The Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

  There’s also the manner of how the Big 5 theory came about. It is based on factor analysis (discussed in Chapter 4) of data produced by decades of personality research. Many different analyses by different people have found these five traits repeatedly, but what does this mean? Factor analysis just looks at the available data. Using factor analysis here is like putting several large buckets across town in order to collect rain. If one persistently fills up before the others, you can say the location of that bucket gets more rain than elsewhere. This is good to know, but it doesn’t tell you why, or how rain forms, or the various other important aspects. It’s useful information, but it’s just the start of understanding, not the conclusion.

  The Big-5 approach has been focused on here because it’s the most widespread, but it’s far from the only one. In the 1950s, Friedman and Rosenhan came up with Type-A and Type-B personalities,6 with Type-As being competitive, achievement-seeking, impatient and aggressive, and Type-Bs not being these things. These personality types were linked to the workplace, as Type-As often end up in management or high-flying positions due to their characteristics, but a study found that Type-As were twice as likely to suffer from heart attacks or other cardiac ailments. Having a personality type could literally kill you, which wasn’t encouraging. But follow-up studies suggested this tendency towards heart failure was due to other factors, such as smoking, poor diet, the strain of screaming at subordinates every eight minutes and so on. This Type-A/Type-B approach to personality was found to be too generalised. A more subtle approach was needed, hence the more detailed interest in traits.

  Much of the actual data that trait theories emerged from was based on linguistic analysis. Researchers including Sir Francis Galton in the 1800s and Raymond Cattell (the man behind fluid and crystallised intelligence) in the 1950s looked at the English language and assessed it for words that revealed personality traits. Words such as ‘nervous’, ‘anxious’ and ‘paranoid’ can all be used to describe neuroticism, whereas words such as ‘sociable’, ‘friendly’ and ‘supportive’ can apply to agreeableness. Theoretically, there can be only as many terms of this kind as there are personality traits to apply them to – the so-called Lexical Hypothesis.7 The descriptive words were all collated and crunched and the specific personality types emerged from it, and provided a lot of data for the formation of later theories.

  There are problems with this approach too, primarily as it depends on language, something that varies between cultures and is constantly in flux. Other more sceptical types argue that approaches such as the trait theory are too restrictive to be truly representative of a personality: nobody behaves the same way in all contexts; the external situation matters. An extrovert may be outgoing and excitable, but if they’re at a funeral or an important business meeting they wouldn’t behave in an extroverted manner (unless they’ve got deep-seated issues), so they would handle each occasion differently. This theory is known as situationism.

  Despite all the scientific debate, personality tests are common.

  Completing a quick quiz, and then being told you conform to a certain type, is a bit of fun. We feel we have a certain type of personality, and completing a test that says we do have this type validates our assumptions. It might be a free test on some poorly assembled website that keeps asking us to sign up to an online casino every six seconds, but a test is a test. The classic is the Rorschach test, where you look at an unspecified pattern of blobs and say what you see, such as ‘butterflies emerging from a cocoon’, or ‘the exploded head of my therapist who asked me too many questions’. While this might reveal something of an individual’s personality, it isn’t something that can be verified. A thousand very similar people could look at the same image and give a thousand different answers. Technically, this is a very accurate demonstration of the complexity and variability of personality, but it’s not scientifically useful.

  But it’s not all frivolous. The most worrying and widespread use of personality tests is in the corporate world. You may be familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), one of the most popular personality-measuring tools in the world, worth millions of dollars. The trouble is, it is not supported or approved by the scientific community. It looks rigorous and sounds proper (it too relies on scales of traits, extrovert–introvert being the most well-known one), but it’s based on untested decades-old assumptions put together by enthusiastic amateurs, working from a single source.8 Nonetheless, at some point it was seized on by business types who wanted to manage employees in the most effective manner, and thus it became globally popular. It now has hundreds of thousands of proponents who swear by it. But then, so do horoscopes.

  One explanation for this is the MBTI is relatively straightforward and easily understood, and allows sorting of employees into useful categories that help predict their behaviour and manage them accordingly. You employ an introvert? Put her in a position where she can work alone and don’t disturb her. Meanwhile, take the extroverts and put them in charge of publicity and engagement; they like that.

  At least, that’s the theory. But it can’t possibly work in practice, because humans are nowhere near that simple. Many corporations use the MBTI as an integral component of their hiring policies, a system that relies on the applicant being 100 per cent honest and almost as clueless. If you’re applying for a job and they make you do a test which asks, ‘Do you enjoy working with others?’, you’re unlikely to put, ‘No, others are vermin, only there to be crushed’, even if you do think this. The majority of people have sufficient intelligence to play it safe with such tests, thus rendering the results meaningless.

  The MBTI is regularly used as an irrefutable gold standard by non-scientific types who don’t know better and have been caught up in the hype. The MBTI being infallible could only ever be the case if everyone who completed it actively played along with their personality diagnoses. But they won’t. The fact that it would be helpful for managers if people conformed to limited and easily understood categories doesn’t mean it’s what happens.

