Nature vs Nurture? what about passion and
discipline?
A Wall Street Journal article (“The Perils
of Believing That Talent Is Innate”, February
7-8, 2015) asked why so few philosophy professors
are women, less than a third, whereas in
molecular biology and neuroscience, half
of the professors are women. From the title,
you know it assumes political correctness
in that condoning innate abilities is a no
no. Fortunately, the article ruled out male
prejudice and oppression as the cause, something
even a liberal journalist must concede is
passe.
However, the author, Alison Gopnik, cites
a Harvard study published in Science which
found: “The more that people believes success
was due to intrinsic ability, the fewer women
and African American made it in that field.”
The wording is deceptive: it implies that
the belief of innate ability causes fewer
women and blacks to succeed in a particular
field. The Harvard study was based on interview
of professors on their opinions of which
field requires more innate ability to succeed
– highly subjective and unreliable data.
Such a study can at best generate correlation,
not causal relationship between a reported
belief of innate requirement and actual ‘making
it’ in a field. It tempts people to conclude
that the belief of innate ability needed
to study philosophy causes especially women
or an African Americans to not succeed in
philosophy. It’s the old learning-stops-at-the-level-of-expectation
idea.
Perhaps a more potent explanation is interest
and passion towards a field. It’s possible
that less women find studying philosophy
interesting than biology or neuroscience.
There is evidence that in-depth interest,
or passion, towards an activity is inborn
and cannot be easily fostered. The fact that
more boys than girls play video games and
more girls than boys like to read could be
explained by the concept of innate interest.
It is possible to train a person who has
little the passion or discipline in a task
to be master of that task, using very effective
behavioral techniques and external rewards.
In fact, that’s what try to do everyday in
school. Most students nowadays hate to write
or learn math. But we aim to make them skilled
at it through systematic teaching and motivation.
We don’t wait for the student to develop
the interest to learn before we teach. Then
if we meet a student that has the potential
to learn and the passion to learn, he or
she won’t need much teaching anyway.
The in-born ability/potential of course places
a limit on how far one can learn even under
systematic and intensive training. A developmentally
disabled person would be hard put to become
a philosophy professor. Short of this out-of-the
norm limitation, most people should be able
to succeed in most fields provided, I really
mean provided, that they are trained properly
and they exert the required amount of effort
and discipline. My violin training for my
son in the last nine years led me to conjecture
that it is possible to teach him to play
the violin very well via behavioral training,
but much harder to foster a passion to want
to hear the violin and to practice to produce
the beautiful tone. It is also hard to foster
stamina and discipline through training.
The attitude of practice-until-perfect and
the discipline to persist on boring but necessary
tasks, like practicing scales, appears to
be inborn. Some people just develop it ‘naturally’
without much structuring and external motivators,
but others, like my son, need to be prompted,
coaxed or even ‘bribed’ in order to do it
regularly. I now tend to believe this passion
for training on a complex, not immediately
gratifying activity, and the subsequent daily
discipline and stamina to perfect it, be
it music, painting, mathematics, etc., is
innate.