Last week, I talked about the basic traits that underlie our personalities. Psychologists refer to them by the acronym OCEAN and they describe at a broad level how we essentially react to stimulus that we both encounter and create. Are we Open to new stimuli? Are we Conscientious about the stimuli we put into the world? Are we Extroverted about putting that stimuli out there? Are we prickly or Agreeable when it comes to accommodating new stimuli? And do we calmly or Neurotically accept that new stimuli into our experience? These basic leanings of our responses are just the first level of our personality though. We are complicated beings with varying needs and the world is full of stimuli of varying qualities. Our basic responses cannot be used across the board for everything that we encounter. And so we have other levels of personality to handle these complications. As a quick reminder, here again is what I wrote in my philosophy about our levels of personality:

Our individual bodies and minds combine to give us personalities. Psychologists currently list three levels of personality.

1. Basic Traits / The Big Five (OCEAN) - Openness to new experiences, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
2. Characteristic Adaptations - personal goals, defense mechanisms, values, beliefs, life stage concerns
3. Life Story - past, present, and future woven into a vitalizing myth

If the basic traits are concerned with how we generally respond to stimulus, the characteristic adaptations are about how we specifically evaluate different kinds of stimuli as good or bad according to our own world views. How do we handle bad stimulus? With defense mechanisms. What do we do when we see good stimulus? We set personal goals to reach them. How do we know what is good or bad? With our values and our beliefs - in other words, our morals. And are there certain times when we evaluate different aspects of the world around us? Of course - during the different life stages that we go through. Let's examine each of these four questions individually.

First, what parts of our personality do we build as we grow and develop through life? The most accepted and influential theory that answers this question comes from Erik Erikson's work during the 1950's through 1980's. He proposed a theory that lists eight stages of human development. They are:

1. Infant. In this stage, you are answering the question, "Can I trust the world?" As your hopes and needs are met or unmet, you develop feelings of trust or mistrust of the world.
2. Toddler. In this stage, you are answering the question, "Is it ok to be me?" As you express your will, you learn whether it is ok to feel autonomy or shame and doubt when you act.
3. Pre-School. In this stage, you are answering the question, "Is it ok for me to do, move, and act?" In addition to simple autonomy, your actions now have a quality of planning to them and you learn to trust your initiative when plans go well or feel guilt when they go poorly.
4. School Child. In this stage, you are answering the question, "Can I make it in the world of people and things?" You are now entering a society of your peers and your relative competence gives you feelings of industriousness or inferiority.
5. Adolescent. In this stage, you are answering the questions, "Who am I? What can I be?" You try things out, move in different circles, and begin to develop an identity that you feel a fidelity towards, or you suffer role confusion if your experiments do not feel right.
6. Young Adult. In this stage, you are answering the question, "Can I love and be loved?" You make deep friendships or romantic attachments and learn to build intimacy rather than remain in isolation.
7. Middle Adult. In this stage, you are answering the question, "Can I make my life count?" As you learn to care for people or things over long periods of time, you produce things that will last beyond you or you stagnate and leave things as they are.
8. Late Adult. In this final stage, you are answering the question, "Is it ok to have been me?" As you look back on your life, you see the wisdom of your actions now that the long-term consequences of your intentions are known. If your life has been successful, you feel ego integrity. If you judge it to have been a failure, you may fall into despair.

These stages are not relegated only to these times in one's life and they are not done only one at a time. You can be successful at later stages having had difficulty in earlier times in your life or you may falter after many successes. That's ok. It is never too late to identify and add the positive elements from these stages to your current personality.

Next, as you go through these stages, not everything will always go well for you. In order to deal with these hard knocks of life, we develop defense mechanisms to guard our views of ourselves. These defense mechanisms also develop (or regress) as we go through life, and they do so through four different levels according to George Vaillant's theory from 1977. The four levels are:

1. Pathological Defenses - psychotic denial, delusional projection, megalomania, paranoia
2. Immature Defenses - fantasy, passive agressive, acting out, projection
3. Neurotic Defenses - intellectualization, dissociation, repression
4. Mature Defenses - humor, sublimation, suppression, altruism, anticipation

Obviously, we would like to develop the way we handle adversity until it can be said that we do so with mature defense mechanism. I find it easier to do this now that I am aware of it, but it does take practice, reflection, and sometimes a breath or two to tame my elephant and let my destructive emotions wash away.

The third question that indicates a characteristic adaptation of our second level of personality is, "How do we know what is right or wrong?" What are the values and beliefs we hold that drive us to progress nicely through life or put up our defenses in a negative reaction? I'm not talking about a universal morality just yet (that will come later in my discussion of ethics), but the personal development of morality that any individual can go through. Once again, a theory of stages of development for these traits has been put forth by the psychological community - this time by Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1950's and 1960's. His three levels of moral development are:

1. Pre Conventional Morality - Rules are external and merely self-serving. Avoiding punishment or gaining rewards are the primary motivators.
   
