Determined, page 43
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For more details about this general topic, as well as specifics about the evolution of delayed frontal cortical maturation, see chapter 6 in Sapolsky, Behave.
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For a good introduction to Kohlberg’s truly monumental work, see D. Garz, Lawrence Kohlberg: An Introduction (Barbra Budrich, 2009).
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D. Baumrind, “Child Care Practices Anteceding Three Patterns of Preschool Behavior,” Genetic Psychology Monographs 75 (1967): 43; E. Maccoby and J. Martin, “Socialization in the Context of the Family: Parent-Child Interaction,” in Handbook of Child Psychology, ed. P. Mussen (Wiley, 1983).
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J. R. Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (Free Press, 1998).
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W. Wei, J. Lu, and L. Wang, “Regional Ambient Temperature Is Associated with Human Personality,” Nature Human Behaviour 1 (2017): 890; R. McCrae et al., “Climatic Warmth and National Wealth: Some Culture-Level Determinants of National Character Stereotypes,” European Journal of Personality 21 (2007): 953; G. Hofsteded and R. McCrae, “Personality and Culture Revisited: Linking Traits and Dimensions of Culture,” Cross-Cultural Research 38 (2004): 52.
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I. Weaver et al., “Epigenetic Programming by Maternal Behavior,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004): 847. For an example of early-life stress causing epigenetic changes in the function of the adult brain all the way down to gene regulation in individual neurons, see H. Kronman et al., “Long-Term Behavioral and Cell-Type-Specific Molecular Effects of Early Life Stress Are Mediated by H3K79me2 Dynamics in Medium Spiny Neurons,” Nature Neuroscience 24 (2021): 667. One would think that the adverse effects of, say, low socioeconomic status in childhood would occur as a result of brain development being delayed. Instead, the problem is that the early-life stress accelerates maturation of the brain, meaning that the window for brain construction being sculpted by experience closes earlier: U. Tooley, D. Bassett, and P. Mackay, “Environmental Influences on the Pace of Brain Development,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 22 (2021): 372.
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D. Francis et al., “Nongenomic Transmission Across Generations of Maternal Behavior and Stress Responses in the Rat,” Science 286 (1999): 1155; N. Provencal et al., “The Signature of Maternal Rearing in the Methylome in Rhesus Macaque Prefrontal Cortex and T Cells,” Journal of Neuroscience 32 (2012): 15626. Among wild baboons, having a low dominance rank shortens the life expectancy not only of a female but of the next generation as well: M. Zipple et al., “Intergenerational Effects of Early Adversity on Survival in Wild Baboons,” eLife 8 (2019): e47433.
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The concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences was pioneered by Vincent Felitti of Kaiser Permanente San Diego/UCSD and Robert Anda of the CDC. See, for example: V. Felitti et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 14 (1998): 245. Their original focus was on the relationship between ACE score and adult health. For example, see V. Felitti, “The Relation between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead,” Permanente Journal 6 (2002): 44. Their findings were replicated widely and expanded upon. See, for example: K. Hughes et al., “The Effect of Multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences on Health: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Lancet Public Health 2 (2017): e356; K. Petruccelli, J. Davis, and T. Berman, “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Associated Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Child Abuse & Neglect 97 (2019): 104127. Extensive research then began to focus on the relationship between ACE score and adult violence and antisocial behavior. See these publications (from which the 35 percent increase estimate was generated): T. Moffitt et al., “A Gradient of Childhood Self-Control Predicts Health, Wealth, and Public Safety,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 (2011): 2693; J. Reavis et al., “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Criminality: How Long Must We Live Before We Possess Our Own Lives?,” Permanente Journal 17 (2013): 44; J. Craig et al., “A Little Early Risk Goes a Long Bad Way: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Life-Course Offending in the Cambridge Study,” Journal of Criminal Justice 53 (2017): 34; J. Stinson et al., “Adverse Childhood Experiences and the Onset of Aggression and Criminality in a Forensic Inpatient Sample,” International Journal of Forensic Mental Health 20 (2021): 374; L. Dutin et al., “Criminal History and Adverse Childhood Experiences in Relation to Recidivism and Social Functioning in Multi-problem Young Adults,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 48, no. 5 (2021): 637; B. Fox et al., “Trauma Changes Everything: Examining the Relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Serious, Violent and Chronic Juvenile Offenders,” Child Abuse & Neglect 46 (2015): 163; M. Baglivio et al., “The Relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and Juvenile Offending Trajectories in a Juvenile Offender Sample,” Journal of Criminal Justice 43 (2015): 229. For good reviews, see: M. Baglivio, “On Cumulative Childhood Traumatic Exposure and Violence/Aggression: The Implications of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE),” in Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, 2nd ed., ed. A. Vazsonyi, D. Flannery, and M. DeLisi (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 467; G. Graf et al., “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Justice System Contact: A Systematic Review,” Pediatrics 147 (2021): e2020021030.
