No Two Alike Page 27

  The mental organs I describe in this book are part of human nature. Every normal human brain comes equipped with them, just as every normal human body comes equipped with arms and legs. But arms and legs vary from one individual to another—some people can lift heavier weights or run faster—and there are individual differences in mental organs too: differences, for example, in the strengths of the motivations they provide. There are people with an unusually powerful sex drive, people who would rather eat than do anything else, and people with a strong urge to nurture small creatures. There are those who are good at relationships and those who aren’t.

  My Achilles’ heel is the socialization system. Like “Z,” the ant played by Woody Allen in the movie Antz, I am deficient in the motivation to affiliate with a group and to conform to the group’s standards. Here’s Z:

  I was not cut out to be a worker, I’ll tell you right now. I, I feel physically inadequate. I—my whole life, I’ve never—I’ve never been able to lift more than ten times my own body weight.

  Wouldn’t you think that Woody Allen, of all people, would have heard of Ernst and Angst? Apparently not. Z’s explanation for why he lacked the urge to dig tunnels was based on birth order:

  I think everything must go back to the fact that I had a very anxious childhood. You know, my, my mother never had time for me. You know, when you’re—when you’re the middle child in a family of five million, you don’t get any attention.

  I had a pretty anxious childhood too, even though I was a firstborn. You know, I was—I was rejected by my, my peers. But I think my motivational deficiencies were the cause, rather than the result, of the rejection. Not only did I fail to figure out why the other kids my age didn’t accept me: I didn’t even try to figure it out. I remember a day when a girl in my class—a popular girl who was visiting my house because her mother was my mother’s best friend—took me aside and gave me a lecture on what I should do to make myself more acceptable. It included some guidance on how to dress properly, a topic I have always found extremely boring. In fact, I found the whole lecture boring and mystifying, and paid no attention to it. It was only years later that I realized it was meant as a kindness: my classmate had been trying to help me.

  I am not totally lacking in the motivation to conform; it’s just weak. I did eventually become more or less socialized, though I suspect in my case it was more a matter of learning how not to behave in order to avoid social punishment. But I’ve never been interested in joining clubs and I belong to no organized religion. I was kicked out of graduate school at Harvard because, the letter from the Department of Psychology informed me, they doubted I would ever fit their “stereotype of what an experimental psychologist should be.” They were right: I’m no good at fitting stereotypes.

  A child whose socialization system is doing its job well will score high in what developmentalists call “group acceptance.” But this child may not be particularly good at managing personal relationships. Research has shown that children who rate high on acceptance by their peer group do not necessarily have successful friendships, and that children who are poorly accepted may nonetheless be good at making and keeping friends.37 Even during the years when none of my classmates would talk to me, I did have one close friend; she lived next door and was three grades behind me in school.

  Group acceptance and success in friendships are largely, but not completely, unrelated. I wouldn’t expect them to be completely unrelated because some qualities—an attractive appearance, an amiable disposition, intelligence, imagination—stand a child in good stead in every domain of social life. But researchers have found that acceptance and friendship make independent contributions to children’s satisfaction with their lives and have distinguishable implications for adult outcomes. A longitudinal study showed that group acceptance or rejection in childhood was a fairly good predictor of “overall life status” in adulthood, but that success in friendships was not. Doing well in childhood friendships had “unique predictive implications only for positive relationships with family members.”38 Having good relationships in childhood means you’re good at relationships. It doesn’t mean you’re good at anything else.

  My description of the socialization system is still not enough to explain how children get socialized. Okay, children form social categories, figure out which one they belong in, and tailor their behavior to that of the prototype for their category. But how do the other kids in their category get socialized? They can’t just be copying one another, because we know that cultures do get passed down from one generation to another. There has to be some input from the older generation.

  To explain how cultures are passed down, I’ll again use my favorite example, language. Acquiring the local language and accent is part of socialization, and once they’re acquired they become social behaviors, sensitive to context. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, which language or accent someone uses is determined entirely by the environment; genes play no role. If children speak the same language or use the same accent as their parents, we know it isn’t due to heredity. Whereas if they hold the same political attitudes as their parents, or have the same positive or negative feelings about going to church or reading books, these similarities can be partly inherited. The heritability of attitude to the death penalty is .50; to organized religion, .46; and to reading books, .37.39

