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209. Who Are You Really? On Personality and Flourishing with Professor Brian Little

• William Wadsworth • Episode 209

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In this final very special episode to round out 2025, we welcome world-renowned personality expert Professor Brian Little to help us answer the question: who are you really?

As one of the great scholars of our time in the field of personality psychology, Professor Little's wonderfully engaging teaching style has also won him “favourite teacher” accolades at Harvard and found him described as a cross between seeing Robin Williams and Einstein on stage. 

Professor Little helps us explore how your personality traits, character and goals interact to shape your learning, engagement, memory, attention and ability to flourish. We connect the Big Five personality traits with study strategies, teaching craft, and the real costs and benefits of acting out of character. With plenty of concrete examples to help you approach life in personal projects in a way that suits who you are.

Plus a whole segment especially for educators looking for novel ways to engage every student, especially those who are struggling.

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Find out more about today’s guest, Professor Brian Little:

• Discover more resources on his website: https://www.brianrlittle.com/

• Find Brian’s TED Talk: “Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality” here: https://youtu.be/qYvXk_bqlBk?si=QAWWBgh1HT0yDqtV

• And his talk for TEDxOxbridge here: https://youtu.be/NZ5o9PcHeL0?si=MPZRzgPDoZM1B84K

• Dive into Professor Brian Little’s bestselling book, Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being right here: https://geni.us/memyselfus *

• Or find yourself in his second book, Who Are You, Really? The Surprising Puzzle of Personality  here: https://geni.us/whoareyoureallylittle *

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Find out more about Exam Study Expert:

Hosted by [William Wadsworth], memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills coach. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress.
   
 • BOOK 1:1 COACHING to supercharge your exam success: https://examstudyexpert.com/workwithme/

• Get a copy of Outsmart Your Exams, my award-winning exam technique book, at https://geni.us/exams *


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 Podcast edited by Kerri Edinburgh.

 * As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases on suggested books.  

Questions? Comments? Requests? Or just want to say "thanks" - send me a text message (I read them all!).

William Wadsworth:

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast, and to a very special end-of-year episode to round out 2025. Our big question today is: who are you really? To help us understand this fascinating area of personality psychology, we are joined by one of the great researchers and professors in the field, Professor Brian Little. Professor Little's teaching has been described as being like a cross between seeing Robin Williams and Einstein on stage. He's a wonderfully entertaining, wonderfully engaging presenter and teacher. In addition to being an incredibly respected researcher in the field of personality psychology and one of the great scholars of our times in this fascinating field. Professor Little has been named favorite professor by the graduating class at Harvard three years in a row. And I had the joy of being taught by him myself. I've never been to Harvard, but he was at Cambridge for a little while. And I had the joy of being in one of his classes, and it was a total blast. And I've kind of had it in the back of my mind to reach out to him one day and build up the courage to invite him onto the show. And when I went and looked him up recently, it turns out that us university students couldn't keep this great man to ourselves for too long. And since I was in his class, he's gone on to become quite the force in this field. He's gone on to write a popular book, Me, Myself, and Us, The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-being, which was an Amazon bestseller. And he's done a TED talk, Who Are You Really? Which has been viewed over 20 million times. Today's talk uh loosens the scope of our podcast just a touch, as we sometimes do uh in and around uh the end of the year and at the end of uh at the end of a season. As you'll hear, there are some really interesting tie-ins between personality and studying. And there are some important practical takeaways today. I, for example, have used some of Brian's ideas uh quite a lot to help guide me and make some of the big major life decisions in the past decade or two. And I certainly am conscious of what Brian has taught about your personality and the way that impacts how you interact the world. And that actually informs and shapes a huge amount of kind of what I do, both in terms of the big picture decisions and some of the little day-to-day things as well. It's been really influential for me in my life. So while there are certainly practical takeaways, uh, and I hope to have a big uh kind of a useful influence on you and your kind of understanding of you and how you can perform best. Um I also just wanted this episode to just be a really fascinating, interesting less, perhaps a little longer than our normal lesson, perhaps perfect to pop on if you're traveling home for the holidays or heading off to visit family. So I'm hugely grateful to Brian for joining us for what I know is an episode you you're all going to absolutely love. Uh so sit back, relax, and enjoy. Here's Professor Brian Little. Professor Brian Little, a very warm welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast. Delighted to be here. We're thrilled to have you on. And I wonder if we could maybe start uh sort of just setting the scene. So perhaps you'd be kind enough just to walk us through the kind of sort of a simple model that can help sort of explain and help us think through how our traits kind of relate to our personal projects and our human flourishing. Give us just a little bit of an overview of that model.

