Quotes

When Americans and Australians rated themselves on more than seventeen hundred psychological qualities, four traits emerged as salient. The adjectives that defined these four seminal traits were all undesirable and, by implication, bad. They were (1) quarrelsome and spiteful; (2) impulsive and undisciplined; (3) withdrawn and untalkative; and (4) hypersensitive and emotional. [The reference is to Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg, "A Hierarchichal Analysis of 1,710 English Personality-Descriptive Adjectives", <i>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</i> 87 (2004): 707-721.]


source: Jerome Kagan, An Argument for Mind, 133 tags: Depravity, Self-image

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