Brian Little: Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle of Personality at TED Talk (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript and summary of Brian Little’s TED Talk: Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle of Personality at TED Conference.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brian Little – Author

What an intriguing group of individuals you are — to a psychologist!

I’ve had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it’s fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today. And I thought you might like to know who you are.

But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself. I’m in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us — each of you — is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person.

Now, already you may be saying of yourself, “I’m not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere.” Or you may say of yourself, “I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit.” But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent ‘twitiness’ that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so.