  Overall, personality tests would be more useful if our personalities didn’t get in the way.

  Do blow your fuse

  (How anger works and why it can be a good thing)

  Bruce Banner has a famous catchphrase: ‘Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.’ When Banner becomes angry, he turns into the Incredible Hulk, world-famous comic-book character beloved by millions. So the catchphrase is clearly untrue.

  Also, who does like someone when they’re angry? Granted, some people display ‘righteous fury’ when they get fired up about an injustice, and those who agree will cheer them on. But anger is generally seen as a negative, largely because it produces irrational behaviour, upset and even violence. If it’s so harmful, why is the human brain so keen to produce it in response to even the most irrelevant-seeming occurrence?

  What exactly is anger? A state of emotional and physiological arousal, typically experienced when some sort of boundary is violated. Someone collides with you in the street? Your physical boundary has been violated. Someone borrows money from you and won’t give it back? Your financial or resource boundary has been violated. Someone expresses views you find incredibly offensive? Your moral boundary has been violated. If it is obvious that whoever has violated your boundary has done so on purpose, this is provocation, and results in even greater levels of arousal, thus more anger. It’s the difference between spilling someone’s drink and actively throwing it in their face. Not only have your boundaries been violated; someone did it deliberately, for their benefit at your expense. The brain has been responding to trolls since long before the Internet.

  The recalibration theory of anger, put forward by evolutionary psychologists,9 argues that anger evolved to deal with scenarios like this, as a sort of self-defence mechanism. Anger provides a quick subconscious way of reacting to a situation that has caused you to lose out, making it more likely you’ll address the balance and ensure self-preservation. Imagin
e a primate ancestor, painstakingly making a stone axe via his newly evolved cortex. It takes time and effort to make these new-fangled ‘tools’, but they are useful. Then, once completed, someone comes and takes it for himself. A primate that responds by quietly sitting and mulling on the nature of possession and morality may seem the smarter one, but the one that gets angry and punches the thief in the jaw with his ape-like fists gets to keep his tool and is far less likely to be disrespected again, thus increasing his status and chances of mating.

  That’s the theory, anyway. Evolutionary psychology does seem to have a habit of oversimplifying things like this, which itself angers people.

  In a strictly neurological sense, anger is often the response to a threat, and the ‘threat-detection system’ is strongly implicated in anger. The amygdala, hippocampus and periaqueductal grey, all regions of the midbrain responsible largely for fundamental processing of sensory information, make up our threat-detection system, and thus have roles in triggering anger. However, the human brain, as we saw earlier, keeps using the primitive threat-detection system to navigate the modern world and considers being laughed at by colleagues because a co-worker keeps doing unflattering impressions of you as a ‘threat’. This doesn’t harm you in any physical sense, but your reputation and social standing are at risk. End result, you get angry.

  Brain-scanning studies, such as those conducted by Charles Carver and Eddie Harmon-Jones, have shown that subjects who are angered demonstrate raised levels of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region often associated with the control of emotions and goal-orientated behaviour.10 This basically means that when the brain wants something to happen, it induces or encourages behaviour that will cause this thing to happen, often via emotions. In the case of anger, something happens, your brain experiences it, decides that it’s really not happy about it, and produces an emotion (anger) in order to respond and effectively deal with it in a satisfactory manner.

  Here’s where it gets more interesting. Anger is seen as destructive and irrational, negative and harmful. But it turns out anger is sometimes useful, indeed helpful. Anxiety and threats (of many sorts) cause stress, which is a big problem, largely because it triggers release of the hormone cortisol, producing the unpleasant physiological consequences that make stress so harmful. But many studies, such as that done by Miguel Kazén and his colleagues for Universität Osnabrück,11 show that experiencing anger lowers cortisol, thus reducing the potential harm caused by stress.

  One explanation for this is that studies* have shown anger causes raised activity in the left hemisphere of the brain, in the anterior cingulate cortex in the middle of the brain, and the frontal cortex. These regions are associated with producing motivation and responsive behaviour. They are present in both brain hemispheres, but do different things on each side; in the right hemisphere they produce negative, avoidance or withdrawal reactions to unpleasant things, and in the left hemisphere produce positive, active, approach behaviour.

  To put it simply, when it comes to this motivational system being presented with a threat or a problem, the right half says, ‘No, stay back, it’s dangerous, don’t make it worse!’, causing you to recoil or hide. The left half says, ‘No, I’m not having this, it needs to be dealt with’, before metaphorically rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck in. The metaphorical devil and angel on your shoulder are actually lodged in your head.