Brian Little:

That's exactly the kind of setting up that I think is helpful to your listeners. I don't have um a graph in front of me. So I want the listener to or viewer to imagine that there is um a set of four. We'll make it simple to start with, four boxes. And on the right-hand side over here, there is what we can call human flourishing, which comprises um a whole set of variables from physical health to a sense of meaning in your life to happiness, and importantly in in my work, increasingly, the impact that you as a person are having on your environment, uh, where whether it be your second child or the the planet. And so it's not just human flourishing in terms of how am I doing? It's how are we doing? And what am I contributing to that, or not, as the case may be. It's the variation in human flourishing that that intrigues me. And then what influences human flourishing or human floundering at the other end of the spectrum? And it seems to me that that we can simplify it by looking at two boxes now on the left, which predict that on the right. One are traits or stable dispositions, which would include interests, but also the big five traits. And I'm going to come back to that in a in a second and discuss what's happening in that very lively domain. And then beneath that is another box on the left-hand side that also predicts well-being and flourishing, which are the uh contextual, the sociogenic, as I call it, aspects of life. These are the cultural codes that we're socialized into as a member of uh ultra um social species. And um they they have a claim on our behavior, just as the stable biogenic features in the first box have. So we've got now a, if I can just do it right in the middle now, so you can see both all these boxes. Here's a box here, traits influencing, flourishing. Here's a box here, culture and social, what I call sociogenic factors influencing well-being. But is that it? Is it just that we're a matter of our biology and our culture? Well, that's an intellectual truism. Who isn't going to say, yeah, you know, my life is influenced by my biology and by my social culture? Pass the cheese. You know, I mean, is there anything that we want to discuss at Thanksgiving dinner that will be a little bit deeper and a little bit uh more of a stimulant to deep thought? And that's where I thought the projects, personal projects you're engaged in. Some call them goals. I don't agree with equating goals and personal projects, but that they certainly rhyme. And there's just a slight difference between goals and projects, which you can get into if you want. But I call them personal projects that can range from the trivial pursuits of daily lives to what I've called the magnificent obsessions of things that consume us for a lot, for our whole life. And they seem to serve as a final common pathway where the traits and the social codes and so on influence human flourishing or human floundering. Um that one, two, three, four boxes sort of captures the framework that I've developed over the years. There are two sub-boxes that attach themselves to the other big ones. And one is what I call dynamic traits instead of relatively fixed traits, which spins off from fixed traits. And then what I call personal contexts, which is not just looking at the cultural codes that you are have been socialized into, but also just just what is Jennifer doing on a Thursday with her boyfriend in the dining room, and that's her personal context. And if I don't know that her boyfriend has come back from Liverpool, then I'm missing what is happening in her life. So personal context help to bring into a kind of fleshy reality the more abstract concepts that we've been talking about up to now. So if we go back to traits, can I say a few words about traits?

William Wadsworth:

Yeah.

Brian Little:

There is, as you know, you may have even alluded to these in some of your podcasts. The the um there is considerable consensus that there are a few basic traits of personality that appear in virtually every culture. I'm not going to say all cultures because there's quite a bit of a debate about that. But in most cultures, you're going to find these five basic dimensions of personality. They're called imaginatively the big five. And they spell out an acronym, Ocean, where I'll give you what these they stand for, then I'll go back to age of them. Um openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And we usually we often will reverse people's scores on neuroticism and talk about stability, but OCS is not as compelling an acronym as oceans. It is usually discussed as ocean or canoe. Sokea. There you go.

William Wadsworth:

My brain's doing my brain's my brain's doing out doing uh anagrams now.

Brian Little:

