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Chapter 4:SEPARATE WORLDS

Folktales passed down to us from earlier times often feature a hero or heroine who was treated badly at home but who eventually left home and became a great success. Consider the story of Cinderella. In the book I had as a child, the story began as follows:

There was once a man who married for his second wife a woman who was both vain and selfish. This woman had two daughters who were as vain and selfish as she was. The man had a daughter of his own, however, who was sweet and kind and not vain at all.

The sweet, kind daughter was, of course, Cinderella. Unlike the Disney movie, this version depicts the (unnamed) stepsisters as beautiful. It was only their personalities that were ugly. In this respect, they closely resembled their mother. Cinderella presumably inherited her sweet nature fromhermother, who was dead. Dead mothers were not a rarity in the old days; as many families were broken by death as are broken today by divorce.

In a fairy tale, events are compressed. Cinderella must have suffered years of abuse from her stepmother and stepsisters. She had no recourse: her father was unwilling or unable to stand up for her, and there were no laws or agencies in those days to protect children against mistreatment. She must have learned early on that it was best to remain as inconspicuous as possible, to do what she was told, and to accept verbal and physical insults without protest. And then -- then came the ball, and the fairy godmother, and the prince.

The folk who gave us this tale ask us to accept the following premises: that Cinderella was able to go to the ball and not be recognized by her stepsisters, that despite years of degradation she was able to charm and hold the attention of a sophisticated guy like the prince, that the prince didn't recognize her when he saw her again in her own home dressed in her workaday clothing, and that he never doubted that Cinderella would be able to fulfill the duties of a princess and, ultimately, of a queen.

Preposterous? Maybe not. The whole thing works if you accept one simple idea: that children develop different selves, different personas, in different environments. Cinderella learned when she was still quite small that it was best to act meek when her stepmother was around, and to look unattractive in order to avoid arousing her jealousy. But from time to time, like all children who are not kept under lock and key, she would slip out of the cottage in search of playmates. (Theycouldn'tkeep her locked in the cottage -- there was no indoor plumbing.)

Outside the cottage things were different. Outside the cottage no one insulted Cinderella or treated her like a slave, and she discovered that she could win friends (including the kindly neighbor whom she would later refer to as "my fairy godmother") by looking pretty. Her stepsisters didn't recognize her at the ball not just because she was dressed differently: her whole demeanor was different -- her facial expressions, her posture, the way she walked and talked. They had never seen her outside-the-cottage persona. And the prince, of course, had never seen herinside-the-cottage persona, so he didn't recognize her when he called at the cottage in search of the girl who dropped the shoe. She was quite charming at the ball, though admittedly lacking in sophistication. But that, he figured, could be easily remedied.

The Two Faces of Cinderella?

Perhaps it sounds like I am describing someone with a "split personality," like the protagonist ofThe Three Faces of Eve.But what made Eve abnormal was not the fact that she had more than one personality, or even that the alternate personalities were very different. Eve's problem was that her personalities appeared and disappeared unpredictably and didn't have access to each other's memories.

Having more than one personality is not abnormal. William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, was the first psychologist to point this out. Over a hundred years ago, William described multiple personalities in normal adolescents and adults -- that is, in normalmaleadolescents and adults.

Properly speaking,a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize himand carry an image of him in their mind....But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinctgroupsof persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.

In other words, to put James's observations into current terminology, people behave differently in different social contexts. Contemporary personality theorists do not dispute this. What they argue about is whether there is any "real" personality under all these masks. If a man can be tender in one context and stern in another, which is hereally?If three different men all are tender with their children and stern with their prisoners, isn't it the situation that determines personality and not the man?

The passage from William James comes from his bookThe Principles of Psychology-- America's first psychology textbook, published in 1890 (I own a copy of it, too tattered to be valuable). Because psychology was just beginning, James had it pretty much to himself for a while, and he stuck his finger in every pie. He talked about personality, cognition, language, sensation and perception, and child development. James was the one who said -- incorrectly; as it turned out -- that the world of the newborn infant is "one great blooming, buzzing confusion."

Today, these fields of psychology are entirely separate, presided over by specialists who seldom read articles outside their own field once they've made it through graduate school. Arcane arguments about adult personality are unlikely to attract the interest of socialization researchers. The word "selves" is not in the vocabulary of most behavioral geneticists.

Which is a pity, because I think it's relevant. Indeed, I think James's observation that people behave differently in different social contexts, and the subsequent discussions about why this happens and whether there is a "real" personality underneath, contain important clues to one of the big puzzles of personality development.

