It’s one of the most fundamental questions about human nature, but a satisfying answer continues to elude psychologists. Popularly known as the nature vs. nurture debate,  this question probes the relative causal roles of biology and experience in the shaping of one’s thoughts, emotions, attitudes and behaviors–in a word, personality.

Figure 1. Nature vs. Nurture.

I like to phrase the question this way: are we primarily endowed with our personality from birth, or is our personality acted on and affected by environmental factors? Given mounting research across multiple domains in psychology and neuroscience, I think the answer to the question is “both,” as data shows that both genetic endowment and learning/experience affect brain–and consequently personality–development.

Today, most believe that neither biology nor experience holds an exclusive claim on how personality is expressed, but older debates in the field liked to think that one would ultimately win out over the other. Such a debate exploded in developmental psychology in the mid to late 20th century, with theorists either siding with biology (e.g Jerome Kagan – “Temperamentalism”) or with learning and experience (e.g John Bowlby – Attachment Theory).

Classically, the types of studies most commonly used to illustrate the nature vs. nurture debate are twin studies. Here, identical (and sometimes fraternal) twins that were separated at birth and raised in households that differ greatly from each other in some manner (e.g. socioeconomic status, location, parenting style, etc.) are examined to see what traits they share in common and, more interestingly, on which ones they differ. Because identical twins share the same genes, twin studies highlight the role of environmental factors in everything from psychopathology to opposing personality traits to differing preferences.

Figure 2. Interaction of genetic predispositions and environment.

The present picture of personality does not present us with a binary choice of causal players, but rather a complex interaction of contingencies. After all, as Dr. Peter Salovey so well puts it, “If the principles of psychology were a series of main effects – meaning that x works better  than y – rather than more qualified statements that reflect interactions between variables, then we wouldn’t need a science of human behavior to deduce them…They’d be obvious.”

The nature vs. nurture debate cannot be a more apt example of the nuance that underlies the study of human behavior, since personality development is necessarily a product of what we genetically have at birth and how our experiences shape the expression of our genes. Biology does endow us with predispositions and possibilities for certain personality types, but our experiences can either activate and turn those tendencies into real genotypic and phenotypic traits–or not.

To make all of this a bit clearer, I’ve crudely rendered the two possible frameworks for understanding personality (see above). Figure 1 shows the classic binary choice between biology and experience, where personality is either innate or acquired. Figure 2 shows the more likely framework in which genetic endowment presents personality tendencies (indicated by the variously sized “Ps”) that interact with experience (squiggly arrow) over development (straight arrow) to produce a final personality type (big “P”).

So, what message should we take home [for the holidays]? In short, our personalities are sticky constructs that escape easy, 1-to-1 explanations. Here’s an example using psychopathology that hopefully demonstrates the complexity of the issue. There are four people (A, B, C, D) who are exposed to either home environment 1 or home environment 2. Persons A and B have a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia, but persons C and D do not.

For person A with a genetic predisposition for schizhophrenia, home environment 1 will be more conducive to “bringing out”  the symptoms and tendencies of the disorder. For person B who has the same exact predisposition, home environment 2 will not be as “effective” and in turn the disorder might never appear.  To make matters more interesting, person C does not have a predisposition for schizophrenia and in home environment 1, the disorder does not appear. Person D is not so lucky; he does not have a predisposition for schizophrenia, but the disorder appears for him in home environment 2. In light of all this, what causes schizophrenia, genetics or environmental factors?

Feel free to discuss this over egg nog and Christmas dinners. I’m sure that it’ll bring your family members’ personalities to the fore!

BAM! ANGRY BABY!

There it is.

In case you’re wondering, “it” is the quick “Whoa, angry baby!” reaction you experienced when you saw the picture. First let’s check the speed of the reaction.  Quick cognitive processes carried out by your brain immediately perceived the baby’s facial expression as the primary input. The output, the “whoa” response we experience,  is seemingly not subject to reflective thought–it just happens. We can say our reaction is automatic in so far as it doesn’t “wait” for us to reflect on it or change it. For many years psychologists debated about what comes first: affective (good/bad) reactions or deliberate and reflective thinking? Of course, these two processes are not mutually exclusive, since a lot of our cognition is probably an interaction between them. But many times one type of process might have greater influence in driving a response to a stimulus, as we’ve seen here with this agitated little one.

