In the old days, a human’s life, too, depended on remaining a member of a group. But because human groups differ in culture, the behaviors necessary for group membership couldn’t all be built in—much had to be learned. The baby’s Job 2, therefore, is to learn how to behave in a way that is acceptable to the other members of his or her society. This is the process that developmentalists call “socialization.” It consists of acquiring the social behaviors, customs, language, accent, attitudes, and morals deemed appropriate in a particular society.
Socialization makes children more alike—more similar in behavior to others of their age and gender. Therefore, socialization cannot solve the central mystery of this book: why people (even identical twins reared together) differ in personality and social behavior. But the socialization system is an essential part of the solution, because one of the things I have to explain is why children become both more alike and less alike while they are growing up. The ways in which they become more alike do not consist solely of language and customs. There is evidence that children become more alike even in the sorts of things that are measured on personality tests.
The evidence has to do with cultural differences in personality. Personality tests have been translated into many different languages and given to people all over the world. This research has shown that there are systematic differences in personality from one part of the world to another. The differences are smallish but they appear to be real—not due to problems in translation. Broadly speaking, Americans and Europeans tend to be more extraverted, more open to experience, and less agreeable and compliant than Asians and Africans. There are also differences within continents: between, say, Italians and Norwegians.
If there are differences between cultures, there must be similarities within them. Two people who grew up in the same culture are, on average, a bit more alike in personality and social behavior than two from different cultures.1
People from the same culture are also, on average, more alike in appearance and in the medical problems to which they are susceptible. Is it possible that some of the cultural differences in personality are genetic? The personality psychologist Robert McCrae has raised this question.2 Answering it is not as straightforward as you might think, because the data from behavioral genetic studies are pretty much useless. Behavioral genetic methods can identify sources of variation only within the group of subjects who take part in a study, and the subjects in these studies almost always come from the same culture. Such studies can tell us about the role of genes in producing differences within a culture, but are uninformative about the role of genes in producing differences between cultures.
Fortunately, there are other ways to answer the question about cultural effects on personality. The best way to do it is to study immigrants. What happens when people move from one culture to another? The answer is that it depends on how old they were when they made the move.
McCrae himself provided some of the relevant data. He and his colleagues gave personality tests to Asian-Canadian college students, the offspring of Chinese parents from Hong Kong who had immigrated to Canada. Some of the students had been born in Hong Kong and had come to Canada with their parents; others had been born in Canada. The researchers found that the personalities of the subjects who had recently arrived in Canada were, on average, about the same as those of college-age people still living in Hong Kong. In contrast, the personalities of subjects who were born in Canada were about the same as those of other Canadian college students. Subjects who had arrived in Canada in childhood were somewhere in between the Hong Kong norm and the Canadian norm.3
So the personality differences between these cultures are not genetic. Nor are they transmitted from parents to children through training or imitation. The children reared in Canada by Hong Kong–born parents became Canadians. What influenced their personality was not their parents’ culture but the culture of the society they grew up in.
Another study, by the Japanese social psychologist Yasuko Minoura, narrows down the time period during which the cultural environment exerts its effects. Minoura studied the children of Japanese executives who were assigned by their companies to temporary duties in the United States and who brought their families along. These children, transplanted to California, varied in how old they were when their parents made the move and in how long they remained there before returning to Japan. During their stay in California, the culture of their home remained steadfastly Japanese, because the parents knew they would be returning to Japan and made efforts to keep the children from becoming too Americanized. The success of these efforts depended on the children’s age and on the length of their stay. Minoura found that children who arrived in California before the age of nine and who remained there for at least four years were likely to become completely assimilated and to adopt American patterns of social behavior. Many of these children experienced social difficulties with peers on their return to Japan. Those who were old enough to understand the source of their difficulties made efforts to change. Minoura puts an upper limit of fourteen or fifteen years on the possibility of returning to Japanese norms of social behavior, but above the age of twelve or thirteen the change had to be made consciously and involved considerable effort. Younger children adapted without conscious effort to the change in social norms.4
These two studies show that the culture does have effects—environmental effects—on personality and social behavior. But large, complex societies aren’t culturally uniform: they contain subcultures. If there are personality differences between cultures, there may also be small personality differences between subcultures within a society. Siblings who grow up together belong (at least in childhood) to the same subculture: they share a neighborhood, social class, and ethnic group. I attribute the small shared environment effects that sometimes turn up in behavioral genetic studies to subcultural effects on personality.
Cultural and subcultural effects on personality are due to socialization; no one questions that. The disagreement is over how children are socialized. The conventional theory is that they’re socialized by their parents, but the conventional theory is not supported by the evidence.
