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Claire Lehmann is an Australian publisher and journalist who founded the online magazine Quillette in 2015. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Quillette and contributes regularly to The Australian newspaper.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Claire Lehmann discuss the psychology behind cancellations and conformity, the impact of psychological sex differences on career choices, and how much our genetics influence how we see the world.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You're somebody who has been critical of a lot of the woke excesses in the social sciences and, increasingly, our society as a whole, since the founding of Quillette and before. You're also one of the few really consistent philosophically liberal voices who hasn't been captured by your audience or captured by critics in such a way that you stick with your tribe no matter what. You've been taking some heat from the right on social media, especially on X, both when you were defending some of Australia's COVID policies during the pandemic and now for your very clear criticisms of Donald Trump.
What does it take in these moments—when it's tempting to go with what your audience wants you to do or expects you to do—to stand up for political principles when, frankly, many people don’t do that?
Claire Lehmann: Well, I'm an Australian and I founded Quillette back in 2015. I wasn't an academic but I was a post-grad student at the time and I noticed that the social sciences and my discipline, psychology, were being skewed due to political bias. So, I had an interest in how politics was affecting academia and scholarship in particular. When I started Quillette, I had academics writing for me and they were of the heterodox variety. They were putting forward ideas that were not popular in the media and were sometimes completely suppressed inside academia itself; things like biosocial criminology, sex differences in neuroscience, sex differences in psychology, and so on. It didn't take long until we were receiving stories of people being completely canceled, fired for their views, or mobbed online and so it just so happened that founding Quillette dovetailed with this explosion in cancellation episodes.
We became the go-to publication for people who were suffering from these horrible experiences and there were so many of them. I think they've died down now, thankfully. But people would be cancelled just for raising an awkward question in a theatre group about transgenderism, for example, or something like that. There were artists, scholars—people working in left-leaning milieus—suffering the consequences of illiberalism, this mob mentality that became popular in the years of 2018, 2019, and particularly 2020.
Mounk: To what extent did you foresee this? When you started to focus on some of those things in your own writing and in Quillette, did you think that we were at the beginning of this rapid development that is going to get worse and gain more power? Or were you just worried about what you were already observing in your corner of the world, like psychology and the social sciences, and got somewhat lucky (or unlucky for the world) in getting in on the ground floor? As for myself, I started worrying about this relatively early on. I wrote about what I called Sokal Squared, the very funny attempt by Helen Pluckrose and some others to write these completely absurd social science papers that they managed to place in academic journals. But, I think that was a good number of years after you were starting to talk about this. There's always some element of getting lucky and some element of having foresight, but, to what extent do you think you really were driven to do this because you saw this coming and to what extent did that take you by surprise?
Lehmann: I think I was taken by surprise by the volume and the ferocity of the cancellations and the illiberalism around the years of 2018, 2019 and 2020. I was also taken by surprise by the pushback against us—Quillette as a publication and me in particular. I had been concerned about bad ideas in the academy for a long time. Before I studied psychology, I did an English degree and I was very familiar with Foucault, post-structuralism and other fashionable theories. I didn't study critical theory at university—that came after my time, but I was very familiar with postmodernism, the denigration of objective truth and empirical investigation. I thought that these philosophies were nihilistic and could only lead to a bad place. When I saw illiberalism in the culture, particularly in American culture, gaining momentum, I was surprised—like in 2020, when business communities all over the United States started putting out statements in favor of BLM when riots were happening across major cities in the United States.
There were lots of things that surprised me, even though I was very familiar with these bad ideas. I'm familiar with how conformity takes over and people do irrational things because lots of other people are doing them. I was surprised when I first started Quillette and I started publishing academics who were putting forward some basic ideas such as genetics having an impact on who we are as people, the fact that genetics matters and people were calling me a eugenicist or a Nazi. I thought that there must be something in American culture in particular that is hostile to some of these basic facts that we get taught in Australian universities. When I was at university, it wasn't controversial to learn that intelligence is partially hereditary. But then, when I spoke to American academics, they told me that American students don't learn that in their coursework. It's controversial.