So what makes up the “stuff” of thought? “Hot,” affective reactions, or “cold” cognitive operations? For a large span of the 20th century, information processing models of cognition assumed that affective (evaluative) judgments happened at a post-cognitive stage. For example, if I wanted to determine whether or not I like a certain sweater, I would first make informed inferences based on multiple criteria of the sweater (e.g. softness of fabric, size, style, etc.). After individually calculating “weights” for each criterion, I would then sum the weights and, finally, make an evaluative decision about the sweater.

The game-changer came in 1980, when the late Robert Zajonc published a seminal paper that swept the theory-scape of psychology  (according to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited nearly 3,600 times since its publication). The paper is entitled “Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.” Zajonc’s main premise was that affect tends to overwhelmingly color our  perceptions and judgments, leaving little room for more reasoned thought. So much does affect dominate, Zajonc argued, that affective processes temporally precede and therefore trump deliberate thinking.

Social psychology has taken this assumption and run with it–probably prematurely. For example, in 1999 John Bargh published “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being” in American Psychologist. This paper highlights some interesting findings from Bargh’s research that suggests that a lot of our behaviors are activated and carried out by unconscious (i.e. cognitive inaccessible) processes. These processes, sometimes called heuristics, are usually rapid and affective in quality, and while they might be more functionally efficient, they give rise to errors and biases in our reasoning and judgments (cf. Kahneman & Tversky, 1974). But Bargh, at the end of what seems like a permissive concession to the intractability of our automatic minds, comes to the strange conclusion that automatic processes

…are in our service and best interests…They are, if anything, ‘mental butlers’ who know our tendencies and preferences so well that they anticipate and take care of them for us, without having to be asked (p. 476).

Okay, that’s all well and good, if our preferences and tendencies are healthy, adaptive, and contribute to our (and others’) well-being and flourishing. But what about in the case of psychopathology? What should I tell the depressed patient about her recurring negative thoughts that paralyze her and prevent her from connecting with those whom she loves? Should I just tell her that her “mental butler” is taking care of everything, and that she shouldn’t go to therapy to try to change her thought processes? While I respect Bargh’s opinion, I do not like its implications. While we might, without proper training or knowledge,  succumb to automatic thought processes that guide our judgments and behavior, we should not believe that we have no power over our thoughts. There is hope in the budding field of social and affective neuroscience, as many lines of research are revealing the possibility of adaptive cognitive change (e.g. mindfulness meditation and cognitive reappraisal).

William James once said, “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.” I would like to think that as we keep charting courses in psychology and neuroscience, we are waking up to the possibilities that our mysteriously beautiful minds can offer us.

This entry in the psychology series will draw upon current events. You might have seen this horrible story, the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in Richmond, CA (the picture at right is approximately where the attack took place).  Here are harrowing details from the SF Chronicle about the incident:

Taken from SF Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/)

“What ensued was 2 1/2 hours of beatings and raping, at times with a foreign object. The scene attracted onlookers, some calling others over by cell phone, and eventually there were as many as 10 men or boys sexually assaulting the girl while another 20 looked on, laughing and snapping pictures.”

The key phrase here: “…while another 20 looked on.” This conspicuous lack of intervention among the witnesses exemplifies a disturbing social behavior in its most extreme form, when the callous underbelly of our human nature is exposed in a permissive social context. Powerhouse social psychologist, the venerable John Darley , empirically studied this phenomenon in the late 1960s. This phenomenon is known as the bystander effect, which represents an instance of diffusion of responsibility. This occurs in social contexts when there is a potentially threatening or harmful situation, but either very few (or no) witnesses will take action to intervene or call for help. As the social context (group) gets larger, individuals feel less and less personally responsible; they figure that someone else will do something to help. Diffusion of responsibility seems to be a measurable and systematic behavior and social psychologists argue that it is one example of the power and influence of the situation, and how aspects of a social context can trump  personality traits and dispositions.

