The Welfare Trait

by Adam Perkins

  Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth-control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature. The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

  (Dawkins, 1976, pp. 125–126)

  Apart from proposing the groundbreaking idea that the welfare state has evolutionary effects, Dawkins’ argument is also important to this book because for the first time it identifies welfare legislation as an agent of personality mis-development, by showing how the welfare state will be exploited by selfish individuals whose genes for selfishness will proliferate as a result. But if Dawkins’ selfish gene theory is correct, it raises the interesting question of why haven’t we all gone hog-wild at the trough of welfare? After all, if systematic, nation-wide welfare provision has been in place for over 70 years in many developed Western democracies, by now society should surely be over-run with genes for selfish, unrestrained reproduction, courtesy of the welfare state.

  Dawkins gives us an answer on the last page of The Selfish Gene: ‘even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators’ (Dawkins, 1976, p. 215). Dawkins was referring to a process known as delay of gratification, in which we forgo a small immediate reward in order to achieve a desirable outcome in the longer term. This is thought to be beneficial to life outcomes in the long run (for example, Smallwood, Ruby & Singer, 2012).

  In other words, even though the vast majority of us realise that welfare benefits represent easy money and are also an easy way of proliferating our genes, we possess sufficient foresight to see that in the long run it would be unsustainable, since the entire population refusing to work and having 15 or 16 children at the expense of the welfare state would lead to economic and social disaster. So instead of milking the welfare system to the maximum, millions of us instead work for a living and also opt to restrain our reproduction.

  However, and this is the most crucial point in the whole book because this is where I add to Dawkins’ work, this course of action is not sustainable either because, as we have already seen in Chapter 4, there are personality-based differences between individuals in the level of foresight that they possess. The lower an individual’s level of foresight, the more likely he or she is to perceive the welfare state as a tool for obtaining extra money by having extra children, since they lack the foresight to see the long-term un-sustainability of this strategy. A side effect of this attitude towards the welfare state is the proliferation of the genes of the claimants in question; that is, a set of genes that includes those for low foresight.

  This might seem a far-fetched claim, but the available data suggest that employment-resistant individuals cannot be relied upon to rein in their own higher than average level of reproduction because of a lack of foresight. For example, this quote summarises the attitude to the future of the Sheffield problem families that were studied by W. L. Tonge and colleagues:

  This is a curious set of values. It adds up to a complete failure to plan for long-term action. It takes forethought to do all that these families failed to do: to take out motor insurance and TV licence, to accumulate household comforts, to limit family size; and education is above all a long-term endowment insurance. This is a style of life which shuts its eyes to the future.

  (Tonge et al., 1975, p. 117)

  An objection to this argument is that since most people have more foresight than the problem families studied by Tonge and colleagues, they would have been able to foresee the dangers of the welfare state being exploited by such people and thus have voted against it. The answer is they could have done, but when the welfare state was introduced (at least in the UK), it was marketed to voters as a reciprocal arrangement, with workers paying a flat rate of national insurance and in return receiving welfare benefits if they happened to fall on hard times (Beveridge, 1942).

  This reciprocal system of welfare provision was sustainable in principle because only those who paid sufficient national insurance were able claim welfare benefits. But the welfare state in the UK had an Achilles’ heel that made it vulnerable to exploitation by the type of selfish person mentioned by Dawkins. This Achilles’ heel was known as national assistance and it was intended to take care of the small proportion of people who were unable to pay insurance through, for example, being paralysed. The architect of the UK welfare state, Lord Beveridge, was a smart man who was well aware that national assistance had the potential for exploitation and took pains to emphasise that it must be tightly controlled:

  Assistance will be available to meet all needs which are not covered by insurance. It must meet those needs adequately up to subsistence level, but it must be felt to be something less desirable than insurance benefit; otherwise the insured persons get nothing for their contributions. Assistance therefore will be given always subject to proof of needs and examination of means; it will be subject also to any conditions as to behaviour which may seem likely to hasten restoration of earning capacity.

  (Beveridge, 1942, p. 141)

  Unfortunately, the politicians who implemented Beveridge’s plan ignored his wise dictum that national assistance should be designed carefully so as not to unbalance the incentives for work. For example, at the inception of the UK welfare state in 1948 there were approximately 800,000 recipients of national assistance. Yet by the early 1990s, the view of the welfare state as ‘something for nothing’ had gained such a foothold in the culture of the UK that what Beveridge had intended to be a residual safety net had ballooned up to become the most-claimed form of welfare benefit, being utilised by more than 8,000,000 people (Timmins, 2001).