Here is the puzzle. There is evidence (I told you about it in Chapters 2 and 3) that parents cannot modify the personality their child was born with, at least not in ways that can be detected after the child grows up. If that is true, how come everyone is so certain that parents do have important effects on the child's personality?

Different Places, Different Faces

Unlike Eve of the Three Faces, most people do not have multiple personalities that lack access to each other's memories. Normal people may behave differently in different social contexts, but they carry along their memories from one context to another. Nonetheless, if they learn something in one situation they do not necessarily make use of it in another.

In fact, there is a strong tendencynotto transfer the knowledge or training to new situations. According to learning theorist Douglas Detterman, there is no convincing evidence that people spontaneously transfer what they learned in one situation to a new situation, unless the new situation closely resembles the old one. Detterman points out that under-generalization may be more adaptive than overgeneralization. It is safer to assume that a new situation has new rules, and that one must determine what the new rules are, than to blithely forge ahead under the assumption that the old rules are still in effect.

At any rate, that is how babies appear to be constructed. Developmentalist Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues have done a series of experiments on the learning ability of young babies. The babies lie in a crib, looking up at a mobile hanging above them. A ribbon is tied to one of their ankles in such a way that when they kick that foot, the mobile jiggles. Six-month-old babies catch on to this very quickly: they are delighted to discover that they can control the mobile's movements by kicking their foot. Moreover, they will still remember the trick two weeks later. But if any detail of the experimental setup is changed -- if a couple of the doodads hanging from the mobile are replaced with slightly different doodads, or if the liner surrounding the crib is changed to one of a slightly different pattern, or if the crib itself is placed in a different room -- the babies will gaze up at the mobile cluelessly, as though they had never seen such a thing in their lives. Evidently babies are equipped with a learning mechanism that comes with a warning label: what you learn in one context will not necessarily work in another.

It is true: what you learn in one context will not necessarily work in another. A child who cries at home gets -- if he's lucky -- attention and sympathy. In nursery school, a child who cries too much is avoided by his peers; in grade school he is jeered at. A child who acts cute and babyish for her daddy evokes a different reaction from her classmates. Children who get laughs for their clever remarks at home wind up in the principal's office if they don't learn to hold their tongue in school. At home the squeaky wheel gets the grease; outside, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Or, as in Cinderella's case, vice versa.

Like Cinderella, most children have at least two distinct environments: the home and the world outside the home. Each has its own rules of behavior, its own punishments and payoffs. What made Cinderella's situation unusual was only that her two environments -- and hence her two personalities -- were unusually divergent. But children from ordinary middle-class American families also behave differently inside the home and outside of it. I remember when my children were in elementary school and my husband and I used to go to Back-to-School Night to meet their teachers. Year after year we would see parents talking to their child's teacher and coming away shaking their heads in disbelief. "Was she talking aboutmykid?" they would say, making it sound like a joke. But sometimes the teacher really seemed to be talking about a child who was a stranger to them. More often than not, this child was better behaved than the one they knew. "But he's so obstinate at home!" "At home she never shuts up for a minute!"

Children -- even preschoolers -- are remarkably good at switching from one personality to another. Perhaps they can do this more easily than older people. Have you ever listened to a couple of four-year-olds playing House?

Stephie (in her normal voice, to Caitlin):I'll be the mommy.

Stephie (in her unctuous mommy voice):All right, Baby, drink your bottle and be a good little baby.

Stephie (whispering):Pretend you don't like it.

Caitlin (in her baby voice):Don't want botta!

Stephie (in her unctuous mommy voice):Drink it, sweetheart. It's good for you!

Stephie plays three parts here: author/producer, stage director, and the starring role of Mommy. As she switches back and forth between them, she gives each one a different voice.

Context and Behavior

The "bottle" that Stephie was pretending to feed to Caitlin was a cylindrical wooden block. Developmentalists are interested in this kind of pretense because it appears to be an advanced, symbolic form of behavior, and yet it appears remarkably early -- before the age of two. Much has been written about the environmental influences that make pretense appear earlier or later; not surprisingly, attention has focused on the role of the child's mother. Researchers have found that a toddler engages in more advanced types of fantasy when the mother joins in the fantasy with the child.

But there is a catch. Greta Fein and Mary Fryer, specialists in children's play, reviewed the research and concluded that, although young children do play at a more advanced level when they are playing with their mothers, "the hypothesis that mothers contribute to subsequent play sophistication receives no support." When the mother encourages the child to engage in elaborate fantasies, the child can do it; but later, when the child is playing alone or with a playmate, it makes no difference what kinds of games she played with her mother.

