No Two Alike

by Judith Rich Harris

  Two famous and never-to-be-repeated experiments in social psychology demonstrate how easy it is for social categorization to lead to hostility and thence to violence. The two groups of eleven-year-old boys at the Robbers Cave summer camp went to war against each other. They got into fistfights, raided each others’ cabins (where they stole or destroyed each other’s property), and filled socks with stones to prepare for retaliatory raids. The subjects in the second study were male college students, prescreened to make sure they were all in good mental health, and then randomly divided into two groups: “prisoners” and “guards.” Within a few days, the guards were mistreating the prisoners and finding loathsome ways to humiliate them. The experiment had to be brought to a halt before its scheduled completion date.51

  The power of groupness was brought home to me while I was watching a golf game on television. Golf is a game that ordinarily pits individual against individual, and one of the pleasures for the viewer is the opportunity to get to know the players: people from all over the world, varying in color, language, accent, body type, age, personality, and skill, all competing with one another for trophies and ridiculously large sums of money. All wanting very much to win.

  But once in a while golf is played as a team sport. The Presidents Cup competition in November 2003 pitted a team of twelve American golfers against an “International Team” of twelve golfers from six different countries. On the final day of the tournament, with the score very close, a player for the International Team, Nick Price, missed a putt. If he had made it, his team would have won; as it was, the tournament ended in a tie. Price was so upset when his ball rolled by the cup that he broke his putter over his knee.

  I have often seen golfers miss crucial putts in ordinary tournaments, and sometimes they let their disappointment show, but I had never before seen anyone break a golf club. And Nick Price is normally an easygoing guy who never loses his cool. But team play evokes stronger emotions than tournaments in which individuals are competing only for themselves.52 The emotions are evoked even if the team is a short-lived, artificial construct composed of twelve golfers from six different countries, some of whom hardly knew each other before the competition began.

  Far back in our evolutionary history, “us” was a real group in which all the members knew one another and most of them were related. The strong emotions associated with groupness were inherited from those ancestors. They served the same purpose, and were passed down in the same way, as the instinct that impels a bee to give up its life to defend its hive.

  The mental system that enables children to adapt to their culture works differently from the one used for managing personal relationships; the two systems rely on different kinds of memory. Socialization is a robust form of learning that is carried out at a level not fully accessible to the conscious mind. Important things go on during childhood that we are not aware of at the time and cannot remember afterwards.

  I said at the beginning of this chapter that the socialization system can’t explain personality differences because it makes people within a culture (or people in a given social category within a culture) more alike in behavior. But just as we have to take account of the effects of genetic effects on personality before we can get a clear picture of environmental effects, we also have to take account of the effects of the relationship system and the socialization system before we can get a clear picture of what the third system does.

  The reason why it has been so difficult to distinguish the effects of these three systems from one another and from the effects of genes is that they often combine to produce a single output. Several different visual mechanisms can combine to produce a unified perception of three-dimensionality; likewise, several different mental mechanisms can simultaneously influence social behavior—for example, emotional expressiveness. Whether, at a given point in time, you bottle up your emotions or blow your cool depends in part on your innate predispositions. It also depends on the culture you were reared in: in some societies, people are expected to keep a stiff upper lip. It also depends on whether you are talking to your father or your boss, and whether you are on your own or are a member of a group. It also depends on a long-term process of personality development, which is the subject of the next chapter.

  What I’ve been doing all this time is paring away the alternatives. Uncovering and eliminating suspects that left confusing clues. Peeling off masks. Now at last I’m ready to identify the perpetrator, the mental system responsible for human individuality.

  9

  The Status System

  HEEDING OCCAM’S advice about not multiplying entities, many scientists have spent their careers trying to force ten pounds of data into five-pound theories. They would have done better to listen to Einstein, who gave similar advice but phrased it in a wiser way. Make things as simple as you can, he said, but no simpler.

  There is good evidence for the existence of both the systems I described in the previous two chapters, but neither can solve the central mystery of this book: why identical twins who grow up in the same home differ so much in personality. The socialization system makes reared-together twins more alike in behavior and personality. The relationship system produces no long-term effects on personality—only short-term adjustments that enable people to behave appropriately with a variety of social partners. To solve the mystery we need a third entity, which I will call the status system.1

  The purpose of this system is the baby’s Job 3: to compete successfully. I’m talking now about competition within the group—classic Darwinian competition. To compete with one’s groupmates is to strive for status; the goal is to be better than one’s groupmates. “Humans everywhere pursue status,” observed the evolutionary psychologist Donald Symons, and for good Darwinian reasons: higher-status individuals have access to more of the world’s goodies.2

  But in humans, striving for status is a complicated matter. There are no straightforward rules for how to go about it; no single set of tactics is going to work for everyone. The status system’s assignment is to work out a long-term strategy of behavior that is tailor-made for the individual in whose head it resides.

