Why Do No Two Persons Have Similar Behaviors? ( Part 1 )

" Through three cognitive devices that go about their company in various ways, three culprits are involved in the mystery, is my answer. These three you collectively address the hows, how, whens, and wheres of character enhancement.

Judith Rich Harris

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Developing into a People

What causes us to be therefore similar and yet so unique? us? What distinguishes someone who is available, fair, and passionate from someone who is ornery and judgmental? Why do some people enjoy taking risks while others do not?

The "nature over cultivate" discussion is likely as old as present civilization. Something about our consciousnesses makes us wonder whether our temperament is predetermined or whether our parents, peers, society, society, or experiences are the deciding factors.

We also wonder, but regards to Darwin and the subsequent works, we no longer own to assume as much as we after did. The present research of behavioural biology has shown us that the answer is, firmly, both. Our chromosomes are extremely important in how we develop into full-grown adults and children, and the proof is obvious.

Strangely enough, we can see from meticulous analysis that about third of persona deviation you been explained evolutionarily. This scares no some. When two parallel twins have indistinguishable characteristics, their characteristics may become comparable.

What's surprising is how completely various equivalent sisters are! Think about it: They share all of their dna, they definitely grew up in the same house with the same set of parents, with the same publications on the ceiling and the same Hdtv viewing behavior, went to the same universities at the same time, had identical groups of friends …and already two entirely independent characteristics emerge. How?

The Nurture Notion

Judith Rich Harris may have the best answer, and it’s in her book No Two Alike, an amazing contribution to modern thought. What really drives the differences? What Harris - a former author of child development textbooks turned super-synthesizing social scientist - wanted to know was: Why do we all turn out with unique personalities?

She had begun to answer this in her deeply controversial 1998 book The Nurture Premise. By socialized, we mean - how do children learn the way to behave and operate within their culture? The idea that parents had the primary influence had become fashionable in the 20th century Western world, thanks to Freud. That book proposed her group socialization theory, the idea that children are mostly socialized by their peers, not their parents. How to speak the right way, act the right way, play the right way, say the right things, and so on?

However, Harris asserted that years of research demonstrated that parallel relatives were no more or less similar than their genomic link had suggest, whether similar relatives were raised by the same set of parents or by two different sets. Similarly, two sisters put up for adoption close up no less likewise, on average, than if they'd been raised in the same household. The reason why identical twins are more similar than regular siblings in general is extremely straightforward: They share more genes!

As Harris explained, this meant that unlike Chinese parents who raise their child in Minnesota who has a Chinese accent, parenting doesn't have an impact on adult personality that isn't already explained by genetic factors. Before behavioral genetics showed the genetic component, the two were regularly confounded, making much of the "research" on development worthless. Although it may seem obscure at first, many traits we believe are related to parenting are simply a result of the genetic variation between the parents and the children.

Beyond genetics, what else has an impact is the peer group and culture of the child. And so besides genetics, it is the group, neighborhood, social group, and subculture of the child that matters, not whether their parents were kind or scolding, attentive or inattentive, soft or hard, or any other style of parent. Although parents can have indirect influence in a variety of ways, the most obvious being by introducing the child to new cultures and places. Harris demonstrated that, as difficult as it is to believe, people do not rely on direct input from their parents to become successful adults. Just like the child of Chinese immigrants would take on the Minnesota accent, they'd also take on the social behavior of their peers as well.

Charlie Munger claimed that Ms. Harris "has not lived in vain" in response to this revelation, investigation into human development, and the debunking of what Harris called the" Nurture Assumption" that parents can influence their children's personalities.

But that still raised a significant question: Given that group socialization tends to make people more similar to others in their chosen social group, why do identical twins hang in the same social circle and exhibit personality differences? Why are some more law-abiding and some less so? How do we come to be surrounded by a group of" conforming individualists," as Harris affectionately refers to us? Why do some people have faith, while others don't? Why are some friendly and some mean?

