Roots of Personality. Column in KomputerraOnline #69

While you speak nothing of what you think,
listen to nothing of what you believe,
and do nothing of what you are inclined toward —
all that time it is not truly you who lives.
Han Xiang-zi
I concluded my previous column with something of a riddle. I posed a rhetorical question: what is it, then, that ensures the selection of priorities enacted in our behavior? I thought to myself: someone will write in the comments "personality," and I will immediately respond "yes, yes, of course." But nothing of the sort. Either everyone already knows the answer in advance, and I alone failed to grasp it immediately, or people are simply afraid to voice their opinion. Strangely enough — it is not an examination, after all...
So then: personality.
"A stable system of socially significant traits characterizing an individual as a member of a society or community. ... Personality is determined by the given system of social relations, culture, and is also conditioned by biological characteristics."
Modern Explanatory Dictionary, "Great Soviet Encyclopedia," 1997.
Generally speaking, definitions of this concept abound. A considerable selection can be found, for instance, in the Wikipedia article "Psychology of Personality." The overwhelming majority of them are biologically unacceptable. No, no — not incorrect. If the authors of these definitions fit them within their own worldview and offer a coherent definition that does not contradict their other ideas, there is nothing to reproach them for.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."
Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking-Glass
In different models of reality, some questions turn out to be genuinely pivotal, while others are meaningless. For example, from a biological standpoint, a human being is an organism, an individual of the species Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 — the product of individual development and evolution. The biological view of the human being is close to the medical one, but differs from it in its attention to the evolutionary causes that shaped humanity. Whereas for jurisprudence, for instance, such problems simply do not exist (just as the majority of problems occupying legal scholars do not exist for biology). And from the perspective of painting, a human is an expressive form that must be rendered by one means or another.
Now, in humanistic discourse, the overwhelming majority of definitions of the human being are formulated from a standpoint incompatible with the analysis of the evolutionary-biological conditioning of our properties. I cite fragments of definitions from the aforementioned page: "a living human being of flesh and blood," "a being transitioning into ideal form," "a subject of life," "a subject of cognition and the objective transformation of the world," "a rational being endowed with speech," "a concrete person who is the bearer of consciousness." They may well be sound within their own logic, but they are useless not only for attempts to understand why we are the way we are, but also for our aspiration to govern ourselves in the best possible way.
And why do I cling so tenaciously to the evolutionary perspective, even when attempting to understand the origins of human personality? Because the answer to the question "why?" is more interesting to me than the question "how?". And the answer to the question "why?" must be sought in our history. This is a complex task. In all likelihood, we have not yet matured to its resolution in a manner satisfying the criteria of evidence-based science. But even now we can construct hypotheses commensurate with our level of understanding and capable of unifying the scattered facts at our disposal.
And why, when speaking about the structure of the human psyche, do I not cite the results of specific studies of the functional units of our soul that would put an end to all disputes? It is not so simple. Different schools employ entirely different schemas to describe our psychological mechanism. One might assume it would be straightforward: determine which approach proves more successful. Those theorists whose frameworks allow for the alleviation of those who suffer are using the correct model. So what does practice tell us?
It tells us that success can be achieved by actions grounded in entirely different — and even mutually incompatible — models of the psyche. Imagine a patient presenting with complaints to a psychotherapist. If the psychotherapist is an adherent of classical psychoanalysis, they will proceed from the assumption that the client's problems stem from a disruption in the interaction of the Ego, Id, and Superego. Whereas if the psychotherapist is a proponent of Eric Berne's transactional analysis, the afflicted mind will be searched for the Child, the Adult, and the Parent. An adherent of Grof will search for systems of condensed experience resting upon basic perinatal matrices, while a representative of yet another school will seek something else entirely different in principle. And all of it works!
I will go even further. In the mind of a patient leaving a therapist after a successful course of treatment, there are now either the Child, Parent, and Adult — or systems of condensed experience. But this does not in the least mean that all these details and mechanisms were present before the given cognitive model was imposed upon the unfortunate individual's mind.
Fortunately, we now have at our disposal mechanisms for studying the human soul that approach it from a completely different angle. A subject is placed in a magnetic resonance tomograph, made to solve tasks of a certain kind, and changes in blood circulation in the brain are recorded. Alternatively, electrodes can be inserted into the head to analyze the potentials of individual groups of neurons. In this way, discrete functional units of our brain can be identified. I cannot claim to follow such research closely or to fully comprehend its results, but the general conclusion, as I understand it, is as follows: almost nothing in common with the constructs of philosophers and psychologists!
Moreover. The same external behavioral pattern can be supported by different neurological mechanisms. In general, many of our psychological functions, even when they are normally associated with particular structures, can under special circumstances (for example, if those structures have been damaged as a result of injury) be performed by other brain centers (from the many available examples, I will select one that I myself once described for KT).
