The Welfare Trait
Page 3
The first point to note is that science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes, or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives. Sometimes a crucial experiment (experimentum crucis) can tip the balance towards a particular narrative. For example, stomach problems such as gastritis and ulcers were historically explained as the products of stress. This narrative was challenged in the late 1970s by the Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who suspected that stomach problems were actually caused by infection with the bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Frustrated by scepticism and by difficulties publishing his academic papers, in 1984, Barry Marshall appointed himself his own experimental subject and drank a Petri dish full of H. pylori culture. He promptly developed gastritis which was then cured with antibiotics, suggesting that H. pylori have a causal role in this type of illness. Opposition continued for a decade or so, but by the early 1990s, it had crumbled, and for their work on H. pylori, Warren and Marshall were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Other narratives, such as the principle of evolution by natural selection, or the welfare trait theory that is presented in this book, concern slow, large-scale processes that are unsuited to testing in a laboratory. In these cases, we take a bird’s eye view of the facts of the matter and attempt to decide which narrative they best support. This book accordingly takes a bird’s eye view of some facts about personality and the welfare state, in an attempt to decide which of the following three narratives they best support:
1. The welfare state should be retained without change.
2. The welfare state should be abolished.
3. The welfare state should be amended to take account of personality.
As we will see, the evidence for any of these three narratives is far from conclusive, but in my opinion, at this early stage in the scientific discussion of personality and welfare, the third narrative is the best supported. If this book prompts new research that shifts the balance of evidence towards another narrative, then so be it – at least the book will have succeeded in advancing our knowledge of personality and welfare, greater comprehension of which can only benefit humanity in the long run.
This brings me to a second point, which is that there is no qualitative divide between people like me, who are scientists by profession, and people who have other careers. We are all scientists in the sense that we are all trying to make sense of the world by appraising the facts of a matter and trying to draw conclusions from them, whether it is to do with deciding what part of a town to live in, what career to pursue or whether someone is lying. This idea is perhaps best illustrated by Albert Einstein’s famous observation: ‘The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of every day thinking’ (Einstein, 1936, p. 349). Based on my own experience of working as a professional scientist, I agree with Einstein’s observation with one qualification: in my opinion, the only difference between a scientific argument and an ordinary argument in a pub or at a dinner table is that scientific arguments are based primarily on evidence obtained by scientific studies that have been written up and published in scientific journals or books.
This formal method of archiving scientific results allows scientists to be aware of what their predecessors discovered. Awareness of previous discoveries is known as ‘mastering the literature’, which is an unglamorous but crucial part of professional science because, if we haven’t mastered the literature, we are likely to waste time trying to discover something that has already been discovered. More briefly stated, we will keep trying to reinvent the wheel. Mastering the literature therefore enables science to move forward, since it allows current scientists to build on the discoveries of previous researchers rather than starting from scratch in each new generation. I view professional science as baton-passing, with the baton being the understanding of a particular topic. The business of each scientist is to polish that baton before he or she passes it on and that is what I am trying to do with this book.
Peer review is the second specialist part of professional science. It is a form of academic quality control in which draft manuscripts are subjected to the scrutiny of scientists who are experts in the field in question but who were not involved in writing the manuscript being reviewed. The reviewers attempt to assess the scientific rigour of the manuscript and judge if conclusions drawn by the author/s are appropriate to the results. A key part of the peer-review process is that the publisher usually conceals the identity of each reviewer from the author/s in order to permit expression of critical opinions without fear of reprisals. The peer-review system is far from perfect as, for example, the identity of the author is usually known to the reviewers and so their reviews may be skewed by professional rivalry or personal animosity (or both). Sometimes the identity of the author/s is withheld from the reviewers by the publisher, but even this cannot eliminate bias, as experts in a topic area often recognise the writing style of their peers and therefore often can deduce who wrote a particular manuscript from its content. But, like democracy, we have yet to find a better system and so peer review remains a cornerstone of scientific rigour.
In order formally to test the scientific rigour of my welfare trait theory, it has undergone two separate rounds of peer review. It was first subjected to peer review (in condensed form) as part of a paper I published recently on personality and reproduction. It survived and was accordingly published in a leading personality journal (Perkins et al., 2013). This book presents a much more elaborate and advanced version of the welfare trait theory and so the publisher decided that it required a fresh bout of peer review. This was undertaken by a panel of three anonymous scientists who were selected by the publisher for their expert knowledge in various different fields connected to the topic of this book. I used the feedback from the reviewers to improve the book, enabling it to be accepted for publication. I therefore must express my gratitude to the reviewers for taking the time to scrutinise my work so thoroughly and in the spirit of constructive criticism.