2. Conventional Morality - Others play a major role in morality. Feelings of empathy are considered. One wants to have good interpersonal relationships and maintain social order.
3. Principled or Postconventional Morality - Moral rules are based on universal principles of justice, equality, the social contract, and individual rights.

If you are reading a blog about philosophy, you are clearly concerned with principled level three morality. Unfortunately, this is rather rare as some studies have found that only 10-15% of 30 year olds reach this level of moral consideration. Examining the news headlines, it is easy to see that many business and political leaders are not among these principled few, so in your own way, spread the word for others to follow this path. (Maybe email this article to a friend or share it on Facebook?)

Finally, lets examine the last question for this level of personality - what positive stimuli should we strive for once we've built our strong and mature personalities? In the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt reported on four broad categories of life goals that psychologists have identified. They are:

1. Work and Achievement
2. Relationships and Intimacy
3. Religion and Spirituality
4. Generativity & Legacy Leaving
   

While an examination of the other areas of personality led to fairly obvious "best practices" for a happy and successful life, this final area is not so easy to choose from. And that is a good thing. If everyone were striving for the same goals with the same perfect personalities, we would become a very one-dimensional and one-directional species. But these broad categories are just a hint of the amazing diversity with which we can spend our lives. It is probably not a wise idea to choose from only one of these areas for your life's goals, but I encourage you to find balance among them and then spend your time on them accordingly. Once you do that, you'll pretty much have figured out the meaning of life - at least for your life anyway.

Let's take a few steps to talk about the OCEAN in our lives.

I'm sure all of you have come across someone at work who didn't want to learn a new piece of software or a new way of doing things just because, "that's not the way we've done things around here." Or maybe you've had a boss who said they would absolutely do something to make your job much easier, only they got really busy and months later you felt bad pestering them again with the same request. There was also the colleague who went to a meeting with you where it was vital they share a piece of information they had...but they just refused to speak up. Perhaps you remember a senior executive who stomped around and yelled at your team because he thought that would really motivate you. And finally, after running into all those people, you probably tossed and turned in bed worrying about how you were ever going to be happy at work. For the most part, you or these other people had all the skills needed to do the job. HR screened everyone, interviewed them, and happily hired them. Yet something's failing in the actual work setting. What goes wrong?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that introduced us to the roots of personality. I mentioned that in the personality section of my Evolutionary Philosophy, I said the following:

Psychologists currently list three levels of personality.

1. Basic Traits / The Big Five (OCEAN) - Openness to new experiences, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
2. Characteristic Adaptations - personal goals, defense mechanisms, values, beliefs, life stage concerns
3. Life Story - past, present, and future woven into a vitalizing myth

This week, I wanted to go into a little more detail about the first level of personality - your basic traits. Look again at those five examples of dysfunction in the workplace that I talked about at the top of this piece. They are all failures of basic personality traits. The co-worker who doesn't want to learn anything new is not O - open to new experiences. The boss who couldn't come through for you was not C - conscientious. The wallflower in a situation that required expression was missing some E - extroversion. The harsh executive was not A - agreeable. (And he likely got to his position because others mistook short-term results and overconfidence for true leadership.) And finally, when we struggle to deal with all these issues and take them on ourselves, we become a little too N - neurotic.

Most people think your personality is something you are born with, that it is immutable, something you can't change. But look at each of these elements of your basic OCEAN traits. Can you not improve each and every one of them? Can you not take shallow steps into new waters until you are eventually swimming in the deep end and perfectly comfortable being Open to new experiences? Can you not gather tips to organize your life and prioritize better so you can be more Conscientious about your commitments? Have you not seen people take public speaking classes through toastmasters and blossom into Extroverts on command? Do we not know of people who have had crises in their lives or sudden insights into the pain they have caused around them and vow to be more Agreeable? And who among us doesn't hope to become calmer and more resilient with age and see our Neuroses subside? All five of these traits are malleable if we know them and recognize the need to change them. A free 10-minute online test of your Big Five is available. Go try it out. Know thyself. I'm an O-96, C-98, E-48, A-69, N-14. I'm happy with my Openness and Conscientiousness. I'm pretty balanced between my extrovert sociability and introvert bookishness. I want to work a little though on my neuroses and try to be a bit more agreeable.

What about you?

So I made it to my new home in Canberra last Friday. It's a real car-centric kind of place, but since I have no car, I've spent much of the first week walking around to grocery stores and bike shops to keep nourished and try to attain some form of mobility. But even with lots to take care of, I did take a break to watch the Super Bowl. It was Monday morning, 10 a.m., a beautiful summer day in a brand new country, and I hunkered down in front of an old laptop to watch a choppy video of grown men bashing themselves to pieces on the other side of the world, 17 time zones in the past. Why?

Partly, I do this to fit in. It's the most watched event every year and as much of a misfit as I am as a philosophical author, I do like to keep tabs on what the majority of society is up to. It's comforting to share a cultural story with so many others.

Partly, I do this to admire others. As Maslow noted, this is one of the higher level needs and desires we possess. I've played a lot of sports in my life and really appreciate the talent and dedication it takes to be a professional athlete. Their grace, power, coordination, and decision-making abilities are a wondrous sight to behold.