It’s hard to believe that among the 20 bystanders who stood by and didn’t intervene to help the poor girl, there wasn’t at least one or two who are otherwise considered “kind and helpful.” I guess the scariest thing is that when we hear about a story, we’re tempted to say, “If I were there, I surely would have gotten help!” But a large amount of  research in social psychology tells a different story. Had you or I been there, watching the base brutality unfold in front of your eyes and seeing no one take action, would you muster the courage to call 911? Or would you just assume that someone else in the crowd must be decent enough to take the time to dial three digits on their phone?

We’d like to think that our private mental lives and outward behaviors correspond with and inform each other.

We hope that our attitudes predict and guide behavior. Pish, that would be too easy! Psychology, in her relatively short history, has sometimes confirmed our intuitions about human nature. But more often than not, psychological research will upend our assumptions, recasting them with more nuance and complexity than what we started with.

Getting back to attitudes and behavior, I am highlighting in this post the topic of cognitive dissonance–originally popularized by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. I’m not going to spend much time defining cognitive dissonance. Just a brief explanation: cognitive dissonance occurs when there are conflicting or “dissonant” cognitions (e.g. attitudes), which will lead one to reduce the dissonance–either by changing overt behavior or the conflicting cognition. For example, a smoker might think after lighting up, “Cigarettes are bad for me and I should quit,” but soon will re-think (to reduce dissonance) and say, “Smoking helps relieve stress and makes me feel better. And I don’t have to quit right away.”

I want to push the implications of cognitive dissonance to see what it means in our everyday experience. First, this means that we can make judgments and rationalizations completely after-the-fact. The behavior, however harmful or maladaptive, is over, so now  we feel compelled to tell ourselves a story that explains and justifies how we behaved. The content of the story doesn’t  matter, we just know that we need to tell it. And we make ourselves feel better in doing so. Is this tendency worrisome? At worst, the picture becomes grim very quickly: if this  tendency to resolve dissonance becomes prevalent and intractable, it means that we are chronically dis-integrated creatures, fumbling through life and making meaning and explanations in hindsight. We do one thing, believe another, and then re-calibrate our beliefs so they sync with our (already committed) behavior. An illustrative example: what accounts for these girls’ justifications for being raped in order to join a gang? This case is tragic, because here we see desperate socio-economic conditions aggravating people’s tendency to reduce dissonance, which, in turn, breeds and maintains destructive patterns of behavior.

This entry will consider a paper by Daniel Gilbert entitled, “How Mental Systems Believe” (published in 1991 in American Psychologist, full text here).

Daniel Gilbert (NYTimes.com)

Before we can really delve into psychological mechanisms and how they influence behavior, which we’ll learn about in later posts,  we first need to know how the mind processes information.

In our human experience, we are constantly bombarded with information of multiple flavors: sensory input (sights, sounds, smells, tastes), abstract concepts, ideas, and propositions (e.g. socialism, freedom), and social signals (facial expressions, gestures). So what do we do with all this information? How do we separate truth from falsehood? Gilbert argues that our mental faculties naturally tend toward believing an idea or piece of information at the precise moment at which we comprehend it. Simply put, we believe whatever we can cognitively grasp.

Gilbert presents his argument by first appealing to philosophy, and then sets out to show empirical support for the claim. He begins with comparing and contrasting the theories of Descartes and Spinoza. Descartes posited that comprehension and acceptance of an idea are two dissociable processes, with comprehension preceding acceptance (or rejection) of an idea. This jives with our intuitive sense of how we make sense of the information in the world around us. I mean, it makes more sense that we would first determine whether or not we could understand an idea or concept, and then subject it to scrutiny to see if it’s believable or not. Spinoza gives us a completely different picture than that of Descartes. He claimed that comprehension and acceptance happen at the same time–one mental event! As soon as an idea is comprehended, it is believed, and an idea can be rejected only if one has additional time and resources to reconsider it in light of additional evidence.

