Nobody else has your personality. Unique individuality is the concept that no one ever has been, is, or will be precisely like you. It’s also what differentiates human intelligence from artificial intelligence. But uniqueness is more than a feel-good concept. When we measure individuality with personality assessments, we can predict performance, empower behavioural change, and better understand ourselves and each other.
On episode 144 of The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Nigel Nicholson, PhD, emeritus professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, about the theories behind his newest book, Unique You. Nigel said, “In psychology, individuals are mostly regarded as a nuisance, a disturbance, error variants. Whereas for me, everybody’s an exception. That’s the only approach that makes sense.”
Read on to learn more about the four laws of unique individuality, why it matters to be unique, and the threats and opportunities that AI poses to individuals and society.
The Four Laws of Unique Individuality
“Individuality is the stuff of life,” Nigel said. He sees individuality not as lonely but as full of exciting potential. According to Nigel, these four laws of unique individuality apply equally and inescapably to everyone:
- No one like you has ever existed before or ever will again. Our DNA and brain are uniquely configured so that no person is exactly like another.
- You are a stranger to yourself. We aren’t always self-aware because so much of our processing occurs in the unconscious. This hidden layer of our consciousness makes us inherently unpredictable.
- You don’t really know anyone else, and they don’t really know you. We may imagine what someone else’s experience is like, but we can never have their experiences ourselves.
- The reason for your existence is to connect with others. Cooperation, or getting along with others, is not only important and valuable but also the heart of most social processes. “We magnify the diversity of our individuality because we cooperate in so many different ways,” Nigel said, naming fun, productivity, and love as reasons for connection.
Nigel explained that free will and choices affect our behaviour and thus our reputations, or how others see us. “For example, thinking of yourself as an attractive person or an unattractive person will set you on a completely different set of experiences,” he said. “You only have to think of yourself in a different way to fundamentally change lots of aspects in your behaviour.” Assessment-based coaching and many other strategies for gaining strategic self-awareness can lead to successful behavioural modification.
Why Does Individuality Matter?
Nigel quoted the Victorian-era Canadian physician Sir William Osler: “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” This speaks to the fact that people’s reactions and experiences are purely their own, even during shared events and despite other commonalities.
“All lived experience is qualified by who you are,” Nigel said. Unique individuality implies that people must be understood separately, not as part of a group or set of personality types. “My thinking on this upends a lot of leadership development presumption, which is the concept of the average manager. But there is no average manager,” he added. “You have to deal with the raw material in front of you.” In fact, the Hogan assessments have 72 quadrillion profiles, more than enough for one per person who has ever lived.
Understanding Your Unique Story
To Nigel, understanding individuality requires a biographical approach. He described a 4D framework that complements psychometric assessment: (1) destiny, (2) drama, (3) deliberation, and (4) development. “Using these four elements, you can tell the story of a human life,” he said.
Destiny
Destiny refers to the given, unchangeable facts about a person, such as DNA, place and time of birth, childhood environment, and the underlying temperamental basis for adult personality. Identical twins start with the same DNA but instantly diverge in experience. These facts of destiny affect behaviour in the workplace and elsewhere.
Drama
Drama relates to the continually unpredictable nature of life. It makes life fun but also at times dangerous and difficult. How we adapt to the events in our lives is where personality comes in. Personality assessments can predict what kinds of reactions and responses individuals are likely to have to the dramas that may happen in life.
Deliberation
Deliberation refers to free will, the point at which someone stops and says, “Wait a minute!” Deliberation helps us answer the question of why we are here and what we are trying to do. In his executive coaching career, Nigel has observed successful leaders who want to change both their identity, or how they view themselves, and their reputation, or how others perceive them.
Development
Development connects to the idea that people never stop learning. Some learning is beneficial, while some is detrimental, such as responding to betrayal with resilience or mistrust. Personality assessment can support learning by describing a person’s strengths, how they tend to respond to stress, and the values that determine what they seek in life.
Uniqueness and Human Connection
Unique individuality is driven by both physical and psychological factors. Briefly, humans consist of a body and a mind, a concept called mind-body dualism (formalised by Descartes and later reframed by Freud and others). Most of the time, we tend to view the body as subject to the mind, but Nigel suggested this is backwards. “The mind only exists for the sake of the body; the body has this mind to look after itself,” he clarified.
Consequently, when we say that humans are biologically wired to form connections with other humans, we mean that our bodies and minds both crave human interaction. We find people who complement us, and we combine our skills to do something completely new. Relationships help us learn about ourselves when we see how others react to us, feedback that reveals our reputation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Unique Individuality (UI)
“UI is our last line of defence against AI,” Nigel said. Artificial intelligence performs brilliant mimicry and simulation, yet computers and AI cannot simulate human thought processes. Nigel referred to the neuroscientific concept that human perception is a controlled hallucination. What we see of the world is a mental construction; we’re predicting the stimuli that we see in the moment. Our unconscious adds randomness, chaos, and improvisation. “We have supreme gifts of quixotic strangeness that AI can’t come close to,” he said.
AI represents certain psychological threats and opportunities. If we let machines make decisions for us, we may become intellectually lazy. If we ascribe human motives, such as friendliness, to AI interactions, we may become emotionally gullible. If we give too much importance to facts and too little credit to human ingenuity, we can become fatalistic and feel powerless. For example, focusing on data about athletic limitations can deter someone from striving to compete.
The opportunities presented by AI, however, relate to the concepts that underlie its potential threats. It can help us personalise how we communicate, analyse and process information, and improve how we make decisions. For instance, Nigel used AI tools to write his book—not the actual words but finding resources and exploring questions. “The recognition of unique individuality as something to be reckoned with in the context of the tech revolution is absolutely central,” he said.
Nigel emphasised that the four laws of unique individuality come with moral imperatives. First, be yourself. Second, be humble and forgiving. Third, reach out to other people. Fourth, find the best way of connecting with people. Personality assessment gives us the tools to act on these imperatives by measuring what makes each person unique so we can build stronger, more meaningful connections. “My hope is that unique individuality takes us in the direction of more genuine communality with the diversity that exists between any two people in their makeup and their orientation to the world,” he said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 144 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts.
*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.
