[tt] TLS: Carol Tavris: It's all in the behavioural-genetics

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I can't think of anyone whose star fell faster than Freud or Marx.

Carol Tavris: It's all in the behavioural-genetics
The Times Literary Supplement, 8.4.16
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3757737.ece

We are coming to the end of the Freudian story - and at the start of an
exhilarating new one.


What a difference a century makes. One hundred years ago, Sigmund
Freud's answer to Daniel Nettle's question - "What makes you the way
you are?" - would have begun with your unconscious mind: the unique
pattern of fantasies, defences, and instinctual conflicts that
create your neurotic insecurities and self-defeating habits. These
unconscious mechanisms would, in turn, have been profoundly
influenced by your parents, who overpunished you or underappreciated
you, who told you too much about sex or not enough. You can't do
much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with
years of psychoanalysis.

Today, personality researchers almost uniformly agree that the
things that make you the way you are consist of a combination of
your genes, your peers and the idiosyncratic, chance experiences
that befall you in childhood and adulthood. Your parents influence
your relationship with them - loving or contentious, conflicted or
close - but not your "personality", that package of traits we label
extroverted or shy, bitter or friendly, hostile or warm, gloomy or
optimistic. Your genes, not your parents, are the reason you think
that parachuting out of planes is fun, or, conversely, that you feel
sick to the stomach at the mere idea of doing such a crazy thing
voluntarily. You can't do much about your personality, though you
can tweak it a bit with cognitive therapy.

Freud's view of personality was passionate, controversial, sexy,
unfalsifiable and wrong. But it was a personal theory of
personality. Anyone could immediately apply it, party-game style, to
his or her own unconscious motivations, hidden fantasies and
terrible parents. The behavioural-genetics view of personality is
calm, uncontroversial (except to a few diehard Freudians),
empirically testable and correct. But it is an impersonal theory of
personality. After all, everyone has genes; not everyone has your
mother.

Daniel Nettle takes on the task of showing how evolution and
genetics have conspired to create "wanderers, worriers, controllers,
empathizers, and poets", along with daredevils and wallflowers. Gone
are the old type theories (are you a Thinking or Feeling type?) and
single-trait descriptors (do you have a Machiavellian personality?
Are you an erotophobe or an erotophile?). Evolutionary theory, the
genome project, studies of identical twins reared together and
apart, and brain-imaging techniques such as PET scans and MRIs have
given scientists the theory and methods of identifying the
differences in how people's nervous systems are wired up and how
those differences express themselves in characteristic responses to
other people and to events. These characteristic responses
statistically cluster into five basic factors, which are pretty much
the same in every culture that has been studied, from Britain to
Korea, Ethiopia to Japan, China to the Czech Republic. Nettle
devotes a chapter apiece to each of the five: extraversion, the
extent to which a person is outgoing, talkative, adventurous and
sociable, or shy, silent, reclusive and cautious; neuroticism, the
extent to which a person suffers from anxiety and other negative
emotions such as anger, guilt, worry and resentment; agreeableness,
the extent to which a person is good-natured, cooperative and
nonjudgmental, or irritable, abrasive and suspicious;
conscientiousness, the extent to which a person is responsible,
persevering, self-disciplined and tidy, or undependable, quick to
give up, fickle, sloppy and careless; and openness to experience,
the extent to which a person is curious, imaginative, questioning
and creative, or conforming, unimaginative, predictable and
uncomfortable with novelty.

You know these people, don't you? You can see yourself in this list,
can't you? But if you are worrying that you are genetically disposed
to worrying, don't worry about it. Each of these dimensions, Nettle
shows, has, in evolutionary terms, benefits and costs. Extroverts
may risk their necks to forage for food in strange places, but they
are also more likely than their cautious peers to be eaten by
strange creatures. Agreeable people may have harmonious
relationships, but by putting others first, they may lose status and
opportunities to advance. Neurotics are more vulnerable to anxiety
and depression, and they see clouds in every silver lining; but they
are also hypervigilant to dangers in the environment, some of which,
after all, are genuine.

As evolutionary theory would predict, you don't have to be a person
to have a personality. Four of the five factors (apart from
conscientiousness, a cognitively complex trait) have been identified
in more than sixty species, not only in our fellow primates but also
in bears, dogs, pigs, hyenas, goats, cats and even the octopus. For
anyone wondering how researchers study octopus personality, the
answer is simple. They drop dinner (a crab) into a tank of octopuses
and watch what they do. Some octopuses will aggressively grab their
dinner at once. Some are more passive and wait for the crab to swim
near them. And some are devious; they wait and attack the crab when
no one is watching. These "personality dispositions" among octopuses
can be reliably identified by independent observers.

