Geek Heresy (44 page)

16
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For the canonical exposition of behavioral economics’ “nudges,” see Thaler and Sunstein (2008), who popularized the term. Their notion of “libertarian paternalism” is among the gentlest conceptions of manipulation, and most of their ideas are undoubtedly worth implementing. But is that all we’re going to ask of ourselves? Can’t we go beyond nudging one another?

17
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Psychologists’ notions of personality development differ from the “personality development” that I have encountered in some social change efforts, especially outside of the United States. Psychological personality development is concerned with how human beings mature across a number of psychological attributes throughout their lives. “Personality development” in Indian development circles is about the development of soft skills and the outward expressions of education and middle-class membership. The two definitions overlap, but the latter implies a somewhat more superficial type of development than the former. There are three-month courses in India for “personality development” (that succeed at their stated goals), but few psychologists would suggest that personality development is something that can be completed in a three-month course.

18
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Freud (1962) proposed a psychosexual theory that took a child through oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages, each layering the libidinous id with a self-protecting ego and an angel-on-the-shoulder superego. Erik Erikson’s (1950) psychosocial theory featured a series of eight crises, whose successful resolutions led to trust, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, caring, and, ultimately, wisdom. Jean Piaget investigated the developmental stages for logical thinking and scientific ability (Piaget and Inhelder 1958). Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to investigate stages of moral development (Kohlberg et al. 1983).

19
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I don’t claim that all such change always moves in a positive direction. Sometimes, someone of praiseworthy achievement decides to make a terrible step backward in intrinsic growth – a prominent example is Bernard Madoff, whose hedge-fund pyramid scheme cheated his investors out of billions. Nevertheless, my main point here is that forward growth and maturation is not an unusual thing. Contrary to anyone who believes that human nature is fixed and economically focused, positive human change at an individual level is common and often not at all about money.

20
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See, for example, Haggbloom et al. (2002). Their ranking shows Maslow as the fourteenth most cited psychologist in introductory psychology textbooks, the nineteenth most revered by other psychologists, the tenth most eminent in a final analysis, and the thirty-seventh most frequently cited.

21
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Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 22.

22
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Maslow (1943), p. 375, repeated in Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 17.

23
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Maslow (1943), pp. 388–389, repeated in Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 28.

24
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Empirical studies of Maslow’s hierarchy show mixed results: Some studies debunk specific aspects of Maslow’s theory, while others uphold them. On the whole, his basic insights have not met with hard counterevidence. Among the most cited critiques of Maslow is Wahba and Bridwell (1976), which summarizes research on evidence for the hierarchy of needs in organizational behavior. But they set up a poor straw man of Maslow, misinterpreting things in exactly the way described in this section. Neher (1991), Rowan (1998), and Koltko-Rivera (2006) provide a better-reasoned set of criticisms as well as links to other critical work. Maslow (1996) himself frequently reflected on his own work. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985) make a case for three flat needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness – without ordering or sequence, but they also leave out needs that span a larger range of human experience, such as survival and transcendence.

25
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A common criticism of Maslow’s theory is that it failed to account for evil. I hardly claim to have a comprehensive answer, but within his framework, one way to explain bad behavior is that when people find it difficult – whether through personal inability, external conditions, or unrealistic expectations – to achieve their needs or aspirations, they act out in ways that are criminal, unethical, and even brutal. Thus, when survival is difficult, some people become savage. When achievement and esteem are not forthcoming, some people choose to cheat. When genuine self-actualization is denied, some people turn to hedonism.

26
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Hofstede (1984) lobs criticism based on the misinterpretation that self-actualization is the peak of human achievement.

27
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Maslow (1965), p. 45, writes, “The difference between the need for esteem (from others) and the need for self-esteem should be made very clear. . . . [R]eal self-esteem rests . . . on a feeling of dignity, of controlling one’s own life, and of being one’s own boss.” Rowan (1998) argues for a split into two levels of the hierarchy of needs, and I tend to agree with him here. Esteem differs from achievement or mastery, and it does seem to precede the more substantive need, which might explain why so many people seem to seek celebrity through reality TV.

28
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The quotation is from Maslow (1996), p. 31. Koltko-Rivera (2006) makes a careful argument that Maslow intended self-transcendence as a separate level, especially in his later years. The beginning of the split between self-actualization and self-transcendence is evident as early as Maslow (1961). However, Maslow continued to wrestle with whether self-transcendence is a separate category in itself, as is evident in his unpublished papers as collected by Hoffman (1996).
Maslow wrote frequently of peak experiences and transcendence, but he rarely used the term “self-transcendence.” Maslow (1968), p. vi, contains several occurrences, but as an aspect of self-actualization.

29
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One example of this critique is from sociologist Tony Watson (2008), p. 35, who writes that he fulfills his social and esteem needs before eating, or that his cousin in the army fulfills prestige needs before security. However, these cases are actually cases of advanced Maslovian development (which Maslow called “intrinsic learning” or “character learning”), where a person operating primarily out of a higher-level aspiration is more than willing to sustain a deficiency in a lower-level need, just as many people skip lunch for a job that compels them.

30
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Maslow (1943), p. 375, repeated in Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 18.

