I think I finally made sense today of something that I have been wondering about for some years: a woman on the radio said that she was attending the Royal Wedding because, as a child, her parents had taken her to the wedding of Charles and Diana.
The thing that I had been struggling to explain for a while was the observation that my daughters’ development seemed to advance noticeably as a result of new experiences; it was as if taking them on a camping trip would unlock new cognitive capacities. This might seem like common sense – but conventional development theory has it that cognitive capacities advance in stages that are more or less preset.
It struck me as odd that a person would attend a royal wedding – at considerable inconvenience – simply because they had attended it as a child. Then it occurred to me just how common this experience is: people who follow football teams because their parents took them to matches when they were younger, people whose love of theatre or fishing is rooted in their experiences as a child. It seems that people are drawn to recreate these defining experiences as moths drawn to the light; in a way similar to the Freudian notion of fixation, but more subtle and prevalent.
What I am saying is that there are experiences which really do, literally, define us. Which acts as catalysts for our development and which are thereby burned into our identity – as the fixed anchor points of who we are. These are the ‘attractors’ of our self-development; experiences whose affective context gathers our lives to them with ever increasing gravity – as we, in turn go fishing and take our own children and grandchildren fishing.
This ties together two questions for me: questions of identity and questions of learning. It seems to me that the two share the same mechanism, albeit at different scales. The experiences to which you and I will return – moth-like – and which in turn define us; are those which acted as stepping stones for our personal development. In adulthood our learning and development continues to be shaped by new experiences to the degree that our identity remains flexible. Eventually, aged and ossified, we reject new experience and cease learning. Our personality is set in stone. Our fixations with the cornerstones of our identity – be they fishing or Royalty or football – consume our personality in its entirety. The common mechanism is the affective nature of experiences – which may be so strong that in a child it draws the entire personality around it, or in an adult strong enough that these become key learning experiences. Finally, our ability to learn waning, we become creatures completely defined simply by those strong echoes, those experiences to which we can only return.
I was massively influenced by Judith Harris's 'The Nurture Assumption' on this issue. She sunk the whole bloated battleship of parenting literature with the idea that it's genetics, peers and parents - in that order, with parents playing a tiny role overall. Largely based on sound science and twin studies.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Donald. I think it's important not to overextend research (that's why we had learning sytles and right brain/left brain guff after all) and to distinguish personality from identity. From memory, I think the genetic/twin studies concluded that about 50% of the variation in personality test scores can be accounted for by genetics. So at some future date knowing your compelte genome (for example) would enable me to make a modest guess at how you would score on an introversion-extroversion test. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, 50% just means there is a lot we don't know - and personality test scores are not the same as identity. I do think you're right about parenting - in fact I couldn't agree more. I think we inherit a great many behaviours from our parents and probably attitudes to match. But I do believe in learning, i.e. that we continue to develop our identity beyond - say - the age of 12. In particular, I want to understand why it is that people seem to make sense of themselves in terms of stories: when I meet people they say 'I remember this one time when...' as a way of explaining their attitudes and behaviours. I think that people continue to develop behaviours and identity through adult transitions - and am intrigued by the observation that these are often summarised/crystallised as stories, which are then exchanged with others. This seems to be true whether I ask people about machinery on a rig, or their first experiences as leaders. Yes, it's a hypothesis - happy to be refuted, or just put to the test ;o)
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