  Just how badly the UK welfare state has lost its bearings was recently revealed by the implementation in April 2013 of new welfare legislation that aimed to curb welfare as a life choice by imposing a cap on the weekly benefits income of each workless household. However, the generous size of the cap has undermined its effectiveness because, at £500 per week, it means that welfare still pays much better than work for thousands of UK households. For example, £500 per week is almost £100 more than the median weekly take-home pay of UK citizens who were working full time in April 2013 (approximately £407 per week) and more than twice as much as the take-home pay of those UK citizens who work full time on the minimum wage (approximately £226 per week). This revelation means that in the modern UK, the fact that anyone persists with a job despite taking home less than £500 in wages per week is, in itself, a telling demonstration of the power of personality in guiding financial decision-making, since from a rational perspective, it would make more sense for such individuals not to work for a living and instead rely on state benefits. Despite its flaws, this capping process has inadvertently served a different purpose, in that it also created a census of workless households who had previously received more than £500 per week in benefits: as of May 2015 that number stood at 62,571 workless households.

  Since a key means of reaching the £500 benefits cap is by having children (as of November 2014, 94 per cent of capped households contained dependent children), we can see that despite the benefit cap, the UK welfare state still provides a substantial financial incentive for having more children for welfare claimants who lack the foresight to see that unrestrained reproduction at the expense of the welfare state is
unsustainable in the long term. Thus, since low foresight is part of the employment-resistant personality profile, we can see that the welfare state, in the UK at least, still has the potential to drive the personality profile of the population towards higher levels of employment-resistance by the standard principles of natural selection; that is, by genetic means alone.

  This analysis is congruent with Dawkins’ advice that the welfare state is only sustainable in the long term if contraception is mandatory for welfare claimants, to avoid the spread of selfish genes. Interestingly, despite their different scientific background, Tonge and colleagues came to the same conclusion in their study of Sheffield problem families: ‘it would seem wise to take special care to help limit the fertility of families in difficulties’ (Tonge et al., 1975, p. 122).

  In order to provide background support for the notion that the welfare state can alter personality by proliferating the genes for employment-resistance, we shall now see direct experimental evidence that the personality profile of a population of non-human animals can be genetically altered by selective breeding. Such experiments are obviously not permitted in humans but, since there is much neural and genetic similarity between humans and other mammals (for example, Panksepp, 1998), these experiments can be regarded as useful models of the selective-breeding effect of the welfare state upon human personality.

  Selective-breeding studies of personality: The Maudsley reactive rats

  Selective-breeding experiments are a powerful tool for researchers investigating the genetic basis of behaviour. Perhaps the most famous example of a programme of selective-breeding experiments for personality is that started by Peter Broadhurst and colleagues at the research wing of the Maudsley Hospital, the Institute of Psychiatry, back in the 1950s and 1960s (for example, Broadhurst, 1960). In that era, the idea that human personality traits were real was not widely accepted by many academics owing to the prevailing political climate that maintained personality is a myth, with behaviour instead being determined by situational cues (Mischel, 1968). Thus, for a researcher such as Broadhurst to try to test experimentally the idea that personality is genetically based was brave and revolutionary.

  Working for a PhD under the supervision of Hans Eysenck, in 1954, Broadhurst began selective breeding of rats that he had tested on a single behavioural measure of fear: the open-field test. In the open-field test, rats are placed for two minutes in a circular, white-painted arena 32¾ inches in diameter which is brightly lit and exposed to relatively loud white noise (78 dB). Rodents innately seek dark, sheltered, quiet areas, as these offer protection from predators and so the open-field arena is highly aversive to the average rat. The test is conducted four times on consecutive days, at the same time of day each time. Fear is indexed by the number of faecal boluses deposited during the two-minute experimental test: the higher the total number of boluses deposited during the four daily sessions, the more fear-prone the animal. Broadhurst selected defecation as a measure of fear because research on reactions to combat of US Army soldiers in the Second World War revealed that 21 per cent reported losing control of their bowels when under fire (Stouffer et al., 1950), suggesting that defecation in response to threat is an objective and face-valid measure of fear in humans as well as rodents. Broadhurst confirmed the validity of defecation in the open-field test as a measure of fear by preliminary experiments that showed defecation rate increased as light and noise intensity was increased.

