Why Being an Asshole Can Be a Valuable Life Skill

Eighty years ago, researchers began one of the longest and most complicated projects to understand human behavior in history. It would take almost 50 years to complete. But their work would define an entire field of psychology.

It started with an idea: that people have different fundamental character traits and these character traits are inherited and stable throughout one’s life. It was the idea of personality.

The problem was that there were an infinite number of human behaviors, so how...