Psychology has a lofty goal - explaining, perhaps even predicting, human behavior. Can we do it? I think this picture teaches us that it is unlikely that we'll meet this goal, at least at the level of the individual's life.
This photograph is of my barn. I captured this shot to document the aftereffects of what I had seen moments before. A gust of wind "hit" the roof and, in a swirl, the snow from this one section of the barn came off. Why?
Physics can certainly shed some light on the forces acting on the snow, particularly cohesive forces between the snow crystals themselves and between the snow and the steel roof panels. All of this and much more would be relevant. However, what physicist could have told me that this section of snow would come down as it did with the next gust of wind? I think you would agree with me (and if you don't, I welcome your blog response) that no one could predict this particular outcome. I'm not even convinced that anyone could explain it, but hindsight is 20-20, and I'm sure there would be lots of plausible stories told.
Of course, these sorts of explanations and predictions are very interesting when it comes to thinking about our own lives. Not surprisingly, many of us are interested in what makes us uniquely us.
Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten
When I teach personality psychology, I borrow from some early scholars in the area to organize my thinking. I tell my students, "We're like all other people, like some other people and like no other person." I also explain that our kindergarten teachers taught us this when we did arts and crafts in class. As we carefully followed directions, folding and cutting a white sheet of paper, we constructed unique "snowflakes" - unique to us, but like all others as they were made from paper and like some others in the class in terms of shape, for example.
Beyond kindergarten: The physics of snowflakes
In "Chaos: Making a new science" (1987, Penguin Books), James Gleick writes "As a growing snowflake falls to earth, typically floating in the wind for an hour or more, the choices made by the branching tips at any instant depend sensitively on such things as the temperature, the humidity, and the presence of impurities in the atmosphere. The six tips of a single snowflake, spreading within a millimeter space, feel the same temperatures, and because the laws of growth are purely deterministic, they maintain a near perfect symmetry" (p. 311).
In this sense, snowflakes are like all other snowflakes. And, of course, snowflakes that fall as a "cohort" as part of one "snow event" or storm share similarities that snowflakes from other storms do not. They are like some other snowflakes in this sense. Cross-country skiers know this well, and they wax carefully based on the recent snowfall and its characteristics.
Ah, the chaos of life: Predicting wiggly nonlinear events
At this point we might agree that we, like snowflakes, are like all other people and some other people, but Gleick continues his account of snowflakes, ". . . the nature of turbulent air is such that any pair of snowflakes will experience very different paths. The final flake records the history of all the changing weather conditions it has experienced, and the combinations may as well be infinite" (p. 311).
In terms of Chaos Theory, Gleick adds that snowflake growth, the growth of tips of the snowflakes, the ". . . dentrites, is now known as a highly nonlinear unstable free boundary problem, meaning that models need to track a complex, wiggly boundary as it changes dynamically. . . The heart of the new snowflake model is the essence of chaos: a delicate balance between forces of stability and forces of instability; a powerful interplay of forces on atomic scales and forces on everyday scales" (p. 309).
Why evolutionary psychology falls short
There is a great deal of writing on these blogs that addresses how we are like all other people. Perhaps the most popular among these is The Scientific Fundamentalist by Satoshi Kanazawa. His postings address evolutionary theory and the processes of selection that have made us like all others, or at least that is how it would seem. In the end, however, these assertions describe everyone and no one. For example, in one of the recent postings on this blog (see Why taller people are more intelligent than shorter people), Dr. Kanazawa writes, "Taller people are on average physically more attractive than shorter people; physically more attractive people are on average more intelligent than physically less attractive people; taller people are on average more intelligent than shorter people . . ." The key phrase here is "on average" as it describes a central tendency in the data, the measured variables, but it describes no one person in particular. Probabilistically, it describes you and me, but it may not. Based on data and analyses like this, we can predict humans, on average. For most of us, this is not very satisfying, at least not satisfying enough.
Of course, the studies conducted to demonstrate the soundness of evolutionary principles never apply to everyone involved. We simply find statistically significant differences that support the trend that the theory predicts. That said, the whole point of a grand theory like that guiding evolutionary psychology is that "we're like all other people" and, of course, there is always some truth in that, just like all snow flakes on my barn and the steel panels that make up the roof are like all other snowflakes and all other steel panels of this sort.
My point is, evolutionary theory explains why we're like all other animals, even like some other animals, but it simply doesn't get to a level of analysis that speaks to individual existence. While fascinating and important to understand (we are animals after all), it falls desperately short of our desire to understand our experience of life (as human animals). It falls short of an analysis of an individual human being situated in an historical context. Perhaps we also need to think of ourselves as a nonlinear, unstable free boundary problem, not simply the survival machine for a gene.
Oh, I have opened up the proverbial can of worms here. I know that. Why? Perhaps because I just returned from a funeral where the life of one man was remembered. A gust of wind came in his own life last Friday, and he fell. No prediction was possible. No explanation focused on how he was like all others or even some others. He was unique, as are you and I. We can't lose sight of this in our psychology.
