The blank-slate straw man

No one really thinks that human behavior is environmentally determined, that humans are “blank slates”, or that human psychological traits are completely determined by nature, with no role or influence from DNA or genes whatsoever. But behavior geneticists often try to deflect criticism of their collapsing paradigm by attacking a straw man argument that human behavior is completely environmentally determined.

Perhaps the most famous and brazen example of this is Steven Pinker’s 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. This book’s title makes it clear that Pinker believes, incorrectly, that many mainstream sociologists, psychologists, and other researchers think that human behavior is entirely a product of their environment. Here I will try to compile some of the many, many other examples of this sort of straw man argument I have found in the many papers I have read on related subjects.

• “Most literature on political behavior assumes sex differences are socialized and remains silent about genetic or biological influences” (Hatemi et al. 2009)
• “The failure to engage behavioral genetics allowed the sources of political attitudes to be viewed narrowly as consisting entirely of postnatal experiences such as parental socialization” (Smith et al. 2011)
• “Although it is difficult to find a scientist who believes any complex social trait or behavior is all nature, there are still social scientists who argue that it is all nurture” (Lockyer & Hatemi 2018)
• “Charney’s criticisms fall into two broad categories…The second, drawing directly from a dualist perspective, is that political beliefs are entirely embedded in culture and therefore, logically could not have a genetic component” (Alford et al. 2008)
• “For the greater part of human history, political behaviors, values, preferences, and institutions have been viewed as socially determined” (Hatemi & McDermott 2012)
• “Are business-related behaviors learned, or can they, at least in part, be explained by our biology? Most management research assumes the former and implicitly rejects the latter; in this view the human mind is basically a blank slate, a general-purpose computer programmed by our parents, our schools, and our culture” (White et al. 2006)
• “Behavior genetic approaches have also inspired philosophical objections due to the firm belief that behavioral differences are entirely socialized” (Hatemi et al. 2014)
• “…we urge social scientists to take seriously the idea that differences in peer and parental socialization are not the only forces that influence variation in cooperative behavior” (Cesarini et al. 2008)
• “…political scientists typically assume attitudes are entirely the product of environmental forces such as parental socialization and do not take seriously the possibility that genes could be involved” (Hatemi et al. 2010)
• “If our model withstands the further tests we propose, it will…undermine the naive assumption that the resemblance of family members can be interpreted in purely social terms” (Martin et al. 1986)
• “…the hypothesis that similar environments lead to similar political attitudes and/or behavior is strongly implied by a literature on political opinion and socialization that stretches back for at least half a century” (Smith et al. 2012)
• “…a researcher can assume added covariates are purely environmental and interpret them accordingly; political scientists seem highly likely to do exactly this given the disciplines’ overwhelming history of environmental determinism” (Smith & Hatemi 2013)
• “Historically, criminologists have modeled the relationship between the family environment and child delinquency as unidirectional, positing the family environment as antecedent to child behaviors…differences in children are thought to be the product of differences in their socialization” (Jackson & Beaver 2015)
• “…political scientists continue to adhere to a model of complete environmental determinism…” (Sturgis et al. 2010)
• “The dogma of course is that of environmental determinism for all important human traits. This dogma has relaxed in recent years, at least for individual differences, and at least within science. But the dogma has not relaxed for group differences and has not relaxed within politics as differentiated from science” (Whitney 1995)

It is also common for behavior geneticists to construct a narrative in which the “blank slate” paradigm used to be widely accepted, but brave, heroic behavior geneticists challenged this dogma and refuted it by demonstrating significant genetic influence on all human behaviors. Here are some examples:

• “By the mid-20th century, the “Blank Slate” model of human nature had taken a strong hold on the field…Initially in Western Europe and increasingly in the U.S., a small group of researchers undertook a set of investigations that would challenge and eventually undermine the Blank Slate model” (McGue 2010)
• “…criminology not only rejected biological explanations of criminal behavior, but also rejected individualistic explanations altogether in favor of perspectives that emphasized factors like structural disadvantage and the cultural responses to it. Things stayed that way for a long time, but the winds have shifted in recent years as interdisciplinary research demonstrating that humans are not “blank slates” at birth has become too convincing to ignore” (Pratt et al. 2016)
• “Events and situations were alleged to be the sole source of political attitudes; indeed, they had to be the sole source given the widely held assumption that people are born with politically blank slates. Still, the more general blank slate assumption has been thoroughly debunked, and the evidence is now clear that certain phobias, preferences, and behaviors are innate” (Smith et al. 2011)
• “Although not all psychologists endorsed these blank-slate assumptions in all of their details — few innate characteristics, the equipotentiality of learning, and the omnipotent power of contingencies of reinforcement — the basic premises underlying them guided many theories in academic psychology in the 20th century” (Buss 2001)