I can tell you're that kind of man. I've known that for 15 years. So let's take a look at each of those five basic dimensions, sometimes known as the big few, um, which I like because there's some argument about whether there's one uber trait, overarching trait, uh, that combines these into uh a highly adaptable person. And there are there's a very strong case to be made for a sixth major factor, which is humility, honesty. And and so so I think in recent years they've been not called the big five so much as the big few. And and they're they're manageable. Cognitively, we can handle seven plus and minus two labels for uh for dimensions as abstract as traits. So let's let's go through and and do the the ocean. Openness to experience would contrast individuals who are curious about the world. They are constantly exploring, have a degree of perhaps even rebelliousness in that they don't like to simply take in what others are saying, but to challenge, sometimes gently, sometimes ferociously. And uh it contrasts with those who are more closed. Sometimes these are seen as, in some of the research, as aligning with liberal and more conservative approaches to the world. Um and uh I think that's a simplification, but again, there's there are hints that there's some relationship between those. And I think probably the most useful way of thinking about openness to experience is that it is found in, I think, the most thorough study of creativity. Certainly, when I was uh studying personality, Donald McKinnon's study of people at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research of Berkeley, they found that the common core of creative individuals, be it arts, science, engineering, business, the most highly creative people were those who were open to experience. And this is an interesting phenomenon because being open to experience doesn't mean that you're just attracted to positive things. Those who are open to experience, and certainly in the McKinnon studies, are open to emotional experience too. And so they, instead of cordoning off and ignoring negative emotions, they will zoom in on it and reflect and be moved by their negative experiences. And they also see joy, where others may not. And I think the creative process is one in which that openness comes to the fore. And so the highly creative architects say, which was one of their main study groups, but scientists and others, one of their characteristics is that they can be difficult to work with because they're they they can experience the joys of creativity and the despair that comes with yet another project gets rejected, doesn't work, it's gorgeous design, but the building falls down. I'm being adulted at MIT and sued by my client simultaneously. And so they're not easy to work with. And that's why um, and this is a way of underlining something that has been implicit so far, open, extroverted, conscientious, and these they're not simply value judgments. There's value at both ends of this continuum. And so I think it is the more call them closed, but the less open individuals are the ones who keep the creative ones in line. They're the ones who tell you your flies open at the briefing of the uh bankers. Uh, they're the ones who pick up the slack when you have, in your creative flourish, made a mess of everything in the office and so on. So this is already hinting at what uh in in my approach to personality is the dictum that we um we are we we we emerged evolutionarily in groups, and we need each other to advance both our personal projects and the core projects of the groups that we live in. So that's openness to experience. C. Conscientiousness. Now, the open to experience people are really good at solving problems that nobody has an answer to. The highly conscientious person is one who gets things done. They get things done on time, they are able to complete tasks with perseverance and grit, which can be seen as a facet of conscientiousness, though that too is debatable, whether it's independent or a facet. And they are the ones that get their projects completed. And uh you can imagine the benefits that this confers. Obviously, they do better because they do complete the tasks that they engage in. They do better in organizations, they're more likely to be um successful in school. Many of the people who face the kinds of tasks that you are training them to pursue effectively are dispositionally conscientious people. Maybe what you um are doing, Will William, is is giving skills to those who are less conscientious to make them more conscientious or quasi-conscientious. And this all makes sense. They're they're promoted more in um in organizations, they rise to the to the top. That makes sense. What was more surprising is that they live longer and they're healthier. And the reason for this is that they will adhere to regimens set up by their healthcare professionals. When they read uh jogging and and uh getting good night's sleep have a impact on your well-being, they jog and get a good night's sleep. And they are able, therefore, to live longer. Um, in fact, the link between mortality or length of life and conscientiousness is is really quite striking. And you can now see that the highly open person and the highly conscientious person are both are complementary, that when you have two of them in a group, you can you can pretty well bet that the outcomes of the group are going to be superior. The notion that you can be you can be open and conscientious um yourself is an interesting one. It's part of what Ed Sampson used to talk about as a Western myth that if you want to get the integration of all these skills, you've got to do it in the individual. So you've got to get conscientiousness and openness located in Jennifer or Jack. Whereas an alternative view says that we should distribute them throughout our groups so that you don't need to become all things, William. You can be Will, and you can be um somebody else, can adopt the more William-ish aspects of your pursuits. So that's uh to me, that's one of one of the intriguing issues of where do we center the need for integration in human personality? Do we distribute it to others or or do we center it within a single individual? So we've got two of those big five. The the third one is extroversion, which is the most commonly studied, vast material available for those interested in it. And essentially, the characteristic of extroverts that I think is most salient is their desire to seek out positive stimuli. Um, they they are attracted to reward, and they are therefore very likely to engage with the world and poke it. And I think that the there's there was a couple of decades ago a perspective that I found really compelling, which is Hans Eisink's model, that it's not just seeking out reward, but it is different levels of arousal in the neocortex. That seems to have been displaced now by the perspective of um uh reward-seeking behavior. But I found it interesting, and we've talked about this in in our past, is that if you see extroverts as being chronically understimulated in neocortex, they need to seek out stimulation to get up to an optimal level of performance. And they can do this by acting on the environment, by going to a party, by asking Fred over, who's always a hoot. And um, but they can also do it biologically. They can uh take in such things as caffeine that will stimulate them, and uh, they are shown to actually perform better when they have a stimulant in their system. And contrastingly, uh, those at the other end of the spectrum, introverts, are more likely to be overloaded in the neocortex or not to seek out stimulation to make a more contemporary perspective salient. And uh, consequently, they're going to, in situations that excite an extrovert, they're going to be a bit averse to those. They'll find ways not to go to the party on Thursday. They'd rather s get up in the um in their bedroom and and read another novel. And these, of course, are gross serotypes. We are much more complex and nuanced. And I haven't even got into the facets underneath these big five traits. But that's that's the gist of these differences. And I think they're helpful. I think, and people really want to know where they stand on these different dimensions. And I see that both as curious and also a bit of a problem, because if you instantiate yourself on one of these big five dimensions or a couple of them, it can be like a cage where you say, I'm an extrovert, or I'm an introvert, or I'm neurotic. And it serves as a Constraint on agency. It serves as a constraint upon our capacity to develop and grow. And so this is why, in that box that I've been talking about of traits influencing, flourishing, I want to move far away from we're just our biological traits. We are more than that. And uh I can I can briefly finish off the others. Agreeableness and neuroticism, agreeableness are people who work particularly well in groups. They're nice people. And those at the opposite end of the agreeableness spectrum are not nice. In fact, they actually, if you ask them what they most enjoy doing, they enjoy doing things like firing people. Gives them a buzz. And we we now have something called the dark triad, which are aspects of personality like narcissism and psychopathy and so on, Machiavellianism, which can be seen as very low agreeableness. And finally, there's neuroticism or stability, which is the disposition to feel anxiety and depressive affect more frequently than others. It's a good predictor of problems in life. If you score on a Big Five questionnaire high on neuroticism, it doesn't mean you are a clinically neurotic person. It's just that you have a predisposition in your personality that might lead to some kind of clinical outcome sometime in your life. But they're not very happy people. If you think about the evolutionary significance of personality differences, I'm not sure where we would have ended up if we'd all been stable extroverts. I think we would have ended up with lots of prey. But I think we may have been food for the predators, because neurotic introverts are the ones who say, oh, what's that? And what's that may be a large beast coming into your village. Or it may be the prospect of an exam coming up for you at university. And the neurotic introvert is likely to say, I can't ignore this, I gotta get going. And the stable extrovert's more likely to say, hey, chill. Just chill. Have a have a good time. Relax. Life is short. Yeah, exams don't matter that much. Let's go. That's a broad overview of the big five. I mean, it's terribly simplistic, but it I hope it gives you the sense of what they're like.

