Tag: interactionism

Two obviously wrong statements about personality and political ideology

Published on by Sanjay Srivastava

On the heels of yesterday’s post about the link between religiosity and conservatism, I came across a New York Magazine article discussing recent research on personality, genetics, and political ideology. The article summarizes a lot of really interesting work by John Jost on ideology, Jonathan Haidt on moral foundations, David Pizarro on emotional responses and politics, etc. etc. But when it says things like…

Over the past few years, researchers haven’t just tied basic character traits to liberalism and conservatism, they’ve begun to finger specific genes they say hard-wire those ideologies.

… I just cringe. Research on personality and genetics does not support the conclusion that ideology is hard-wired, any more than our work on how political discourse ties religiosity to politics shows that ideology is a blank-slate social artifact.

Any attempt to understand the role of personality and genetics in political attitudes and ideology will have to avoid endorsing 2 obviously wrong conclusions:

1. Ideology and political attitudes have nothing to do with personality or genes.

2. Genes code for ideology and political attitudes in a clear, unconditional way.

Maybe in some distal and complex way our genes code for variations in how different psychological response systems work — under what conditions they are more and less active, how sensitive they are to various inputs, how strongly they produce their various responses, etc. In situ, these individual differences are going to interact with things like how messages are framed, how they are presented in conjunction with other information and stimuli, who is presenting the information, what we think the leaders and fellow members of our important social groups think and feel, etc.

What this interactivity means for doing science is that if you hold one thing constant (whether by experimental control or by averaging over differences) and let the other one vary, you will find an effect of the one you let vary. For example, if you look at how different people respond to the same set of sociopolitical issues, you are going to get reliable patterns of different responses that reflect people’s personalities. And if you frame and present the same issue in several different ways, and measure the average effect of the different framings, you are going to get different average responses that reflect message effects. Both are interesting experimental results, but both are testing only pieces of a plausible theoretical model.

Most researchers know this, I think. For example, from the NYMag article:

Fowler laughs at the idea that he had isolated a single gene responsible for liberalism—an idea circulated in much of the chatter about the study. “There are hundreds if not thousands of genes that are all interacting to affect complex social behaviors,” Fowler says, and scientists have only a rough sense of that process. “There’s a really long, complex causal chain at work here,” says UC-Berkeley political scientist Laura Stoker, “and we won’t get any real understanding without hundreds and hundreds of years’ more research.”

Let’s stay away from lazy and boring concepts like hard-wired. The real answers are going to be a lot more interesting.

Stanley Milgram was an evolutionary psychologist

Published on by Sanjay Srivastava2 Comments

And an interactionist. From Obedience to Authority:

A potential for obedience is the prerequisite of such social organization, and because organization has enormous survival value for any species, such a capacity was bred into the organism through the extended operation of evolutionary processes. I do not intend this as the end point of my argument, but only the beginning, for we will have gotten nowhere if all we can say is that men obey because they have an instinct for it.

Indeed, the idea of a simple instinct for obedience is not what is now proposed. Rather, we are born with a potential for obedience, which then interacts with the influence of society to produce the obedient man. In this sense, the capacity for obedience is like the capacity for language: certain highly specific mental structures must be present if the organism is to have potential for language, but exposure to a social milieu is needed to create a speaking man. In explaining the causes of obedience, we need to look both at the inborn structures and at the social influences impinging after birth. The proportion of influence exerted by each is a moot point. From the standpoint of evolutionary survival, all the matters is that we end up with organisms that can function in hierarchies.

I’d take Milgram’s endorsement of interactionism one step further and say that “the proportion of influence” isn’t just moot – it’s nonsensical. You don’t have a human mind unless you have inborn mechanisms and social influences working in concert with each other.