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This is part of the nature vs nurture debate that has been argued for millennia. People try to decide which is more critical. Politically on the left, I encoun
by etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
This is part of the nature vs nurture debate that has been argued for millennia. People try to decide which is more critical.
Politically on the left, I encounter hostility when mentioning innate differences as an explanation for anything. (I always thought I leaned left politically...) I now self censor myself and it feels horrible. Everything is just attributed to deep cultural expectations and similar.
Me, I think outcome = nature * nurture. It makes no sense to try to argue which is more important when they are both directly proportional to outcome!
- JacksonGariety 7y agoYeah I've never understood how people take such one-sided positions on this issue. And it becomes such an emotionally-charged subject for both sides.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoIt is kind of disturbing to think that your personality and many other traits make you different from other people, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's quite disturbing to me.
- JacksonGariety 7y agoHopefully we are able to use our willpower to bring about personality change over the course of our life.
- blfr 7y agoYour genes are at work 24/7/365. How much willpower do you have?
- rofo1 7y agoI have a lot. Whats your point? Are you saying there's no willpower at all or what? There are people with unusual levels of willpower. I am one of them and I know others. It is what it is.
- gherkinnn 7y agoImplying our willpower is separate from your genes. Maybe the will to change yourself is encoded in your DNA.
- JacksonGariety 7y agoTrue. But DNA is also to some degree shaped by the choices we make in life, no?
- gherkinnn 7y agoThat’s a question for people who know about epigenetics. But it seems so. Not necessarily our choices alone, but the environment as a whole.
- rofo1 7y agoYou are responsible for the choices you make. You can learn new information, and you can adjust your behavior or habits based on that. The new things you learn wouldn't have been inside your DNA/genes.
- gherkinnn 7y agoI don’t wholly agree with the first point. I’m not much of a free will guy. Regarding learning new information, surely the type of info you’re susceptible to, and how to act upon these, isn’t all of your choosing.
- Tade0 7y agoI cope by having an unfounded sense of superiority.
- dkersten 7y agoSure, its kind of disturbing, but that's just life. There's a lot of things that you can't do anything about. I didn't grow up to a rich family and that prevented me from doing a lot of things rich people got to do, for example. I agree that it can be disturbing that traits that you have no control over make you different from others, but its normal and just part of life. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.
- randomidiot666 7y agoYes ideally you would be some kind of indistinguishable Borg creature.
- gherkinnn 7y agoI find that notion somewhere between comforting and irrelevant. The difficulty lies in not succumbing to fatalistic complacency. Accepting that one simply is of a heavy physique and not needlessly starving oneself sounds healthy to me. There are plenty of activities for which a heavy frame is desirable. On the other hand, giving up in the face of ones perceived insurmountable genetic makeup serves nothing.
- simonh 7y agoI believe it is possible for some people to change some aspects of their personality, and I have managed to do so. It’s hard to assess something like that objectively, but I’ve hit positive feedback from family members that I have changed over time. I used to get very frustrated and obstructive or confrontational about things, but with effort and self reflection Ive mostly tamed those tendencies. I also remember as a child noticing how adults behaved, and particularly how they treated children, or even other adults, and made a conscious effort to develop the positive behaviours I admired and avoid ones I saw as negative. This has been particularly important in bringing up my own children. Of course the capacity to change may well be something that varies from person to person, I’m sure it does, but I also believe we all have every human capacity to some extent.
- insickness 7y ago> it becomes such an emotionally-charged subject for both sides. Yeah but it's not like one side is claiming it's 100% nature and the other is claiming it's 100% nurture. One side is claiming it's 100% nurture and the other side is claiming it's some mix. The side claiming it's 100% nurture is 100% wrong. But somehow it is verboten to state this publicly or you are shamed.
- shadowgovt 7y agoIt's not the claim that natural differences exist, it's the claim they're relevant that'll get a person laughed out of the discussion.
