Chapter 2 Biological Factor in Personality

• Confluence of Nature and Nurture on Personality
  • The question is how do nature and nurture interact to influence personality?
    • Personality is a dependent variable.
    • Biological factors is a independent variable
    • Sociocultural factors are the intervening variable.
  • Biological factors affect personality and sociocultural environments.
  • Genetic inheritance between generations doesn’t mean personality inheritance.
    • Personality can’t be reduced to either hereditary or environmental factors because each individual is unique to both factors coming together in different context.
  • Charles Darwin theory survival of the species depends on its adapting ability to the environment.
    • “Survival of the Fittest” deals with the idea that the strong will survive.
    • Darwin explains the process of evolution i terms to heritability and adaptive characteristics.
      • Adaptive characteristics are inherited and physical traits and mental capacities.
  • Herbert Spencer’s used Darwin’s concept of natural selection to reinforce his theory of unilinear social evolution from simple to complex.
    • According to Spencer, the survival and progress of a given society depends on its members mental capacities to develop a viable social structure.
  • Social evolution has played a part in emergence of scientific racism.
  • “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race” by Arthur de Gobineau, he claims that the Aryan branch of the white race was the best equipped by innate intelligence to dominate and carry on civilization.
    • Hilter’s Nazi’s ideology can be traced back to Arthur de Gobineau
    • This idea of white supremacy justified Western colonialism in Africa and Asia and also slavery in America.
    • Henry FItzhugh asserted that slavery was “morally and civilly good.”
  • Louis H. Morgan and Edward B. Taylor were anthropologist, who advanced an ethnocentric theory of cultural evolution.
    • Morgan believed that mental characteristics of the people in the same stage or state of mind are universally similar but are different by the evolutionary stages from savagery to civilization.
    • Taylor and Morgan views of cultural evolution are similar to one another.
    • Taylor decided to divide the human race by language and families and arrange races on an evolutionary scole and he can the conclusion “ the general tenor of the evidence goes far to justify the view that on the whole the civilized man is not only woser and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier.”
  • When it came to the nineteenth century theories of social evolution were racist due to the fact that they were based the assumption of superiority of the Western world. When it discusses the superiority of the Western world means the white world. As anthropology grew, it has problems with classifying individuals and it had to find a way to documents the differences betweens as a scientific manner. As slaves became free, many individuals looked for scientific verifications of their prejudices.
• Race and Intelligences
  • When it came to the controversy of race versus intelligence was triggered by Arthur R. Jensen’s, when he wrote an article called, “ How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?”
    • He claimed he had found a lot of evidence to support the following assertions.
      • 80% of human intelligence is inherited.
      • Black Americans score on the average 15 points below white Americans on most of the IQ test
      • This IQ differences between blacks and whites is due to the genetic factors and hence
      • Compensatory education is useless because the educability of blacks is limited due to their lower innate intelligence
• Is There a Culture- Fair Test?
  • Ashley  Montagu explains the problems with IQ test.
    • She explains how no one truly know what intelligence is. She mentions how the genetic capacity can be altered by the operation of environmental condition both prenatal and postnatal, long before its complex elements have been exposed to be more socially complex conditions of cultural environments.
  • In the text, it explains how an individual who answers the questions on the IQ test, answers the question with a perfect reasonable answer can still be count as unacceptable  due to the author of the test.
  • If the tests are loaded with cultural biases, a cross cultural comparison is meaningless.
  • The definition of intelligence is a social and cultural product. There is no unified way to measures a individuals intelligences . There is no cross-culturally vails IQ test developed.
• Is There a Pure Race?
  • Human variations are resulted of four major evolutionary processes.
    • Natural selection
    • Interbreeding
    • Genetic drift
    • Mutation
  • Many anthropologist  refer to race as a group of individuals with more or less similar biological characteristics. A problem of rac classification us that some differences in a single race can be as great as or even greater than that between race.  
• How about Twin Studies?
  • This section discusses how the ideal way to solve the question of heredity intelligence is to observe and study identical twins. When trying to study twins there are some problems that one will face.
    • One of the problems is that most twins are generally treated the same by their family and friends.