A story Harris tells about a pair of identical twins as an illustration of the difficulty in figuring out the answer:

Conrad and Perry McKinney, both 57, were featured in the Boston Globe article titled" Two Lives, Two Paths" Born and reared in New Hampshire, the twins did everything together in their earlier years. The twins were eventually separated because their teachers eventually got fed up with their behavior: Conrad was promoted to sixth grade, Perry was held back in fifth grade, and Conrad was promoted to sixth. They were in the same classrooms and attended the same schools. Today, Conrad is a successful businessman-as it happens, he runs a private detective agency. By the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire, Perry is a homeless alcoholic who" sleeps amid trash under a bridge." That is where their paths diverged, according to the Globe reporter. Conrad went on to graduate from high school, Perry dropped out in eleventh grade. They were, in theory, average students, but they were troublemakers.

Small, often unintended changes in circumstances can have dramatic effects on a person's life, making many experiments completely unethical. We can't just sort out twins and send some of them to the ghetto and some to Palo Alto and see what happens- we're reliant on what we can observe in natural experiments.

In No Two Alike, Harris uses a variety of sources to gather data, including information on developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and genetics, while disseminating several well-known red herrings in search of a plausible explanation for how human personality develops. The theory she lands on appears not only plausible but also probable by elimination and investigation.

The Modular Mind

The idea that the mind is composed of specific, useful mechanisms to perform a variety of functions, all of which were created through a long process of natural selection, is what modern evolutionary psychologists have come to refer to as the "modular mind." ( For instance, ants can certainly see and taste, even in crude language, but they are unable to speak or learn non-programmed language. ) Our mental tools allow us to see, hear, taste, feel, learn, speak, and do lots of other things that we need to survive and thrive. Some of these are present in other species, while others are not: It depends on how developed they are.

From the perspective of human personality development, Harris sees it differently than it does. Our modular minds have at least three separate but interrelated systems, working at turns separately and together to produce social success- one of the prime goals of a human being. We are, after all, a very social species.

This is so crucial in one passage, to illustrate:

" Why\ We as people need to know that not only do girls at school tend to be cruel if we don't don beauty, but that Sally may also state anything specially lovely and that Jane may claim anything particularly unpleasant. The psychological model that distinguishes "girls our years at institution" from the one that comprehends the distinctions between Jane and Sally is different.

Our ability to recognize eyes, accents, and fragrance, as well as our ability to know what's a common experience is when someone we know, as well as our ability to give people and things particular labels and recognize them, and thousands more.

Harris uses a Rolodex comparison:

There are literally thousands and thousands of people-information psychological backup locations. Create a mental dictionary with a pussy pics website for each person you know, space for their title, face, and near relative, as well as information about their occupation and memories of the interactions you've had with them. Each of the individuals we are connected to has info about that entity in its own right.

An emotive indicator that reflects your feelings toward this person might also be present. Some games perhaps get difficult to read, while others may never have been filled in. People you've never met might own a phrase for you in their dictionary! You gather and keep details about figures you read about in books or speak about from various citizens. Perhaps if you've previously opened your eyes or lips to the person you're referring to, a webpage may be set up in the dictionary.

This "lexicon" of info, which is frequently updated, provides what we need to know about how to deal with specific folks and how to socialize with them. We simply do it quickly because we don't need to be motivated to do this for a certain cause. Although we generally and describe citizens we don't recognize, we start filling in facts and creating a webpage in the dictionary once we do ( actually from a distance ).

The people lexicon's adaptive objective is just as explicit as the pair-bonding's biological purpose: to help us to act properly toward various people, based on what we have learned about them. Even if the person is the correct age and sex, the girl raises its forearms to its mom but not to the man. To allow us to adapt our conduct to the nature of the connection we have with each. Folks cease doing benefits for those who always receive them, unless they are near friends. The child is taught to look for other kids in the neighborhood rather than the thug.

