Is there a “you” anymore? A problematic divide between psychology and society
Psychology’s main goal has been to better inform our understanding of human beings using a scientific approach. While this goal remains persistent in psychology research, society might be further away from what we scientifically know than ever before.
As research takes a more deterministic view in implying that human behavior is a product of genetic or environmental factors, society continues to treat humans as beings who are solely responsible for their actions.
What Psychology Says
Behavioural geneticists present evidence of a genetic basis for our personality traits, religious and political affiliations, and even our sense of right and wrong. When looking at the genetic basis for morality, the current argument in the field of psychology is that we are born with a set of predetermined moral genes that allow all members of the species to detect and respond to violations of care, fairness, or purity, while the environment we are born into can dial up or down the sensitivity we have to these genetic predispositions. This is a well-established understanding that genes and environment interact.
For example, we may share amongst our fellow humans a universal set of moral traits or sensitivities, but a person born and raised in a western, liberalized and secular society may have a very different response to moral violations as compared to someone raised in a non-western, conservative and religious society. A person’s morality is the result of their genes and environment, which means that their moral decisions and beliefs are not truly their own. The person’s moral decisions and beliefs are only expressed through the individual but not as a result of the individual. According to this view of human beings, your moral decisions are not really yours, they are a product of your genetic makeup (something you cannot control) and the environment you are brought up in (something else which you cannot control).
What Society Says
Our society is built around the notion of human beings as having agency and free will. If you commit an immoral act, you are seen as responsible for that act because you, as a person with free will and control, decided to act in contradiction with the principles or norms of the culture or society within which you are living. You are not, as psychology would have it, seen as a mere product of the interaction of your genetic makeup and the environment you find yourself in that results in a particular action. We condemn people on the basis of their actions, their views, their beliefs regularly, but we can only do this if we truly see human beings as having agency and choice. Our society at large views human beings as responsible on the basis of factors that are within an individual’s control — their reasoning. Being able to determine through the power of reasoning what is and is not appropriate or acceptable is how society actually views the human being, not as mere outcomes of environmental and genetic factors.
Let’s take the vilification of a recent public figure — United States Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting Professor Christine Ford in a public testimony delivered by Ford which in turn resulted in the demonization of Kavanaugh. What followed was vicious public shaming that amounted to calls for social justice in eviscerating Kavanaugh’s tenure as a supreme court justice. This reaction from those who believed in Kavanaugh’s guilt is at complete odds with how psychology promotes its understanding of human beings. If we take the interaction between genes and environment as being sufficient in explaining human behaviour, then Bret is merely a product of a genetic makeup that resulted in poor impulse control or poor empathic responsiveness, and an environment that resulted in potentially negative parental influences, negative micro and macro cultural influences that may have promoted misogyny. This would eliminate Kavanaugh’s responsibility — why would we demonize a person who is merely a product of these factors that live outside of the person’s control? The answer is we wouldn’t, because this is not how society actually views human beings. The criminal justice system in any part of the world, and the backbone of moral judgment and condemnation of people is based on the view that humans have agency and choice.
Let’s step outside of the moral realm. Even something as gene-environment driven as physical appearance is filled with societal injections of human responsibility and agency. A person has a genetic predisposition for an above ideal BMI or spotty skin or oily hair. These genes interact with the environment such that the resulting physical makeup of a person is deemed to be unattractive or unhealthy by societal standards. Do we sit back and say “well, that’s just the gene-environment influence, not really their fault”? No. Even in these cases where gene-environment influences really are quite robust, we tell the person to make sure to eat a particularly low calorie diet or to exercise regularly, or we tell the person to make sure to wash their face multiple times a day and use cosmetic products. And if they don’t, we judge them. We judge them for making a poor choice — for not taking responsibility for their outcomes. We judge them because we cannot escape our widely-held societal view that human beings have options, choices and are held responsible for their actions.
While genes and environment play a part, there is a force that humans exert on the world that is made-up of decisions and choices that result from an ability to think and reason. We don’t condemn plants because they are truly a product of their gene and environmental influences — they bend towards light in the environment based on the genes that make photosynthesis possible. They have no agency outside of this gene-environment interaction, and therefore it would make no sense to hold a plant accountable, for example, for its choice to grow through the floor of a sacred temple causing destruction, or to hold plants accountable for anything they may or may not do. Human beings, however, seem to have something more. At least that’s what a look at society and the way humans operate would tell us. And the way humans operate societally should not be at such great odds with a field of scientific study that aims to make sense of human behaviour.
About the Author
This post is written by Nina Powell. Nina is faculty in the psychology department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Yale-NUS. Her work involves theoretical and empirical research on morality and ethics, the nature of consciousness and human development. She is the co-founder of Cognitive Handshakes.
