Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
A SOCIAL scientist is the kind of scientist who tells you some obvioUs fact "r about the world you live in which you have known all your life hut when you say, 'that is an obvious fact about the world I live in and I- have known it all my life; he is pleased. Most other kinds of scien- tist would break their magic wands and throw their books into the sea like Prospero if they discovered that C7aliban had already anticipated their discoveries. Even such a gentle, even-tempered genius as Einstein would be unlikely to jump for joy if the first person to whom he confided E=mc" had replied, 'Yes, I know.' But to the sociologist, we are all expert witnesses. Each one of us is an experiment. Our evidence must be tabulated and fed into the computer with democratic respect— even if they later segregated it into a footnote or an appendix as `a statistical artifact.'
Some of them, however, have grown cunning over the years and tend to feed us with plausible prejudices such as: 'women drivers are more likely to have accidents than men drivers.' Before the words `everybody knows that . . .' can drop from our lips, they brandish great sheafs of in- surance figures and police reports from nine countries between 1920 and 1960 which disprove our assumptions. The human consciousness. is ,so malleable, externally by conformity with our neighbours and internally by rationalisation of our impulses, that there is almost nothing we will not believe about ourselves if it is presented with sufficient dogmatism and conviction.
Adaptability is the secret of our survival as the dominant species. When we remember that our an- cestors and collaterals have at one time or another been polygamists and cannibals, homosexuals and celibates, nomads and cave-dwellers, slave- owners and idol-worshippers, collectivists and individualists, brigands and shopkeeper:, pigmies and giants, women-haters and priest-lovers, nudists and puritans, Augustinians and Pelagians --it would be difficult to imagine an impossible world in which most of us could not be condi- tioned to feel at home.
With such choices and combinations of choices
open to us in theory, there is.an obvious need for some encyclopedic work which will codify the information available today about how we behave in fact. Recently a generous American friend presented me with a pioneering volume -which claims to do exactly that--Human Behaviour by Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner (Harcourt, Brace and World, $11,00). These two tireless polymaths have raked over the whole field of anthropology, psychology and sociology to turn up 1045 well-authenticated findings about human acitivity. It is an inventory of self-knowledge. Like all inventories, it begins to be out of date as soon as it is made. In so far as its propositions are scientifically accurate, they are true only about a specific period (the last fifty years) and a specific area (mainly the United States and Western Europe).
In a map-less waste land, where almost every guide turns out to be a stranger here himself, even the most exiguous of ordnance surveys would provide a welcome means of orientation. And these 1045 signposts, each one erected upon a mass of detailed digging, are a valuable corrective to much of the wishful thinking, partisan opinionising and hasty generalising which passes for sociological comment among us journalists now. We are not obliged to accept them all as infallible pointers along the route to Sodom or Jerusalem or Eldorado. But, at least, with this behavioural Baedeker and Michelin of mankind at hand, we can no longer set up our own tourist kiosk at the crossroads smugly confident that no one has been here before.
Sometimes the findings seem obvious to the point of banality. At first sight, it appears un- necessary that a thousand rats should wear them- selves out in madness and slavery to establish a commonplace like 'other things being equal, the longer since an experience, the harder it is to remember.' But other things are rarely equal even in a laboratory-and when rats have learned their way through a maze they will still occasion- ally wander off down a side alley simply, as far as anyone can tell, to introduce a little variety and adventure into a dull routine. Remembering is a technique that can be practised and im- proved.
What has been discovered about intelligence also does not always fit our favourite precon- ceptions. Does it depend on heredity or environ- ment? All the evidence points to 75 per cent through inheritance and only 25 per cent through upbringing. (Nineteen pairs of identical twins, reared separately, were found to differ only by an average of eight points-little more than the variation found in the same person tested on different days.) The IQ of adopted children correlates with their real, not their foster, parents. And to date, no known treatment will substanti- ally elevate the mental level of the severely retarded child. (3 per cent of all children born in the US will never achieve the intellect of a twelve-year-old child). Here, too, things are rarely equal-there is the phenomenon of the 'idiot savant' such as the boy with an IQ of fifty who could play complex musical compositions by ear and another who was excellent at chess. Our IQ also depends on birth in the most literal sense -there is a consistent increase in intelligence from the first-born to the last-born in a family. There is even a slightly higher average score for those born in summer and autumn, which gives an advantage to children resulting from 'cold- weather conceptions.'
Are genius and madness closely linked? It is obviously difficult to spot, capture, and hold still the true genius long enough to achieve any results. But studies of men of 'high creativity' all agree that they display greater 'psychological well-being' than their colleagues. They are less anxious, more autonomous, less authoritarian, more practical, less mystical, more wilting to trust their impulses and express their irrational feelings, more humor- ous. They are not, however, significantly more intelligent.
I did my best to recognise myself in that out- line-though I was rather shaken to learn that if I wanted to stay among them I would need to stoke up my output. The top 10 per cent of creative men in any field, it says, produce about 50 per cent of the work there. I was also some- what. disturbed to learn that the faculty of think- ing in pictures (which is about the only faculty of thinking I have) is regarded as, an immature habit. It is found only in about 10 per cent of adults but common among children.
So far, I have only skimmed a few of the 1045 findings. Readers of this column may expect to find here in future a significantly higher pro- portion of factual evidence to back up my generalisations; often with learned footnotes re- ferring the curious to articles with titles like 'Social-Class Difference in Educational Life- Chances,' Reinforcement Conditioning of Verbal Behaviour by Verbal and Non-verbal Stimuli in a Situation Resembling a Clinical Interview' or 'Effects of Instructions on the Ex- tinction of Conditioned Finger-Withdrawal.'
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