Pinker: There were also a number of recurring misunderstandings of particular points that some reviewers insisted on having, even though I made every effort to leave nothing to the imagination. One example is the shaping of personality. I said that the most important influence parents have on their children is at the moment of conception. People interpreted that as coming from the discovery that identical twins reared apart are quite similar, which is indeed an interesting finding. But the finding that motivated that claim is that twins or siblings reared apart are no less similar than twins or siblings reared together. It's a separate and logically independent finding: it's not just that you're similar if you're reared apart, but you're no more similar if you're reared together. That is a second finding that many highly intelligent people just cannot grasp - Steven Jones in the New York Review of Books being an example.
the evolutionist: In many ways the book is arguing against the view that our thoughts are socially constructed by how we were socialized as children. Can you say what this view is and why you think it's wrong?
Pinker: Yes, it argues against the view that parents mold or shape their children, that the early years in the home form personality for the rest of one's life:"as the twig is bent so grows the branch." This is unlikely from an evolutionary point of view because the interests of children and the interests of parents only partly overlap. Robert Trivers pointed out 25 years ago that a direct consequence of Mendelian genetics is parent-offspring conflict: a child shares 50% of its genes with each parent and shares 50% of its genes with its siblings, but shares 100% of its genes with itself. Therefore one would expect that parents would, all things being equal, have an interest in treating all of their children equally. But each child values its own interests twice as much as those of his siblings, and this sets up an area of conflict. So you should not expect children to allow themselves to be molded by their parents -- to follow the norms and examples their parents set for them.
And, indeed, one of the deepest discoveries in psychology and behavioral genetics in this century is that there are few if any long-term effects of "shared environment," that is, the environment that siblings have in common when they grow up in a kin family. It's amazing that few people know about this finding, and few people understand it even when it's spelled out. It runs so counter to our deeply ingrained folk-theory of child-rearing that it's very difficult for people to accept that it's even a logical possibility as opposed to being self-evidently false.
It's not that children are unaffected by their parents or environment. It's just that they are information-processors and strategists who tailor their own best responses to the environment they find themselves in; they are not pounded or indoctrinated into shape.
Pinker: The assumption that children are permanently moulded by their upbringing is shared among theories that differ in almost every other way. Psychoanalysis, behaviourism, Marxism, and secular humanistic liberalism all believe to varying degrees that the way we treat children in the first few years is decisive. It's also thought to have political and moral implications, namely that the details of child-rearing will shape the next generation and therefore deserve special attention. This is in large part a good thing. The child-rearing revolution of the 20th century, where we switched from Oliver Twist/Jane Eyre-style tyrannical treatment of children to one in which children are indulged has certainly led to an improvement in human welfare. But it has also led to misplaced priorities and expectations. Parents are routinely blamed for any difference or deviation in the way their children turn out: if the child is schizophrenic it's because the mother conveyed mixed messages; if the child has a language impairment it's because the mother didn't provide enough "motherese" and so on. Not only does it stigmatise mothers but it diverts attention away from the real causes of differences among children.
the evolutionist: I've always thought the standard social science model presents a surprisingly pessimistic view of human nature -- that people are entirely malleable and at the mercy of the rest of society -- compared to the evolutionary psychology view in which people are born high-spec, specialised problem-solvers just waiting to spring into action.
Pinker: It's pessimistic in the sense that it's fatalistic, even though it's touted as the alternative to the fatalistic view that everything's determined by our genes. It's fatalistic because it says that the first few years of life set the course for the person's entire existence, which I think is false. I personally find the alternative comforting: the first few years don't put you on trolley tracks that you travel the rest of your life. The child-moulding theory has also led, ironically, to a perverse view of child rearing. Judith Rich Harris is coming out with a book called The Nurture Assumption which argues that parents don't influence the long-term fates of their children; peers do. The reaction she often gets is, "So are you saying it doesn't matter how I treat my child?" She points out that this is like someone learning that you can't change the personality of your spouse and asking, "So are you saying that it doesn't matter how you treat my spouse?" People seem to think that the only reason to be nice to children is that it will mold their character as adults in the future -- as opposed to the common-sense idea that you should be nice to people because it makes life better for them in the present. Child rearing has become a technological matter of which practices grow the best children, as opposed to a human relationship in which the happiness of the child (during childhood) is determined by how the child is treated. She has a wonderful quote: "We may not control our children's tomorrows, but we surely control their todays, and we have the capacity to make them very, very miserable."
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