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The “relative age effect” is considered at length in both M. Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little Brown, 2008), and S. Levitt and S. Dubner, Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (William Morrow, 2009). For more explorations of the phenomenon, see: E. Dhuey and S. Lipscomb, “What Makes a Leader? Relative Age and High School Leadership,” Economic Educational Review 27 (2008): 173; D. Lawlor et al., “Season of Birth and Childhood Intelligence: Findings from the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s Cohort Study,” British Journal of Educational Psychology 76 (2006): 481; A. Thompson, R. Barnsley, and J. Battle, “The Relative Age Effect and the Development of Self-Esteem,” Educational Research 46 (2004): 313.
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For more detail about this general topic, see chapter 7 in Sapolsky, Behave.
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T. Roseboom et al., “Hungry in the Womb: What Are the Consequences? Lessons from the Dutch Famine,” Maturitas 70 (2011): 141; B. Horsthemke, “A Critical View on Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance in Humans,” Nature Communications 9 (2018): 2973; B. Van den Bergh et al., “Prenatal Developmental Origins of Behavior and Mental Health: The Influence of Maternal Stress in Pregnancy,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 117 (2020): 26; F. Gomes, X. Zhu, and A. Grace, “Stress during Critical Periods of Development and Risk for Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Research 213 (2019): 107; A. Brown and E. Susser, “Prenatal Nutritional Deficiency and Risk of Adult Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 3 (2008): 1054; D. St. Clair et al., “Rates of Adult Schizophrenia Following Prenatal Exposure to the Chinese Famine of 1959–1961,” Journal of the American Medical Association 294 (2005): 557. This entire topic has been subsumed under the concept of “origins of adult disease,” pioneered by David Barker at the University of Southampton in the UK. See, for example: D. Barker et al., “Fetal Origins of Adult Disease: Strength of Effects and Biological Basis,” International Journal of Epidemiology 31 (2002): 1235. For a skeptical read of this entire literature, with the conclusion that the magnitude of the effects are generally overblown, see S. Richardson, The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
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For more details about this general topic, see chapter 7 in Sapolsky, Behave.
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J. Bacque-Cazenave et al., “Serotonin in Animal Cognition and Behavior,” Journal of Molecular Science 21 (2020): 1649; E. Coccaro et al., “Serotonin and Impulsive Aggression,” CNS Spectrum 20 (2015): 295; J. Siegel and M. Crockett, “How Serotonin Shapes Moral Judgment and Behavior,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1299 (2013): 42; J. Palacios, “Serotonin Receptors in Brain Revisited,” Brain Research 1645 (2016): 46.
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J. Liu et al., “Tyrosine Hydroxylase Gene Polymorphisms Contribute to Opioid Dependence and Addiction by Affecting Promoter Region Function,” Neuromolecular Medicine 22 (2020): 391.
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M. Bakermans-Kranenburg and M. van Ijzendoorn, “Differential Susceptibility to Rearing Environment Depending on Dopamine-Related Genes: New Evidence and a Meta-analysis,” Development and Psychopathology 23 (2011): 39; M. Sweitzer et al., “Polymorphic Variation in the Dopamine D4 Receptor Predicts Delay Discounting as a Function of Childhood Socioeconomic Status: Evidence for Differential Susceptibility,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8 (2013): 499; N. Perroud et al., “COMT but Not Serotonin-Related Genes Modulates the Influence of Childhood Abuse on Anger Traits,” Genes Brain and Behavior 9 (2010): 193; S. Lee et al., “Association of Maternal Dopamine Transporter Genotype with Negative Parenting: Evidence for Gene x Environment Interaction with Child Disruptive Behavior,” Molecular Psychiatry 15 (2010): 548. For a nice example of some of these same gene/upbringing patterns in other primates, see M. Champoux et al., “Serotonin Transporter Gene Polymorphism, Differential Early Rearing, and Behavior in Rhesus Monkey Neonates,” Molecular Psychiatry 7 (2002): 1058. It is worth noting that there have been controversies over the years regarding some of these gene/upbringing interactions in humans, with one side arguing that they are not reliable and consistently replicated, with others arguing that these relationships are robust when only considering the studies that were actually done well. For example, see: M. Wankerl et al., “Current Developments and Controversies: Does the Serotonin Transporter Gene-Linked Polymorphic Region (5-HTTLPR) Modulate the Association Between Stress and Depression?,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 23 (2010): 582.
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E. Lein et al., “Genome-wide Atlas of Gene Expression in the Adult Mouse Brain,” Nature 445 (2007): 168; Y. Jin et al., “Architecture of Polymorphisms in the Human Genome Reveals Functionally Important and Positively Selected Variants in Immune Response and Drug Transporter Genes,” Human Genomics 12 (2018): 43.
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For more detail about this general topic, see chapter 8 in Sapolsky, Behave.
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Cross-cultural differences: H. Markus and S. Kitayama, “Culture and Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98 (1991): 224; A. Cuddy et al., “Stereotype Content Model across Cultures: Towards Universal Similarities and Some Differences,” British Journal of Social Psychology 48 (2009): 1; R. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (Free Press, 2003).
