© K S Harris, PhD, 2002 |
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Nothing fascinates us as much as ourselves.
From the changing vantage points along our developmental path, life appears variously complicated, worrisome, meaningless, harried, disturbed, bizarre, frightening and, when we're lucky, miraculous, magical and mystical. The basis for all this variability isn't just that the non-human world is a complicated place. In fact, it's the human world that mostly concerns us. The people we happen across as we make our way through the world seem just as capriciously designed as the weather. Some are gentle and loving, some are ruthless and determined, yet others are sly or dangerous. Some are even changeable day by day or hour by hour. Many, perhaps most, appear to be overly self-serving, often to the exclusion not only of good manners but even common decency. So what's up with all this human diversity? When we look at other species, even those most closely associated with our own, we see what appears to be a much greater degree of standardization. Not only do we not see a lot of within-species variation in behavior (a horse is a horse, within relatively narrowly-defined limits), we don't see anything remotely resembling culture, which in our own species adds an exponential element to the other sources of variability. One way of framing this issue it is to assume that the less cognitively sophisticated a species is, the more it relies on hard-wiring; thus, there would be little advantage for a worker ant to have its own distinct, individual nature, different that all the other worker ants. In fact, the survival strategies of ants probably work against individuality. In the animated film, Antz, the Woody Allen character rails against the meaninglessness of ant existence, bemoaning the fact that he's the middle child in a family of five million. In the colony, millions of virtually identical ants carry out their repetitive daily routines, each ant completely and perfectly interchangeable with any other of the millions of its type. We humans pride ourselves on our individual natures, those collections of characteristics that make us each unique, as we like to say. And when, as happens from time to time, we begin to feel unappreciated for "who we are," we become depressed and sullen, and come to suspect the whole universe is itself without any meaning. (However, we are after all the only ironic species, and if we begin to feel too different and unique, we become anxious and alienated, and begin to suspect the universe has no meaning.) If we're going to begin to think scientifically about human nature, we have no choice but to think in terms of evolutionary strategies. No matter how it seems at first glance, human nature isn't random, capricious, or unpredictable. Our personality characteristics evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in ways that gave us survival advantage. Some of these characteristics are literally survival-oriented; for example higher intelligence increases our chances of avoiding predators. Other characteristics are more socially-based, such as shrewdness in bargaining, or the willingness to engage in idle chit-chat simply in order to strengthen reciprocity bonds. The key idea here is that human nature really can be subjected to scientific inquiry, using scientific methodology. Although some thinkers and writers have suggested that the personality is much too complex and abstract to be approached empirically, there are plenty of reasons to believe otherwise. This is not to say we'll ever lose our fascination with ourselves. Nor do I believe we'll soon be able to predict individual behaviors with a high degree of accuracy. More likely, diligence, persistence, an improved understanding of the evolved bases for our tendencies and behaviors, and advancing technology will first allow us to calculate the behaviors of groups of people. Even this is significant, however, because human nature is social. In a very true sense, all psychology is social psychology. |
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