William Wadsworth:

Well, firstly, thank you for such a great summary and such a great overview. And I guess on that last point, you know, whether you're you know, we we we kind of ideally want somewhere, a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of those two extremes you described between being very anxious about the exam and and very relaxed about it. As with so many things, it's uh halfway between those extremes we probably want to aim for. Yeah. We started talking, uh you touched a couple of times on on some, you know, some ways that that that our that our traits may sort of play out in a in an education context, not least at the point you you were just raising just then about exam um exam scientity versus relaxedness. I believe that the research tells us that generally speaking, introverts perform better at most stages of education. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Brian Little:

Yes. There is some evidence that introverts do better in education. There is one exception that I recall, and this is in what in North America we call kindergarten. These would be the five-year-olds who have not uh gotten to the formal system yet. And that's where extroverts tend to do a little better. And I I think the reason is that in kindergarten or the equivalent in the UK, you're graded on how extroverted you are. Johnny is busy in the sandbox, then he's over in the girls' era, then he's over doing something that he shouldn't be doing. They say, Oh, he's he's doing well. Whereas Stephanie is is in the corner and she's not really doing anything. She's just sort of sitting back. And that's fine. They do do well until first grade, grade one, when they have to actually start doing the conventional things that kids in school are taught to do. And there the the uh introverts are are more likely to uh come into their own. And the extroverts get bored. Both of us, I don't know whether I'm feeling something I shouldn't right now. Both of us are introverted people. And I don't think I was ever bored in school. Maybe once in a while I was bored, but extroverts, bless their hearts, are dying in the back of the class because what? They need stimulation. Much of schooling is boring. And so the tolerance for boredom is much higher in those who are extrovert uh or introverted, and they this means uh extroverts do not um engage. Then they start, if they if they thought of themselves as bored, fair enough, they are. But if they start to think of themselves as stupid, that really bothers me. And this often happens, you know.

William Wadsworth:

If you weren't paying attention last week and it's moving on today, you you can't follow it, and so you don't feel like you're yeah, it's it's exactly.

Brian Little:

Yeah, you know, Muhammad may do very well in um in his class because he is able to concentrate, whereas Stephanie is just looking out to see if there are any other girls who at recess are likely to have fun with. So one thing that is really important, and I don't know whether we should get into it now or or later on, is that we're not the victim of our traits. We can, what I call act out of character. And so while I see myself, I am neurophysiologically introverted. I overstimulate easily. I can't have coffee late in the day, or I'm not going to be able to sleep. Um, I have all the biological markers of being highly introverted. And if you look at my preferences, um I tend to make introverted choices. But I have a role in life, and this is part now of the social cultural box here. I'm a professor. And it seems to me that the job of a professor is to profess. And it's hard to mumble in an introverted way when you're professing. Um, I think professors are a little bit like wines W-I-N-E-S. In the the students need need to become connoisseurs so that a really astute student might say, you know, I love Professor X because he was so shy. I could barely hear him. But he was a tender little wine, a gentle little wine, and I learned to appreciate him. And I also enjoyed Professor Y, who was over the top, who was the most gregarious, extroverted, weird professor I've ever had. And so I think that on the one hand, if the students become connoisseurs of different styles of professing, great. Alas, they tend not to. They tend to stay awake, get engaged, retain information from more extroverted props. And so those of us who really think, who really value, cherish professing, wanting nothing more than to throw out sparks to highly combustible students, I um I think we naturally, not strategically in the overt sense, but implicitly we become pseudo-extroverts if we're able. There's a skill to that. And I know that I'm regarded as a outgoing extroverted uh professor, and that's fine. But I was in the public performing at four years of age as a boy soprano. And so for me, the skill as a professor, as a as a page boy at nine or ten, I was in public performing. And so, unlike a very introverted teacher who now says, I should be more outgoing in my lectures, it may be very difficult for him. But for me, it was relatively easy. But my theoretical perspective is that if you protractedly act out of character as a, let's say, a disagreeable person who's acted agreeably for three weeks, that's going to place a pressure on you. It's going to increase, in technical terms, autonomic arousal, cortisol uh increases, and so on. This is this is my theoretical expectation. And so I think that after protractedly, which is a which is a weasel word, isn't it? Because what how how long is protracted? Can you do it for an hour? Sure. Can you do it for can you act as a pseudo-extrovert for a week? Yeah. A month? I don't know. I think that I and I leave it to my students and their students to figure out what the parameters of temporality are here. But I think that after a period of time, acting out of character can extract these costs. And there are ways of mitigating those costs.

