Alison Gopnik: observation

Transcript context

…Let me give you the example that I give when I’m doing my developmental psychology class. We know that there’s a particular kind of disorder in a particular gene that means that you can’t metabolize a particular substance in your food, and the result is that you have mental retardation and a lot of difficulties. We actually know pretty much what the gene is. We test babies. They prick their heel when they’re born to see if they have this disorder. If they do, then we make sure that they don’t eat anything that has that enzyme or that piece in it, and then they’re fine. The question is, does this come from nature or does it come from nurture? How much is it nature? How much is it nurture? In one sense, it’s 100 percent nature. It depends on this particular gene. In another sense, it’s 100 percent nurture. If you get rid of the material in the environment, then you won’t get the syndrome. That’s a very specific case, but the same thing’s true in Eric’s work with something like SES [socioeconomic status]. What Eric found was that you had much more convergence in twin studies in upper-class contexts than in poorer families. The explanation is that if you’re in a poor family, small differences in your environment can make a big difference in how the rest of your life goes, and that’s less likely to be true in a richer family. One that I particularly have thought about, and I think is really interesting, is thinking about the effect of nurture on development, so the effect of having caregivers. As you probably know, there’s a sort of people who’ve said, “No, we are overestimating how much what parents do influences kids’ development.” But the argument that I and others have made is that the effect — and we’re doing this more and more in the context of this big caregiving program — is that the effect of having a protective caregiver is that it allows more variability. When you don’t have to worry at a particular moment about what your particular situation is, you can do many more different things, and you can have more variability. That’s true in biology and ecology, for example. The example I give in my book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is if you have a garden that is protected and has a lot of possibilities, you’re going to get a much wider variety of plants than if you have a much more restricted circumstance in which only a few plants will thrive. Okay, what does this have to do with kids? Well, when people say that there isn’t an effect of the family environment on development, what they mean is that they don’t see high correlations between kids in the same family and some measure of what an adult is like. You get siblings — sometimes it’s called the non-shared environment. The things that don’t seem to be the same things are playing a larger role than the shared environment. So, what you might think is, okay, if you have two kids and they have the same parents, those kids are going to be more similar to one another. s are playing a larger role than the shared environment. So, what you might think is, okay, if you have two kids and they have the same parents, those kids are going to be more similar to one another. But if this picture about what caregiving does is allow variability is true, then you might expect the opposite. You might think if you have a really caring family, what that means is that the siblings are going to have more opportunity to develop in really different ways, so you won’t see a correlation. Again, part of the problem is, if the effect of nurture is not on the mean but on the variation, on the standard deviation, you’re not going to see it in any straightforward way in a twin study. If the Turkheimer hypothesis is correct and societies are growing wealthier and wealthier, over time, virtually everything will be genetically determined rather than environmentally because we’ll all be higher SES, we’ll all have better environments, less likely to be crippled by polio in our youth or whatever, and it will just be about genes.…

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