Jeremy Dean at Psyblog nicely summarizes the empirical work that Gilbert has done to demonstrate that Spinoza might have been right after all. One really cool manipulation that Gilbert does in this study (and others) is to strain cognitive resources by diverting attention or increasing task demands. In a 1993 study he showed that people, when deliberately interrupted, are more likely to ignore falsifying information that they would otherwise take into account in the absence of interruption.

I’ve included Gilbert’s theory and work about this topic in this series because I think it well demonstrates that higher-order cognition, specifically comprehension and belief, at least depends as much on how information is presented as what the information’s content is. For example, if the content of an argument is lackluster and not persuasive, but I frame the argument to you in a clear way that makes it believable, you might just agree with me. Of course, this topic of how mental systems believe is still debatable and there is sure to be a counterargument. But, I’ll just assume that the counterargument is not well presented and difficult to understand.

NB: Check back next week for my second post in this psychology series!

This past weekend I attended the 3rd annual meeting of the  Social and Affective Neuroscience Society. Everyone in attendance had the great privilege of hearing New York Times columnist David Brook give a keynote address. And lo and behold, today Brooks wrote an article recounting his experience at the conference. I am so glad that he is giving the field a strong, needed voice–so that, at the very least, core assumptions about human nature can be challenged and replaced with insights gleaned from empirical study of emotions, behavior, and social phenomena.

One of Brooks’ conclusions:

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments.

I have determined that the time has come for me to discover (or re-discover) psychology studies and/or articles from the 20th century that have significantly impacted how we think about the mind and human behavior.

My intention with this is manifold: not only to describe and inform, but to challenge, question, and provoke. Psychology is one of the youngest sciences, but I would argue that  she has the most to tell us about what differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, getting at the perennial question of what makes us human. Because of this, we can get a sense of how our cognitive processes and social abilities can lend themselves to either compromised humanity,  characterized by global errors in thinking and doing that lead to harm, or, greater and richer humanity, in terms of traits and qualities (e.g. compassion and altruism) that lead to health, well-being, and general flourishing.

To see which studies or articles I would select, I first checked my memory to see which studies consistently appeared in my psychology coursework, from Psych 101 all the way through advanced seminars in specific topics. Then I polled my friends via social media (yes, Facebook) to see if their suggestions corresponded to my initial memory search. Finally, I incorporated one or two suggestions by the PI of my lab, Professor Kevin Ochsner, since he made some suggestions of noteworthy papers at a recent lab meeting. The end product, I hope, will be helpful to everyone who takes the time to read through the series in its entirety.

And so it begins. (read: the first paper will be discussed this week!)

Click here for the full article. Here’s an excerpt:

In the U2 song Crumbs from Your Table, which laments the nagging tension between scarcity and abundance, Bono speaks of “dignity [that] passes by.” For millions who are caught in the horrors of debt bondage, forced labor, and sex trafficking, dignity does pass by, every day. With their dignity absent, these individuals’ humanity necessarily wanes and wears thin.  And every day we, the privileged ones in a developing world, have the opportunity to make sure that dignity is restored to all who suffer the gross oppression of modern-day slavery. When we take this opportunity, we move closer to a world where restored humanity confronts and subverts dehumanizing suffering.

This article was eye-opening and challenging to my mind (and stomach). Here is an excerpt:

We ought to start by looking at the great food cultures of the world. The traditional cuisines of Asia and North Africa, not to mention France and Italy, are based on rice, wheat, spices and smatterings of all cuts of meat. In just about every other cuisine, protein plays second fiddle to grains and vegetables. When meat appears, it does so modestly; it takes up less space on the plate, and more often than not it’s a piece of the animal–tripe or oxtail–that Americans so willingly discard.

I do not (and might never) consider myself handy, certainly not as handy as my Dad. But tonight, I was genuinely surprised and I can only thank my Dad for what he has taught me over the years whenever I helped him around the house.

Tonight, my friend Liz and I assembled an awesome kitchen cart. It really rocks because of its many uses: cutting board, veggie/meat prep station, storage for utensils and the like, and…a bar on wheels!!! The photos below depict the before and after pics, and the image of the cart from the Bed, Bath, and Beyond website.