William Wadsworth:

So I want to come back to this. I'm very excited to come back to this. I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about the the classroom, because what you're kind of dis what you were describing a moment ago, that that kind of having those extroverts in in the classroom that are maybe struggling more than others to get engaged is a fascinating perspective on a challenge that I think many, many people in education have noticed from both sides of being in the classroom and also teaching at the front of the classroom. I have a lot of ed educators themselves that that listen to the podcast, um they're they're teachers or or or professors themselves. And I think that idea that, you know, it's it's there's a kind of a personality kind of element in there as well. It's a really interesting perspective and quite a fresh perspective, I think, to a lot of people. I wanted to just ask us a sort of almost to like a little bit of a sidebar on this. You have an amazing reputation for being very engaging as a lecturer and uh you know, you want one sort of student accolade and so forth. Um and you know, having been in your lectures, they're they're they're a genuinely a blast, you know, stories, humor, you know, they they are genuinely, really, really engaging. I wonder if you have any messages or ideas for educators, how you can make your content as engaging as possible to help bring all students in the room with you.

Brian Little:

What a challenging question. I think if we could approach it by looking at what not to do and then invert it to what you can do in contrast. I think the one thing that is terribly simple, but many teachers and professors don't realize, is that it really helps to look at the people in your class. And I don't just mean, oh yeah, there she is, but to engage in eye contact. And you can do it with every single person in the class if you have 200 people in the class, but if you've got 12 in the class, you sure can. You can look at them at times, not stare, but just say, like I'm doing, I'm doing this now with you. I'm looking at, there is William. I used to know him as Will. Hi, this is how you doing. Uh, and if you're in my classroom and even beforehand, many teachers will walk in and start the lecture or the class, just chatting with people a little bit beforehand and say, how are you doing? And even confessing that things, you know, to today we're discover we're we're discussing advanced topics and multivariate statistics, and it's tough. Boy, I was up late last night revising this myself, and I I know it's tough. Do you find it tough? I do. And sometimes the students will say, my goodness, she's human. She knows this is tough. She's even working at it herself and finds it a little anxiety produced. That humanizing of the teacher is one way we can go about being more engaging. When it comes to the mechanics of actually lecturing, it's deadly to read your slides. Um, you know, a sure way of turning students off is to just read what you've got on your PowerPoint. Now, I'm not saying you should be PowerPointless, but I I think that, and indeed I can I use PowerPoint, used to when I when I was lecturing, but I think that moving away from, I mean, they don't want to see your back for the whole class. Moving away from, I'm going to, how are you doing? Is this clear? Having a little after each class, having a little, what were the the clearest points of my lecture? What were the most obscure points of my lecture? And having people actually tell you these. And this requires that you develop a little bit of a thicker skin. I you know, I I live in mortal fear of somebody saying, that was a terrible lecture. But I hope that at 84 I'm mature enough to be able to say, where precisely did it suck? And what was I doing that made it so suckable? And uh so I think we need to be what is it? It it calls for humility. And I think humility, it it can backfire if you simply say, I am not worthy to teach you. I I I don't know what I'm talking about. I mean, that extreme, as you were alluding to earlier, extremes are bad when it comes to all of these issues. Uh, but some degree of humility, humor, some people are naturally humorous people. I I don't believe that it is helpful to tell jokes. I think humorous anecdotes that illustrate the point that you're on in the in the particular lecture are very helpful. But I've seen, bless their hearts, some teachers who really want to be better teachers come at the beginning of the lecture with three jokes. You know, a prophet student and an octopus go into a bar. Okay. You know, at some point. Right. And at some point the word hokey is going is going to emerge in the classroom chatter. Um so those are just a few off the top of the head uh answers to that fascinating question.

William Wadsworth:

That's interesting. Um there's another angle I just wanted to see if you had a perspective on as well, which is when those students go home at the end of the day. There's there's uh you know huge concern in society at large, and you know, certainly teachers and parents worry about this a lot that you know this young people are are very distracted when they're trying to get on with their work at home. Maybe particularly sort of to, you know, at a teenage teenage level, so maybe kind of towards the end of high school and potentially early, early into their university, college career. And you know, the the literature on multitasking and focus is very clear. It's it's really bad news, not only for mental health and well-being, but also just for your ability to get stuff done, right? And I don't know a single school now that isn't saying, oh, you should really be turning your phone off and not distracting yourself when you're trying to study. And yet, so many students are still doing it. Um, you know, I do a lot of research with students and varies a bit from school to school, but somewhere between one in three and one in five students report checking their phone frequently while they're studying, while they're doing their homework assignments in the evening. And you know, while I was kind of reflecting ahead of this conversation, I was wondering, well, you know, maybe it's those same extroverted students that are struggling to engage in the class that are sort of more likely to be, you know, desperately sort of punching their phone or or reaching for it every few minutes to get that kind of jolt of stimulation to keep themselves, you know, awake. I wondered if uh I don't know, I don't know if there's been any kind of research on this specifically, perhaps not, but I wondered if you had any any sort of speculation on on that uh that particular challenge.

