The human nature

In the summer of 1994 Time magazine's cover story featured a scientific tale about the genetic underpinnings of human infidelity. In case you missed the punch line, it goes something like this: Individuals' most basic drive involves insuring that their genetic codes survive death, that motivations to make a billion bucks or to be the most wonderful person in the world are really attempts to attract the "right" person with whom to transfer genes into the next generation. Men and women are by nature supposedly fairly promiscuous apes. As is the case among species where males' body size is greater than females,' men are innately polygynous (87% of the 1154 known human societies allow multiple wives) with the more"successful" males broadly spreading their genetic code (the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, Moulay Ismail, sired more than 1,000 children). Women, on the other hand, limited by their ability to generally bear but one child a year, will do whatever it takes to guarantee the survival of their offspring, including tricking supportive men into raising the another male's child.
This is but the latest controversy surrounding humans' bestial origins and traits, an issue underlying the gap between the "humanities" and the "sciences." Remember the public outcry against Darwin's thesis-- as recently as 1993, more than half the American public still believed that the idea of humans developing from earlier animal species was probablyor definitely not true! Nowadays its successor, sociobiology (along with such variants as psychobiology --see Paul Kenyon's "Biological Bases of Behaviour" page --and evolutionary psychology ) haunts the social sciences as it tilts the nature-nurture equation of human fate toward natural explanations. See Al Cheyne's (University of Waterloo) Psychology, Culture & Evolution website.
What are the implications of truly believing that one's behaviors are due to uncontrollable genetic impulses? Caught philandering or stealing? Instead of saying "the devil made me do it" I guess you can now argue that "it runs in the family." But what happens when people are no longer held accountable for their actions? Is society even possible if its rules cannot be observed? This issue underlies not only philosophical debates over free will and determinism but also the current trend toward our becoming a no-fault no-risk culture (Did you get caught shooting at the President? Argue temporary insanity. For an inventory of some of the most frivolous lawsuits see the Stella Awards .) Click here for PBS's A Science Odyssey series on how twentieth century's theories of human behavior have alternated in the primacy given to nature and nurture.
What does free will mean to you? How much free will do you think you have? In the wake of the 1997 suicides of members of Heaven's Gate in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the largest mass suicide in the United States,the question was again raised. Were these 39 people acting on their own volition or were they brainwashed by their wild-eyed leader, persuaded by a sustained psychological regimen, or perhaps ensnared insome lethal groupthink dynamic? Click here to see international rates of agreeing that "we each make our own fate." What, if anything, happens when people believe that their fates are predetermined, whether by genes, their environments, or by God?
Such questions are far from academic musings. The role of genetics versus environment, of nature versus nurture, underlie such public debates as gender roles, homosexuality (see PBS's Frontline edition on "Assault on Gay America" ), and individuals' proclivity toward violence. Society depends upon people being responsible for their actions (hence it does not punish those who commit deviant acts but who either didn't know better, were mentally ill, or had no alternatives to act in non-deviant ways). And from the perspectives of individuals, those who sense having no control over their lives, who believe that there is no relationship between what they do and how things turn out, run the risk of becoming fatalistic or victims of learned helplessness .
Citation for international survey:
International Social Survey Program (ISSP). 1994. International Social Survey Program: Religion, 1991 Computer file. Koeln, Germany: Zentralarchiv fuer empirische Sozialforschung producer. 1993. Koeln, Germany: Zentralarchiv fuer empirische Sozialforschung/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research distributors.
According to the 1993 NORC General Social Survey , we have the following glimpse of Americans' beliefs:
*. LIFE GOD : How life turns out--[is because] Such things are decided by God.
RESPONSE CATEGORY % RESPONSES
Very Important 23%
Important 28%
Somewhat Important 22%
Not At All Important 23%
*. LIFE GENES : How life turns out--[is because] Some people are born with better genes than others.
RESPONSE CATEGORY % RESPONSES
Very Important 3%
Important 28%
Somewhat Important 29%
Not At All Important 30%
*. LIFE SOC : How life turns out--[is because] Society gives some people a head start and holds others.
