psycoloquy.95.6.40.group-selection.4.harris Sunday 31 December 1995
ISSN 1055-0143 (14 paragraphs, 8 references, 230 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
Copyright 1995 Judith Rich Harris
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES WITHIN HUMAN GROUPS
Commentary on Caporael on Group-Selection
Judith Rich Harris
54 Crawford Road
Middletown, NJ 07748
72073.1211 who-is-at compuserve.com
ABSTRACT: Caporael's (1995) target article discusses four topics in
evolutionary psychology. Of these, the most useful is her approach
to human social relations and her categorization of human groups
into four "core configurations" that vary in size and have
different functions. The least useful is her attack on behavioral
genetics. Caporael's theory does a good job of accounting for the
assimilatory aspects of group membership -- the fact that the
members of groups tend to acquire shared patterns of behavior and
cognition. However, the theory does not take sufficient account of
within-group individual differences.
1. Caporael's (1995) target article, according to its abstract,
"sketches three major topics." These topics are (a) evolution; (b)
human social relations; and (c) socially constructed views of reality.
A fourth topic, not mentioned in the abstract, is (d) an attack on what
Caporael calls "nature-nurture dualism." This commentary will consider
all four topics, in that order.
I. EVOLUTION
2. "Survival of the fittest" and "natural selection" are vivid phrases
that evoke images of the jungle. Caporael would like us to drop these
evocative terms and speak instead of "repeated assemblies," a phrase
that makes me think of a factory. Clearly, she has an uphill fight
ahead of her. How can she convince us that her metaphor is better than
Darwin's? Since she is addressing an audience sophisticated enough to
realize that "natural selection" does not imply a selector, she can
succeed only by showing that "repeated assemblies" makes more accurate
predictions or provides more convincing explanations of existing data.
As far as I could tell, repeated assemblies does not make any specific
predictions and can explain just about anything.
3. There are two problems with the concept of repeated assemblies. The
first is its elasticity and vagueness. Caporael starts out by defining
the term as "recurrent entity-environment relations" (para. 11), which
gives the impression that what is being assembled is an entity and an
environment -- an impression reinforced by the example of language as a
repeated assembly of a child plus a language environment. But then we
have a zygote being assembled from two sources of DNA, and a group
being assembled from individuals or from smaller groups, and even
breakfast being assembled, presumably from things like toast and orange
juice. Can a concept this elastic be useful?
4. The second problem is that the concept of repeated assemblies throws
away useful information. The process of evolution is lumped together
with the product of evolution (para. 51), and the effects of the genes
are lumped together with the effects of experiences. Caporael
constructs a model that makes it impossible to distinguish between
genetic and environmental effects, and then uses that model to support
her claim that the two are indistinguishable.
II. HUMAN SOCIAL RELATIONS
5. Sociality theory (Brewer & Caporael, 1990) says that humans are
social creatures with a long evolutionary history of living in groups,
that human psychological mechanisms evolved to meet the social needs of
group living, and that these mechanisms sometimes cause humans to put
group loyalty above selfish interests. This view is contrasted with
what Caporael calls "economic man" -- the view that humans are
independent and basically self-interested creatures who will aid others
only insofar as the others share their genes. A 1989 paper by
Caporael, Dawes, Orbell, and van de Kragt described a series of
ingenious experiments designed to refute the "economic man" view; it
did the job convincingly. Give humans any excuse at all to think of
themselves as a group and they will do so, and thereafter -- whenever
group identity is salient -- they will consider the welfare of the
group as important, or more important, than their own welfare. (This
tendency does not always have benevolent consequences; it is what makes
war possible.)
6. Caporael (1995) elaborates on sociality theory by distinguishing
four "core configurations" of human groups: dyads, workgroups, bands
(or demes), and macrobands. These different sized groups have different
functions: in the band (a group of about 30), individuals acquire a
social identity and a shared construction of reality; in dyads they
develop "microcoordination." I agree with Caporael on this; in fact, I
have made a similar distinction (Harris, 1995).
7. However, Caporael goes too far when she tries to find social sources
for ALL human cognitive abilities. Thus, she attributes the ability to
use tools to the microcoordination acquired in dyadic interactions --
the cognitive mechanism that enables people to use a hammer is the same
one that enables them to please a lover. I find this far-fetched. Our
ability to manipulate objects has a long evolutionary history of its
own; there is no reason to view it as a side-effect of some other
adaptation.
III. SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED VIEWS OF REALITY
8. It is advantageous for the members of a group to be able to
communicate with each other. To facilitate communication, humans use
what Caporael calls "unsituated coordination" or "shared construction
of reality." The members of a band share particular ways of
interpreting and evaluating events, and when they converse they talk
about interpretations and evaluations, not about raw sensory data (if
there is such a thing). That people do this is not a new idea; it is a
basic tenet of sociology. The notion that, as a consequence, there will
sometimes be "tensions" between the group's view of reality and an
individual's experiences (a prediction Caporael makes in her abstract)
has also been around for a while. Asch (1956) gave us a demonstration
of that tension 40 years ago, when he described the discomfort of the
subjects in his experiments on group conformity. The point of those
experiments was not to show that people cave in to group pressure (not
all of them did cave in) -- it was to show how surprised and troubled
people are when their own perceptions fail to agree with the group's
shared construction of reality.