Other developmentalists attacked this conclusion. Fein and Fryer responded by saying that they "did not intend to disparage the importance of adult caregivers in the lives of young children" and that they hadn't previously realized "how deep is the belief" in the omnipotence of parents. But they stuck to their guns. The evidence indicates that mothers influence children's play only while the children are playing with the mothers. "When theories don't work," Fein and Fryer counseled, "chuck 'em or change 'em." My view precisely.

Learning to do things with Mommy is all well and good, but the infant does not automatically transfer this learning to other contexts. This is a wise policy, because what is learned with Mommy might turn out to be useless in other contexts -- or worse than useless. Consider, for example, a baby I will call Andrew. Andrew's mother was suffering from postpartum depression, an affliction that is not uncommon in the first few months after childbirth. She was able to feed Andrew and change his diapers, but she didn't play with him or smile at him very much. By the time he was three months old, Andrew too was showing signs of depression. When he was with his mother he smiled infrequently and was less active than babies of that age usually are -- his face was serious, his movements muted. Fortunately, Andrew didn't spend all his time with his mother: he spent part of it at a day nursery, and the caregiver at the nursery was not depressed. Watch Andrew with his nursery caregiver and you will see a different baby, smiley and active. The somber faces and muted movements common in the babies of depressed mothers are "specific to their interactions with their depressed mothers," according to researchers who studied babies like Andrew.

Different behaviors in different social contexts have also been noted in older infants, infants of walking age. Researchers have studied how toddlers behave at home (by asking their mothers to fill out questionnaires) and at day-care centers (by observing them there or by asking the caregivers at the center) and found that the two descriptions of the children's behavior do not agree. "There exists the possibility that the toddler's actual behavior differs systematically in the home and day-care settings," admitted one researcher.

Sisters and Brothers

Granted that what children learn from interacting with their mothers might not help them get along with their peers in nursery school, but surely what they learn from interacting with theirsiblingsshould be transferable? You would think so -- I would have thought so too. But on second thought, children are probably better off starting from scratch with their peers. The child who dominates her younger brother at home may be the smallest one in her nursery school class; the dominated younger brother may turn out to he the largest and strongest in his. Here is what one team of researchers has to say on this topic:

There was no evidence of individual differences in sibling interactions carrying over into peer interactions....Even the second-born child, who has experienced years in a subordinate role with an older sibling, can step into a dominant role [with a peer].

And this from another:

Few significant associations were found between measures of children's sibling relationships and characteristics of their peer relationships....Children who were observed to be competitive and controlling to their siblings were reported by their mothers to have positive friendships. Children whose mothers reported that they had hostile sibling relationships received higher scores on friendship closeness....Indeed, we should not expect competitive and controlling behaviour toward a younger sibling to be necessarily associated with negative and problematic behaviour with friends.

Unless they happen to have a twin, children's relationships with their siblings are unequal. In most cases the elder is the leader, the younger is the follower. The elder attempts to dominate, the younger to avoid domination. Peer relationships are different. Peers are more equal, and often more compatible, than siblings. Among American children, conflict and hostility erupt far more frequently among siblings than among peers.

Conflict between siblings is the theme of Frank Sulloway's bookBorn to Rebel,which I mentioned in the previous chapter. In Sulloway's view, siblings are born to be rivals, fighting to get their fair share -- or, in the case of firstborns, more than their fair share -- of family resources and parental love. Children do this, he says, by specializing in different things: if one niche in the family is filled, the next child must find some other way of winning parental attention and approval.

I do not disagree with that. Nor do I doubt that people often drag their sibling rivalries along with them to adulthood and sometimes to the grave. My Aunt Gladys and my Uncle Ben hated each other all their lives. What I doubt is that people drag the emotions and behaviors they acquire in their sibling relationships to their other relationships. With anyone other than her brother Ben, my Aunt Gladys was as sweet and kind as the Cinderella in my childhood storybook.

The patterns of behavior that are acquired in sibling relationships neither help us nor hinder us in our dealings with other people. They leave no permanent marks on our character. If they did, researchers would be able to see their effects on personality tests given to adults: firstborns and laterborns would have somewhat different personalities in adulthood. As I reported in the previous chapter (also see Appendix 1), birth order effects do not turn up in the majority of studies of adult personality. They do, however, turn up in the majority of studies of one particular kind: the kind in which subjects' personalities are judged by their parents or siblings. When parents are asked to describe their children, they are likely to say that their firstborn is more serious, methodical, responsible, and anxious than their laterborns. When a younger brother or sister is asked to describe the firstborn, a word that turns up is "bossy." What we're getting is a picture of the way the subject behaves at home.