RESPONSE CATEGORY % RESPONSES
Very Important 13%
Important 37%
Somewhat Important 33%
Not At All Important 13%
*. LIFE WORK : How life turns out--[is because] Some people use their will power and work harder than others.
RESPONSE CATEGORY % RESPONSES
Very Important 57%
Important 36%
Somewhat Important 4%
Not At All Important 1%
*. LIFE CHANCE : How life turns out--[is because] It's just a matter of chance.
RESPONSE CATEGORY % RESPONSES
Very Important 3%
Important 16%
Somewhat Important 37%
Not At All Important 42%
Of these, LIFE GENES produces the greatest correlations with the others. The greater the importance individuals place on genes in determining fate the more likely they say LIFE SOC, LIFE CHANCE, and LIFE GOD are"very important." And who is most likely to see genes being important or very important? We find:
*. while high school drop outs are about one-quarter more likely than those with four or more years of college to believe that genes are important or very important in determining individuals' fates, those of the upper class (54%) are significantly more likely than those of the lower (33%) and working (36%) classes to so believe;
*. those 70 years of age and older are more than three times more likely than those 18 to 29;
*. within categories of age (18-29, 30-39, ..., 70+), the conditional relationships between education and importance placed on genes evaporates ;
*. those who are strongly religious are more than one-quarter more likely than those with no religious affiliation, with those from liberal Protestant denominations being more likely to say genes are important or very important (47%) than Jews (41%), Catholics and moderate Protestants (38%), and fundamentalist Protestants (36%);
*. those believing homosexual relations are always wrong are more likely (42%) than those saying they are not always wrong (30%);
*. a nd there is no significant differences in responses of the sexes, races, political parties, and those who believe or disbelieve in the theory of evolution.
Belief that individuals' fate is decided by God also produces some interesting relationships. Consider, for instance, the relationship between this belief and whether or not Americans believe that "human beings developed from other species of animals." Click here to see how these beliefs hang together in the minds of political liberals, moderates, and conservatives .
Cross-nationally we can see considerable rates of agreement/disagreement with the statement "the course of our lives is decided by God." So what is the relationship between believing that "we each make our own fate" and "the course of our lives is decided by God"? In this figure, the United States is compared with countries that are predominantly Catholic, predominantly Protestant, mixed Protestant and Catholic, Catholic countries that were formerly Communistic, and formerly Communist nations. Observe how as disagreement that "we each make our own fate" increases there is generally increasing agreement that "the course of our lives is decided by God." However, rates intriguingly vary across this grouping of countries.
S OCIOBIOLOGY : TO WHAT EXTENT IS FATE THE PRODUCT OF GENETIC PROGRAMMING?
According to Richard Dawkins (click here for more information), the ultimate goal of the game of life is the immortality of one's information. This information is of two forms: the genetic, the programming of one's DNA, and the memetic, the units of mental information individuals pass on in their culture. "We are survival machines," he writes in The Selfish Gene , "robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."
And "just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."
Evidence of possible genetic factors shaping the direction of individuals' lifelong interests and behaviors mounts. For example, Alexander GrahamBell, who accidentally invented the telephone while working on ways to help the hearing impaired, came from a family that was preoccupied with matters of speech and sound. Both his mother and his wife were deaf. His paternal grandfather wrote a book on phonetics and developeda cure for stammering, which was taught by his father and uncle. To detect such intergenerational legacies, psychologists employ genograms to map the multigenerational proclivities of family members. Now, with the rapid developments in genetic engineering, the beginning of the 21st century bears certain eerie similarities to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century (visit the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement at the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) .
It is worth noting the sad history of attempts to link cultural differences and social deviance to genetic "imperfections." In the early physiognomic literature on deviance, for instance, Cesare Lombroso reported in the 1870s how criminals had inordinately long legs in comparison with rest of their bodies, strange skull shapes, absence of a proper chin, ingrown ear flaps or big, protruding ears. They were, he argued, throwbacks to earlier stages of human evolution. At the beginning of the century appeared The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit , a vile work by David Starr Jordon, the first President of Stanford University. Indeed, the American Eugenics Movement was to underlie the Nazi's "racial purity" political campaign, which was to culminate in the Holocaust. (Check out Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum .) And during the Nixon presidency, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker proposed to the Health, Education and Welfare Department that all American children be psychologically tested at age six with ink blots to detect criminal tendencies. The "hard core" of these"future delinquents" would be sent off to appropriate "camps" where they would learn more socially accepted behavior patterns.
