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It's honestly worth asking even about humans. By the time an infant is old enough to display meaningful personality traits, they've been around other humans lea
by nonameiguess 2y ago
It's honestly worth asking even about humans. By the time an infant is old enough to display meaningful personality traits, they've been around other humans learning as much as the cats. An infant can't survive in complete isolation, so we have no way of testing how much behavior is truly pure instinct and how much is learned. It's unethical to do this experimentally, so all we have is a sparse collection of historical feral children, but even these were always raised by humans at least through infancy. This paper's intro notes that inequity aversion shows in humans as early as age 4. That is more than enough time for it to be entirely learned.
- MrMcCall 2y agoOur bodies have intrinsically mammalian tendencies, such as our competitive nature, especially over food. At some point in our development, we gain the ability to learn sharing and impulse control and other such higher brain functions. This is why childhood education is so important, and was such an important part of mid-to-late 1930s German youth education. We are all brainwashed by our upbringing, in whichever directions our mentors exemplify or force upon us, such is the nature of our adaptive wetware. At some point, we can always exercise our ability to choose, however difficult it may be, and for better or worse, for both ourselves and our cultures.