Brian Little:

I was talking with my wife not long ago and saying, thank goodness I'm no longer teaching. Because the uh capacity to engage is really in the classroom is is really conditional on there not being distractions. And you know, if if you're in a in a classroom environment in which it's stipulated that students are able to bring other devices in, then competing with it is really, really difficult. I don't have any simple solution to that, nor am I aware of any research that that can help us greatly. Um again, I think at the beginning of a class, I'm thinking now more of university than I am of high school or elementary school. I think it's so helpful to just raise these things and to say, you know, good morning, I'm Professor Chan. I love teaching biology. Here's an issue that bothers me. I really want you to enjoy this. We've got eight weeks together. What can I do to get you to listen to the lecture and not listen to your phone? What any suggestions on what I might do? Now you're putting the onus on the student to come up with ways. Well, you could make it more interesting. Well, I'm gonna try to do that. Well, you could just um give us in an hour's lecture a six-minute break where we can, where we're encouraged to say, okay, you want to check your phone? Check your phone, you silly people. And I think having that human connection where you say, I got a problem. I need to teach you. I'm excited by what I'm teaching, and I can't do it if you're on your phone. So let's schedule a little, little break. Maybe, you know, we'll move, we'll start with six, maybe we'll get it on a five. You know what? By the end of our lecture, you may not need that break at all because you'll be so over-the-top enthusiastic about the cilia that uh that you'll you'll you'll not you'll you'll have forgotten about your phone. So that's one way of doing it is create micro breaks in which they can do that. But apart from that, uh it's a it's a challenge. Boy, it's a challenge.

William Wadsworth:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do it as a parent, too. You touched earlier on the well, we're sort of exploring. Some of these practical points. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but but there's there's research to suggest that if we are uh extroverted, we perform better with a little bit of caffeine in our system, also compared to if we're introverted. I mean, I found this fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit more about universal? Does it depend on the task we're working on?

Brian Little:

Yeah. Great question. Yes. Caveats. One. Let's look at this from the perspective of the introvert now. Caffeine can actually interfere with the performance on certain tasks of introverts relative to extroverts. So it potentiates the performance of extroverts and it impedes the progress of more introverted students. I said particular kind of task. The task that is most vulnerable to this effect are quantitative tests, quantitative reasoning. And particularly if it is a speeded quantitative task. And so you can have an introverted student, assuming now that we're we're talking about introverts and extroverts who are equal in intelligence, you can have an introverted bright student who is in class said, okay, I want you to do this mathematical test. Right now, look at me, okay, you take the square of this, you raise it to the next power, you multiply by the root of do it. Now, now the introverted student is more likely to go because they're overstimulated. They're on in front of the class. It's quantitative, it's speeded. Now, if you would just ask this question without the speed factor, and in an environment where there's very little surrounding stimulation, there'll be no differences between extroverted and introverted students. But that interaction is uh is the caveat that I would put in. It depends on the kind of task, it depends whether it's speeded. And research out of Northwestern, Bill Revell, and others have shown that it also depends on time of day. Now, I can't actually remember what the results were, but the effect is influenced by what time of day the testing is taking place in. And so there are the, this is the problem with using traits as predictors of performance, is that there are so many contingencies you you need to put in. And once you get these contingencies building up, you run the risk of people rolling their eyes and saying, uh, you can't really tell us, can you? And so I think this is where looking at the individual student, her particular kind of personal dispositions, that the states that she gets in when she's confronting a certain problem, is a more productive focus for a teacher than availing yourself of the generalized knowledge from trait psychology. It's helpful, it's perspectify, it's interesting, but I think that in the final analysis, you need to look at the singular student pursuing her individual projects.

William Wadsworth:

Well, with with with that with that caveat in mind, there was just one final trait question I wanted to ask, which was um we talked about traits and engagement, we talked about traits and and caffeine. I believe there's a relationship also between traits and short-term and long-term memory. Is that is that right?

Brian Little:

Yeah, yeah. There there is there was some, and I'm not sure whether it's been replicated. This is something that that I haven't checked for a decade. Um, but there was some evidence that um extroverts are are um relatively good in short-term memory, and that the introverts are better in in longer-term memory. And um this is why extroverts may uh do very well in remembering the name of the person they just met at the party during the party, but a week later they bump into them in the greengrocers and I think I know you. Do I know you? Yes, we had a date. And uh, whereas the introverted person may forget it, and they often will. So an introverted person who who is talking to somebody because they're overroused may not cache the name, but they retrieve it later. So when they see them in the store, when they see them in the store a week later, they're like, Miriam. And uh people say, What a good memory. So memory uh is temporarily divisible into those who are able to do things online and continue coherent exchanges with people because they're processing online, and those who are more likely to be storing it for for middle and longer term retrieval. That's interesting.

William Wadsworth:

I mean, it's it's not quite the same thing, but I always I've always felt that I don't think very well off the cuff. I don't perform very well off the cuff, but I'm quite good reflectively, you know, when I have a chance to mull and let it marinate. That's when I'm kind of at my cognitively best.