Mounk: It's interesting to see where the taboos lie and how they've evolved. One of the questions I have is whether the particular histories and political cultures of places produce the taboos, or whether there's a demand for taboos because of the desire for cancellations. So, one way of thinking about this is that questions of race are, for obvious reasons, particularly sensitive in the United States given the particular history that America has. Even though the ideas that you're referring to are primarily about genetic inheritance at the individual level, there may be this fear that if we acknowledge what is completely uncontroversial in the literature—which is that, on average, parents who are much more intelligent as measured by IQ tests are going to have children who are of more than average intelligence, with some reversion to the mean—that might somehow then be used to also argue the same thing at the group level, where the political taboo is easier to understand. But there's also a theory which says that actually, it's not driven by any specific things in the culture. It’s really about the demand for having taboos so that we can go after people.
I was thinking about how, at one time in America, it was all about race. You could get canceled and be told that you're a racist. In one case, a famous food writer criticized two women who both happened to be Asian American. The nature of the criticism wasn't really connected to any negative stereotypes about Asian Americans. But there was enough to say, hang on a second, perhaps this person is racist and they're going to get canceled. She effectively was fired from the New York Times or at least never wrote for the New York Times again.
At the same time, trans issues had this incredible salience in the United Kingdom. That was really the third rail in Britain. It seemed to me at the time that what was happening didn’t mean that Britain has a particular history that makes trans issues more salient there than they are in the United States. In fact, now trans issues have become more salient in the United States. This is likely not because the race issues are in any way resolved—they likely never will be given American history—but because, after four or five years of that being the absolute center of obsession it naturally seeped into the background and so there's a need for a new arena of battle. But in Britain where the race thing wasn't as available, the trans topic took up more space.
Lehmann: Yeah, and you're probably familiar with Musa al-Gharbi's thesis that a lot of this stuff is about intra-elite competition for status when a lot of people with advanced degrees or post-secondary qualifications are downwardly mobile. So, if you're a master's graduate in English literature and you're finding it difficult to get a job, maybe you can secure a position by claiming that someone who already works at your university or media institution is racist. So, it's about fighting over limited resources. Is that what you mean when you say people are searching for taboos?
Mounk: I think that can be one of the explanations. There are various levels of how self-conscious that needs to be. There's Rob Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs, which in some of his formulations I think have a slightly conspiratorial tone, and in others I think much less so. When you push him on it, I don't think he really believes in the more conspiratorial version. He does suggest at one point in his memoir that his classmates at Yale who are talking about the evils of capitalism and turning around to apply to Goldman perhaps think—at some level, in the back of their minds—that that's a good way of making sure they don't have too many competitors. There's the broader question about how you gain cultural currency. I think that is the smarter version of that, which both Henderson, I think, defends and perhaps in a different way, al-Gharbi does as well.
In your PhD program in English literature, how do you show that you are the most groundbreaking, radical, politically engaged and organic intellectual? It's by going further and further into a recherché and, frankly, into silly theory. I wonder whether it is also in response to some emotional needs. If you have a need to be in a moral community that you feel is pure, where you are demonstrating the purity of your moral community and the superiority of your own moral standing by finding sinners, expelling them, tarring and feathering them, and flogging them in the town square, then you need pre-written or ad hoc rules which you can accuse them of having broken. It seems to me that that's the main thing that's going on here.
Lehmann: I find that explanation the most persuasive myself. Just through anecdotal experience, the person who is able to separate out morality from accuracy is a surprisingly rare person. So, being able to decouple what is true from what is good doesn't come naturally to us. We have to be trained to think that way. It's just very natural for people to confuse their moral outlook with the way the world should be. Any kind of facts or theories or ideas that run contrary to the way they think the world should be is deemed as threatening or taboo and worthy of censure.