Neural bases of some of these differences: S. Kitayama and A. Uskul, “Culture, Mind, and the Brain: Current Evidence and Future Directions,” Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 419; B. Park et al., “Neural Evidence for Cultural Differences in the Valuation of Positive Facial Expressions,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11 (2015): 243; B. Cheon et al., “Cultural Influences on Neural Basis of Intergroup Empathy,” Neuroimage 57 (2011): 642.
Cross-cultural differences in shame versus guilt: H. Katchadourian, Guilt: The Bite of Conscience (Stanford General Books, 2011); J. Jacquet, Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool (Pantheon, 2015).
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T. Hedden et al., “Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control,” Psychological Science 19 (2008): 12; S. Han and G. Northoff, “Culture-Sensitive Neural Substrates of Human Cognition: A Transcultural Neuroimaging Approach,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (20008): 646; T. Masuda and R. E. Nisbett, “Attending Holistically vs. Analytically: Comparing the Context Sensitivity of Japanese and Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 922; J. Chiao, “Cultural Neuroscience: A Once and Future Discipline,” Progress in Brain Research 178 (2009): 287.
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K. Zhang and H. Changsha, World Heritage in China (Press of South China University of Technology, 2006).
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T. Talhelm et al., “Large-Scale Psychological Differences within China Explained by Rice versus Wheat Agriculture,” Science 344 (2014): 603; T. Talhelm, X. Zhang, and S. Oishi, “Moving Chairs in Starbucks: Observational Studies Find Rice-Wheat Cultural Differences in Daily Life in China,” Science Advances 4 (2018), DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aap8469.
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Footnote: The genetics of cross-cultural differences: H. Harpending and G. Cochran, “In Our Genes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99 (2002): 10.
Specific papers in the area: Y. Ding et al., “Evidence of Positive Selection Acting at the Human Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene Locus,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99 (2002): 309; F. Chang et al., “The World-wide Distribution of Allele Frequencies at the Human Dopamine D4 Receptor Locus,” Human Genetics 98 (1996): 891; K. Kidd et al., “An Historical Perspective on ‘The World-wide Distribution of Allele Frequencies at the Human Dopamine D4 Receptor Locus,’ ” Human Genetics 133 (2014): 431; C. Chen et al., “Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor (DRD4) Allele Frequencies around the Globe,” Evolution and Human Behavior 20 (1999): 309.
For a nontechnical introduction to this topic, see R. Sapolsky, “Are the Desert People Winning?,” Discover, August 2005, 38.
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Footnote: M. Fleisher, Kuria Cattle Raiders: Violence and Vigilantism on the Tanzania/Kenya Frontier (University of Michigan Press, 2000); M. Fleisher, “ ‘War Is Good for Thieving!’: The Symbiosis of Crime and Warfare among the Kuria of Tanzania,” Africa 72 (200): 1. In these tensions, I root for my Maasai, of course; Maasai/Kuria tensions have been going on for a long, long time but thanks to the arbitrariness of what some European colonials did in the last century, when the two groups fight, it counts as an international conflict; R. McMahon, Homicide in Pre-famine and Famine Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2013); R. Nisbett and D. Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Westview Press, 1996); B. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford University Press, 1982). Theory about the origins of the southern culture of honor among pastoralists in the British Isles: D. Fischer, Albion’s Seed (Oxford University Press, 1989).
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Footnote: E. Van de Vliert, “The Global Ecology of Differentiation between Us and Them,” Nature Human Behaviour 4 (2020): 270.
Second footnote: F. Lederbogen et al., “City Living and Urban Upbringing Affect Neural Social Stress Processing in Humans,” Nature 474 (2011): 498; D. Kennedy and R. Adolphs, “Stress and the City,” Nature 474 (2011): 452; A. Abbott, “City Living Marks the Brain,” Nature 474 (2011): 429; M. Gelfand et al., “Differences between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study,” Science 332 (2011): 1100.
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Footnote: K. Hill and R. Boyd, “Behavioral Convergence in Humans and Animals,” Science 371 (2021): 235; T. Barsbai, D. Lukas, and A. Pondorfer, “Local Convergence of Behavior across Species,” Science 371 (2021): 292. For more details about this general topic, see chapter 9 in Sapolsky, Behave.
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For an overview of this topic, see chapter 10 in Sapolsky, Behave.
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P. Alces, Trialectic: The Confluence of Law, Neuroscience, and Morality (University of Chicago Press, 2023). P. Tse, “Two Types of Libertarian Free Will Are Realized in the Human Brain,” in Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, ed. G. Caruso and O. Flanagan (Oxford University Press, 2018).
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N. Levy, Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2015), quote from p. 87.
Footnote (p. 83): The poignance of this reality is wonderfully summarized by a quote from Charles Johnson’s short story “China,” The Penguin Book of the American Short Story, ed. J. Freeman (Penguin Press, 2021), p. 92: “ ‘I can only be what I’ve been?’ This he asked softly, but his voice trembled.” I thank Mia Council for pointing this out.
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4. Willing Willpower: The Myth of Grit
N. Levy, “Luck and History-Sensitive Compatibilism,” Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2009): 237, quote from p. 242.
