What makes me like coffee over tea? Why do some people engage in criminal activities? What is it that makes some people a rapist? What are the sources of bullying behaviour?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find simple explanations for such complex questions? Psychology is constantly trying to explain complex behaviour. It’s not uncommon to hear explanations by psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, criminologists, and the like, usually each from their own perspective, asserting why we prefer one thing over the other, why we are repulsed by certain things, or why we behave the way we do. These explanations often invoke factors such as parenting style, genes, environment, history, culture and so on, depending on the perspective the subject has been approached from.
Arguably, explanations that closely focus on certain factors and not others serve a purpose when it comes to narrowly defined investigations. The problem is, in attempting to explain complex behaviour, we often fail prey (knowingly or unknowingly) to false dichotomies. Despite the constant warning against false dichotomies, it is common to read scientific papers making attempts, for example, to ascribe the influence of genes as opposed to environment in seeking to understand the effect of parenting on the kind of person we grow up to be.
The “person” is an extremely slippery and difficult concept to pin down. What makes me ‘me’ is extremely fuzzy (and constantly changing) to the extent that it cannot be separated from those around me, my historical background, the culture and time I am situated in, and the dynamical interactions at play. We are constantly dynamically interacting and influencing others around us, and the physical environment, as well as being influenced by these factors. My view of what constitutes a criminal behaviour for example, does not spring into being from nowhere. Rather it is an interplay of many factors, such as the currently available discourse, my political, social, economic, and geographical position in a certain society, the kind of shared of language that is available for use, as well as my family, culture and historical background.
Given that we are constantly in the process of becoming mediated by the dynamical interplay of inextricably linked factors such as culture, genes, physical environment, history, currently available discourses, local societal norms, diet and so on, attempting to separate these factors and claiming to have determined the contribution genes and/or environment makes towards complex behaviour such as criminality would be similar to having successfully separated the inside and outside of a Mobius strip.
Abeba Birhane 