Brian Little:

I've I've always felt I think we need a psychology of marination. Yeah. Right. I really think that's exactly the right word is, you know, no, I can't answer right now, but let me marinate for uh a day.

William Wadsworth:

Yeah. And as with all these things, you know, having that self-awareness and recognizing that. And I'll sometimes say to people that, I mean, I'll give I'll try and answer now, but like I'm gonna think about this in a couple of over the next couple of days, and I'll probably come up with something much better.

Brian Little:

Well, that is exactly the whole leitmotif of what we've been discussing about. It's just being humble and open with people and say, oh goodness, what an interesting question. I bet I'll be able to answer it tomorrow. And not just because I'll look it up, but I I need to marinate on that a little bit. And people say, oh, okay, I I could answer it now, but you know, I will have forgotten that tomorrow. And just openness about differences in personality. I think when Susan Kane wrote her blockbuster in the book Quiet on how introverts aren't given the recognition they deserve, I think this was the main point is that we just need to open up lines of conversation that um show us with strengths and worts and awe. And humility is called for.

William Wadsworth:

So you were talking earlier about how um it is possible to act out of our character. So we might have a sort of a a hard wiring, we're we're biogenically introverted, say, but we can, as we're exploring, you know, we can we can learn to adopt extroverted, outward-facing personalities in order to pursue our pursue our life goals and pursue something that's important and meaningful to us. You were saying there sometimes comes a cost for acting out of character if we do it for too long, if we do it for too protracted a length of time, you know, we we risk uh you know potentially even burning out if we do it for too long. And perhaps that kind of self-awareness and possibly like confessing and and talking to people about your challenge is one mitigating factor. Uh do you have any other um suggestions for people when they have this challenge of they want to act in a certain way, but it doesn't come so easily to them. How can we kind of mitigate that?

Brian Little:

A couple of thoughts. Uh I think it's important to ask why do we act out of character? Why why are we motivated to be other than we naturally are or biogenically disposed to be? Yeah, I I think there are basically two reasons. I think we do it out of professionalism, and I think we do it out of love. And professionally, you may have no choice but to act assertively. You're a criminal lawyer, for goodness sake. You can't be sweet and pleasant. You have to act in a combative way, even, not simply assertive. Because that's your profession, that's your job. It's not just professional in the sense of being white collar or anything like that, but it could be an athlete, it could be a professional bartender who knows that you've got to listen empathetically to that guy who comes in every Thursday evening. And so we the reason we act out of character, if it is very meaningful to us, like wanting to profess with passion, it makes it a little easier to do it. Whereas if you're just, you know, the classic case is the airline personnel who have to have a smile. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much, thank you, thank you. And it becomes habitual but draining after a period of time. So I th I think we need to take into account the reason why we're acting out of character. Are there any other things about that? You know, I talk a lot and have featured the costs of acting out of character for introverts who are having to act extrovertedly. It's hard. The empirical evidence of this has been mixed until a couple of very good studies out of Australia that um have shown that introverts can pay the cost of acting out of character as pseudo-extroverts. There's much more evidence, some of it out of your fellow students at Cambridge, who um who've shown that it's harder for extroverts who have to act introvertedly. I've always favored the other example, partly because I'm very introverted. But the extrovert who has to sit still and be controlled in her cubicle for eight hours after she's finished, she's just ready to burst. And if there are no what I call restorative niches in which she can revisit her first nature and get that stimulation, even explosively so, um, then she's going to feel the feel the cost. So I think that um it's it's a choreography of acting in ways that are our professional calling, that um that create creatures such as we who are complex, frustrating, annoying, noble because we're not just the victims of our biochemistry, but we're creatures who try to make sense of our lives and make commitments that will redound to the benefit of ourselves and others. When it comes to love, I think this is where another subtlety comes in. If you realize in your partner that they have been acting out of character for a long time because they tell you, and because you see it, he does not like parties, but he goes because he adores you and you love parties, that there should be some recognition that a restorative niche might be not only helpful but vital to sustaining their their happiness and well-being. And so when your spouse says, you know, love you dearly, but I need to get away for a day or two, and it's not because she doesn't love you, it's because she does. And she needs to restore herself to a position in which she can act fully to advance your joint projects. And sometimes we may not even know that people are acting out of character. We may maybe we may misconstrue. And so we see Doug and Sherry every weekend or are at a party for the last three months of being at a party, uh, or some neighborhood function, they even initiate them. And you may say, oh, that Doug, he's very extroverted. Well, Doug may be extremely introverted, very anxious, but he knows that Sherry is terminally ill. Nobody else does. He does, but nobody else in the neighborhood does. And so his project is taking care of Cher, not go to another party and have a blast. And I think, as I say, this is what makes us complex creatures. You can't just slot a person on a bot and say, Will's introverted, or Brian's extroverted, or Dave's a neurotic, or Cherry is very, very conscientious. Mohammed is solid as can be. I think we need to look at the panoply of influences that in this kind of choreographic way play out in the rhythm of life. And without that humility and curiosity to look beneath the surface, I think we've missed what it is to be human.