Nor does it make sense from an evolutionary point of view. The evolutionary purpose of childhood is to prepare for adulthood—an adulthood that is unlikely to be spent in the parental home. People outside the immediate family, being less motivated by kinship, are going to be less tolerant of deviant behavior. The child has to learn to behave in a manner that is acceptable, not just to his or her parents, but to other people as well. That’s why getting socialized is the child’s Job 2.
The mental machinery I described in the previous chapter won’t serve this purpose. For Job 2, the child needs different equipment. The socialization system I propose has ancient roots: it is the descendant of the system that makes fish swim in schools and birds of a feather flock together. The human version of the device is more elaborate—some new bells and whistles have been added—but it provides the same motive: to go where my group goes, to do what my group does.
Consider the challenge facing the child. She has to learn how to behave appropriately for her society—how to behave in a way that won’t get her laughed at, picked on, or shunned. What makes it difficult is that the people in her society don’t all behave alike. Aside from the striking individual differences, there are also systematic differences in behavior between people in different social categories. Within every society, males behave differently from females and children behave differently from adults. These two age categories, children and adults, were probably enough in hunter-gatherer times, but most contemporary societies provide at least one more, for adolescents. There may also be distinctions based on other factors, such as social class. Adolescents behave neither like adults nor like children. Princes behave differently from peons.
The behavioral differences between social categories mean that the child can’t learn how to behave properly simply by imitating her mother, because she’s a child a
nd her mother is an adult. She can pretend to be an adult while playing a game, but a child who behaved like an adult in other circumstances would be considered silly or impertinent. Though children can learn skills such as cooking, weaving, and fishing by imitating the actions of adults, it won’t work for social behavior.
It won’t work even for language. In many societies, children are expected to use a somewhat different language—different verb forms—in talking to their parents than their parents use in talking to them. The parents in traditional French families, for instance, use the tu form in addressing their children but expect their children to reply in the vous form. Moreover, in many societies (including those in which one of the forms of “you” has disappeared), children use a somewhat different vocabulary in conversing with other children than when talking to adults. The language of the play group is likely to be peppered with dirty words—words the children didn’t learn from their parents and wouldn’t dare use in their presence.5
So how does a child go about learning to behave like a child—more precisely, like a female child or a male child? Through a cognitive process that requires specialized mental equipment. The system I described in the previous chapter maintains a lexicon of people-information and avoids mixing together data from different individuals. In contrast, the system I will describe in this chapter combines data and does statistics on them: it computes averages.
The first step for the child is to figure out the social categories that exist in his or her society. This task is equivalent to that of learning other kinds of categories: for example, chairs and fish. Like chairs and fish, categories of people have fuzzy boundaries. Is a three-legged stool a chair? Is a seahorse a fish? Is this person a boy or a man? Traditional societies often provide rites of passage to sharpen the boundaries between age categories, but industrialized societies seem to manage pretty well without them. What we haven’t gotten used to yet is the blurring of the boundary between males and females.
An interesting thing about fuzzy mental categories is that, although they tend to be hazy around the edges, they’re clear at the center. We have an image of what the ideal or prototypical member of each category should be, and it’s somewhere in the middle.6 When I say “man,” you probably don’t think of an eighteen-year-old or an eighty-year-old and you probably don’t picture him wearing a dress. When I say “bird,” you think of a robin or sparrow, not an ostrich or vulture. The prototypical chair has four legs, a seat, and a back.
Computer graphic programs can be used to blend together two or more photographs of women’s faces, producing a picture that is the average of the individual photos. Psychologists have asked subjects to judge the attractiveness of these blends. The journal article reporting the results of the first experiment of this kind, by the psychologists Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman, was titled “Attractive Faces Are Only Average.” The subjects judged an artificial face, created by blending sixteen real faces together, as more attractive than any of the real ones. Using photos of men’s faces yielded similar results.7
Evolutionary psychologists have explained these findings in terms of an evolved preference for healthy partners. Since health problems before or after birth can produce asymmetries and irregularities, the symmetry and regularity of the averaged face are signals of good health.8 I have no doubt that signals of good health are perceived as attractive, but I don’t think that averaged faces are attractive simply because they look healthy. Something else is coming into play here: the categorization mechanism. One of the psychological effects of categorization is that we tend to see the average member of a category not only as more typical but also as more attractive. This is true not just in judging people’s faces; it also holds for birds, dogs, and wristwatches. Subjects in these experiments say that an average-looking dog or wristwatch is more attractive than an unusual-looking one.9
And yet unusual-looking watches are sold, basset hounds and shih tzus become cherished pets, and unusual-looking men and women find mates. Some of the most beautiful people in the world have faces that are neither average nor symmetrical. Judging artificial, blended faces is different from judging real ones, and the reason, I propose, is that different mental mechanisms are involved. Judgments of blended faces or the faces of strangers are the province of the categorization mechanism; people who don’t have a page in your people-information lexicon are seen simply as anonymous representatives of their social category. But when the face belongs to someone you know, the relationship system speaks up and offers its opinion.
