The Welfare Trait by Adam Perkins

Author:Adam Perkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

7

Personality as a Product of Nature and Nurture

So far in the book we have seen evidence that low scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness constitute the ‘employment-resistant’ personality profile. We have seen that the employment-resistant personality profile is over-represented amongst welfare claimants. We have also seen evidence that welfare claimants on average have more children than employed citizens, as well as evidence that welfare generosity is at least partly responsible for this reproductive difference. If we accept that personality runs in families, then a welfare state that causes claimants to have more children on average than employed citizens risks proliferating the employment-resistant personality profile.

This is my theory of welfare-induced personality mis-development – what I label the ‘welfare trait’ theory – but it only holds true if personality is transmitted from parents to offspring. If personality did not run in families, then the children of individuals with employment-resistant personalities would be just as likely to turn out to be solid citizens as the offspring of solid citizens and vice versa.

We saw evidence in Chapter 5 that childhood neglect appears to be the active ingredient in the environmental transmission of employment-resistant personality characteristics. We saw in Chapter 6 that selective-breeding experiments in non-human animals demonstrate that personality characteristics can be transmitted genetically from parents to offspring. However, there are concerns that psychological models created in non-human animals are too simple to be valid in humans (for example, Matthews, 2008). The purpose of this chapter is to summarise evidence that human personality characteristics are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors.

Circumstantial support for the idea that dysfunctional personality characteristics are transmitted from parents to children is provided by the existence of the concept of ‘problem families’. For example, Sheffield, Wright and Lunn (1971) followed up the offspring of 108 problem families and estimated that at least 250 new problem families would be created by them. I have already described in detail some of the research on problem families by Tonge and colleagues (1975). I have also mentioned that in 1981 there was an attempt to assess transmission of problem family status by tracking down and assessing the work records and other important variables of the offspring of the 66 families whose comparison they had published in 1975. The researchers (Lunn, Greathead & McLaren; W. L. Tonge had died in 1976) managed to obtain complete information on 16 sons and 18 daughters from the problem families and 13 sons and 12 daughters from the comparison families.

Overall, this follow-up of the 1975 study revealed a pattern of results that fits the idea of transmission of personality characteristics from parents to offspring: six of the sons of the problem families were unemployed whereas none of the sons of the comparison families were unemployed. In the daughters, the pattern was similar but less extreme: ten of the problem family daughters were unemployed compared to five of the daughters of the comparison families. In keeping with the idea that the employment-resistant personality profile has an effect on social

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