31
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Maslow himself used the word “aspiration” only twice each in Maslow (1954 [1987]) and Maslow (1971).

32
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Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 35.

33
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Robert Wright’s (2000) conception of a positive-sum return in his book
Nonzero
is an example. Psychologist David C. McClelland (1961) made a similar case over half a century ago.

34
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In
Generation Me
, psychologist Jean Twenge (2006) relates trends among those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. She finds a generation narcissistically focused on itself, but also tending toward less prejudice and greater self-confidence. These apparently conflicting traits are consistent with a focus on self-actualization, which is at once the height of selfishness and a plateau of good judgment about how to achieve selfish ends. On the other hand, it’s possible to stagnate in self-actualization, which is arguably the danger facing privileged society. This is why it’s important to acknowledge self-transcendence as a further level of human growth.

35
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When exactly a person feels ready to put aside each level of Maslow’s hierarchy is a big question, and current psychology has no easy answer to it. The accumulation of wealth, for example, can serve to satisfy survival, security, esteem, and self-actualization needs to various extents, so success at it often engenders moves toward self-transcendence. Yet it’s clear that there’s no absolute level of wealth that causes the transition. Some billionaires seem stuck on nothing but expanding their empires, while some people of very modest means seem to care for little other than self-transcendent activity. A lot seems to depend on upbringing. Like many other aspects of personality, inclinations harden as we grow into adults.

36
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Duthiers and Ellis (2013).

37
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Bales (2002).

38
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The pressing concern for survival becomes clear if you spend time with poor communities. Vivid accounts of this survival mentality occur in Boo (2012), Collins et al. (2009), and Narayan et al. (2000).

39
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Butterfield et al. (1975), p. 260. John and Abigail Adams kept up a routine correspondence when they were apart. In this letter, dated May 12, 1780, John Adams writes of the well-tended gardens he visited in Paris and Versailles with admiration and a tinge of envy. He marvels at the art and architecture of France, but suggests that the duty he has to studying the science of government precludes him from going into more detail. One wonders, given the prominent role he played, whether it was strictly duty that held him or a deep, personal aspiration.

40
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I don’t mean to suggest that changing careers is a requirement of forward movement. I highlight Agyare and Awuah as exemplars because their intrinsic growth was marked by clearly visible milestones, but the milestones are simply signposts, not a cause or a necessary result of change. It’s possible to undergo dramatic aspirational changes while holding the same job. One reason why it is so difficult to make the case for intrinsic growth is because so many of its effects are not visible, and we increasingly neglect truths not accompanied by tangible metrics.

41
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I make this claim only of the dominant paradigms of economics. Economics is a broad field, so there are, of course, economists who study changes in preferences (such as Matthew Rabin at UC Berkeley), but they are in the minority, and as far as I know, no economist studies a systematic way in which people’s preferences change as a result of psychological maturation. In a quest for the precision of the physical sciences, economists seek equations of human behavior based on measurable variables. Though nothing limits the complexity of mathematical models in theory, in practice the reality of scarce data, intractable mathematics, and an undeniable physics-envy favors oversimplification.

42
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Sandel (2012), p. 85, compiles a series of prominent contemporary economists putting incentives at the center of economic thinking: “Economics is, at root, the study of incentives” (Levitt and Dubner 2006, p. 16); “People respond to incentives” (Mankiw 2004, p. 4). In development, Mankiw’s point is reiterated verbatim by William Easterly (2001).

43
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One exception is Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, who has cobbled together neuroscience and psychology to arrive at an economic model of investing in early childhood education. See, for example, Heckman (2012).

44
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Anthropologists take pains to distance themselves from straw-man interpretations of cultural relativism set up by critics (e.g., Geertz 1984), and I apologize for the overgeneralization in this paragraph. A more nuanced treatment of anthropologists’ relationship to development appears in Lewis (2005). Nevertheless, my experience has been that many qualitative researchers loathe the very idea of societal progress and the idea that one culture can be considered superior to another, especially in any moral sense. I sympathize with the aversion to ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism, but if progress is taboo, it’s impossible to debate the best routes to
progress. It seems clear that a culture that engages in child trafficking, for example, is morally and culturally improved by ceasing it. The hard questions are not whether there can be progress or not, but what aspects of culture admit a notion of moral progress (as opposed to nonmoral differences of taste or tradition), and how cultures can engage with one another on moral progress without one culture imperially imposing its own ideas.

45
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Though economists and anthropologists both vehemently insist that they believe in individual agency – or free will – their agents supposedly respond rationally or intelligently to external circumstances, which again pushes the cause of different outcomes to different external conditions, not to different internal states.

Other social sciences have similar debates. Psychology has its person-situation debate, which pits internal personality against external situation as determinants of behavior. Sociologists talk about social structures versus individual agency. And in the public sphere, it’s become fashionable to note the “fundamental attribution error,” which says that behavior is more often a result of circumstances than of some underlying stable personality. It’s obvious, though, that behavior is caused by a complex interaction of
both
internal states and external situations. Which matters more is difficult to answer in a general way. You can contrive contexts in which one matters more than the other. It’s like asking whether an athlete’s skill or the quality of his/her equipment matter more in her performance, but that depends on the sport, on the athlete, and on the range of skill and quality being considered.