  Broadhurst then brother–sister mated the most frequent defecators (the rats with the most fearful personalities) with each other and did the same with the least frequent defecators (the least fearful rats). Within ten generations, the defecation rate of the least fearful rats (known as the Maudsley nonreactive strain) in the open-field test had dropped from an average of three boluses to zero boluses and remained there despite attempts to scare them more intensely by increasing light and noise levels in the open field. Conversely, the most fearful rats (known as the Maudsley reactive strain) in the same number of generations increased their average defecation rate from three to four boluses. Importantly, the differences in defecation rate between the two strains of rat were specifically related to threat and were not some general metabolic phenomenon of frequent defecation. This was found by measuring defecation rates when the animals were not under threat (when they were returned to their home cages). This study showed the reactive rodents defecated less than the nonreactive rats when not under threat (Broadhurst, 1975).

  It is critical to note that this divergence in defecation rates between the two strains was seen in rats that had no experience of the open-field test before they were tested on it: the differences in defecation rate were wholly genetically determined. This was confirmed by Broadhurst’s use of cross-fostering to control for effects of potential differences in maternal care between rat mothers of the two different strains. In brief, the cross-fostering entailed swapping half the pups at birth between mothers of the two different strains. So, half the pups born to reactive mothers would be given to nonreactive mothers and vice versa. The results of this programme showed that there were no significant differences in the defecation rate between cross-fostered pups and pups raised by their own mothers. In a very basic but elegant way, this aspect of Broadhurst’s research indicates that the differences in fearfulness in the rats was genetically based and not a product of differences in maternal behaviour.

  However, the real significance of Broadhurst’s experiments was that the reactive and nonreactive rats showed a similarly divergent pattern of reactivity to other measures of fear that did not use defecation rate and also differed in non-behavioural measures of processes that could reasonably be thought to underlie fear (Eysenck & Broadhurst, 1964). For example, relative to the nonreactive rats, the frequently defecating reactive rats reduce their food and water intake under threat, show higher heart rate, run away faster and are less exploratory in novel environments (Broadhurst, 1975). Moreover, relaxation of selection from generation 16 onwards caused no reversion of the defecation behaviour of the two strains (Broadhurst, 1975). These follow-up studies indicate that what had been created by Broadhurst’s selective-breeding process was not two strains of rats with odd toilet habits but instead two strains of rats with personalities that differ in their general sensitivity to threatening stimuli (fearfulness), of which their differing defecation rate is just one manifestation. The reactive rats have been likened to people with high scores on the personality dimension of neuroticism and the nonreactive rats to low scorers on the same dimension. Importantly, the two strains of rats also differ in the activity of their noradrenergic and serotonergic brain systems, systems that in humans are thought to influence susceptibility to anxiety disorders and depression (Gray & McNaughton, 2000).

  Broadhurst’s work is valuable for supporting the general idea that personality can be changed by selective breeding over only a few generations, but the personality construct of neuroticism is not the focus of this book: we are interested in factors that influence conscientiousness and agreeableness. In order to check that the latter aspects of personality are as sensitive to selective breeding as neuroticism, I will now summarise selective-breeding programmes that target work ethic (as a non-human proxy for conscientiousness) and tameness (as a non-human proxy for agreeableness).

  Selective-breeding studies of personality: Breeding work ethic in mice

  Arguably, the selective-breeding experiments that are most relevant to conscientiousness are those done by Theodore Garland and colleagues who have shown that work ethic in mice can be altered by selective breeding. In these studies, work ethic was quantified as the activity that each mouse displayed on an exercise wheel. Importantly, in this sort of research, each mouse is typically housed individually with an exercise wheel that they can run on whenever they want, so the amount of wheel-running displayed by each mouse provides a direct measure of willingness to expend effort. The willingness to expend effort is not a perfect analogue for conscientiousness in humans because
it measures more than just our tendency to be a couch potato, but nevertheless individual differences in laziness are captured by conscientiousness in most major personality theories (often under somewhat more polite labels such as activity, industriousness, persistence or achievement-striving, for example, McCrae & Costa, 2008). This analysis means that willingness to run on a wheel in rodents can reasonably be seen as equivalent to laziness-related aspects of human conscientiousness.

  A good example of research on selective breeding for work ethic in mice is a study by Swallow, Carter and Garland (1998), in which they examined the effects in mice of ten generations of selective breeding for high levels of voluntary wheel-running. Approximately 600 mice per generation (from ten families) were placed in individual cages with exercise wheels for six days and selection was based on the average number of revolutions on days five and six. From each of the ten families of mice in each generation, the highest-running male and female were mated. Six additional mice (three male, three female) were selected to breed in order to provide enough offspring to produce ten families in each generation. These additional mice were the second-highest runners in the highest-running families. Siblings were not permitted to breed with each other. In order to provide a comparison, mice were randomly selected to breed from a control population, who were not selected according to wheel-running behaviour.