Personality is not only about who but also where you are
What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?
05 January, 2020
David DUCOIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it.
<p> If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she'll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this 'marshmallow test', the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/244/4907/933" target="_blank">demonstrated</a> that children who could resist immediate gratification and wait for a second marshmallow went on to greater achievements in life. They did better in school, had better SAT scores, and even managed their stress more skillfully.</p><p>Mischel's pioneering studies at Stanford in California and later at Columbia University in New York had a profound impact on both professional and popular understandings of patience, its origins, and its role in our lives. People reasoned from these studies of the 1970s and '80s that there must be some deep individual characteristic, some personality feature, that set kids up for higher achievements throughout life. But what if that wasn't the right conclusion to draw from these studies?</p><p>What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?</p><p>When trying to study the relationship between the environment and our personality characteristics, researchers face two big challenges.</p><p>The first challenge is casting doubt on the tendency to see personality traits – patterns of behaviour that are stable across time – as parts of our identities that are inevitable and arising from within. While it's true that people are the products of genes interacting with the environment (the answer to the question 'Is it nature or nurture?' is always 'Yes'), <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167204271182" target="_blank">work</a> by the psychologist Nick Haslam at the University of Melbourne and other researchers has shown that people err in the direction of nature, seeing personality traits as much more fixed. In other words, you're more likely to say that your friend Jane just <em>is</em> a patient person and always would be, even in an environment where it's not the best strategy – for example, in a dangerous situation where tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Patience, you might say, is something that comes from within her, not from the world around her.</p>
<p>The other challenge concerns <em>whom</em> psychologists have been studying for the past century. While scholars know a fair amount about how traits develop, that knowledge derives from research on a very specific and peculiar subset of humans: those living in industrialised societies. As quantified in a now-landmark <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17" target="_blank">study</a> called 'The Weirdest People in the World?' (2010)<em>,</em> the anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team at the University of British Columbia showed that roughly 96 per cent of subjects in psychology studies came from so-called 'WEIRD' societies – or those that are Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic.</p><p>A bias toward WEIRD societies is <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/american-undergrads-are-too-weird-to-stand-for-all-humanity" target="_blank">problematic</a> for a number of <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/what-happens-to-cognitive-diversity-when-everyone-is-more-weird" target="_blank">reasons</a>. First, people in these societies are a poor proxy for the average human, representing countries that make up only about 12 per cent of the world's population. But this asymmetry toward industrialised societies is problematic for another reason: it represents an environment that's fundamentally different from the ones in which human beings evolved.</p><p>If our surroundings do shape our personalities, how do we capture this important process? Here, Mischel's method was right: go straight to childhood, one of the most sensitive and flexible periods of personality development. Recently, my collaborators and I did just that, designing a <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-54565-001" target="_blank">study</a> to look at two traits of interest: how patient someone is, and how tolerant of uncertainty. We took our investigation to four different societies across the globe: to India, the United States, Argentina and, importantly given our effort to combat the WEIRD bias, indigenous Shuar children living in Amazonian Ecuador.</p>
<p>The Shuar communities we visited were remote: the only way to reach them was to take a long and winding canoe ride up the Morona River. Many of the Shuar we visited in these regions still maintain a more traditional way of life: hunting wild game, cultivating garden crops, fishing. Industrialised goods are not as critical to their way of life. At least, not yet.</p><p>To measure how patient a child was, we used an experiment similar to Mischel's marshmallow test, offering children aged four to 18 a choice between one candy today or an increasing number of candies if they were willing to wait a day. If you could muster up the patience, you'd be candy-rich the next day. For uncertainty, they got to choose between a safe bag that always paid out one candy or a risky bag that gave them only a one-in-six chance of more candy.</p><p>We found lots of variation, especially between the Shuar and the three other communities. Children in the US, Argentina and India behaved similarly, tending to be more patient and more tolerant of uncertainty, while the Shuar showed a very different pattern of behaviour. They were more impatient, and warier of uncertainty; they almost never picked the risky bag.</p><p>In a follow-up study the next year, we looked <em>within</em> Shuar communities and found the same patterns. Shuar kids living near the cities acted more like Americans than the Shuar kids in the rainforest. Something about living near cities – and perhaps something about industrialisation more broadly – seemed to be shaping kids' behaviour.</p>
<p>To understand why industrialisation might be an influential force in the development of behaviour, it's important to understand its legacy in the human story. The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago launched perhaps the most profound transformation in the history of human life. No longer dependent on hunting or gathering for survival, people formed more complex societies with new cultural innovations. Some of the most important of these innovations involved new ways of accumulating, storing and trading resources. One effect of these changes, from a decision-making standpoint, was a reduction in uncertainty. Instead of relying on hard-to-predict resources such as prey, markets allowed us to create larger and more stable pools of resources.</p><p>As a result of these broader changes, markets might have also changed our perceptions of <em>affordability</em>. In WEIRD societies with more resources (remember that the R in WEIRD stands for rich) kids might feel that they can better afford strategies such as patience and risk-seeking. If they get unlucky and pull out a green marble and didn't win any candy, that's okay; it didn't cost them that much. But for Shuar kids in the rainforest with less resources, the loss of that candy is a much bigger deal. They'd rather avoid the risk.</p><p>Over time, these successful strategies can stabilise and become recurrent strategies for interacting with our world. So, for instance, in an environment where the costs of waiting are high, people might be consistently impatient.</p><p>Other studies support the notion that personality is shaped more by the environment than previously thought. In work among Indigenous Tsimané adults in Bolivia, anthropologists from the University of California, Santa Barbara <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104167/" target="_blank">found</a> weak support for the so-called 'Big Five' model of personality variation, which consists of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Similar patterns came from rural <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/107/26/11745" target="_blank">Senegalese</a> farmers and the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23527163" target="_blank">Aché</a> in Paraguay. The Big Five model of personality, it turns out, is WEIRD.</p><p>In another recent <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0730-3" target="_blank">paper</a>, the anthropologist Paul Smaldino at the University of California, Merced and his collaborators followed up on these findings further, relating them to changes that were catalysed by industrialisation. They argue that, as societies become more complex, they lead to the development of more niches – or social and occupational roles that people can take. Different personality traits are more successful in some roles than others, and the more roles there are, the more diverse personality types can become.</p><p>As these new studies all suggest, our environments can have a profound impact on our personality traits. By expanding the circle of societies we work with, and approaching essentialist notions of personality with skepticism, we can better understand what makes us who we are.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/c85fd869-f02c-4816-9ab5-34bdae2ad8b3.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/personality-is-not-only-about-who-but-also-where-you-are" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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How to find your own truth, according to Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell
Finding your own truth without a guiding mythical worldview.