And partly, I do this because sports is great drama. As noted filmmaker Andrew Stanton (Toy Story, Wall-E) said in his TED talk about "The clues to a great story", drama is anticipation mixed with uncertainty. This is exactly sports in a nutshell. We anticipate that someone will win, but when two evenly matched teams meet on the field, we really don't know what will happen.

But these partial explanations are true for most sports. Why has football in particular - and the Super Bowl itself - captured the highest point in the sporting landscape? And why is that the one American sporting event I still go way out of my way to enjoy no matter where I am in the world?

Surely there are many small reasons about the Americanness of the game, the nature of the rules which allows for many commercial breaks (important to its money making prowess as well as providing time for particularly entertaining ads during the biggest game of the year), and perhaps even the primal adrenaline rush we get from watching such a fast and violent sport. But intellectually, I like to believe that there is a deeper underlying cause for football's popularity.

Possibly the biggest theme that runs through my Evolutionary Philosophy is the need for wisdom to judge the balance required between the two basic strategies for survival - competition and cooperation. No other options best explain the actions we choose between whenever we interact with another form of life and I would argue that no other sport requires the balance of these two strategies at such a high level. In baseball, basketball, soccer (English Football as I like to call it), tennis, hockey, or any other sport I can think of, individual players play a much larger role in the outcome of the game. And on the flip side, individual players can also take more time off from contributing to the success of their team if they choose to do so. In football, especially the modern variation played at the level of the NFL, all 11 players on the field for each side have to coordinate with their teammates to block, tackle, cover, draw attention, or move the ball in extremely complex choreographed ways. The after-match analysis of the NFL can be almost as complex as chess literature, yet the game itself moves at speeds and strengths that are just awesome to watch for an average person.

That's the good side of sports and football. Now for the bad news. In addition to the season-long concerns about head trauma and gun culture in the NFL, there have been so many bad stories about sports in the past month that I wonder if we are at a crossroads where the balance between competition and cooperation has moved so far out of whack that the future of professional sports is in real doubt. Players say it, the President expresses concerns for it, and even marquee events like the Pro Bowl may be cancelled because essentially, the game has become too dangerous to play well when nothing is on the line.

And it's not just football that has been affected. In early January, no one was elected into baseball's Hall of Fame because of concerns about the steroid use era. In mid January, Lance Armstrong confessed to a massive history of doping and a coordinated effort to lie about it. At the end of January, there was an interview by essayist Chuck Klosterman that gave us the story of Houston Rocket Royce White and his concerns about how the NBA is handling mental illness and the ills of modern society. And finally, on February 1st, the most read sportswriter in America wrote a long story on Performance Enhancing Drugs and what it has done to the modern sports athlete as well as the perception of normal observers.

So many specific questions arose during this time period - who did what, when did they do it, why did they do it, who helped, who covered it up, etc., etc., but I want to tackle one general question about these crises in professional sports that I was really surprised to see gain some traction:

Why don't we just let athletes do whatever they want?

Here's why. Because it's bad. As in objectively the opposite of good. From the standpoint of the evolutionary philosophy I have developed so far, basic tenet #5 describes what I mean by "good":

5. A universal definition of good arises from nature. Good is that which enables the long-term survival of life.

Clearly, many of the PEDs and blood doping practices and violent collisions that are commonplace in professional sports these days are detrimental to the long-term health of the participants. Prizes of money, the trappings of fame, and the lure of historical immortality are so great that individuals will sacrifice themselves for the hope of these gains, but should we as a society let them? To me, the obvious answer is no. I do not want to bear witness to that kind of sacrifice. Like wild animals who do not fight to the death for mating privileges, we should compete up to a point. Beyond that, we should go no further. Unlike the other animals though, our point can be placed much further down the spectrum of danger to oneself. Can we eliminate all risks? Surely not. But we can sensibly debate where lines are to be drawn and we can continue research to tell us if they need to be adjusted. Does this mean some currently banned substances should be allowed? Probably. Let's conduct real inquiries into that using the long-term survival of life as our guide.

From some basic understandings of evolution, particularly that of Evolutionarily Stable Systems, we know that: "Systems remain evolutionarily stable when cheaters do not continually win." Once cheating is allowed to succeed, the rules change, and the system becomes unstable. Sports can have such great benefit to our physical and mental health, our need for play, our love of a good story, and for learning and practicing the wisdom required to balance self vs. society, short term vs. long term, and competition vs. cooperation. When cheaters continually undermine this system, they threaten to bring the whole thing crashing down. This is not something we should be prepared to allow. Not for the sake of money, not for the sake of TV ratings, and certainly not for the sake of appearance.

As a society, we must cooperate to survive. Cooperation is enhanced when cheaters are punished and their tarnished reputations are spread to the rest of the group. In that spirit, let's hope these latest public examples of cheaters leads to a change in the way we view cheating, a change in the way we view competition vs. cooperation, and a change to a brighter future for honest competition up to the point that it is beneficial for the long-term survival of life.