Center for Evolutionary Psychology UC Santa Barbara
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (Springer journal)
Johann Peter Murmann & Joe Fleischhacker's Evolutionary Theories in theSocial Sciences
Leslie Jones, "Social Darwinism Revisited"
David N. Menton, "The Religion of Nature: Social Darwinism"
Edward O. Wilson, "The Biological Basis of Morality"
Barry Mehler, "In Genes We Trust: When Science Bows to Racism"
André N. Sofair and Lauris C. Kaldjian, "Eugenic Sterilization and a Qualified Nazi Analogy: The United States and Nazi Analogy: The United States and Germany, 1930-1945"
B EGINNING WITH THE BODY SELF
Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
--Jawaharlal Nehru
In many ways, social psychology begins with the body. According to Enid Schildkrout in Body Art as Visual Language , "if the impulse to create art is one of the defining signs of humanity, the body may well have been the first canvas. ... Body art is a visual language. To understand it one needs to know the vocabulary, including the shared symbols, myths, and social values that are written on the body." Consider the following findings:
*. studies often show that the single most critical factor in self-esteem is physical appearance.
*. salaries of U.S. executives over 6 feet tall exceed those of executives under 5'5" by an estimated $4,200 ( Harper's Magazine's "Harper's Index ," May 1993).
*. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the number of people undergoing cosmetic surgery tripled between 1992 and 1999.
*. One study of the role of attractiveness in affecting court decisions found that defendants judged to be unattractive were more likely to be judged guilty and to receive a prison sentence than attractive ones. A 1999 Gallup survey revealed Americans agreeing that attractiveness is a plus in modern society--and only 2% rated themselves as being below average in looks. With these points in mind take a visit to Beauty Worlds: The Culture of Beauty and to Lindie Pavati's Beauty Matters .
*. A study of a random sample of 10,039 people aged 16-24 surveyed in 1980 and 1988 found that women who were overweight during their teens and early twenties were, when compared with the rest, 20 percent less likely to get married and in households with incomes that averaged $6,710 less.
*. In 1993, the New York Times asked six foreign photographers to comment on one of their images that reveals a telling aspect of America. Observed Tomas Muscionico of a Ernest Hemingway look-alike festival in Key West, Florida: "There is no other country where people so cherish the ability to look like famous people. I could spend the rest of my life photographing look-alike contests as well as ugly baby contests, conventions of twins. Although these are fascinating events, there is a sense of desperation and emptiness in a society that places such a high regard on looking like someone else." ("Foreigners Frame America," July 5, 1993)
*. Judging from what theme makes up most of the traffic of images in this cyberspace medium, there exists an American obsession with the"bulge factor." The current trend is for females to augment their breasts. Why else would 150,000 American women accept the risks of having breast implants each year, more than 80 percent for purely cosmetic reasons? And what is to be inferred from a 1991 (February) "Harper's Index" claiming that the average size bra worn by an American woman increased from 34B in 1985 to 36C in 1991? (That same year, Triumph International Japan, a Japanese lingerie firm, marketed in honor of Mozart's bicentennial year, a brassiere that played 20 seconds of a Mozart variation, using the memory chip found in musical greeting cards.)
*. Baring all as means of delivering social protest: As the U.S., Britain and other nations mobilized for war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003, one strategy that proved successful in making news agencies carry anti-war sentiments was to create messages with nude bodies.
*. Materialism and the body self: " Commodification and the Value of Human Life "
Horace Miner's 1956 classic "Body Ritual among the Nacirema"
Examples of the ways social factors shape biological processes
Links to body/corporeality theory from Voice of the Shuttle
The Face: Meaning and Expression
body i con : Columbia U. Graduate School of Journalism project examining mass media representations of women's bodies and their consequences
BME: Body Modification Ezine
The Almost Complete Body Piercing Links List
Yahoo:Left-Handers
Left-Handers Day
Bald Headed Men of America ( you know, the BHMA
The Troubled History of Beards Did you know Russia's Peter I and England's Henry VIII & Elizabeth I taxed their bearded subjects?