At home there are birth order effects, no question about it, and I believe that is why it's so hard to shake people's faith in them. If you see people with their parents or their siblings, you do see the differences you expect to see. The oldest does seem more serious, responsible, and bossy. The youngest does behave in a more carefree fashion. But that's how they act when they're together. These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don't even drag them to nursery school.

Never Leave Home Without It

My favorite example of a failure to transfer behavior from one context to another involves picky eating -- a common complaint among the parents of young children. You would think a picky eater in one setting would be a picky eater in another, wouldn't you? Yes, it has been studied, and no, that's not what the researchers found. One third of the children in a Swedish sample were picky eaterseitherat home or in school, but only 8 percent were picky inbothplaces.

Ah, but what about that 8 percent? It is time to admit that I have been misleading you: the correlation between behavior at home and behavior outside the home may be low, but it's not zero. I mentioned another example in Chapter 2: the children who behaved obnoxiously with their parents but not with their peers, or vice versa. The correlation between obnoxious behavior in the two settings was only 19, which means that if you saw how a child behaved with her parents you would be unlikely to predict correctly how she would behave with her peers. Still, the correlation was not zero; in fact, ir was statistically significant.

Significant, but surprisingly low. Surprising because, after all, it was thesame childbehaving in both contexts -- the same child with thesame genes.We know from behavioral genetic research that personality traits such as disagreeableness and aggressiveness have heritabilities of around 50 percent. That means a sizable portion of a child's personality (the exact percentage isn't important) is built in, innate, not acquired through experience.Children who have a built-in tendency to be disagreeable take this tendency with them wherever they go, from one social context to another. What they've learned may be tied to the context it was acquired in, but what they were born with they cannot leave behind. The child who is a picky eater both at home and at school may have food allergies or a delicate digestive system. Thus, the fact that some children are picky both at home and at school, and some children are obnoxious both with their parents and with their peers, could be due to direct genetic effects.

Indirectgenetic effects -- the effects of the effects of the genes -- can also lead to a carryover of behavior from one context to another. Cinderella's case was unusual: her prettiness put her in danger whenever she was within striking distance of her stepmother. Only in the world outside the cottage was her prettiness an asset. Most pretty children find their prettiness an asset wherever they go. Most homely children learn that homeliness is a disadvantage in every social context. Perhaps some of the children who were obnoxious both with their parents and with their peers were physically unattractive children who had given up trying to get their way by being pleasant, because it didn't work with anyone. Or perhaps they were born with unpleasant dispositions, which made their dealings with all sorts of people problematic. A disagreeable temperament can lead to trouble both directly and indirectly: directly because it makes the child respond unfavorably to other people, indirectly because it makes other people respond unfavorably to the child.

Code-Switching

The carryover of behavior from one context to another due to genetic effects is a nuisance for me -- it gets in the way of the point I am trying to make. I am trying to convince you that children learn separately, in each social context, how to behave in that context. But social behavior is complicated. It is determined partly by characteristics people are born with, partly by what they experience after they are born. The inborn part goes with them wherever they go and thus tends to blur the distinctions between social contexts. To solve this problem I will turn to a social behavior that's acquired entirely through experience: language.

Perhaps I'd better qualify that statement. Language is acquired through experience; yet it is also innate. It is one of the things that we inherit from our ancestors but that does not vary among normal members of our species, like lungs and eyes and the ability to walk erect. Every human baby born with a normal brain is equipped with the ability and desire to learn a language. The environment merely determineswhichlanguage will be learned.

In North America and Europe, we take it for granted that we must teach our babies how to communicate with language; indeed, we consider that to be one of a parent's important jobs. We start the language-learning lessons early, talking to our babies the minute they're out of the womb, if not before, We encourage their coos and babbles and make a big deal out of their "mamas" and "dadas." We ask them questions and await their replies; if they don't reply we answer the questions ourselves. If they make a grammatical error we rephrase their poorly formed phrase into proper English (or proper whatever). We speak to them in short, clear phrases about things they're interested in.

Thus encouraged, not to say prodded, our babies start talking when they're barely a year old and are speaking in sentences when they're barely two. By the age of four they're competent speakers of English (or whatever).

Now I ask you to imagine a child who goes outside her home for the first time at the age of four and discovers -- as Cinderella did -- that out there everything is different. Only in this case, what's different is that everyone is speaking a language she can't understand, and no one can understandherlanguage. Will she be surprised? Probably not, judging from the reaction of the babies who learned to jiggle the mobile by kicking one foot. Change the liner surrounding the crib and they're in a different world. They assume that the new world has new rules, yet to be learned.