  People with a more confident, extroverted personality probably have a dominant left side, while for neurotic or introverted types it’s likely to be the right. But the right side’s influence doesn’t lead to anything being done about apparent threats, so they persist, causing anxiety and stress. Available data suggests that anger increases activity in left hemisphere system,12 potentially prompting someone into action in the manner of someone shoving a hesitant person off a diving board. Lowering cortisol at the same time limits the anxiety response that can ‘freeze’ people. Eventually dealing with the stress-causing thing lowers cortisol further.† Similarly, anger has also been shown to make people think more optimistically, so rather than fearing the worst from a potential outcome, it encourages people to think any issue can be dealt with (even if that’s wrong), so any threat is minimised.

  Studies have also shown that visible anger is useful in negotiations, even if both parties are showing it, as there’s more motivation to obtain something, greater optimism as to the outcome, and an implied honesty to all that is said.13

  All this disputes the idea that you should bottle up anger, and suggests you should instead let it out in order to reduce stress and get things done.

  But, as ever, anger is not so simple. It comes from the brain, after all. We’ve developed many ways to suppress the anger response. The classic ‘count to ten’ or ‘take deep breaths before responding’ strategies make sense when you consider the anger response is very quick and intense.

  The orbitofrontal cortex, highly active during experiences of anger, is involved with the control of emotions and behaviour. More specifically, it modulates and filters emotional influence over behaviour, damping down or blocking our more intense and/or primitive impulses. When an intense emotion is most likely to cause us to behave dangerously, the orbitofrontal cortex steps in as a sort of stopgap, acting like the overflow outlet on a bathtub with a leaky tap; it doesn’t address the underlying problem, but stops it from getting too bad.

  The immediate visceral sensation of anger isn’t always the extent of it. Something that angers you can leave you seething for hours or days, even weeks. The initial threat-detection system leading to anger involves the hippocampus and amygdala, areas we know are involved in forming vivid and emotionally charged memories, so the anger-causing occurrence would persist in the memory, leading us to dwell on it, or ‘ruminate’ to give it the official term. Subjects ruminating on something that made them angry show increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, another area involved in making decisions, plans and other complex mental actions.

  As a result, we often see anger persisting, even building up. This is especially the case for minor irritations we have no response for. Anger may make your brain want to address the aggravating problem, but what if it’s a vending machine that didn’t give you any change? Or someone recklessly cut you up on the motorway? Or your boss saying you need to work late at 4.56 p.m.? All of these cause anger but there are no options for dealing with them, unless you want to commit vandalism/crash your car/get fired. And these things can all happen on the same day. So now your brain is in a state of having multiple angering things to dwell on and no obvious options to deal with them. The left-hand element of your behavioural response system is urging you to do something, but what is there to do?

  Then a waiter accidentally brings you a black coffee instead of a latte and then that’s your limit. The hapless service person gets both barrels of an enraged tirade. This is ‘displacement’. The brain has all this anger built up but no outlet, and transfers it onto the first viable target it encounters, just to release the cognitive pressure. This doesn’t make it any more pleasant for the person who unintentionally opened the furious floodgates.

  If you are angry and don’t want to show it, the brain’s versatility means there are ways to be aggressive without using crude violence. You can be ‘passive aggressive’, where you make another person’s life miserable via behaviour they can’t really object to. Talking to them less or speaking to them neutrally when you’re normally quite friendly, inviting all your mutual friends to social events but not them; neither of these behaviours are definitely hostile, but as a result they lead to uncertainty. The other person is upset or uncomfortable but they can’t say for sure if you’re angry at them, and the human brain doesn’t like ambiguity or uncertainty; it finds them distressing. Thus the other person is punished without violence or violation of social norms.

  This passive-aggressive method can work because humans are very good at recognising when another person is angry. Body language, express
ion, tone of voice, chasing you with a rusty machete while screaming; your typical brain can pick up on all these subtle cues and deduce anger. This can be helpful, as people don’t like it when others are angry; it means they present a possible threat or may behave in harmful or upsetting ways. But it also reveals that something has genuinely aggrieved that person.

  Another important thing to remember is the experience of anger and the response to anger are not the same thing. The sensation of anger is arguably the same for everyone, but how people react to it varies substantially, another indication of personality type. The emotional response when someone threatens you is anger. Should you respond by behaving in a manner that will harm whoever’s responsible, this is aggression. To round it off, the thinking about causing harm to someone is hostility, the cognitive component of aggression. You catch a neighbour painting a swear word onto your car, you experience anger. You think, ‘I’m going to absolutely batter them for this’ – that’s hostility. You throw a brick through their front window in response, that’s aggression.‡

  So should we let ourselves get angry or not? I’m not suggesting you go and row with colleagues or force them through the office shredder every time they irritate you, but be aware that anger isn’t always a bad thing. However, moderation is key. Angry people tend to have their needs addressed before people who make polite requests. This means you get people who realise that being angry benefits them, so they do it more often. The brain eventually associates constant anger with rewards, so encourages it further, and you end up with someone who gets angry at the slightest inconvenience just to get their own way, and then they inevitably become a celebrity chef. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is down to you.