Jan 2, 2020 03:24 AM
https://aeon.co/ideas/personality-is-not...re-you-are
EXCERPT: In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it. If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she’ll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this ‘marshmallow test’, the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel demonstrated that children who could resist immediate gratification and wait for a second marshmallow went on to greater achievements in life. They did better in school, had better SAT scores, and even managed their stress more skilfully.
Mischel’s pioneering studies [...] had a profound impact on both professional and popular understandings of patience ... But what if that wasn’t the right conclusion to draw from these studies? What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?
When trying to study the relationship between the environment and our personality characteristics, researchers face two big challenges. The first challenge is casting doubt on the tendency to see personality traits – patterns of behaviour that are stable across time – as parts of our identities that are inevitable and arising from within. [...] The other challenge concerns whom psychologists have been studying for the past century.
[...] knowledge derives from research on a very specific and peculiar subset of humans: those living in industrialised societies. ... the anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team ... showed that roughly 96 per cent of subjects in psychology studies came from so-called ‘WEIRD’ societies – or those that are Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic.
A bias toward WEIRD societies is problematic for a number of reasons. First, people in these societies are a poor proxy for the average human, representing countries that make up only about 12 per cent of the world’s population. But this asymmetry toward industrialised societies is problematic for another reason: it represents an environment that’s fundamentally different from the ones in which human beings evolved.
If our surroundings do shape our personalities, how do we capture this important process? Here, Mischel’s method was right: go straight to childhood ... Recently, my collaborators and I did just that, designing a study to look at two traits of interest: how patient someone is, and how tolerant of uncertainty. We took our investigation to four different societies across the globe: to India, the United States, Argentina and, importantly given our effort to combat the WEIRD bias, indigenous Shuar children living in Amazonian Ecuador. The Shuar communities we visited were remote...
To measure how patient a child was, we used an experiment similar to Mischel’s marshmallow test [...] For uncertainty, they got to choose between a safe bag that always paid out one candy or a risky bag that gave them only a one-in-six chance of more candy. We found lots of variation, especially between the Shuar and the three other communities. Children in the US, Argentina and India behaved similarly, tending to be more patient and more tolerant of uncertainty, while the Shuar [...] were more impatient, and warier of uncertainty; they almost never picked the risky bag.
In a follow-up study the next year, we looked within Shuar communities and found the same patterns. Shuar kids living near the cities acted more like Americans than the Shuar kids in the rainforest. Something about living near cities – and perhaps something about industrialisation more broadly – seemed to be shaping kids’ behaviour. To understand [...] it’s important to understand its legacy in the human story.
The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago launched perhaps the most profound transformation in the history of human life. No longer dependent on hunting or gathering for survival, [...] markets might have also changed our perceptions of affordability. In WEIRD societies with more resources ... kids might feel that they can better afford strategies such as patience and risk-seeking. ... But for Shuar kids in the rainforest with less resources, the loss of that candy is a much bigger deal. They’d rather avoid the risk.
[...] Other studies support the notion that personality is shaped more by the environment than previously thought. ... as societies become more complex, they lead to the development of more niches – or social and occupational roles that people can take. Different personality traits are more successful in some roles than others, and the more roles there are, the more diverse personality types can become. As these new studies all suggest, our environments can have a profound impact on our personality traits. (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it. If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she’ll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this ‘marshmallow test’, the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel demonstrated that children who could resist immediate gratification and wait for a second marshmallow went on to greater achievements in life. They did better in school, had better SAT scores, and even managed their stress more skilfully.
Mischel’s pioneering studies [...] had a profound impact on both professional and popular understandings of patience ... But what if that wasn’t the right conclusion to draw from these studies? What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?
When trying to study the relationship between the environment and our personality characteristics, researchers face two big challenges. The first challenge is casting doubt on the tendency to see personality traits – patterns of behaviour that are stable across time – as parts of our identities that are inevitable and arising from within. [...] The other challenge concerns whom psychologists have been studying for the past century.
[...] knowledge derives from research on a very specific and peculiar subset of humans: those living in industrialised societies. ... the anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team ... showed that roughly 96 per cent of subjects in psychology studies came from so-called ‘WEIRD’ societies – or those that are Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic.
A bias toward WEIRD societies is problematic for a number of reasons. First, people in these societies are a poor proxy for the average human, representing countries that make up only about 12 per cent of the world’s population. But this asymmetry toward industrialised societies is problematic for another reason: it represents an environment that’s fundamentally different from the ones in which human beings evolved.
If our surroundings do shape our personalities, how do we capture this important process? Here, Mischel’s method was right: go straight to childhood ... Recently, my collaborators and I did just that, designing a study to look at two traits of interest: how patient someone is, and how tolerant of uncertainty. We took our investigation to four different societies across the globe: to India, the United States, Argentina and, importantly given our effort to combat the WEIRD bias, indigenous Shuar children living in Amazonian Ecuador. The Shuar communities we visited were remote...
To measure how patient a child was, we used an experiment similar to Mischel’s marshmallow test [...] For uncertainty, they got to choose between a safe bag that always paid out one candy or a risky bag that gave them only a one-in-six chance of more candy. We found lots of variation, especially between the Shuar and the three other communities. Children in the US, Argentina and India behaved similarly, tending to be more patient and more tolerant of uncertainty, while the Shuar [...] were more impatient, and warier of uncertainty; they almost never picked the risky bag.
In a follow-up study the next year, we looked within Shuar communities and found the same patterns. Shuar kids living near the cities acted more like Americans than the Shuar kids in the rainforest. Something about living near cities – and perhaps something about industrialisation more broadly – seemed to be shaping kids’ behaviour. To understand [...] it’s important to understand its legacy in the human story.
The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago launched perhaps the most profound transformation in the history of human life. No longer dependent on hunting or gathering for survival, [...] markets might have also changed our perceptions of affordability. In WEIRD societies with more resources ... kids might feel that they can better afford strategies such as patience and risk-seeking. ... But for Shuar kids in the rainforest with less resources, the loss of that candy is a much bigger deal. They’d rather avoid the risk.
[...] Other studies support the notion that personality is shaped more by the environment than previously thought. ... as societies become more complex, they lead to the development of more niches – or social and occupational roles that people can take. Different personality traits are more successful in some roles than others, and the more roles there are, the more diverse personality types can become. As these new studies all suggest, our environments can have a profound impact on our personality traits. (MORE - details)