Children of immigrant parents, like the kids of the Russian couple who ran the rooming house in Cambridge (described in Chapter 1), are in exactly that situation. They learn things at home -- most conspicuously a language but other things as well -- that prove to be useless outside the home. Unfazed, they learn the rules of their other world. They learn, if necessary, a new language.

Children have a great desire to communicate with other children, and this desire serves as a powerful incentive to learn the new language. A psycholinguist tells the story of a four-year-old boy from the United States, hospitalized in Montreal, trying to talk to the little girl in the next bed. When his repeated attempts to talk to her in English proved futile, he tried the only French words he knew, fleshed out with a few nonsense syllables: "Aga doodoo bubu petit garçon?" An Italian father living in Finland with his Swedish-speaking wife and son tells of the time he took his three-year-old son to a park and the boy wanted to play with some Finnish-speaking children. He ran up to them shouting the only words of Finnish he had learned: "Yksi, kaksi, kolme...yksi, kaksi, kolme" -- Finnish for "One, two, three."

This fools-rush-in approach is practiced mainly by younger children; older ones are more likely to start off with a least-said-soonest-mended strategy. Researchers studied a seven-and-a-half-year-old boy -- I'll call him Joseph -- who moved with his parents from Poland to rural Missouri. In school, Joseph listened quietly for several months, watching the other children for clues to what the teacher was saying. With neighborhood friends he was more willing to risk making mistakes and he started practicing his English with them almost immediately. At first Joseph's speech sounded like that of a toddler -- "I today school" -- but within a few months he was speaking serviceable English and after two years he was using it like a native, with hardly a trace of an accent. The accent eventually went away entirely, even though he continued to speak Polish at home.

It is common for immigrant children to use their first language at home and their second language outside the home. Give them a year in the new country and they are switching back and forth between their two languages as easily as I switch back and forth between programs on my computer. Step out of the house -- click on English. Go back in the house -- click on Polish. Psycholinguists call it code-switching.

Cinderella's alternate personas are an example of another kind of code-switching. Step out of the cottage -- look pretty, act charming. Go back in -- look homely, act humble. If she had also spoken one language in her home and another language outside it, as Joseph did, that would have been just another difference between life inside the cottage and life outside it. Mastering bilingualism is probably easier for a child than switching back and forth from looking pretty to looking homely.

Code-switching is sort of like having two separate storage tanks in the mind, each containing what was learned in a particular social context. According to Paul Kolers, a psycholinguist who studied bilingual adults, access to a given tank may require switching to the language used in that context. As an example, he mentioned a colleague of his who had moved from France to the United States at the age of twelve. This man does his arithmetic in French, his calculus in English. "Mental activities and information learned in one context are not necessarily available for use in another," Kolers explained. "They often have to be learned anew in the second context, although perhaps with less time and effort."

It is not only book-learning that is stored in separate tanks. "Many bilingual people," reported Kolers, "say that they think differently and respond with different emotions to the same experience in their two languages." If they use one language exclusively at home, the other exclusively outside the home, the home language becomes linked to the thoughts and emotions experienced at home, the other to the thoughts and emotions experienced outside the home. At home Cinderella thought of herself as worthless, outside her home she found that she could win friends and influence people. A bilingual Cinderella might still be scrubbing floors if the prince had addressed her in the language used in her cottage.

Personality theorists don't pay much attention to language. And yet, language, accent, and vocabulary are aspects of social behavior, just as "personality traits" such as agreeableness and aggressiveness are. Like other aspects of social behavior, the language a person uses is sensitive to context, and this is as true for monolingual speakers as it is for bilingual ones. William James said that a person "shows a different side of himself" in different social contexts and gave as his first example the youth who swears like a pirate when he's with his friends but is "demure enough before his parents and teachers." A high school student tells this anecdote about one of his classmates:

A girl at my school was walking down the hall and remembered she forgot something.

"Oh shoot!" she exclaimed.

As she looked around and saw her friends she said, "I mean oh shit."

The girl's parents and teachers make similar adjustments in their verbal behavior. They do not use the same vocabulary or sentence structure when they're talking to a teenager as when they're talking to a two-year-old. They do not use the Same vocabulary or sentence structure when they're talking to their automobile mechanic as when they're talking to their doctor.

Though it is a social behavior, language has the advantage of being free of the genetic complications that plag

Excerpted from The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris
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The Nurture Assumption; Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

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