  Mental organs are specialized collectors of data; each is tuned to respond selectively to certain kinds of cues. The relationship system and the socialization system both collect information about other people. The status system has a more difficult job: it specializes in collecting information about the self. One of the important things that children have to learn while they are growing up is what sort of people they are. Are they big or small, strong or weak, fast or slow, smart or dumb, pretty or plain? Without this information they would have no basis for deciding whether to try to dominate others or yield without a fight, to make suggestions or follow the suggestions of others, to turn down potential mates in hopes of doing better or take whatever comes along.

  During childhood and adolescence, young humans collect information on how they compare with the others who will be their rivals in adulthood. Armed with this information, they make long-term modifications in their behavior. It is the status system that enables them to do this.

  One way to tell mental organs apart is by the motives they provide. The socialization system makes you want to be like others of your kind; the status system makes you want to be better than others of your kind. If you think these two motives can’t coexist, your mind must have crossed you off its mailing list.

  In an experiment carried out more than half a century ago by the social psychologist Solomon Asch (have you noticed how many of the landmark experiments I’ve described in this book were the work of social psychologists?), a subject was given a simple task: judge the length of a line by comparing it to three other lines. He was required to do this in a group of six or seven others, and they all had to announce their answers out loud. You may have heard of this experiment; if so, you will know that the other “subjects” were not what they appeared to be. They were confederates of the experimenter, trained to give wrong answers (the same wrong a
nswers) without cracking a smile—without even looking at the real subject, the victim of this ruse.

  Asch’s experiment is sometimes called a study of “group pressure,” but no pressure was exerted by the others; they remained impassive. The pressure to conform to the group’s consensus came from within the subject. In fact, the subjects did not conform most of the time: they yielded to the group’s unanimous opinion, and consequently gave wrong answers, on only about a third of the trials on average. But the subjects’ comments afterwards made it clear that all had felt themselves to be in a quandary. They all experienced an inner conflict in which their desire not to be different vied with their desire to be correct.3

  Two mental systems—one providing the motivation to conform, the other, to be better (in this case, more accurate) than the others—were issuing contradictory instructions. “Behavior is the outcome of an internal struggle among many mental modules,” said Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works, “and it is played out on the chessboard of opportunities and constraints defined by other people’s behavior.”4 Usually the internal struggle is carried on quietly, but sometimes the noise of the clash is loud enough to reach the conscious mind. Sometimes it’s loud enough to keep you up at night.

  If the motives to conform and to compete are provided by built-in equipment, no external rewards or punishments should be required. But without rewards and punishments, how do you know whether your efforts to achieve these goals are succeeding? The answer is that feedback is required from the environment—social feedback. Deviating from group norms reduces one’s acceptability to the group; thus, the socialization system can use information about group acceptance to keep track of how well it is doing its job. The status system requires a different kind of information. As the evolutionary psychologists Lee Kirkpatrick and Bruce Ellis have pointed out, winning acceptance by a group and achieving high status within the group are by no means the same thing and may even work in opposition to each other: “It may be ‘lonely at the top’ because intense status-striving can undermine social inclusion.” Kirkpatrick and Ellis proposed that humans are equipped with a set of “sociometers” to monitor success and failure in various domains of social life. This set includes a device that keeps its owner apprised of group acceptance and another that supplies information about status.5

  Supporting evidence comes from a study in which college students were provided with two different kinds of (fictitious) social feedback: feedback about group acceptance or rejection, and feedback about their ability to influence the other members of the group. The researchers found that the two types of feedback had independent effects on the self-esteem of the subjects. One can feel good about one’s acceptability as a member of a group at the same time one feels rotten about one’s status within the group. Or vice versa.6

  The existence of these two separable kinds of self-esteem solves one of the puzzles of the playground: why bullies don’t feel bad about themselves. Because big, tough kids who push other kids around are generally disliked, many developmentalists have assumed that they must have low self-esteem. But they don’t. Nor do aggressive adults lack self-esteem.7 Aggressive people may get negative feedback on group acceptance, but they make up for it by getting positive feedback on their rank in the pecking order. Most self-esteem tests lump together the effects of these two kinds of feedback.

  Kirkpatrick and his colleagues unlumped them. They gave their subjects (college students again) two different self-esteem tests: one to assess the degree to which the subjects felt socially accepted, the other to assess the degree to which they felt superior to others. Then each subject was given a chance to administer a mildly aggressive punishment to a nonexistent person who had supposedly given him a bad grade on an essay. (The punishment involved eating food spiked with hot sauce in a fictitious taste test. The subject could specify the amount of hot sauce the grader of his essay would have to consume.)