Being published in a peer-reviewed journal or book is however only one step towards validating a theory: it must also stand the test of time. Thus, the validity of the welfare trait theory will only become apparent decades from now. Even then, some new findings could be made that counter it, so the most accurate intellectual stance to take is that theory validation never really ends. This sentiment was expressed elegantly by the young British neuroscientist Tom Schofield in his posthumous comment piece on the scientific method that was recently published in Nature magazine:
Science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong. The best scientific theory is not the one that reveals the truth – that is impossible. It is the one that explains what we already know about the world in the simplest way possible, and that makes useful predictions about the future.
(Schofield, 2013, p. 279)
However, just like pub debates over who is the best footballer, science boils down to a matter of opinion as to which rival narrative is correct (or at least not as incorrect as the others). When reading the evidence presented in the following chapters, it is therefore particularly important to be on guard against one’s pre-existing views distorting one’s perceptions of the facts. It is not easy to do this, but it is worth the effort because it will bring one’s intellect into line with the advice of such great thinkers as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said the following in a 1959 BBC TV interview:
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you would wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed but look only and solely at what are the facts.
The physicist Richard Feynman warned in a similar vein in the conclusion of his report about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 that ‘For a
successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.’
Applied to the present topic, the advice of great thinkers such as Russell and Feynman means that to create a successful welfare state – that looks after unemployed citizens but does not encourage the development of the employment-resistant personality profile – we would be wise to face up to the facts on personality, even if it is politically incorrect to do so. After all, penicillin is a successful antibiotic not because a politician tells us that it is but because it obeys the laws of nature: why should the welfare state be any different?
When we are evaluating a theory, the more lines of independent evidence that support it, the more convincing it is. Thus, a theory that is based on a huge amount of data gathered by one or two researchers is less credible than a theory which is supported by smaller amounts of data gathered by scores of independent researchers. As will be seen in the following chapters, my welfare trait theory falls into the latter category, but judging whether data support a theory is, in itself, a subjective process. I have therefore supported my theory primarily with older studies and experiments, the results of which have stood the test of time. Thus, I hope to avoid the common trap of rushing to publish a theory based on trendy new research findings, only for those findings to be discredited within a year or two.
This cautious strategy I have followed does not mean my theory is valid – that is a matter of interpretation – but it does mean that my theory is based on respected, time-honoured scientific discoveries that cannot be dismissed as a flash in the pan. Clarity concerning my sources of evidence was accordingly a high priority for me when writing this book. Each study that I have used to support my theory is therefore cited in my text in standard academic style with the author’s name or names followed by the year of publication (for example, Smith & Jones, 1960). Quotations are shown in quote marks with the page number listed after the year of publication. The publication details for each study that I cite are listed in full at the back of the book, in alphabetical order of the first author’s name. This is so that any reader who wants to learn more about a topic or who thinks there is something fishy about a piece of evidence I have presented can then use these references as start points for tracking down other publications on that topic.
Last, but not least, it is important to acknowledge that the welfare state is a political hot potato and this book, despite its scientific nature and sober tone, risks being mischaracterised as an attempt to undermine the welfare state and/or demonise its claimants. I therefore must put on record that after completing my BSc, I found it difficult to obtain graduate-level employment. I spent years working in a variety of low-paid roles and, between jobs, I claimed unemployment benefits. This experience left me with great admiration for our welfare state, as well as the belief that most unemployed individuals are keen to work and only rely on the welfare state temporarily, as I did. Moreover, I realised that blaming welfare claimants who are work-shy for their attitude is pointless: we are no more responsible for our personality profiles than we are for our height or our shoe size. It is better instead to assess the causes of problematic personality characteristics in the same neutral way that we assess the causes of other biological phenomena, because that is what personality is – a biological phenomenon.
The latter point about viewing personality as just another biological phenomenon leads me onto a second likely criticism, namely that because my academic specialty is the neurobiology of personality, this book cannot contribute any insights into problems with the welfare state. Such a criticism does not stand up to scrutiny because it fails to take into account the cross-disciplinary relevance of personality research. For example, insights from personality research can be used to help address psychiatric, educational and occupational problems: why should problems with the welfare state be off limits?