- nicky0 7y agoIrrelevant to the individual, but relevant when talking about groups. For example, upon observing that more women than men tend to take up nursing. Do we conclude that there is a gender bias in healthcare recruitment and a distorted soceital expetation of gender roles, or can it be explained as a consequence of the aggregate personality bias between the sexes resulting in more women choosing that career. The personality science comes in to play when trying to answer that question.
- shadowgovt 7y agoUsually, the correct answer is "insufficient data." The systems are circular and self-reinforcing; what does maternity leave look like in the nursing profession, for example?
- nicky0 7y agoAll good points. I wasn't actually trying to start a debate about the nursing profession, of course. Just an example of where average personality differences may partially explain observed outcomes.
- manigandham 7y agoSo they're all irrelevant? That's effectively the same as saying they don't exist in the context of this discussion about their effects. Why do you think nature is completely irrelevant?
- bsder 7y agoThe problem is that generally people use these kinds of articles to extrapolate from group to individual--and that's generally not a good idea. Individuals break "typical" all the time. If I'm interviewing you for a job, I shouldn't apply "group stereotype" as I'm specifically looking for your individual traits that break the norm. I don't want the "average" from your group--I probably want someone far from it. So the arrow from individual to aggregate group is generally strong. The reverse arrow from aggregate group to individual, however, has nowhere near the same strength.
- travisoneill1 7y agoThe article seems to say that the difference here is strong enough that you can do that: > To put this number in context, a D= 2.10 means a classification accuracy of 85%. In other words, their data suggests that the probability that a randomly picked individual will be correctly classified as male or female based on knowledge of their global personality profile is 85% (after correcting for the unreliability of the personality tests).
- elyobo 7y agoThe article suggests that you can do the opposite of that (use traits of the individual to reasonably accurately infer that they're male or female). The parent's concern is that, given you know someone is male or female, you will make further assumptions about them based on their group membership rather than their individual traits, something that is not supported by the article. > I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than sex differences.
- travisoneill1 7y agoBut the only case where you would rely on group membership is if the individual traits are unknown. Obviously generalization will never be as accurate as individual knowledge. Why would anybody be worried that people would act otherwise?
- 7y ago
- Sniffnoy 7y ago> This is part of the nature vs nurture debate that has been argued for millennia. People try to decide which is more critical. If you read the article, though, it isn't. The article claims that sex differences are large; it explicitly makes no claim as to what causes them.
- mpweiher 7y agoMaybe not directly. However, the article does cite the Gender Equality Paradox: "Contrary to what one might expect, for all of these personality effects the sex differences tend to be larger-- not smaller-- in more individualistic, gender-egalitarian countries. " This finding, which apparently surprised and puzzled everyone, is very difficult to square with the idea that it is the societies/cultures that are creating these effects, because then you would expect the correlation to be the other way around. So not a magnitude difference, but a sign difference. Again, that observation, which has been replicated repeatedly with ever larger sample sizes and larger effect sizes, just isn't compatible with a cultural source.
- falcolas 7y agoHonestly, it kind of makes sense. If you have the option to be anyone you want to be, you take advantage of that option. There's no reason it would (or should) apply only to jobs, dress, and outward interactions. Let's take a non-gendered example of someone (we'll call them Kris) who loves creating art, but is also capable of being a computer programmer. If Kris lives in a country where being an artist means being poor and mocked, Kris would be smarter to chose the path of a computer programmer. However, if Kris lives in a place where an artist can live a good, and perhaps even a great life, and be encouraged while pursuing that path, why would they go into computer programming? Coming back to the topic at hand, if Kris has the capability of expressing compassion and will not be punished for doing so, why wouldn't Kris do that? A more individualistic and gender-egalitarian country is less likely to punish such expressions of compassion.
- rowanG077 7y agoIt makes sense if you believe that men and women generally have different interests. If you believe that the men and women don't generally have different interests it's a paradox.