  Here’s how it works for language. In modern societies most children learn the local language at home from their parents. When the child starts school or goes outside to play, she finds that the language she learned at home is also spoken outside the home, so she keeps using it. The result is that the language of the child matches that of her parents: the parents have succeeded in passing on their language to their child. But it works this way only if the parents speak the same language as the other parents in the community. If the child’s parents happen to speak a different language at home, she will first acquire her parents’ language and then find, when she goes outside, that the people out there speak a different language. In this case the child will learn the language used outside the home—the language of her peers—and will soon begin to favor it over the one she learned from her parents. The children of immigrants often forget how to speak the language of their parents, unless they have an opportunity to use it outside the home. They will speak the language of their community without an accent. That is, they will speak it with the same accent as their peers.40

  Other aspects of socialization are passed on in the same way. The child learns things from her parents and siblings and takes them with her when she starts to play with children outside her family. If what she learned agrees with what she finds out there—if the other children are following the same customs or expressing the same attitudes—then she will retain what she learned at home. If they don’t agree, if she finds herself out of step with the others, she will change. The socialization system (if it is working properly) will signal a discrepancy between her behavior and that of the prototype for her social category, and will motivate her to reduce that discrepancy.

  In traditional societies, children don’t actually learn much from their parents; they are socialized mainly in the children’s play group. Play groups pass on languages and customs the same way they pass on children’s games: the younger children learn the vocabulary and rules from the older ones. The games, language, and customs can remain unchanged for hundreds of years, while generations of children enter the group, learn the rules from the older children, and pass them down in turn to younger children before graduating from the group. The children’s culture matches the parents’ culture because the children and the parents were socialized in the same way, by the same groups, whose membership changed over the years but whose games and culture remained constant.41

  Even in a complex, industrialized society, some aspects of the culture can remain relatively constant for generations. It will depend in part on how homogeneous the society is. In a homogeneous society, what one child learns at home is likely to
agree quite well with what her peers learned at home, so what she brings to the peer group is fine—she needn’t change. In most parts of the United States, nearly everyone speaks English, and generation after generation of children learn English at home and continue to speak English in adulthood. The parents assume, and most developmentalists do too, that the children speak English in adulthood because that’s what their parents taught them. They have no observations to tell them that this assumption is incorrect.

  Nonetheless, they are correct in assuming that parents have the power to determine their children’s language and accent. The way parents exert this power is by deciding where their children will grow up and which schools they will attend. One of the reasons upper-class British parents send their children to boarding schools like Eton and Harrow is so they will acquire the proper accent.42 Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whose father was a grocer, acquired her plummy accent by winning a scholarship to a fancy private school. Children who go to these schools don’t just acquire an accent: they acquire an upper-class culture as well. The language and culture are passed on by the students in these schools in the same way that children’s games are passed on by the play groups in tribal societies.

  Many people explain their actions or beliefs by saying “I was raised that way,” by which they mean that they got their attitudes toward honesty, hard work, or whatever, from their parents. It’s true that they might have first heard these principles expressed by their parents, but they retained them because they agreed with what they encountered outside the home. They agreed because their schoolmates were hearing the same views expressed by their parents. Someone who says “I was raised that way” is implying that there was something unusual about the way she was raised, but the actions or beliefs in question are almost always commonplace within the subculture to which the speaker belongs. In the pages of the New York Times, the daughter of a Nobel Prize–winner in physics attributed her success to her father’s advice to “maintain the highest standards” the son of a Korean Airlines executive attributed his success to having learned from his father “that with hard work and perseverance you can overcome a lot of things.”43

  People have a tendency to attribute their actions to what they remember, and—thanks to the way the relationship system hogs the conscious mind—they remember their parents. But culture consists largely of behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge acquired through implicit learning. Your memories therefore cannot be relied upon to give you accurate information about how you were socialized. What the conscious mind does, when it lacks an explanation for something, is to use whatever material it has and make up a plausible story.44

  Many developmentalists believe they can improve children’s behavior outside the home—make them less aggressive or more amenable to instruction—by modifying the parents’ child-rearing methods. Such interventions, I concluded in chapter 5, may improve children’s behavior at home but are ineffective in improving their behavior in school. The socialization system can explain why some kinds of interventions succeed and others fail.

  I’ll again use my favorite example, language. This is a story of two men who spent their lives pursuing an improbable goal: they wanted to change people’s language. As far as I know, they never met; but these two Eastern European Jews were born within a few hundred miles and a few hundred days of each other. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born in Lithuania in 1858; Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof was born in Poland in 1859. Ben-Yehuda’s ambition was to revive Hebrew as a spoken language so that Jews from all different countries would have a common language in which to converse. Zamenhof’s ambition was even loftier: he wanted a common language for everyone on earth. Since no existing language was good enough for his purpose, he created one. He named it Esperanto.