William Wadsworth:

Well, on that note, um, I wonder if I could just ask by way of by way of close, when we're thinking about the grand question of choosing our personal projects, a degree, a job, do we choose that in line with our personality? Or is that unconnected and we just sort of have to make it- We've got a calling and we've got to make it work, whatever.

Brian Little:

Yeah, there's there's some evidence that um that there is uh an affinity between your personal dispositions and the projects you choose, for example, and the appraisals you give to those projects. For example, extroverts are more likely to engage in interpersonal projects and do well in them. Conscientious individuals are much more likely to engage in tasks that are structured and completable. What's interesting is that, and this is something that some of the trait psychologists who are most influential, I was thinking of Jeff McRae, and I hate we had an interesting exchange that I was puzzled. That highly conscientious individuals tend to enjoy their projects much more. So if you look at how enjoyable are the projects you've got, people to list their projects, I expected them to be higher on efficacy, which they are, higher on control, which they are. But hang on a sec, did somebody get this data wrong? Higher on enjoyment than extroverts? And Jeff suggested that I had an image of the conscientious person that was a bit hackneyed, and that I saw them as joyless drones who just got things done. And I've come round now to believing the highly conscientious people are able to spend their projects to make them enjoyable. And so they make games out of things. The reason they get things done isn't because of sheer grit, it's because of a playful ability to reconstrue, in a George Kelly sense, their project as something that is really fun and to design it so that it is fun. And now with with um the kind of multimedia feedback we can get, the whole the whole renaissance in feedback possibilities, there should be no reason why you can't make a a a tough task more enjoyable and uh and that way uh advance the well-being of the pursuer, the project pursuer, and the rest of us.

William Wadsworth:

Fascinating stuff. Well, look, Professor Little, thank you so much. We're very glad you you've been able to join us. And thank you so much. It's been really, really fascinating to talk. And thank you for sharing so much. I think uh, you know, for I I'd I'd I'd I can't speak for you, but I know from my own work, you know, sometimes when you spend so long swimming in a world, you sort of assume or kind of you get a misjudge. Oh, you know, I sometimes like I sometimes find myself forgetting, you know, not everybody knows about retrieval practice. I talk about it every single day, and I just sort of assume, oh, you know, everybody knows that, surely. And uh, you know, I think you know, so many of the things that that that you talk about are are really kind of fresh and exciting to lots of people um who are probably listening. And um, you know, I just think about when I kind of first started discovering some of these ideas myself, and it's just really kind of fascinating, light bulb stuff. And starting to understand yourself and how that interrelates with your your flourishing and and the projects you choose along the way and mitigating those, you know, that any disconnect between your natural biogenic state and what you're working on with with those kind of restorative niches and other strategies. Really interesting stuff.

Brian Little:

You realize how rewarding it is for a professor to see his students flourish and help others flourish. And I really admire what you've been doing. I've listened to a bunch of your podcasts. I think they're terrific. Keep up the good work.

William Wadsworth:

Well, thank you. When I stop recording, I'll ask you where I sucked the most. Okay, well, Professor Little, if we're interested in finding out more about your work, perhaps your published works, where might we go for further reading? Um, probably going to my web page. Have you seen that one? Yeah, we'll put a link for people in the in the show notes.

Brian Little:

There's another book called Who Are You that was based on my TED Talk. So you've seen the TED Talk, I think.

William Wadsworth:

Yeah, we'll put the link for that in the show notes as well for if anybody wants to take a look.

Brian Little:

That that that um book, yeah. Yeah, it was based on the TED Talk. I don't like that nearly as much, that book nearly as much as the Me, Myself, and Us book. Yeah, you've got it. Exactly. Oh, and you've got the good cover too. Isn't that a great cover? Great cover. Yeah, yeah. I love it. So I think that's all. I hope your listeners get something out of this.

William Wadsworth:

Smashing. Well, thank you, Brian, once again. Much appreciated. Well, thank you once again, Brian, and thank you to you all as ever for your support for the show. Uh, the support this year has been wonderful in terms of the comments and the questions you've left us, uh, the five-star ratings you've been kind enough to drop, uh, the shares. I know many of you do a lot to share the show, and we're so, so grateful for that. Uh, and in particular to those of you who have helped fund our show this year by being our patrons. So thank you to you all. I hope you've enjoyed this show and listening to it this year as much as I've enjoyed making it for you. Uh, there's lots more to come in 2026. Uh, we've been hard at work recording the 2026 season, and there's a lot of wonderful stuff coming your way. So enjoy and look out for that when it comes. For now, do study smart if you've got work to do this season. Uh, but remember to take some time off for yourself too to rest and recharge. We ourselves are going to be taking a week or two off uh to rest and recharge on our end. Uh, we'll look forward to seeing you back in the new year, refreshed, recharged, and raring to go. For now, I want to wish you a very happy holiday season, uh, which for me and my family means a very happy Christmas. Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

Speaker:

Well, that was good, wasn't it? I found myself taking notes. If you need a reminder of anything from today, head to the website for a write up of this episode, as well as lots more top lock advice and resources. That's examstudyxpert.com. See you next time.