Body Art
Russian Prison Tattoos
Tall People:Clubs
Little People of America
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance Home Page
A Sizism Page
NAAFA: National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
G ENDER AND SEXUALITY
Few cases provide better evidence of how biological matters determine social fates than how social roles are universally allocated and personality traits inferred from individuals' genitalia. Are the gender roles occupied by men or women the product of nature or nurture? Is theinferior status of women (a 1990 survey found only 22% of Americans believing women have a better life than men) a natural inevitability (which is why Freud, who promoted anatomical destiny, is the bane of feminists) or is it the consequence of male oppression?
In The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Free Press, 1991), Eviatar Zerubavel observes how "Only two centuries ago, the mental gapbetween the sexes was so wide that women were perceived as "closer" to animals than to men and granting them political rights seemed as ludicrous as extending such rights to beasts." (p.65) Nowadays the search for distinguishing characteristics of the sexes continues, from differences in brain structures, biological drives (e.g., testosterone's aggressive side effects), social drives (are women's drive to achieve more a function of fear of failure than desire for success?), language (Deborah Tannen speaks of "genderlects" in You Just Don't Understand , socialization differences, and the sexes' ways of knowing (the assumption that women's ways of knowing differ from men's has recently led to curricular reforms throughout the country). In 1991, whennoting how out of touch male politicians are with their constituencies, the late Barbara Jordon argued that "women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have, [and] does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it."
And then there's the matter of sex . Perhaps in no other instance do we find clearer example of the difficulties of our dual nature as both near-angel and beast than in the case of human sexuality, whose drive supposedly overwhelms rational thought. This activity we share with animals is endowed with considerable meaning: Every civilization has produced distinctive ideas concerning the nature of sexuality and its relationship to religious, philosophical, economic, political, legal, familial, and educational systems. ( Click here for a collection of international and state laws regarding matters of sex.) From society's perspective, the issue is how to channel such powerful urges into socially acceptable and"functional" outlets. It is a curious anomaly of modern American life how little historical and social scientific perspective we have on the topic of sexuality given our supposedly sex-obsessed society (and the number ofsites here in cyberspace dedicated to the topic). Nevertheless, according to the World Health Organization , sexual intercourse occurs worldwide more than 100 million times daily, resulting in 910,000 conceptions and about 350,000 cases of sexually transmitted disease.
How would you explain the decreasing age of Americans' first sexual experiences--despite widespread STDs, AIDS, and the Bush Administration's abstinence programs? According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report released May 2003 (n=1,800), half of American 15-to-17-year-olds have engaged in sexual relations. Biologically, sexual maturity has come earlier; over the past century and a half the age at menarche has declined by three-quarters of a month per decade. Social maturity, on the other hand, comes later. According to the 2002 GeneralSocial Survey, most Americans believe that one is not grown up until the age of 26. The 2000 Census revealed over 4 million Americans aged 25-34 live in the home of their parents.
And what about homosexuality? To what extent is it a product of nature or nurture? Current perceptions are a legacy of the nineteenth century, when sexual activities were first used to define the people who engagedin them. As Michel Foucault observed, "The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." Instead of being something that people did homosexuality became who they were:a different biological creature than heterosexuals.
*. For a sociobiological perspective see Laura Betzig's "Sex in History"
*. Theodore C. Bergstrom's "Primogeniture, Monogamy and Reproductive Success in a Stratified Society"
*. Diederik F. Janssen's "Growing Up Sexually: A World Atlas"
*. National Sexuality Resource Center from San Francisco State University
*. Studies in Scarlet: Marriage & Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914 from Harvard University Library
*. "American Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-demographic Differences, and Risk Behavior" findings from the NORC General Social Surveys
*. The Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology at the Robert Koch-Institute in Berlin
*. The Kinsey Institute (includes a thorough data archives )
*. there are matters of sex education: The Zogby 2003 poll of parents' attitudes; the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States , Advocates for Youth , and Planned Parenthood Federation of America
*. SIECUS's ( Sexuality Information & Education Council of the U.S ) overview of State Sexuality Laws
*. Sexual Assault Information Page
C LOTHES MAKE THE PERSON
The greater the social control the greater the body control expected. Thescope of this maxim extends beyond controlling biological processes (e.g., either hiding them, as in the case of copulation or excretion, or, as in the case of eating, covering them with etiquette) to the clothing that we wear. Dress is a language. Throughout history, clothing fashion has been used as means for differentiating people, reaffirming the differences between elites and non-elites , between children and adults, and between men and women. In medieval times, clothes denoted one'splace in a strict, inherited social hierarchy.
