Assorted thoughts #1

What Spirited Away teaches us about kindness, and the problems with "neuroticism" as a personality dimension.

Kindness in Spirited Away

Miyazaki’s Spirited Away has a scene that I think about a lot. We are in a boiler room that heats a bathhouse. Little soot sprites carry chunks of coal to feed the boiler. The sprites visibly struggle under their burdens and one even collapses under the weight. The main character, Chihiro, has compassion for the collapsed sprite and carries its coal to the boiler instead. When the other sprites see this, they make a big show of collapsing under their burdens, squeaking to beg for help as well. The boiler man threatens to destroy them all to get them back to work. He notes to Chihiro that the sprites can only live if they work, otherwise they turn back into lifeless soot.

Chihiro’s choice to help the collapsed soot sprite is kind, but the instinct of the soot sprites is to see kindness as weakness, as an opportunity to take advantage. And even if they succeed in taking advantage, there is no real payoff, because without work they lose their vitality. This form of kindness is akin to ruinous empathy, bad for both the giver and receiver. Kindness only makes the world a better place when offered to those who may benefit from it, grow from it, respect it, be grateful for it, pay it back or forward in some way.

That said, the sprites do end up helping Chihiro out when she needs it later in the story. Her kindness ends up paying off in the end. Actually, many tough-minded characters end up helping Chihiro out of appreciation for her caring, gentle nature, a type that seems nonexistent in the superficially cynical, petty society of the bathhouse workers.

Kindness can backfire, and we must be open to learning from those experiences. But it is also a precious trait that can refresh and inspire communities. Kindness is both a precious thing and a liability of the naive, and navigating that seeming contradiction is an important part of life. It’s an inevitable consequence of being human, of being an evolved organism whose greatest strength is sophisticated, adaptable large-scale cooperation, a state as fragile as it is powerful.

Neuroticism as misnomer

The Big Five personality model has a trait traditionally called Neuroticism. The naming of this trait clearly suggests that it’s essentially a bad thing, and the trait is often described purely in terms of a risk factor for emotional dysfunction. For example, the opening of Wikipedia’s article on neuroticism:

Individuals with high scores on neuroticism are more likely than average to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, shame, frustration, envy, jealousy, pessimism, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness. Such people are thought to respond worse to stressors and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations, such as minor frustrations, as appearing hopelessly difficult.

I understand why psychologists might think about it this way. They’re disproportionately preoccupied with mental illness and the risk factors that can lead to it, and it’s great that we have a rigorous quantitative link between a measurable personality trait and mental health issues we want to help people with. But naming a trait after the dysfunctions it can lead to (in only a minority of cases!) seems liable to distort and limit our perceptions. It’s like if we called white skin “cancer-prone skin”. If we did that, I think we would have more trouble keeping in mind that “cancer-prone skin” has adaptive functions in some contexts, e.g. Vitamin D synthesis in less sunny environments. The name would also suggest to us that white skin is somehow the risk factor for skin cancer, when there are actually many risk factors entirely unrelated to skin color.

Psychology is definitely conscious that “neuroticism” is a complex trait that can be beneficial, and that there’s more to mental illness risk than just this personality trait. So it’s interesting that the terminology hasn’t changed. I guess it’s common in all sorts of fields that terminology gets locked in by history, people get used to it, and there’s not enough motivation to get behind a disruptive change. With something as widely used as the Big Five though, I think it should be considered, if only to help laypeople with high neuroticism appreciate that maybe their tendency to negative emotions is more than just a vulnerability to mental illness.