degree to which you’re responsible; and openness, or your receptivity to new experiences and idea. Plus, consider a sixth personality trait that’s starting to get attention.

4. Basic Motives Underlying Behavior

What motivates you to do the things you do each and every day? Professor Leary explores three motives that instigate and energize people’s behavior: the motive to interact with other people, the motive to achieve and be successful, and the motive to influence other people.

5. Intrapersonal Motives

There are other motives that underlie behavior—ones that don’t involve getting anything from the outside world. What are the benefits of these motives? After considering the Freudian roots of the subject, learn about three fascinating intrapersonal motives: for psychological consistency, for self-esteem, and for authenticity.

6. Positive and Negative Emotionality

A large part of who you are as a person depends on the kinds of emotions you experience as you walk through life. In this lecture, look at our general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. What, exactly, are emotions? What leads some people to have more positive – or negative – emotions than others?

7. Differences in Emotional Experiences

In addition to the general tendency to feel good and bad, we also differ in the degree to which we experience specific emotions such as anger, joy, guilt, and sadness. These tendencies, too, are an important part of your personality. As you’ll learn, they help explain why different people respond to the same event in different ways.

8. Values and Moral Character

When we talk about someone’s character, we’re referring to the degree to which that person tends to behave in ethical (or unethical) ways. In this illuminating lecture, take a look at moral aspects of personality from four critical angles: values, moral foundations, virtues, and character strengths.

9. Traits That Shape How You Think

Turn your attention to cognitive aspects of personality: characteristics related to people’s styles of thinking. Here, Professor Leary focuses on four cognitive characteristics that involve differences in the degree to which people are curious, make decisions quickly, critically evaluate their beliefs, and enjoy thinking.

10. Beliefs about the World and Other People

You are who you are partly because of the beliefs that you hold. Discover several big, broad beliefs that function like personality traits. These include people’s beliefs about human nature, fairness, and the beliefs and attitudes that underlie authoritarianism.

11. Beliefs about Yourself

Your beliefs about yourself have a dramatic impact on how you feel and behave. Take a closer look at four types of self-related beliefs: identity (who you think you are), self-efficacy (what you’re capable of doing), self-esteem (your evaluation of yourself), and self-compassion (how you think about yourself when bad things happen).

12. Personality and Social Relationships

Some of the most important differences among people involve their ways of relating to others. First, examine the differences in people’s attachment styles. Then, consider the tactics people use to persuade and influence others (with a focus on Machiavellians). Finally, explore three aspects of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern.

13. Consistency and Stability of Personality

People obviously don’t act the same way all the time, and personalities do change over the course of a life (at least within limits). Yet people do show stability in how they tend to think, feel, and behave. In this lecture, learn about the complexities that make personality both stable and changeable.

14 Evolution and Human Nature

The fact that certain personality characteristics can be seen in almost everybody probably reflects evolutionary processes. Learn why some aspects of behavior became part of a shared human personality; how some personality features evolved differently for men and women; and why people who live in different environments may develop different personalities.

15. Personality and the Brain

All differences we see in people’s personalities are based on differences in what’s happening somewhere in their brains. Unpack research being done on the neuroscience of personality, with a focus on four aspects of anatomy and physiology that involve brain regions, neurotransmitters, hormones, and bodily rhythms.

16. Genetic Influences on Personality

Take a closer look at the ways in which the genes you inherited from your parents have contributed to your personality. Topics in this lecture include heritability studies; the role genes play in people’s attitudes; and how genes can change our environment in ways that then affect our personality.

17. Learning to Be Who You Are

Professor Leary explains four learning processes that influence how people’s personalities turn out: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, observational learning, and personal experience. It’s a lecture that’ll change how you think about the ways learning has helped make you who you are.

18. How Culture Influences Personality

How might your personality have turned out differently if you’d grown up in a culture different from the one you grew up in? Explore this question by looking at several dimensions on which cultures differ: individualism versus collectivism, power distance, agentic versus communal orientations, and uncertainty avoidance.

19.Nonconscious Aspects of Personalit

Freud believed that much of what influences our behaviors occurs outside our conscious awareness. To understand people’s personalities, we have to consider unconscious processes—the topic of this lecture. What is our nonconscious? How can we determine someone’s nonconscious motives? How does this idea relate to behaviors like procrastination?

20.Personality and Self-Control

People differ in self-control, so understanding how we self-regulate is critical to understanding personality. After learning about the nature of self-regulation, examine the characteristics and skills that affect how well people control themselves. Then, learn important findings from studies of self-regulation in childhood and explore the relationship between self-regulation and impulsivity.

21. When Personalities Become Toxic

In the first of two lectures on the three broad clusters of personality disorders, consider the dramatic-emotional-erratic cluster, which includes the antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. As you’ll learn, these disorders all involve problems with emotional regulation and impulse control.

22. Avoidance, Paranoia, and Other Disorders

First, learn about a cluster of three personality disorders that involve excessive anxiety: the avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Then, explore a cluster that involves eccentric behaviors and distorted thinking: the paranoid personality disorder, the schizoid personality disorder, and the schizotypical personality disorder.

23.The Enigma of Being Yourself

Should you try to always be yourself? Can you tell when you’re not being yourself? Professor Leary considers the possibility that authenticity has some serious problems as a psychological construct—that it’s either not what we assume it is, or that it’s not as important as we typically think.

24.The Well-Adjusted Personality