  The results again supported the distinction between status and acceptance. Subjects who felt superior to others—high in status—were more aggressive than average. Subjects who felt socially accepted were less aggressive than average. As Kirkpatrick and his colleagues pointed out, aggression is a useful tactic only for those who can carry it off—those who have confidence in their ability to overpower their rivals. On the other hand, aggression can incur heavy costs for those who rate themselves high on social acceptance: it can tarnish their reputation as reliable, cooperative members of the group.8

  Status within a human group isn’t a simple matter of ups and downs: it is multidimensional and dependent on context. A child who has high status on the playground because of his size or strength may have low status in the classroom because he can’t answer the teacher’s questions. Researchers have assessed children’s self-perceived status in the various arenas in which they compete by measuring their “academic self-esteem,” “athletic self-esteem,” and so on.

  The measurement of academic self-esteem gives us another way to look at what happens when the status system is pitted against the socialization system. A child of above-average academic ability will generally have above-average academic self-esteem. But if we put this child in a highly selective school where she is only an average student, her academic self-esteem will drop.9 So, does this lead to a poorer academic outcome? No, because something else is going on as well: the child is getting socialized. She’s conforming to the norms of her group. A quarter century of research has shown that children learn more in schools and classrooms that have a relatively high concentration of able students.10 The reason is that attitudes toward academic achievement and intellectual activities are part of the culture that the child absorbs through socialization.

  The internal struggle between the status system and the socialization system can itself be influenced by socialization. Cross-cultural psychologists divide the world’s cultures into two types, called individualist (or competitive) and collectivist (or cooperative).11 In individualist, competitive societies like ours, people strive mightily for status; in collectivist, cooperative societies, conformity is felt to be the greater good. Asch’s experiment on group conformity has been carried out in a number of different countries and the results back up this distinction: conformity is higher in collectivist cultures. Interestingly, conformity within the United States has gone down since Asch carried out his experiments in the 1950s; fewer subjects now yield to the group’s consensus. Evidently American culture has grown increasingly individualistic over the years.12

  Children assimilate these cultural values because the feedback they receive for cooperating or competing differs in different societies. But even in societies in which personal achievement receives no praise, people vary in what they think they are good at. Even in societies that emphasize conformity, the world’s goodies are not handed out in a strictly equitable fashion. In fact, most collectivist societies permit polygyny (or used to, before the missionaries got there). Depending on his wealth or prestige, a man might have two wives, or one wife, or none.

  I’ve given you evidence that the socialization system and the status system provide different motives and respond to different kinds of feedback. Now it’s time to examine the status system more closely and figure out how it works. I said at the beginning of this chapter that children have to learn, while they are growing up, what sort of people they are: big or small, strong or weak, fast or slow, smart or dumb, pretty or plain. The question is, how do children find out whether they are big, strong, smart, or pretty? What they need is information on how they compare with others like themselves, others of their sex and approximate age.

  Children are motivated to seek out others of their sex and approximate age; they are motivated to collect this kind of information. These assertions are by no means novel; they are the basis of social comparison theory, formulated in 1954 by yet another eminent social psychologist, Leon Festinger. One of the tenets of social comparison theory is the “similarity hypothesis”: people prefer to compare themselves with othe
rs who are similar to themselves, which means others in their own social category.13

  All over the world, children’s preferred playmates are other children of the same sex and approximate age. According to the anthropologist Beatrice Whiting and the cross-cultural psychologist Carolyn Edwards,

  In interaction with same-sex children who are close in age, a child can compare her appearance, behavior, and likes and dislikes with those of the companion. These experiences teach understanding of the self, as well as understanding of the behavior of others who are perceived as similar in salient attributes of gender.14

  During middle childhood—what Freud called the “latency period”—girls and boys spontaneously separate into single-sex groups. As developmentalists have observed, boys’ groups tend to be larger (girls often split up into pairs or trios) and more hierarchical, or at least more overtly hierarchical. Boys appear to be more concerned about competition and status and their play is rougher.15 One of the reasons boys and girls form separate play groups is that boys go in for a lot of rough-and-tumble play and most girls don’t like it. This activity, also called “play fighting,” can be seen in the young of most mammalian species, from puppies to chimpanzees. In virtually every species, the males do more of it than the females.

  In virtually every species, males are more aggressive than females. But rough-and-tumble play shouldn’t be confused with aggression. Though occasionally it does escalate into real aggression, children recognize the difference and get angry if the boundary is crossed. After a bout of rough-and-tumble play, children continue to play together; after an aggressive encounter they go their separate ways.16

  Children also engage in a lot of active play that isn’t rough-and-tumble, but this kind of play reaches a peak around age four or five and then gradually declines during middle childhood. In contrast, rough-and-tumble play is less common during the preschool years and increases in frequency until just before puberty. This distinctive pattern has led the evolutionary developmental psychologists Anthony Pellegrini and Peter Smith to propose that it has a specific purpose: “We postulate that R & T may serve a social function in peer groups, for boys especially, by assisting in the establishing and maintaining of dominance relationships.” In play, stronger children hold back in an effort to avoid hurting their friends, but nonetheless, the researchers report, “many children say they can determine their own as well as peers’ strength from these encounters.”17