Personality, consciousness, "the self," intellect — these are epiphenomena that do not exist at the level of individual brain structures. And so it turns out that a substantial portion of our psychological mechanism most often "falls out" of the sphere of attention of biologists and other natural scientists. It is examined almost exclusively by humanists, who do not give the slightest thought to the evolutionary formation of the object of their study.
One of the few Russian-language sources available to us that examines the human personality from a biological standpoint is the textbook by Dmytro Anatoliyovych Zhukov, "Biology of Behavior: Humoral Mechanisms." I will not attempt to retell all the material contained in this remarkable book. I will point to what strikes me as an omission. Zhukov emphasizes:
"The set of innate needs and the style of their satisfaction determine the psychological type of a person."
Psychological type is one of the important components of personality. I do not agree that the differences between individuals concern the set of innate needs. I believe that this set is, broadly speaking, identical in all people. What differs is the relative importance, the hierarchy of priorities (what can be regarded as "style" — strategy). And the hierarchy of priorities is influenced by both innate characteristics and acquired experience.
If a child manages on several occasions to obtain what they want from parents through tantrums, a personality will form that will pursue its priorities in precisely that manner. If someone is instilled with the belief that they must care not for their own interests but for the common good, what emerges will be a hypocrite who masks their actual goals with high-minded discourse. If the harshness of life has trained a person to negotiate and seek compromise, the "output" will be an entirely different style of adaptation. This list of examples could be extended indefinitely.
Personality is closely linked to biological individuality and grows out of it through social interactions. We are individuals characterized by a particular temperament, instinctive programs and their individual variations, and individual life experience. Personality ≠ individuality.
Analyzing the formation of personality from an evolutionary-biological standpoint, we are compelled to regard it as an instrument for solving certain adaptive tasks. We possess personality because, in our ancestors, possessing such a structure — which developed as a consequence of social interactions — increased their reproductive success (augmented the number of offspring they produced). Personality ≠ essence.
Do you see the bouquet of questions that opens before us the moment we adopt the position I have just briefly characterized? Here are just a few of them.
Do personality, or its analogues, exist in other animals besides humans?
What are the evolutionary-biological prerequisites for the emergence of personality?
What contribution do innate, biological components make to the formation of personality, and what contribution do social, culturally acquired ones make?
Do genes, social environment, and life experience unambiguously determine personality?
To what degree do the biological components of our personality (determined by selection in earlier stages of our evolution) render it anachronistic?
How does one govern one's own personality? What in us (or which part of our personality) can ensure its transformation?
I do not possess complete answers to these questions. No column would suffice for all the reasoning that revolves in my mind in connection with them. I will offer only a few fragments of possible reflections.
...Individual behavioral differences arise in evolution very early. What should vineyard snails do when humidity decreases: wait out the dry period on plants, burrow into the soil, or migrate to more humid habitats? Since a single universally correct solution for all situations does not exist. The highest chances of survival will belong to that population whose individuals realize different strategies...
...Already in amphibians (for example, in newts) there is a distinct difference between individuals with weak and strong temperament, between behavior of type A (flight-fight) and type B (freezing)...
...Experiments on rats have shown that the difference between stress response types A and B is to a high degree genetically predetermined. This conclusion most probably holds true for humans as well...
...What does an owner do when training a dog? They alter, in a desired direction, that part of the dog's psyche which may be compared to the human personality. The fact that the interaction between the dog and its owner is interspecific is not particularly significant...
...There are serious grounds for assuming that the "excessive" (from the standpoint of adaptation to the external, extra-population environment) level of our intelligence is connected with adaptation to social interactions within the group. The principal instrument of this interaction is personality...
...The "diagnosis" of contemporary humanity, in my view, is identification of the self with one's personality. Daily routines, momentary priorities, and key stimuli triggering habitual reactions obscure the very foundation of our existence. Our true essence is not that restless construct which strives to react to the stream of stimuli pouring down upon us, enacting habitual adaptive patterns. This, most readers will probably concede. But WHAT exactly constitutes our true essence is a more complex question, and a great many versions of the answer may be put forward.
Some will say — an immortal soul. Others will say — belonging to a nation. Some will invoke class essence, and others perhaps even the derivation of pleasure from the consumption of resources.
I will refrain from formulating my own version: sometimes an unanswered question "works" more effectively than an insufficiently persuasive answer. I believe that for this answer, the very fact of our existence is of paramount importance. Adapting to the world outside us, we create a world within ourselves, and find a place in it for ourselves as well. And we do this not in isolation, but together with one another, embedded in an immeasurable sequence of transmission of our genetic and cultural endowments. Adaptation, modeling, reproduction, creativity...