A third likely criticism is that the relationship between personality and the welfare state is complex and requires much greater nuance, detail and balance in discussing it than is contained in this book. That would be a sensible point decades in the future when the scientific discussion of personality and welfare is well advanced and the nuances of the topic are ripe for discussion, but my argument is that, at the moment, there is no scientific discussion of personality and welfare. What this book is aiming to do is blaze a trail for that discussion – a trail that will no doubt be bedevilled by thorny topics, empirical quicksands and conceptual wrong turns, but one that I hope will be turned into a smooth highway by researchers far cleverer, more detail-focused and better qualified than me.
Bearing these three likely criticisms in mind, I can therefore reassure the reader that this book is not an attempt to dress up political motives as science or waste time on arguments about whether personality researchers should be allowed to comment on problems with the welfare state. I prefer instead to let the data speak for themselves whilst accepting, as George Orwell declared, that ‘no book is genuinely free from political bias’ and it would be presumptuous of me to suppose that this book is an exception to that rule.
2
The Employment-Resistant Personality Profile
In order to assess the credibility of the idea that the welfare state could undermine human capital by inducing personality mis-development in the domains of conscientiousness and agreeableness, it is first necessary to summarise evidence showing the importance of these personality traits in the world of work. That is the purpose of this chapter, which presents evidence from three different parts of the scientific literature. First, we shall review neurological case studies of people who have suffered injuries to the prefrontal area of their brains. These injuries are relevant to personality and employment because they do not necessarily alter intelligence but do tend to alter personality in a way that is consistent with a reduction in conscientiousness and agreeableness (for example, Blumer & Benson, 1975). Furthermore, a prefrontal brain injury will typically transform a person with a good work record into someone who is unemployable. Such case studies, therefore, provide evidence that conscientiousness and agreeableness play a causal role in determining the likelihood that a person will work for a living.
A second source of evidence linking low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness to employment difficulties is provided by research with so-called problem families (now known as troubled families). This research compared the psychological characteristics of problem families with those of families who are matched on important variables such as neighbourhood and income, yet are sufficiently functional not to require the intervention of more than one social service agency. The chief psychological difference between these families lies in the domain of personality: the adults of the problem families, on average, display personality profiles that are significantly less conscientious and agreeable than those of the adults of the comparison families. These attributes contribute to the employment-resistant personality profile, as it was found that the adults in the problem families also had significantly worse work records than the adults in the comparison families had.
Further evidence linking low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness to employment difficulties is provided by studies that correlate personality questionnaire scores with occupational outcomes. The importance of these studies to the present argument is that they show that both conscientiousness and agreeableness influence job performance in healthy, employed adults in a way that is consistent with findings relating to the more extreme cases presented by prefrontal brain-injury victims or by problem families. So we can see that even in people who are in employment, the lower the level of conscientiousness and agreeableness, the less satisfactory they tend to be as employees. More specifically, conscientiousness is positively associated with job performance (Barrick, Mount & Judge, 2001) whereas agreeableness is positively associated with non-contracted behaviours that benefit organisational cohesion (for example, being personable or helpful; Hogan, 2011).
Viewed as a whole, th
ese occupational studies suggest that there is a gradient of personality effects on employability, all the way from extreme but rare clinical cases such as brain-injury victims, through problem families, to people with relatively normal personalities and reasonably normal work records. These occupational studies can therefore be used to counter the concern that the sheer rarity of prefrontal brain-injury victims and problem families means that conclusions concerning effects of their personality profiles on their work records are too atypical to be generalised to the majority of the population. In line with Albert Einstein’s view that science is just an extension of everyday thinking, it is easy to observe in most workplace contexts that some people are difficult to work with/for and that personality has a big influence on that.
Agreement between formally gathered personality data and the anecdotal observations that we make in the workplace might sound trivial but, as we will see in later chapters, such agreement is valuable to science as it provides an important sanity check, helping to confirm our results are measuring something real and are not merely the product of a misplaced decimal point or a statistical blunder. Therefore, when you are reading this chapter, it would be valuable for you to keep in mind your own experiences concerning the effects of personality on employability so that you can check the credibility of the findings described here.
Case studies of the personality effects of prefrontal brain injury
A rich, if rare and specific, source of causal evidence that conscientiousness- and agreeableness-related aspects of personality are key determinants of employability comes from studies of individuals who have suffered injuries to the prefrontal area of their brains. Prefrontal brain injuries are important in the context of this book because they typically result in a drastic reduction in employability, not through loss of intelligence or physical ability (both of which are usually unaffected by this form of brain injury), but by changing the personality of the sufferer in a way that approximates to a reduction of conscientiousness and agreeableness.