At a Meetup recently we were talking about various qualities people have. Someone mentioned agreeableness / disagreeableness. I consider myself agreeable while the group said that disagreeableness is a valuable quality (Steve Jobs was given as an example of someone highly successful & highly disagreeable). I brought up another quality, which I tried to describe as “true to self-ness”—that is, I can get along with people easily, reply to things I disagree with by saying, “I see what you’re saying”, but in the end, my true belief is unshaken. The example I brought up in the discussion was someone who goes to church every day for a year, goes through the rituals, and in the end is still a hardcore atheist. The group mentioned that “going through the motions” as if you believe something makes it more likely for you to actually believe it. It seems to me different people are more or less susceptible to this due to some quality that they have. What is this quality called?
I think it is valuable to signal agreeableness in most but not all contexts; in the context in which Steve Jobs worked it might have been valuable to signal disagreeableness to enhance an impression of brilliant iconoclasm. Privately, it’s probably a bad idea to think of yourself as either particularly agreeable or particularly disagreeable; the extent to which you agree or disagree with people in private should vary a lot more than either of those adjectives suggest (depending on who you’re agreeing or disagreeing with). I don’t have an answer to your actual question, though.
At a Meetup recently we were talking about various qualities people have. Someone mentioned agreeableness / disagreeableness. I consider myself agreeable while the group said that disagreeableness is a valuable quality (Steve Jobs was given as an example of someone highly successful & highly disagreeable). I brought up another quality, which I tried to describe as “true to self-ness”—that is, I can get along with people easily, reply to things I disagree with by saying, “I see what you’re saying”, but in the end, my true belief is unshaken. The example I brought up in the discussion was someone who goes to church every day for a year, goes through the rituals, and in the end is still a hardcore atheist. The group mentioned that “going through the motions” as if you believe something makes it more likely for you to actually believe it. It seems to me different people are more or less susceptible to this due to some quality that they have. What is this quality called?
I think it is valuable to signal agreeableness in most but not all contexts; in the context in which Steve Jobs worked it might have been valuable to signal disagreeableness to enhance an impression of brilliant iconoclasm. Privately, it’s probably a bad idea to think of yourself as either particularly agreeable or particularly disagreeable; the extent to which you agree or disagree with people in private should vary a lot more than either of those adjectives suggest (depending on who you’re agreeing or disagreeing with). I don’t have an answer to your actual question, though.