E19 - Interview with Brent Roberts (Destroyer of Myths) Part 2: Personality Impacts on Relationships, Divorce, and Parenting (and Dungeons & Dragons Personality Types?)

In this episode we are excited to bring you part 2 of our interview with Dr. Brent Roberts, Professor of Psychology and renowned personality psychologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In our opening segment, Alvin shares some survey data about which Dungeons and Dragons personality types people associate with and we discuss which of these character traits we identify with most (4:49-24:10), and then Jack gives a brief summary of some new papers he found in which the economists and psychologists call each other out on their interpretations of the u-shaped life happiness curve (24:15-30:00). In part two of our interview with Dr. Roberts (30:00-1:13:17), we discuss the impact of personality and personality change on Relationships and divorce, personality disorders, the interplay between personality traits and psychopathology, personal identity and how it might change over time for individuals, and the resilience of our core personality traits to external life events. We end the interview discussing the books iGen by Jean Twenge and The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, how the narratives of these books relate to parenting, and Dr. Roberts discusses issues he has with social scientists running with these types of ideas that might seem intuitive, but are not clearly backed up by the data. After the interview we briefly reflect on how our broader identities may have changed over the years but our “personality zones” have likely remained fairly stable, and we briefly discuss the point Dr. Roberts made about how what we do as parents likely has much less impact on our kids’ outcomes than we might intuitively think (1:13:21-1:33:48). David (Danny) Blanchflower papers: 2021 Perspectives on Psychological Science paper: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.dartmouth.edu/dist/5/2216/files/2021/07/u-shape-perspectives.pdf 2023 International Journal of Psychiatry paper: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.dartmouth.edu/dist/5/2216/files/2023/02/a-response-to-another-attempt-to-move-beyond-the-crosssectional-u-shape-of-happiness-a-reply-by-galambos-krahn-johnson-a-2.pdf Nancy Galambos paper: 2021 International Journal of Psychiatry paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211008823 Email: [email protected] Twitter (X): @midlifepod2023