IV. THE ATTACK ON "NATURE-NURTURE DUALISM"
9. Caporael is critical of all attempts to distinguish between the
effects of heredity and environment. In repeated assemblies, genes are
important only at the cellular level; those interested in human
behavior should concern themselves with "functional relations between
entity and environment, rather than just traits of the organism" (para.
8).
10. We are advised to stop studying human traits because (a) a trait
such as nearsightedness can be compensated for by an artifact such as
eyeglasses; and (b) an individual who exhibits a personality trait in
one context may not exhibit it in another. The first of these
statements seems to say that, because modern technology (eyeglasses)
can wipe out some of the differences among us, there is no point in
studying these differences. The second implies that the differences are
not real because they are context-specific. The context-specificity of
personality traits is a matter that personality theorists have been
arguing about for decades (see Carson, 1989). Since the bathwater is by
now very dirty, Caporael proposes throwing it out, and the baby along
with it. I believe the baby is salvageable: human behavior is indeed
context-specific, and yet humans are born with characteristics that
they carry around from one context to another (Harris, 1995). It is
true that the same individual behaves differently in different social
contexts, but it is also true that, in the SAME social context,
different individuals behave differently.
11. Even within a group, even when group identity is salient, different
individuals behave differently. Caporael's theory focuses on the
assembly process and ignores the entities that are being assembled. Not
enough attention is paid to individual differences, or to the fact that
group membership involves differentiation as well as assimilation. Over
time, the members of groups adopt their own specialties, carve out
their own niches, and typecast each other in different ways. These
processes can lead to the exaggeration of individual differences.
12. The failure to acknowledge individual differences is quite evident
in Caporael's blithe dismissal of the field of behavioral genetics:
"Phenotypic features are fully codetermined by genes and environment in
development throughout the lifespan . . . the phenotype cannot be
analyzed into separate genetically determined and environmentally
determined components" (para. 16). "It makes little sense to separate
language into an innate and an acquired component; both are part of
inherited resources" (para. 17). The first statement, that the
phenotype cannot be analyzed into separate components, is inaccurate.
Identical twins have exactly the same genes; therefore any phenotypic
differences between them must be due entirely to environmental
influences. The second statement, that it "makes little sense" to try
to do this, betrays Caporael's nomothetic bias. Nomothetic approaches
strive for general laws that are assumed to apply to "all of the people
all of the time" (Scarr, 1992); human variability is regarded simply as
noise. Behavioral genetics, in contrast, is an idiographic approach: it
focuses on the variability and tries to explain why individuals differ
from one another. In evolutionary psychology, theorizing tends to be of
the nomothetic sort. This is ironic, because evolution itself would be
impossible were it not for individual differences.
13. Ideally, a theory should be able to do both jobs at once: account
for individual differences and posit general laws that apply to all
humans. Efforts are currently being made to construct such theories --
see, for example, Scarr (1992) and Harris (1995) -- by combining the
insights of evolutionary psychology with the findings of behavioral
genetics. Behavioral genetics has produced at least one noteworthy and
reliable finding in the past 15 years: growing up in the same home does
not make siblings more alike in personality -- any similarity between
them is due to shared genes, not to shared environment (Plomin &
Daniels, 1987). This finding goes against commonly held assumptions and
suggests that Caporael should not be so quick to conclude that parents'
attitudes toward sex roles, or their use of artifacts such as cups with
weighted bottoms, have important effects on children.
14. Ideally, a theory should also be testable. Although Caporael states
that her article presents "a thesis to test" (para. 49), most of the
statements in it do not seem to me to be open to disproof. She implies
that her theory can be used "to derive testable, nonobvious hypotheses
about human mental systems" (para. 3). Perhaps we would have a better
grasp of what Caporael is getting at if she would derive some of these
testable hypotheses for us.
REFERENCES
Asch, S.E. (1956) Studies of independence and conformity: A minority
of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs 70 (9,
Whole No. 416).
Brewer, M.B. & Caporael, L.R. (1990) Selfish genes versus selfish
people: Sociobiology as origin myth. Motivation and Emotion 14:
237-242.
Caporael, L.R. (1995) Sociality: Coordinating bodies, minds, and
groups. PSYCOLOQUY 6(1) group-selection.1.caporael.
Caporael, L.R., Dawes, R.M., Orbell, J.M., & van de Kragt, A.J.C.
(1989) Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic
incentives. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12: 683-739.
Carson, R.C. (1989) Personality. Annual Review of Psychology 40:
227-248.
Harris, J.R. (1995) Where is the child's environment? A group
socialization theory of development. Psychological Review 102:
458-489.
Plomin, R. & Daniels, D. (1987) Why are children in the same family
so different from one another? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10,
1-60.
Scarr, S. (1992) Developmental theories for the 1990s: Development and
individual differences. Child Development 63: 1-19.