  Zamenhof succeeded in recruiting a remarkable number of people to his cause. There are hundreds of thousands of Esperanto users in the world; they belong to Esperanto clubs and publish Esperanto magazines. Some users even teach the language to their children.45 And yet, as an intervention, the Esperanto movement failed. There are few, if any, native speakers of Esperanto; it remains a second (or, more commonly, third or fourth) language for the dedicated adults who speak or write it.

  Ben-Yehuda’s task was not a whole lot easier than Zamenhof’s. Reviving a dead language—Hebrew hadn’t been used for ordinary conversation for two thousand years—required almost as many arbitrary decisions, and almost as much creativity, as constructing one from scratch. Jews in different parts of the world had different ways of pronouncing Hebrew words; Ben-Yehuda decided which pronunciations to use. A greater challenge was the vocabulary, or lack thereof. Many of the nouns and verbs needed to get along in the modern world didn’t exist in ancient Hebrew. Ben-Yehuda had to invent them.

  He married a woman who shared his ideals; they moved to Jerusalem and had a child—a boy who became the first native speaker of Hebrew in two thousand years. The child learned Hebrew because he had no choice: it was the only language his mother and father spoke in his presence. Ben-Yehuda was fanatical about preventing his son from hearing other languages. On one occasion he erupted in anger when he caught his wife singing a lullaby to the child in her native Russian.46

  So the boy spoke Hebrew. But what good did that do, when their neighbors all spoke other languages? Whom could the child talk to, other than his parents and, later, his younger brothers and sisters?

  There was only one solution to the problem, and Ben-Yehuda knew what it was: Hebrew would have to become the language used in the schools. He accepted a position as a schoolteacher, with the provision that he would be permitted to teach in Hebrew. The Jerusalem school in which he taught became the first in which Hebrew was used (for some subjects, at least) as the language of instruction.

  But it was an uphill battle; Ben-Yehuda didn’t win it in his lifetime. Hebrew as a spoken language didn’t make much headway until a generation later, when a wave of idealistic new immigrants arrived in Palestine and formed little communities. The communities created schools, and the children who went to these schools were taught in Hebrew. Hebrew became the children’s “native language,” though it wasn’t the native language of their parents, because it was the language they used with one another. The interventionists who succeeded were not those who made Hebrew the language of the home but those who made it the language of the school.47

  This example shows how much power parents can have when they get together with other like-minded parents. It works for other aspects of socialization as well. The Amish and the Hutterites prevent their children from being assimilated into the majority culture by sending their children to schools they run themselves—schools in which all the students are offspring of Amish or Hutterite parents.

  Ordinary run-of-the-mill American parents do the same sort of thing (though with less dramatic results) when they decide to live in a certain neighborhood or to send their children to a certain school. In many cases, these decisions are based on the feeling that they have something in common with the other people in the neighborhood or with the other parents whose children go to the school. Thus, Republicans and Democrats tend to rear their children in places where the majority of their neighbors belong to their political party. College-educated parents rear their children in neighborhoods where most of the parents are college educated. And parents who think religion is important send their children to religious schools.

  Attitudes toward intellectual activities and academic achievement are part of socialization. Different subcultures within our society—different socio-economic classes or racial or ethnic groups—have different attitudes regarding the importance of education; their members tend to choose different leisure-time activities. Even within a single classroom, kids may split up into subgroups with contrasting attitudes toward schoolwork. This is the anti-meme effect I’ve mentioned before.

  A difference in attitudes towards intellectual pursuits can have important repercussions. Time spent doing schoolwork—or reading boo
ks, going to museums, or performing chemistry experiments—is time well spent, because these things can increase a child’s IQ. A child who enjoys such activities or considers them important is likely to end up with a higher IQ than one who turns up her nose at them.48

  Some neighborhoods or subcultures foster more positive attitudes toward academic and intellectual achievement than others. In the mythical town of Lake Wobegon, everyone believes in the value of hard work, nobody sneers at good students, and all the children are above average.49

  The socialization system makes children more alike in the ways that are affected by socialization, and IQ is one of the things affected, in this indirect way, by socialization. So two children who grow up in the same neighborhood or go to the same school will, on average, be more alike in IQ than two who grow up in different neighborhoods or go to different schools. This means that in a behavioral genetic study, especially if an effort is made to include subjects from more than one subculture or socioeconomic class, there may be a measurable effect of shared environment on IQ. Twins reared together are a little more alike in IQ than those separated in infancy and reared in separate homes.50

  The socialization system is responsible for some of the strongest emotions we feel, and some of the nastiest. In human warfare, as in ant warfare and chimpanzee warfare, it is standard practice for the victors to show no mercy to the losers. The losers are “them” and are treated accordingly. Simply being told that he’s an overestimator can make a schoolboy feel favorably disposed to other overestimators and mildly hostile to underestimators.