Luke Ford

From the 2013 book, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences:

While not turning Janes into Joes, the universal architecture of primates, including humans, also permits measurable biological changes based on environmental situations. For example, remove the alpha male from a troupe of chimps and the testosterone levels of the “second-in-command” shoot up; he’s literally getting hormonally primed to be top dog (or chimp).20 The point here is that these organisms are not “hardwired” to be male or to be juiced with a particular level of testosterone. Instead, their underlying genetic architecture permits substantial flexibility for the organism to be shaped by its environment.

Though the notion of universal architecture seems to allow evolutionary psychology to account for behavioral variation, the source of the variation is the situation and not deep-seated, perhaps genetic, biological, individual-level variation. Universal architecture allows flexible responses, but the architecture itself is still universal. Evolutionary psychologists typically acknowledge that architectural differences exist across reproductively meaningful groups such as gender and perhaps age, but otherwise the notion that variation in biological architecture is responsible for variation in behavior is treated skeptically. This is where we part company with evolutionary psychology and all theories (like behaviorism) based on the notion that there is a single human nature…

This tendency to view people as interchangeable and situations as determinative is by no means restricted to hoary social science theories. Authors, philosophers, and public intellectuals also typically explain behavioral variations via context and not dispositional differences. Thomas Hobbes thought human nature was so nasty that we needed an oppressive government to save us from ourselves.24 John Locke is frequently held up as the light to Hobbes’ darkness, but Locke was not much cheerier about basic human nature. He thought people would be nice, but only if conditions made it unprofitable for them to be mean. He pinpointed the technological advances of salting meat and coining currency as creating conditions ripe for meanness. As long as anything valuable was perishable, it made no sense to stockpile goods beyond what could be consumed in the next day or two—so go ahead and have an extra slice of my mammoth meat. Invent money and preservatives and the gloves come off; now if you want a taste of my cured ham, it’ll cost you. Locke did not see differences between people as particularly consequential and believed that crucial situational changes in the long-distant past allowed another side of human nature to be manifested.25

Karl Marx also believed human behavior was driven by situations—more specifically, by position in the class structure.

One of the most tragic consequences of the noble savage mindset occurred in China. Chairman Mao thought the uncorrupted rural peasant embodied all that was good about the human condition, so he tried to create more of them. He forced millions to relocate from China’s teeming cities to its pastoral environs. This “make-a-peasant” program was, to say the least, a failure. Instead of thriving, the transplants died in droves—upwards of 20 million by some estimates. The view that social context alone determines human behavior—that individual variation does not matter—has been a source of misunderstanding and even catastrophe throughout history.

The tradition of dismissing meaningful individual-level human variation is not restricted to philosophers, Communists, and devotees of the noble savage concept. It can also be found on modern best-seller lists. Take, for instance, the work of Malcolm Gladwell.28 In one book, Gladwell says he wants to go “beyond the individual” in explaining why some people are successful and some are not. He writes of “hidden advantages,” “extraordinary opportunities,” “cultural legacies,” and “hard work,” and says the keys to success are luck and diligence. Want to be the next dominant hockey player on the planet? Then your best strategy is to have a birthday just after the age cutoff used to classify youth teams. That way you are more likely to be the oldest and most physically mature specimen on the squad, thus increasing your chances of developing confidence, being selected for the
traveling squad, getting to refine your skills even more, and going on to be the next Wayne Gretzky.

Hockey not your thing? Never fear, the basic principle applies to doing sums, playing soccer, and strumming a guitar. Gladwell does offer hope for those whose birthdays do not fall at the right time of the year but it has little to do with natural aptitudes and core individual differences. If you want to succeed, all you need to do is practice. Not just practice a little but practice a lot—a minimum of 10,000 hours. The Beatles, Gladwell claims, made it big not because of any particular musical talent but because when they were fledgling musicians they packed themselves off to perform in Hamburg dives where they refined their skills by playing extended shows in front of tough crowds night after night. But so did Tony Sheridan and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and not many people have heard of them, though they have probably heard of the Hurricanes’ drummer. His name is Ringo and the Beatles poached him after they gave Pete Best the boot. Perhaps Pete slacked off and only practiced 9,999 hours.

Importantly, Gladwell treats the capacity to dedicate yourself to a punishing practice regimen as something that is purely a matter of individual will. The assumption seems to be that any one of us could be the next Paul, John, George, or Ringo because we all possess the willpower to put in 9 to 10 hours every single day for three years on our Stratocasters. That’s a pretty big assumption, since the required dedication to practicing a craft simply is not something everyone has. People who do not put in 10,000 hours mastering a single skill, we want to emphasize, are not slackers. Spending all that time in the gym, at the library, or practicing chord progressions to a Merseyside beat means you have to sacrifice a lot. Not everyone has an inner drive so strong they are willing to live potentially unbalanced lives to nurture it. Gladwell’s message seems to be, “You too can be great if you just work at it.” Our message is that most people are not predisposed to work at it to the degree required to become great. They are not necessarily lazy but physiologically, cognitively, psychologically, and perhaps genetically different from those who are willing to dedicate themselves in this fashion.

We are not so sure. Changing someone’s predisposition toward trying hard or toward illegal immigrants often is no easier than altering that person’s musical ability, preferred writing hand, or proficiency at commutative algebra.

The bottom line is that innate aptitude is unlikely as trivial a factor as Gladwell implies. Most of us could not skate like Wayne Gretzky, play guitar like George Harrison, sing like Adele, think like Stephen Hawking, dribble or shoot like Lionel Messi, or jump like Michael Jordan no matter how much we practiced and no matter where on the calendar our birthdays happened to fall. But it is arguably a bigger mistake to believe that innate attitudes do not exist and therefore that all people are dispositionally the same when it comes to work ethic, favored recreational and occupational pursuits, or even preferences for the best way to organize and run mass-scale society. Most people, including Gladwell, accept that individuals vary somewhat in aptitudes, but most people tend to be less willing to accept that differences in attitudes are shaped by similar sorts of forces (things like biological and cognitive dispositions), yet they are.

It is a significant adjustment to think of attitudes as products not just of our environments or situations but also of biologically based predispositions; yet attitudes are undeniably based in what people think and feel, and thinking and feeling are undeniably physical processes. It is possible to tell if people view images as stimulating merely by looking at patterns of their physiology.

People’s differences run deep. We are not all born with the same “slates.” We come into the world with much on our slate and the environment we encounter piles on its idiosyncratic touches. Though the prevailing view both in academic and folk wisdom is that this individuation is not particularly enduring or biological, in more self-reflective moments most people accept that they have longstanding biases and predispositions. Our claim is that these predispositions are biologically measurable and connect to a variety of generic psychological and cognitive patterns.