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The partnership method also has a number of elaborately linked components. There are regulatory procedures that use the information contained in the vocabulary to guide behavior in various cultural lifestyle regions and that use their own motivations, the sexual generate being an obvious case. It is very helpful to know what someone else's motives are and what they are thinking about you whatever you are thinking about doing with them, whether you are helping them, finding a partner with them, trading with them, or starting a duel with them. The face-recognition package, a system that determines brotherhood, and the telepathy mechanisms I described in the previous chapter are just a few examples of the other professional modules that the relationship system receives. A people-information-acquisition gadget is used to create and store a dictionary of folks and provide the desire to gather the information.

And so it ends. Our vocabulary is ready to get, available to get filled in right away. We spend a lives hustling, studying, thinking, interacting, and watching some but that we can form lasting interactions with them.

However, we also start putting categories together very first, based on a thorough research of our vocabulary. We begin categorizing people into groups, such as individuals, kids, teens, ladies, boys, teachers, students, and pussy pics website a million others, depending on the situation. Significantly, we likewise begin to define ourselves, which is when the socializing process takes place.

The Socialization System

Why do kids "hive off" into organizations and try to stand out from various organizations? The typical high school groups are not uncommon anywhere in the world; they may have different ages and interests, but all young ( and old ) people can form one or another if given the chance. The infant is socialized during this clustering procedure:

In the old days, a human’s life, too, depended on remaining a member of the 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. 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. 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.

Children become more similar in behavior to those of their own age and gender as a result of socialization. Even in the kinds of things that are measured on personality tests, there is proof that children become more similar. They do not all have to do with language and customs in order to become more similar. Socialization cannot therefore solve the main mystery in this book: why people, even identical twins raised together, have different personalities and social behaviors. However, socialization is a crucial component of the solution because, according to one of my explanations, children grow up both more and less alike.

As a child ages, they must undergo this process to prepare for adulthood outside of the home. The children must also learn what is acceptable in the organizations they belong to, which they will be a part of. All of these require a few different types of actions and behaviors. So we begin categorizing Texas ' young boy into three categories: boys, boys, men, students, employees, Americans, Southerners, athletes, children, and children, among others.

The child must first identify the social categories that are present in their society. Traditional societies frequently establish rites of passage to narrow the age gap, but industrialized societies do so without them. People's categories have ambiguous boundaries, just like fish and chairs. The blurring of the line between male and female is something we haven't gotten used to yet. A seahorse is a fish, right? Is this a boy or a man, exactly? A three-legged stool is it a chair? This task is comparable to learning other kinds of categories, such as chairs and fish.

Although fuzzy mental categories tend to be hazy around the edges, they are clear at the center, which is an interesting feature. The typical chair has a seat, a back, and four legs. When I say "bird," you don't think of an ostrich or vulture but rather a robin or a sparrow. You don't think of an eighteen- or eighty-year-old when I say "man," and you probably don't picture him wearing a dress. We have a representation of what the ideal or typical person in each category should look like, and it falls somewhere in the middle.

We create all different kinds of implicit knowledge about the world, and we do it naturally and without any prior thought. At first, we might consider her to be a" White, middle-aged woman who looks like a mother." Again, not intentionally; it occurs instantly and automatically. All we can do is categorize someone until we actually have a sheet set up in the lexicon for them. Let's say we meet a woman named Susan. Although stereotyping is unpopular, we categorize people in the same way we categorize chairs and birds. The two systems begin interacting once we do start to learn more about them specifically.

However, once we go on a date with her, Susan transforms from being just a member of a group to being Susan. The two systems occasionally conflict. ( I don't typically like white middle-aged women, but Susan is ). And even though we don't remove the categories right away, we let her become a part of our perceptions, dominating them as the years go on.

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Let's leave it alone for the moment. We'll look at the rest of Harris ' theory in Part 2 and connect it all together to try to understand the mystery of human personality.