Nettle also explains why evolution hasn't made life easy for itself,
so to speak, by simply selecting for one kind of trait among members
of a species. Some guppies, for example, are more wary than others.
Put them in a tank with one of their natural predators, such as "the
splendidly named pumpkinseed", and in only twenty-four hours,
fourteen of twenty highly wary guppies will still be alive, compared
to only five of the twenty unwary, extroverted guppies. Shouldn't
evolution have seen to it, then, that wariness would become a
universal guppy trait, akin to the long neck of the giraffe? No,
because guppies live in different environments. If you are a guppy
in a pumpkinseed-free environment, you don't want to be wasting your
time searching for predators when you could be dating and mating (an
activity that in humans, if not guppies, requires its own degree of
wariness). Most environments provide a constantly changing level of
danger from predators, making it maximally beneficial for any group
of guppies to have both cautious members and bold ones.

Behavioural-genetic studies have consistently found that the
heritability of personality traits, whether the Big Five or one of
many others from aggressiveness to happiness, is around 50 per cent.
This means that within a group of people, about 50 per cent of the
variation in such traits is attributable to genetic differences
among the individuals in the group. Most people have assumed that
the other 50 per cent comes from the "shared environment" of the
home: parental child-rearing methods and the experiences the child
shares with siblings and parents. If it did, studies should find a
strong correlation between the personality traits of adopted
children and those of their adoptive parents. In fact, the
correlation is weak to nonexistent. This means that when children
resemble their parents and grandparents temperamentally, it is
because they share genes with these relatives, not experiences.
What, then, is going on in the "unshared environment", the other
half of the influences that "make you the way you are"?

Put simply, Nettle argues, we don't know. "The area of environmental
influences on personality is a morass of unsupported or poorly
tested ideas", Nettle observes. He suggests that the reason there is
only one Daniel Nettle, not 200 Daniel Nettles who are "also working
on books about the five-factor model of personality", is that the
five factors can be channelled in countless ways, encouraged or
impeded given a person's chance experiences, opportunities, health,
peers and immediate circumstances. Moreover, because human beings,
unlike the guppy and the octopus, have complex, sense-making minds,
they are forever telling stories about themselves to explain why
they are the way they are. No one else will experience Nettle's life
as he does or interpret it as he does. Our storytelling brains make
each of us unique.

When Judith Rich Harris reported the same information about the
genetic origins of personality in her pioneering book The Nurture
Assumption (1998) and then developed a richly complex theory about
the origins of individual differences in No Two Alike (2007),
readers understood that we are in the midst of a revolution in
understanding of what makes us the way we are. Daniel Nettle, in
contrast, has written an engaging primer on the genetics of
personality, but he does not fully examine the implications of this
work for child rearing, parent-blaming, literary analysis, memoir,
psychotherapy and human hubris. Were he to have done so, readers
would have more deeply felt the impact and consequences of coming to
the end of the Freudian story, and of being at the exhilarating
start of a new one.

Daniel Nettle
PERSONALITY
What makes you the way you are
298pp. Oxford University Press. £12.99 (US $19.95).
978 0 19 921142 5

Carol Tavris is co-author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why
we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts, 2007.

* Have your say

Freud might have had a cogent analysis of Nettle's personality...?
Terry, London
Terry Adams, London, UK

A thoroughly competent and most interesting review.
The recognition of our uniqueness is fundamental. Pity the law
makers don't know about this.
richard, bangkok,

I'm unique much like yourself. Thing I don't do is presume my
uniqueness makes me different from the next fellow. But he's every
right to disagree - after all that's what makes us all human isn't
it?
kevin, Lincoln, UK

How do you know that no one has ever had experienced Nettle's
life as he did or interpreted things as he did?Have you ever ex-
plored all the people's minds,thoughts or experiences in the
past ,now or in the future?It is not so impossible to have the same
feelings,mindset ,thoughts and experiences like Nettle,s or yours!
Then what makes you think that personality is so unique?! How
often we are rediscovering the same identical thoughts and
experiences literally as ours in books, films,personal stories and
literature!Philosephers used to say that despite the change there
is something in the objects or in us that is unique and stays the
same, it is a question of the qustions how something that constantly
changes as ourselves or the objects could stay at
the same time unique and just one time given in the world?!
Another words how could something stays unchangable in the ever
changing world like personal identity for example.
Emil Peev, Plovdiv-4000, Bulgaria

Hi,
Behavior or behaviour refers to the actions or reactions of an
object or organism, usually in relation to the environment. Behavior
can be conscious or unconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or
involuntary. You refer to genes do you mean blue genes ? Evolution
is governed by simple laws the instinct for food so one can
reproduce. Why make things complicated.
Regards
Dr. Terence Hale, zandvoort, Holland