Willie71 wrote:Teague wrote:Oldskeptic wrote:Macdoc wrote:So a professor of political science is doing psychology and sociology now....
Ethics are innate except for those with FAS and a few genetically linked crime families where it takes both the genetics and an abuse trigger.
FAS in particular is a challenge to society ....the kids didn't do anything wrong ...their fucking drunkard mother did.
I get it, nature over nurture, right? I'm glad that you have settled the debate over the two that has been going on for at least 300 years. Sorry to burst your bubble but research has shown that the biggest influence on modern young people regarding their values and behavior during their formative years is not parents, it's not brothers or sisters, and it's not family elders as behaviorists have wanted to believe and make everyone believe for years. And it's not genetics either. The surprise really isn't that surprising when you think back to your younger days. The largest influence on young people is other young people - their peers, their friends, their gang or whatever you want to call them. It's the other kids that they hang with. The group of other humans that they have to compete with for acceptance, a place in the social hierarchy.
When Dilulio wrote:
" A youth who repeatedly commits violent crimes as a result of being raised without morals." it doesn't necessarily mean that his or her parents, older brothers or sisters, or elders never tried to teach them "morals". It means what it says,
"raised without morals" and if the largest influence on a young person's life is a group of other young people that have inherited their amorality and lack of empathy from other young people a bit older and looked up to they are going to lack and or ignore the morality taught at home or any other place.
This is not say that there is no innate sense of empathy or that empathy isn't heritable. It means that an innate empathy can be overridden by environmental factors.
To serve as an example overriding innate empathy I'll cite loving and kind mothers and fathers, loving and kind grandmothers and grandfathers, and other "good" people known for their fine morals and empathy having their smiling faces photographed while standing in the background with the corpse of another human hanging from a tree or burning on a pyre.
Old skeptic, you are flat out wrong on this. I am a family therapist, and by far the greatest influence on a child's development is the parents and immediate social network. Peers are influential after the majority of brain development and socialization has already passed. There was a researcher a few years ago who tried to pistulate that peers are more important than parents, but her work was deep,y flawed, overlooking many very well established principles in a child's development.
The woman's name you can't come up with is Judith Harris, she has a masters in psychology and has been doing research in cognitive development since 1977, and has co-authored two text books on child development. Her article, published in
Psychological Review, that I based my explanation on was awarded a George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience by the American Psychological Association in 1995.
The book based on Harris' new theory,
The Nurture Assumption was published with 1998 with a forward by Steven Pinker, another George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2010, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for general non-fiction in 1999.
Harris did more than just try to postulate, she fleshed out her new theory and had it published in the most respected peer reviewed psychology journal in the US.
In a nut shell Harris' conclusions were that parents teach children how to behave at home. As Steven Pinker put it in
How the Mind Works "children everywhere are socialized by their peer group, not by their parents. At all ages children
join various play groups, circles, gangs, packs, cliques, and salons, and they jockey for status within them." Or in Harris' own words peers teach children and young adults how to behave outside of the home.
Certainly parents contribute to how children and young people behave outside of the home, as do genetics, family, and other social networks, but it should be easy to understand that the world outside of the home and family is where they learn how to deal with/behave in the world outside of the home.
It also an observable that people in general, and not just children and young adults often behave differently in different environments but especially adolescents and young adults: They often behave differently at school than they do at home, or at work, or in church, or on the streets. Even behave differently in one group of peers as opposed to another.
What started this particular tangent in this thread was
this from Macdoc concerning the term "superpredator" coined by John DiIulio a professor of political science. Macdoc frowns on a professor of political science doing psychology and sociology, then contends that, ethics are innate except for some womb induced or genetically caused anomalies.
And while I agree that there are some womb induced and genetically caused anomalies behind violent behavior it's far too simple, actually outlandish, to think that they are a main cause let alone the only cause of violent behavior in youths.
So remember that what was being discussed was not how youths act at home, or in a classroom, or at grandma's house, or in church. We are talking about youths in their own "environment" separate from the others where the roll models may be slightly older peers and or peers higher up in the pecking order.
Something to consider is that, not always but very often, when a young person commits a violent act like rape or assault or murder the reaction of family, neighbors, and other adults that know them is surprise and disbelief. We hear things like, "I can't believe it, he/she was/is such a nice polite young woman/man." Using Harris' theory, as accepted by Pinker and others in the field, there are good explanations of how the acts of the violence committed by the youth can be squared with the nice polite young man/woman of the experiences of people outside of the peer group/gang/clique.
Something else to consider is how often and quick parents themselves are to blame change in behavior of their children for the worse on "bad influences" in the form of new friends/peers. Yet parents are unlikely to give the same degree of credit for changes in behavior for the better to new peers/friends, even though in deeds and conversation they demonstrate that they do place a great deal of importance on peers/friends by wanting to raise there children in "good" neighborhoods, send them to "good" schools. Parents, and some psychologists and sociologists, are reluctant, even venomously opposed, to Harris and her theory while at the same time admitting that the environment is a very large factor in the behavior of children, adolescents, and young adults by talking about the importance of such things as "good" neighborhoods and "good" schools.
Harris' new theory isn't really all that new. It's just that she spoke what an awful lot of people did/do not want to hear or face. And like some Christians that want to justify their god thru morals consequentialism where by if their god doesn't exist to be the source of their morals there is no reason to be moral. Some parents, and some psychologists and sociologists, resit Harris' theory because they think Harris is delivering a message that good parenting is futile in the light of larger roles that genetics and peer groups play. There is no such message. Nowhere in Harris' or Pinker's or anyone else's writings on the subject is there even a hint that good parenting is useless or not valuable. It's just that the utility and value may not be where most parents, and some psychologists and sociologists believe them to be.
If a good environment is important then the role of parents picking the environment is important. If peer groups and or friends are important then steering their children towards peers and or friends acceptable to the parents is important. And parents, at least parents that we would consider good parents, do much more than teach good behavior. Good parents provide good nutrition, they provide secure and comforting homes, they provide stability, they provide good educations, and they provide safe havens when or if the world outside of the home gets too rough.
Granted some of these things are out of reach of some "good" parents due to financial and or other factors, but that's a whole other topic.
There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher will not say it - Cicero.
Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead - Stephen Hawking
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