2017 Personality 20: Biology & Traits: Orderliness/Disgust/Conscientiousness

Summary

The lecture examines conscientiousness—especially its orderliness component—and argues that personality, disgust, and pathogen avoidance can shape moral and political attitudes. The lecturer also uses Nazi propaganda as a warning about how these instincts can be exploited. Several explanations are presented as hypotheses or interpretations rather than settled conclusions.

1. Temperament Shapes How People Interpret the World

• The lecturer describes political differences as partly associated with personality. In broad terms, he links greater openness with left-leaning views, and lower openness and greater conscientiousness—particularly orderliness—with right-leaning views.
• He argues that people do not simply assess the same facts neutrally. Temperament influences what they notice, value, and regard as important.
• Personality traits have trade-offs. Conscientiousness can support planning, reliability, and long-term achievement, but it can also bring rigidity, self-criticism, and difficulty adapting when circumstances change.

2. Conscientiousness, Industriousness, and Orderliness

• The lecture treats conscientiousness, or “scrupulousness,” as having two aspects: industriousness and orderliness.
• Industriousness is associated with working steadily, completing tasks, concentrating, and carrying plans through. The lecturer says it predicts outcomes such as job and military performance, while noting that researchers have struggled to explain or measure it using simple laboratory tasks.
• Orderliness includes tidiness, a preference for routines and rules, attention to detail, and discomfort with disorder. These qualities can be valuable in work that requires precision.
• The lecturer distinguishes intelligence from conscientious follow-through: being good at planning does not necessarily mean being good at execution.
• He suggests that conscientiousness may support life satisfaction partly by making a person’s surroundings more predictable. However, conscientious people may be especially vulnerable to guilt or depression when they fail, including when a setback is outside their control.
• Saving and delaying gratification can pay off in stable conditions but become costly during upheaval—for example, when inflation wipes out savings or social conditions change abruptly.

3. Disgust and the “Behavioral Immune System”

• The lecture describes disgust as part of a behavioral immune system: psychological responses that help people detect and avoid possible sources of infection.
• Because missing a genuine threat can be more costly than reacting to a harmless one, these responses may be hypersensitive. The lecturer uses the example of mistaking a branch for a snake: a false alarm is inconvenient, while failing to notice a real snake could be fatal.
• Disgust can protect against contaminated food and other possible sources of disease. The lecture extends this idea to social behavior, suggesting that pathogen concerns may contribute to preferences for conformity, tradition, and stronger social boundaries.
• The lecturer presents research linking disgust sensitivity and orderliness with conservative attitudes, while describing egalitarian preferences as more closely related to compassion. He emphasizes that societies face a genuine tension between openness, which can bring benefits, and caution about unfamiliar risks. He says decisions about where to draw boundaries depend on circumstances and discussion.

4. Disgust Can Affect Judgment and Well-Being

• The lecturer refers to experiments in which inducing disgust led participants to make harsher moral judgments or recommend stronger punishments.
• He also connects disgust and orderliness to clinical examples, describing obsessive-compulsive behavior as involving excessive contamination fears and cleanliness rituals. He presents anorexia as involving, in some cases, perfectionism, rigid categories, and distorted body perception.
• These clinical explanations reflect the lecturer’s framing; they are not comprehensive accounts of either condition.
• In relationships, he warns that contempt and disgust—illustrated by eye-rolling—can be damaging and should be addressed rather than allowed to grow.

5. Disease Risk and Authoritarianism

• The lecture discusses the parasite-stress hypothesis: regions with greater infectious-disease burdens may show stronger conformity and authoritarian tendencies because people are more motivated to avoid unfamiliar risks and maintain social order.
• The lecturer cites research associating pathogen prevalence with authoritarian personality measures and authoritarian governance, and presents personality as a possible link between disease conditions and political systems.
• He also points to historical epidemics, including the devastating impact of diseases brought to the Americas by Europeans, as evidence of how consequential infectious disease can be. These examples are used to explain why pathogen avoidance might be deeply rooted.
• The lecture’s broader causal claims about disease and political systems should be understood as the lecturer’s account of a research hypothesis, not as a complete explanation of authoritarianism.

6. Nazi Propaganda as a Misuse of Order and Disgust

• The lecturer argues that post–World War I disorder in Germany helped create public demand for order, which Hitler and the Nazis presented through disciplined rallies, uniformity, cleanliness, and spectacle.
• He interprets Nazi rhetoric and propaganda as turning a “clean versus contaminated” or “order versus chaos” contrast into political imagery. Jews were falsely depicted as disease-bearing parasites; this antisemitic propaganda dehumanized people and helped justify persecution and mass murder.
• He emphasizes that this propaganda worked not only through abstract political arguments but also through emotionally powerful images and metaphors that activated disgust and threat responses.
• The lecture analyzes an antisemitic Nazi film excerpt and pamphlet as examples of how propaganda can portray a targeted group as a contaminant. These materials are hateful fabrications, not factual accounts of Jewish people.
• The lecturer’s central warning is that instincts that can serve protective purposes may be manipulated into prejudice, exclusion, or violence when a group is framed as a threat to the social body.

7. Practical Lesson

• Notice how temperament influences what feels threatening, orderly, or morally repugnant.
• Be alert to political messaging that uses disgust, contamination, purity, or disease metaphors to stigmatize a group.
• Avoid reducing complicated questions—such as immigration, trade, social change, or public safety—to simplistic claims that one side represents purity and the other danger.
• The lecturer’s proposed safeguard is awareness: understanding why such messages feel compelling may help people resist propaganda and consider when openness or caution is appropriate.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Jordan B. Peterson — lecturer and primary speaker.
• Jonathan Haidt and Paul Rozin — researchers whose work on disgust is discussed.
• Fayard — researcher cited in connection with conscientiousness, guilt, and emotion.
• John Jost — researcher whose work on dimensions of conservative ideology is discussed.
• Mahzarin Banaji — identified as Jost’s supervisor and mentioned in the lecturer’s criticism of political assumptions in research.
• Martha Nussbaum — philosopher and legal scholar whose argument about excluding disgust from political reasoning is discussed.
• Richard Koenigsberg — author of Hitler’s Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy and History, cited in the discussion of political imagery.
• Adolf Hitler — quoted via Hitler’s Table Talk and dinner-table conversations; these quotations are presented as examples of Nazi rhetoric.
• Leni Riefenstahl — filmmaker associated with Triumph of the Will, mentioned in the discussion of Nazi spectacle.
• M. L. Reifer and Eric Schwartzburg — named by the lecturer as authors of a 1944 antisemitic pamphlet.
• An unnamed narrator and speakers in a Nazi propaganda-film excerpt — the film’s antisemitic claims are analyzed as propaganda.