In the 1990s, hundreds of Iranian women have been arrested by morals police for dress code violations. In 1995, Navy Admiral Jeremy Boorda committed suicide, perhaps to remove any chance of scandal surrounding his wearing of two Vietnam combat decorations. The White House pushes for uniforms in the public schools . And nearly 25 million American workers wear some type of uniform (or "career apparel" ).
*. Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey
*. Body Modification Ancient and Modern from University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
*. Yahoo directory on history of fashion
*. A. & L. Tirocchi Dressmakers Project --read about the relationship between fashion and art and the shop's role in broader historical, social, and economic issues from 1915-1947 (Brown U.)
*. Tara Maginnis's The Costumer's Manifesto --an impressive collection of links related to clothing and costumes; the Costume History section goes from ancient Babylonian times on
*. Fashion Worlds articles on the social and cultural influences on fashion--and the messages conveyed
*. The Foundations of Fashionable Thought: The Girdle a history of the undergarment and its portrayal in the mass media
*. Christopher Wagner's overview of 500 years of boys clothing
*. Antique Photographs, Old Hats
E NVIRONMENTAL/ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY--WITH A FOCUS ON THE SOUTHERN MIND
Another family of deterministic models of human behavior (including environmental psychology , ethology , cultural geography , and behavioral ecology ) focuses on the defining role of the natural environment. Does, for instance, increasing summer heat lead to increasing levels of assaults and rapes, as some psychological biometeorologists have found? Why are people most likely to make their wills in the Spring? Why are accidental death rates the highest in the Southwest? Why are homicide rates greatest in the South? Can the ecological model observed in nature (e.g., matters of territoriality, niches, etc.) be applied to human affairs?
Resources on color psychology:
Psychology of Color from infoplease
Pantone Color Institute
The Color Association of the United States
Color Matters: psychological effects of color
Resources on regional psychology
The Southern Mind
*. Documenting The American South , which includes "First-Person Narratives of the American South" from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*. Center for the Study of the American South
*. The Journal of Southern Religion
*. Center for the Study of Southern Culture Home Page
The Midwest Mind
*. Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures --from the University of Wisconsin
C ONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON THE "NATURE" SIDE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Animal behaviors are either instinctive or learned. Much is random and therefore isn't really "behavior": a flagellating protozoa isn't "looking for" food. When social scientists speak of human behavior they mean purposeful and meaningful activities. It is implied that humans are aware of their own activities and those of others. In other words, humanbehaviors are learned rather than instinctive. Instincts , which are behaviors that are performed without learning, evolved as adaptations to specific situations. But adaptive success comes at a cost: Instincts make organisms "puppets" of their environment. With the stimulus of rain a frog croaks, just as the rooster crows with the stimulus of dawn. Neither the frog nor the rooster had any choice in the matter; their behaviors were simply determined by the environment.
In higher-order species like mammals we find fewer instincts and, hence,greater behavioral flexibility and environmental adaptability. Mammals are engaged in a constant process of adaptation to avoid extinction. Humans have the fewest instincts; instead, we have differing genetic propensities and capacities to respond to our surroundings. For us, therefore, environment remains a potent determinant of behavior.
Social scientists are increasingly appreciating the extent of the interactions that take place between nature and nurture. The presence of genes does not by itself ensure that a particular trait will be manifested. Genes require the proper environments for innate tendencies to be fully expressed. These "proper environments" consist not only of natural surroundings but also of individuals' social and symbolic milieus.