20 February, 2019
- Joseph Campbell's monomyth as a guide to finding one's self.
- Alan Watts explores the notion of symbolically returning to the forest.
- How to set ones own meaning in a world of confusion and chaos.
<p>Joseph Campbell's life work covered a wide range of the communal human experience. Campbell explored the various mythologies of our planet and managed to elucidate on the common threads between them all. He's popularly known for coining the concept of the hero's journey, or monomyth, which is a narrative cycle that is found to some degree in all great legends and stories around the world. </p><p>This topic of discussion in an influential television series with journalist Bill Moyers brought Campbell's idea further into the mainstream posthumously in the latter half of the 20th century. </p><p>From this idea stems one of Campbell's greater points about the universality of experience and need to find your own truth or, as his famous saying goes, to "<a href="https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/who-is-joseph-campbell" target="_self">follow your bliss.</a>"</p><p>Campbell's ability to fuse comparative mythologies into one comprehensive world spanning myth can serve as the basis for discovering one's own personal truth. Human patterns repeat themselves over timescales far and wide. Once you can come to terms with the multifarious iterations of these universal stories, Campbell believed that you need to leave ideology behind once you've learned from it.</p><p>Alan Watts, had a similar sentiment to this idea, a contemporary and friend to Campbell — Watts explored the implications inherent to Campbell's view when exploring his early work of <em>Return to the Forest.</em></p><h1><em></em>Return to the Forest</h1><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Alan Watts - Return to the Forest</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Alan Watts Foundation </small>
</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential." — Joseph Campbell</p><p>In <em>Return to the Forest, </em>Campbell explored what it meant to the individual and society when these common myths and systems begin to break down. In this chaos, when there is no central guiding myth, celestial authority or truth to guide us — what will become of the individual seeking meaning or their own truth? </p><p>Watts believed that the fundamental force guiding civilizations together has been one not only of mutually shared communication in a common language, but a common viewpoint of the world and even common types of sensuous experience. But such is the nature of change that through major cultural shifts, dynamics of technological change or ways of viewing the world, these foundational pillars of civilization begin to erode. Left in its wake is chaos and confusion. </p><blockquote><em>Social cosmologies, views of the world held in common by society tend to break up. </em></blockquote><p>Watts went on to say that the relativistic world of modern thought that Westerners live in, one that is largely bereft of one unifying worldview leads people to become interested in other and former attempts to reconcile the mysteries of living and the universe. For example, in Watts' time and our own, the exploration of ancient Eastern religions, occult schools of thought, and shamanism. </p><p>However, in similar Campbell monomyth fashion, even this idea of going it alone, without an overarching myth to live by, has arguably been done before. Watts explores and explains the rich ideas of shamanism in agrarian culture around the world, and how metaphorically we need to drop out back into the forest if we're to find ourselves. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"More and more each one of us is thrown on to our own resources. This seems to me an excellent state of affairs. So that in a symbolic sense we are back in the forest like the hunter of old who has nobody around him to tell him how to feel or how he ought to use his senses. He therefore must make his own exploration and find out for himself." </p><p>Watts and Campbell believed that due to the uncertainty of our times and confusion inherent in modern thought, which offers us no secure and comfortable singular view of the universe — we are forced to confront and find truth for ourselves from the universe. We are all now as Watts put it: </p><blockquote><em>All alone together whistling in the dark. </em> </blockquote><p>In a sense, much of Campbell's work dealt with remedying these past mythological works to probe deeper into just what common truths lurks beneath all individual human psyche and communal beliefs. Or as he Campbell once quipped in <em>The Hero with a Thousand Faces: </em> "Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology."</p><p>Now to the point of finding one's self or finding personal truth. Campbell believes that these myths and stories can become guide posts. But just what is your own personal truth? Well that's for you and only you to find out and experience. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"These are the kinds of experiences that cannot be transmitted, which for their very nature are something one finds out for themselves. If they could be explained or transmitted they couldn't be the very thing which they are intended to be. Our discoveries of something authentic, genuine, first hand and part of one's universe, cannot be codified and be factored into social communication." — Alan Watts </p><h1>Campbell & Watts' exemplified living their own way </h1><div class="rm-shortcode amazon-assets-widget" data-rm-shortcode-id="DNJ6S21550154492" contenteditable="false">
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<p>Both Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts lived a life on the fringes of their own meaning. Taking a cosmic and comprehensive look at the world-views around them, they developed both a sobering and at once wonderful view of the cosmologies of humankind. A statement made about Watts could be applied to Campbell as well:</p><p>"The pomposities of prodigious learning could be undone by him with a turn of phrase. One stood before him, disarmed — and laughed at what had just been oneself."</p><p>Together, their wisdom today still stands as a spectral guide to finding one's own truth.</p>
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