This is from William Saletan’s New York Times review of Judith Harris’s No Two Alike:
Ultimately, however, long-term behavior modification is at odds with
itself. As our minds become subtler and our occupations less stable,
short-term modifications suited to the situation at hand become more
advantageous than permanent modifications. This is already happening,
according to her theory. The reason parental influence doesn’t control
children’s behavior outside the home is that they adjust to context.
"Children are capable of generalizing – of learning something in one
context and applying it in another – but they do not do it blindly,"
Harris observes. At home, where you’re the younger sibling, you yield.
At school, where you’re one of the bigger kids, you don’t. And unlike
other animals, you can shuffle your self-classifications. In seconds,
you can go from acting like a girl to acting like a child to acting
like a New Yorker.In short, the evolutionary logic that makes
us different from one another will gradually make us different from
ourselves, context by context. Personality – behavior that is
"consistent across time and place," as one textbook puts it – will
fade. We’ll miss characters like Harris, the little woman from New
Jersey who boasted of giving psychologists a "wedgie" and tried to
solve the puzzle of human nature.
But is it true? Cannot evolutionary pressures favor extreme constancy, for purposes of precommitting to transparency and attracting a better mate?
By the way, I’ll give "best sentence of the day" honor to Daniel Akst: "Any benefit from shining the cleansing light of day on executive greed
will probably be outweighed by the inflationary effect of additional
disclosure, which will provide more ammunition for executives and
consultants seeking to justify additional increases."
Besides genes, children are different because of micro-environmental difference (not the macro-environmental differences that sociologists are so interested in) and randomness in the way the brain develops. This explains how identical twins with the same macro-environment still wind up being different.
Peer influence is more important than parental influence because children instinctively crave status in society. In evolutionary terms, children who rejected their peers in favor of their parents were less successful in mating and had fewer children.
“But is it true? Cannot evolutionary pressures favor extreme constancy, for purposes of precommitting to transparency and attracting a better mate?”
If find Harris more convincing that Saletan in the sense that the incentive to behave differently in different social environments is certainly not new. Harris may be an implacable foe to her acadmeic antagonists, but that ‘bulldog’ side of her personality is quite likely kept under wraps and rarely displayed in relationships with her family, say, or friends and neighbors. Having these different sorts of spheres is not a new pheonomenon, so I doubt more frequent job changes would really affect the dynamic materially.
Could evolutionary pressures favor ‘constancy’ in the sense of insensitivity to different social environments? I doubt it–behaving predictably doesn’t mean being insensitive to context. A potential partner who behaved flexibly and appropriately in a variety of social situations would seem more valuable than one whose behavior was ‘constant’.
“And unlike other animals, you can shuffle your self-classifications.”
Obviously, Saletan hasn’t kept up with David Friedman’s blog. This post describes game-playing chimps. This is just one example of animals exihibiting exactly the behavior described in the passage. My dog, in fact, would stay off the couch when humans were present, and get on the couch when they were not. He certainly shuffled between his self-classifications of obedient son and reckless bandit depending on the context.
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