The two of us have been studying the H factor since the late 1990s, and most of the time we treat it simply as a topic of scientific study. But our work on the H factor has made us more aware of our own behaviour. Each of us can look back on his life and recall having acted in some decidedly low-H ways. Although it doesn’t feel good to think about those occasions, it does at least make us think about how we ought to act in the future. Already, each of us has often behaved a bit differently after considering how a high-H person would approach a given situation. We haven’t achieved anything remotely approaching perfection in this regard, but we do find ourselves trying to be more straightforward and less self-important, more ethical and less materialistic.
Our own cases help show an important point about the H factor: your level of H doesn’t just depend on your genes and on your childhood—it also depends on your own free will. We assume that by nature you’re fairly high in H, given that you’ve already read nearly this whole book. (Most really low-H persons would be turned off long before reaching this chapter.) Now, if we’re right—if you’re a somewhat high-H person by nature—then you’ll very likely accept that being a high-H person is a good thing: you’ll believe that being sincere and modest is inherently better than being deceitful and conceited. But unless you’re at the extreme high end of the H dimension, you probably feel at least some low-H motivations: maybe you sometimes manipulate others a bit, or give a little less than you really should, or try to impress others with your status.
Well, if you really do want to be higher in H, you can use your high-H idealism to overcome your low-H inclinations. Even though you have some temptations to deceive or dominate or exploit other people, you can decide to be alert to those temptations and then to resist them. In trying to be higher in H, you might even find it useful to follow some specific set of prescriptions, whether secular or religious (recall the “Quaker testimonies” of Chapter 8). Of course, this kind of conscious choice won’t change your “natural” level of H as given by your genes and early experiences. But who cares? Your actual level of H will be higher just the same. Only you will know the difference, and this is surely one case where no one will mind being deceived.