Many social scientists believe that what we become is entirely a result of the social causes, of things our families and societies do to and for us.
They think we could package and use that kind of thing to make better and happier people. It gives them hope they have the power to be effective and become heroes.
John Watson, the behaviourist, epitomised this view when he claimed that “he could take any dozen healthy infants and train them to become any type of specialist he chose – such as a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, or even a thief – regardless of their talents, tendencies, or ancestry.” (Apologies to sociologists; psychologists and economists also think that way.)
This is the optimistic notion.
A negative implication is that if people end up with different life outcomes, it must be due to negligence or oppression. The conviction that our social environment melds our fate is an article of faith of great moral import.
If the world is not manipulable, we don’t need authorities, and we won’t be able to blame anyone for our ills. Indeed, the usual response of believers to the questioning of dogma is panic and moralising sermons.
Social causes are things like child rearing or classroom practices, conditioning schedules, racism, the imposition of sex roles, the form of our inherited religion, what we see on TV or growing up under diverse levels of socio-economic status.
These social environments could be unique to you or shared, growing up under the same parents or going to the same school, for example. It is understandable why we find them convincing as causes. There are usually clear correlations between them and outcomes. It is hard to miss that those raised in rich or poor families or neighbourhoods tend to become rich or poor.
We notice that people treat their children just like their parents treated them. Ironically, chances are that jumping to those conclusions is an evolved rule of thumb that turned out useful when we were prey animals.
Under threat
Unfortunately, or fortunately, one class of these social causes is very much under threat – the shared social environments. Suppose we want to know if height is manipulable or hereditary. The appropriate statistical technique to investigate that is analysis of variance. What we do is select a sample that captures the full known range of genetic and environmental variation. For genetic variation we code different degrees of genetic similarity, like parents and children, mono- and dizygotic twins, siblings, adoptees, first cousins and distant cousins.
We can identify shared-environment effects if dizygotic twins or siblings are more alike than expected from their 50% genetic overlap, or cousins more than their 25% genetic overlap. We can estimate unshared environments from differences in the outcomes of identical twins reared together.
I will not torture you with more of the stats theory. I merely wanted to illustrate that we can readily divide the explanation of variation in the heights between variations in genetic relatedness, shared environments (like well-fed vs hungry families) and within shared environments.
We can and do apply the same method to abilities, personality, attitudes, religiosity or choice of denomination and social mobility.
A well replicated finding is that differences in every physical and mental trait we have (ok, there are a handful of exceptions) is partially (on average about 50%) explained by genetic differences. That alone tells us the sociologist’s conviction is a fallacy. It is not all about what we do to and for each other.
But it gets worse for sociologists. Another well-replicated finding is that while we are still subject to particular environments, they do partly explain variations in outcomes, although seldom as much as do genes. Then within-family, or unshared, environments explain a big fraction of the variation in outcomes.
The important thing to know about unshared environments is that we have no idea what these are, despite concerted attempts to find out.
Explanatory power
Finally, by the time we are adults, and no longer subject to environments we cannot control, the explanatory power of those abandoned shared environments vanishes (with few exceptions.) In other words, what determines who we become later in life is mainly genes.
This thoroughly undermines the validity of mainstream psychological theories, like Freud’s or John Watson’s. It undermines the idea that middle- and upper-class children do better at school because their mothers were privileged to have more time and books and so read much more to them. It explains why gigantic programmes that assume the validity of the sociologist’s fallacy utterly fail to achieve their expected aims.
Head Start in the USA, costing $6.8-9 billion per year, is a prime example. Despite mass education we do not see the expected reduction in the variation of PISA scores. Extra years of education have added nothing to the stock of mental skills of the bottom 20%. What looks like the effect of privilege is the expected result of smart parents having smart children. The sociologist’s fallacy is responsible for a massive waste of resources.
Two more examples. Extra wealth per se does not contribute to outcomes. Natural experiments like lottery wins and other wealth shocks illustrate this. The descendants of winners do no better than they would have without the surprise wealth. Instead of using it productively winners typically consume until it is gone. Jail and rehabilitation programmes do nothing to curb recidivism among criminals.
Economic historian Gregory Clark has shown that socio-economic status is about 75% heritable, that is, genetic, in cultures as varied as England between 1600 and the present, modern Sweden and the Soviet Union.
He found no evidence of social transmission of status to speak of. For example, the communist regime comprehensively oppressed the upper classes of the Soviet Union, yet their grandchildren came to dominate professional occupations in the late Soviet era. He shows that the South of England does better than the North, not because of any great social programme in the South or neglect of the North, but because the able in the North have migrated South.
Polygenic scores
We can see that in historical changes in polygenic scores for years of education attained. He has convincingly ruled out things like extra time with children, extra reading to children, eldest getting more attention and resources, family size, privileged education, and access to occupations and influential networks. None of it contributes to social mobility or stability. Not even the presence or absence (through death or abandonment) of parents has an influence. He attributes the 25% due to non-shared environments to luck … in other words, like everyone else, he does not know. Class inequality is here to stay.
Blaming the inequality of outcomes on negligence or oppression is pernicious in the extreme.
It creates unnecessary conflict, drastically misallocates resources, and prevents us from looking for real solutions. The effect of incentives is real but only last while the incentives are in place. A real solution might be to keep incentive in place. Anyway, popular as it is, the sociologist’s fallacy is pseudo-science – it uses the language of science while violating the principles of science.
Science has rules of evidence, including, for example, resistance to cherry-picking, and is open to hypotheses and their rigorous and public critique, rather than ruling them out a priori. The sociologist’s fallacy violates all of them. Ironically, believers accuse hereditary or evolutionary explanations of being pseudo-science. Draw your own conclusions.
[Image: Igor Omilaev on Unsplash]
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