Categorization has its strongest effects on reactions to strangers. Once you know someone, your opinion of her attractiveness doesn’t depend on her symmetry; nor can it be accurately predicted on the basis of judgments made by people who don’t know her. Your opinion of someone’s attractiveness, once you’ve gotten to know her, is strongly influenced by whether or not you like her.10 The relationship system sees a familiar face and immediately turns to the proper page in the people-information lexicon. The categorization mechanism, which seeks averageness, is overruled. That wasn’t a lady I saw you with last night: that was your wife.
Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor whose specialty is memory, once played a round of golf with a man with amnesia. Frederick, as Schacter calls him, was in his mid-fifties; he had been an enthusiastic golfer for many years. Though his memory disorder was severe, he had by no means lost everything; indeed, Schacter’s first impression was that there was nothing wrong with him. Frederick could converse in a normal fashion and remembered how to do most things. In particular, he remembered the words, rules, and physical skills of the game of golf. He still knew how to swing a golf club, which club to use for long shots or short ones, and the meaning of words like birdie and par. He still knew that the golfer whose ball lands closest to the hole marks its position with a coin and lets the other player putt first. But by the time it was Frederick’s turn to putt, he had forgotten that the coin on the green was his. He had forgotten that he placed it there.
With occasional reminders from Schacter, Frederick played a pretty decent round of golf. So Schacter invited him to come back for another round on another day.
When I picked up Frederick at his home to play our second round, about a week later, he warned me that he was not a very good player, that he had not been out on a golf course for several months, and that he might be a bit nervous since this was the first time he had ever played with me. I did not have the heart to tell him the truth.11
All memories are not alike; nor are all memory disorders. What Frederick had lost was his ability to form new memories of a sort called “episodic”—explicit memories of actual events, which can be consciously recalled and put into words. What he had retained was his semantic memories (factual knowledge, like the meaning of birdie) and his implicit or procedural memories (how to play golf). You may have episodic memories of being taught to play golf by your father, but your knowledge of how to play golf is procedural. Sad to say, you may lose your explicit memories of your father sooner than your implicit memories of how to play golf.
We know that these memory systems are located in different areas of the brain, because brain injuries or diseases can wipe them out selectively, depending on where the damage is. The hippocampus and adjacent areas are involved in the formation of new explicit memories (episodic or semantic), which are then stored in the cortex, chiefly in the temporal and parietal lobes. These brain areas tend to be among the first ones damaged by Alzheimer’s disease.12 Mildly affected Alzheimer’s victims forget words; as the disease progresses they may fail to recognize the faces of their spouses or children. Newer memories tend to be lost before older ones. My mother, during her long, slow decline due to Alzheimer’s disease, mistook my brother for her father. She didn’t remember having a son that old—probably didn’t remember having a son at all—but for a while she still remembered having a father. And my brother’s face still turned on a familiarity signal in her failing brain.
Par
kinson’s disease has distinctly different effects: it damages the basal ganglia and the areas in the frontal lobes to which they are connected by neural pathways. These brain areas are involved in procedural memories. People afflicted with this disorder may lose, not only physical skills like the ability to swing a golf club, but also other kinds of procedural knowledge such as the rules of grammar—how to form the past tense of a verb, for instance. In the previous chapter I told you about the two systems Steven Pinker described for language: one based on words, the other on rules. Alzheimer’s victims tend to lose the words, Parkinson’s victims the rules.13
Our memory for words is explicit memory; our memory for rules is implicit, procedural. Amnesiacs who can no longer form new explicit memories can still acquire new procedural knowledge. A person with a damaged hippocampus can still be taught to play golf, though he will not remember who taught it to him or when he learned it.14
Categorical knowledge is based on implicit memory, not explicit. Amnesiacs like Frederick can learn artificial categories, such as random-dot patterns that look somewhat alike; they can tell you whether a new pattern is or is not in the category. People with intact brains acquire categorical knowledge without realizing they’re doing it. Babies have the ability to acquire procedural and categorical knowledge before they are capable of long-term storage of episodic memories. Those babies who, in chapter 5, learned to kick one foot to make a mobile jiggle were demonstrating procedural knowledge.15
Babies make categorical distinctions between men and women and between children and adults before they have words for the categories.16 They are prepared to acquire knowledge about these social categories and other social categories they may encounter later—racial categories, for instance. This knowledge is acquired implicitly, mostly without conscious awareness. Though no one sees anything wrong with implicit knowledge about chairs, fish, dogs, wristwatches, or verbs, implicit knowledge about social categories of people is frowned upon and given a pejorative name: stereotypes.
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