Some Links
Scott Barry Kaufman on activist psychology; Leon Voss on college and adolescence; Timothy Taylor on what managers do; Oliver Kim on hierarchy in the economics profession
people with narcissistic and/or psychopathic personality traits are attracted to certain ideologies and forms of political activism. They...use activism as a vehicle to satisfy their own ego-focused needs instead of actually working toward social justice
Quoted by Rob Henderson. Not all activists have these personality traits. But activism may provide an outlet for some that do have them. At least since Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, people have speculated that some political behavior serves personal psychological needs. This has been a week to think about political psychology.
Henderson also points to an article by Hannah Spier on the evolution of autism diagnosis.
Kanner’s original understanding of autism was fairly rigid and recognized a distinct group with unmistakable qualities: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures. These were not quirky introverts. These were children who required full-time care and specialized schooling.
The most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. Subtypes were eliminated. Autism became a spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: first, social-communication difficulties; second, restrictive and repetitive behaviors. … a 30-year-old who recalls feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing can receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care.
I recall reading that parents of a child who was autistic under the original definition resent the trend to calling lots of behavior autistic.
Personality psychology is a challenge. Everyone is at least an amateur personality psychologist. In order to get along among other people, we need theories of how they feel and behave. One hopes that the professionals in academia and clinical practice know more than the rest of us. But not necessarily.
now university attendance is ever increasing, and people are talking about making it universal.
Caplan would say this is because of a signaling arms race. I would say it’s because teenagers and their parents want school, and as society becomes wealthier, they will vote for longer educations that cover more of the teen years.
…Something like 70% of teenagers enroll but only 25% finish, or 35% of those who enroll. It’s not like the work is hard, it’s just that they’re going for the liberal boarding school experience and lose interest in their marketing degree when they’re 20 or 21 and leave for work. Quite literally, the majority don’t go to signal, they go for other reasons and leave when those reasons become unimportant to them.
Economists have been thinking for a long time about the operation of buying and selling in markets. However, they have traditionally spent less time studying what happens inside a firm–a setting in which forces of supply and demand are replaced by managerial decision-making. Anyone who has had both a good boss and bad boss knows that it makes a difference, but how and why? Alan Benson and Kathryn Shaw tackle the research on this question in “What Do Managers Do? An Economist’s Perspective” (Annual Review of Economics, 2025, 17: 635-664).
He goes on to cite other studies as well. I imagine that economists could find a large literature if they walked next door to the business school.
According to a 2022 study in Nature, 6% of academic economists place at a higher-ranked school than their PhD, third-last among all fields after Classics & Religious Studies, and less than half the average for social sciences
In economics, MIT, Chicago, and Harvard export many more of their students to lesser departments than the other way around. I think of the top economics departments as a back-scratching cartel. I did not realize that this is less true in other disciplines.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Kim’s post is mostly about the recent downturn in the hiring of economists.
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The change in the autism definition was part of a broader philosophy in DSM-V (and in modern psychology/psychiatry). Put bluntly, everyone is somewhat weird. Some are weirder in some way that others. If the weirdness makes if hard to live your life or do what you want to do, then it becomes a "disorder." And once if becomes a disorder and has a name, a medical professional can treat it and charge insurance.
Or to put it a different way, most disorders are the tails of a distribution. They are one end of a spectrum.
So lots of people have rigidities. When I see a pile (say, of books) that do not have the biggest ones at the bottom, I want to "fix" it. When those rigidities become too much, a person has obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Some people hear voices. But most everyone gets "earworms", snatches of songs that play in your head without conscious action. Social workers will often notice that the families of clients diagnosed with schizophrenia contain one or more unusual people.
Personality Psychology Final Exam
1) True or false? “Personality psychology is a challenge.”
2) Multiple choice: “Personality psychology is”
A) a challenge.
B) a pseudoscience.
C) a quasi-science.
D) All of the above
3) Note the discrete similarities and differences between these smiley face characters. What characteristics do they have in common? Assign them to groups based on these similarities.
4) Note the non-discrete psychological similarities and differences between these real humans.
What characteristic do they have in common? Please assign them to discrete groups.