    • Another problem is that twins are usually placed in similar environments
  • Past testing on twins have shows conflicting results. Some of the results showed similarities and other found difference in the oginites testing of the twins. Some showed strong correlation and others showed strikingly different scores.
    • Not conclusive evidence has yet been advanced to support either position.
• Biological Factors in Criminality
  • This sections discusses a theme of nature versus nurture controversy. Are Criminals born or made?
    • Cesare Lombroso is an Italian physician who had the earliest attempt on the born criminal theory. He believed that criminals were this genetic  throwbacks to the atavistic stage of human evolution. But his theory did not survive due to the defective methodology such as measurement problems.  
    • The theme of Lombroso theory had biological bases of criminal behavior that has been resurrected in many forms.
      • Somatotypes and Delinquency: three types of somatotypes; endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy.
      • XXY Karyotype and Criminality: karyotype is a technique of studying the patterns of chromosome configuration. XYY chromosome was seen  as men who are aggressive and criminals. When a study was conducted trying to prove this theory, the resulted showed that the biology of a person had no correlation to how a individual would act or what choices they would make. It was easier to blame genes for deviant behavior than to investigate various environmental contexts in which genes operate differently. There is no evidence has been found to support the XYY karyotype criminality linkage.
      • Criminality Among Twins: Karl Otto Christiansen conducted a study to try to find the criminality among twins. He concludes that no study carried out can be said to have provided conclusive evidence of the dominance of genetic or environmental factors in the genesis of criminality. Christiansen states that the nature of genetic and environmental facts, it is still an appropriate a priori hypothesis that heredity and environment always interact in a dynamic fashion to bring about and shape criminal behavior.

• Gender Differences in Personality
  • Anthropological studies have discovered a variety of patterns in sex roles around the world.
  • Sociologists studied the socioeconomic and demographic consequences of sex role differences.
  • Psychologist have tried to identify sex differences in personality characteristics like affect, ability, and cognition.
  • Biological, sex roles, demographic data, and behavioral characteristics are clear. However, the interrelationship between these variables are not so clear.
  • Women generally live longer than men.
  • Men commit suicide drastically more than woman.
  • The highest suicide rate for women is in Denmark and the lowest in the UK.
  • Male arrest rates is about 5 to 50 times higher than female arrest rates.
  • From the age of 15, females have a higher sickness rate than males, although females recover from sickness more often compared to males and males are more likely to die from different sicknesses at all ages compared to females.
• Gender Differences in Mental Disorders
  • Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend managed to come up with the following conclusions… there is no consistent sex differences in rates of psychosis in general or of schizophrenia, higher rates of manic depressive psychosis among women, consistently high rates of personality disorders for men regardless of time and time, and consistently higher rate of neurosis for women regardless of the time and place.
  • Tidor attempted to find an answer in women marital roles. In his findings, married women are significantly more vulnerable to mental illness in the U.S.
  • Extensive cross cultural and longitudinal studies are needed to unravel the complex relationships between genders.
• Gender Difference in Intellectual Abilities
  • When it came to sex differences in cognitive abilities the findings consist of higher mathematical abilities for males than females, greater visual spatial abilities for males, greater verbal ability for females than males, female higher abilities in writing skill, but no significant sex difference in the overall IQ and creativity.
• Gender Difference in Aggression and other Personality Traits
  • When it comes to sex difference in other personality traits past findings have shown that they are less conclusive.
  • When researcher study the gender difference, they are no clear verbal and indirect forms of aggression.
• Sociobiology
  • Sociobiology is a systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all kinds of organisms is above all a comparative science.
  • Ethology and population biology can explain human social behavior in three categories,
    • On Marriages Form Polygyny and Monogamy: explains how in each group the the idea of marriage is look as. The phenomenon in these groups are entire based on culture.
    • On Extra Marital Sex: It explains how men are more threatened by the sexual activities of their women than women feel as a result of sexual dalliance by their men.
    • On Altruism: Unrelated individuals should be most adaptive when directed towards those with the greatest likelihood of reciprocating effectively.
  • Sociobiology contributes to the study of human personality in both individuals and groups.
  • Genes do not determine personality.