MAVERICK OR OPEN TO EXPERIENCE?
Lately I have been struggling to understand how two distinct, seemingly congruent theories about the nature of human nature, fail to totally mesh.
On the one hand you have the Big 5 Personality Dimensions that have gained significant traction over the past decade as a model that accurately captures much of the variance in human personality. (Digman, J.M. 1990)
The five traits are:
- openness to experience
- conscientiousness
- extraversion
- agreeableness
- neuroticism
In particular I am interested in the trait Open to Experiences (McCrae, R. R. 1996).
The trait is pivotal trait in a number of ways….
Jonathan Haidt, for example, talks about how the trait is the single best predictor of an entire constellation of factors, including political orientation.
Intuitively, we know people are divided into two camps. In one camp are traditionalists who are conservative on social issues. They like to preserve the status quo and understand the fragility of social order. In the other camp are the progressives who are always trying something new, always experimenting. Haidt does a good job of depicting the value sets of these two populations.
A genertic component is suspected for the trait. Identical twins who have not shared the same environment nevertheless share simalar profiles of this trait (Jang, K. L., Livesly, W. J., & Vemon, P. A. (September 1996). “Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets: A twin study”. Journal of Personality 64 (3): 577–592).
Apparently, Openness to Experiences is normally distributed.
Which is odd to me.
Evolutionary Psychologists have also modeled how the population is divided along similar lines. They call them Conformists versus Mavericks. In any population, there is a mix of people who are naturally inclined to either follow the cultural traditions of the group or shun these old ways in favor of doing things their own way. This basic propensity to learn by imitation or learn through individual experimentation is either adaptive or mal-adaptive, depending upon the environment.
In the simplest of terms, if the environment is stable, the conformists would do better as they get the benefit of the culturally learned information what is probably still fairly on track with the environment they live in, without incurring any of the costs from individual experimentation. If the environment starts to change significantly, the variance will mean that there is a greater and greater chance that culturally learned information is not longer applicable. In this context Mavericks who test for themselves will get an advantage.
… if social learning becomes the sole learning strategy, with individual learners extirpated, the behavior of the population will no longer be able to track environmental variation, as individuals will only be reacting to each other and not to the underlying environment. Several analytical models examining the evolution of culture have predicted a population equilibrium between individual learning and social learning, with the individual learners tracking the environment more closely but paying higher costs (e.g., Aoki, Wakano, & Feldman, 2005; Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Feldman, Aoki, & Kumm, 1996; Wakano, Aoki, & Feldman, 2004) Alternatively, and probably more realistically in the case of humans (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1995; Enquist, Eriksson, & Ghirlanda, 2007; Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002; Wakano & Aoki, 2006), a contingent strategy may evolve in which individuals adopt either social or individual learning depending on the circumstances.
(Hal Whitehead and Peter J. Richerson The evolution of conformist social learning can cause population collapse in realistically variable environments. Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009) 261–27)
The model posits that the percentage in the population that is conformist versus maverick is linked to the degree of environmental variability. A Nash Equilibrium will be reached balancing the benefits of each adaptive strategy to the frequency in the population. After all, the advantages of learning by imitation or learning by experimenting is a function in part of the percentage of the population that is following the same strategy as you.
There are other complexities as well. People cannot sample the distribution of trait in the population so the conformism mechanism must be localized. Game theoretics enter into the picture too, creating local adaptive peaks based upon coordinated behavior even thought these may be sub-optimal to the environment.
So there are lots of forces acting upon the population, impacting the relative number of conformists versus mavericks. Or Experiementers vs Traditionalists. One would expect that the distribution of the personality trait Open to Experiences would be anything but normally distributed in the population.
Perhaps I am missing something.
References:
Aoki, K., Wakano, J. Y., & Feldman, M. W. (2005). The emergence of social learning in a temporally changing environment: A theoretical model. Current Anthropology, 46, 334–340
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1995). Why does culture increase human adaptability? Ethology and Sociobiology, 16, 125–143
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: Chicago University Press
Digman, J.M. 1990. “Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model”. Annual Review of Psychology 41: 417–440.
Enquist, M., Eriksson, K., & Ghirlanda, S. (2007). Critical social learning: A solution to Rogers’s paradox of nonadaptive culture. American Anthropologist, 109, 727–734.
Eriksson, K., Enquist, M., & Ghirlanda, S. (2007). Critical points in current theory of conformist social learning. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 67–87
Feldman, M. W., Aoki, K., & Kumm, J. (1996). Individual versus social learning: Evolutionary analysis in a fluctuating environment. Anthropological Science, 104, 209–231.
Jang, K. L., Livesly, W. J., & Vemon, P. A. (September 1996). “Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets: A twin study”. Journal of Personality 64 (3): 577–592
Kameda, T., & Nakanishi, D. (2002). Cost–benefit analysis of social/cultural learning in a nonstationary uncertain environment: An evolutionary simulation and an experiment with human subjects. Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 373–393
McCrae, R. R. (1996) ”Social consequences of experiential openness”. Psychological Bulletin 120 (3): 323–337
McCrae, R. R., & Sutin, A. R. (2009). Openness to Experience. In M. R. Leary and R. H.
Hoyle (Eds.), Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior (pp. 257–273). New York: Guilford.
Wakano, J. Y., Aoki, K., & Feldman, M. W. (2004). Evolution of social learning: A mathematical analysis. Theoretical Population Biology, 66, 249–258
Wakano, J. Y., & Aoki, K. (2006). A mixed strategy model for the emergence and intensification of social learning in a periodically changing natural environment. Theoretical Population Biology, 70, 486–497