Mounk: I was thinking about this when I was teaching about questions of democracy, identity, diversity and so on. Some of the readings from my course were ones that I expected to be contested and controversial. I obviously assigned readings on both sides and really encouraged the students to have a good debate. Then, some of the readings took me by surprise in that the students had real resistance to them. I can mention two of those. One of them was a very classic book on African politics that asks the question about how we should think about a democracy in a deeply ethnically divided place. You have pretty good democratic institutions in a stylized way, let's say the perfect institutions. There's no disadvantage to the opposition. You have a free press. You're not jailing opposition leaders or anything like that. But it's a society in which one ethnic group makes up 55% of the population and the other ethnic group makes up 45%. Ethnic group A always wins and they always have all of the key cabinet positions. The regions of the country where they're hugely overrepresented get a huge share of the funding and therefore have more economic development. It's a democracy based on the simplest idea of what a democracy is, but it obviously seems not to live up to one of the core promises of democracy. That's an interesting paradox.
But the students I had in this particular course just did not want to engage with that. They said that there's no country like that. Of course, it's a stylized example. No country is exactly like that. There's plenty of countries that are like that to some extent. A good number of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, but others, for example, are in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Europe and other parts of the world. Ethnic politics, unfortunately, is a very real presence in various ways, on virtually every continent.
To me, that was an interesting example. That wasn't woke exactly, in that it doesn't exactly touch on the hot-button issues of the culture wars over the last 10 years. But it did feel to me like a refusal by some of those students—not all of the students of course—to engage with facts that in their mind might require them to come to conclusions they want to resist. Now, I think that there are often ways to resist those conclusions in those circumstances. There are ways to take this seriously as a challenge to democracy and not to come up with the idea that either democracy is doomed or that multi-ethnic societies won't ever work. But I think they felt that if they accepted this empirical premise, they might be pushed towards a normative conclusion they really don't want. And the easiest way around that is just to refuse the empirical premise.
Lehmann: I think that's quite a common outlook. It's not a conscious one, it's just a difficulty that many people have in separating out their moral feelings, or their emotional response to what they think a good society looks like, from reality, If I look at it from a psychological point of view, perhaps personality traits such as openness to experience mediate that relationship. Perhaps it's not a matter of intelligence but one of being open to new ideas. Perhaps people very high in conventionality struggle to update their moral worldview when they're confronted with challenging facts. I think it must be a psychological issue.
Mounk: That is interesting and I am convinced by some of the psychological research that correlates those traits with political behavior. There's one interesting study that made the rounds a number of years ago, which suggested that people who are high in the dark personality triad—narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy—are also more likely to be drawn to political extremes on both the far right and the far left. Some woke politics may be not driven by a genuine desire to undo injustices, but actually by the search for an excuse to punish people for heterodoxy and for deviance from the in-group norm. I was initially a little bit skeptical about this because there are so many psychology papers that don't replicate.
But there's actually, I think, a convincing replication of that that came out subsequently, perhaps a year or so ago now, which also had some interesting things to say about the role of sadism in this: part of this is wanting to engage in sadistic behaviors and being drawn towards online spaces that give you an excuse for that. This is something—I argued in an article called The Cruelty is the Point—that platforms like Bluesky can very easily fall afoul of.
Now, it's interesting to wonder whether the behavior I experienced in the case of these students would be correlated to broader Big Five personality scores, like openness and experience. I can see why it might be. I can see that the logic here is that if you're just quite rigid in your worldview and you're very threatened when you think your worldview might be undermined, you're going to resist that. Of course, there might be a countervailing factor here. The kind of political communities in which some of those far left views are popular also tend to be ones that are actually quite open to experience, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that those people are more likely to be drawn to study in certain kinds of universities, to live in big cities and so on. At least they would think of themselves as being very open to experiences. So it'd be super fascinating to see whether that hypothesis holds up.
Lehmann: It would be. But remember that you can be a conformist even in a social milieu that sees itself as non-conformist.
Mounk: Yeah, of course. But the question is, what is the psychological profile of the people in that milieu? Are people who are open to experience more likely to be drawn to these milieus that claim that they're super nonconformist, even if they end up being conformist-nonconformity? Perhaps it's that within the nonconformist milieu, the super conformist people are the ones who are not open to experience. But whether they're less open to experience than the average person who isn't drawn to the nonconformist milieu in the first place is a different question perhaps.
Lehmann: Right. You mentioned the dark triad traits. An interesting finding: I think it's been replicated that competitive victimhood signaling correlates with narcissism. So, people who present themselves as victims and use victimhood to gain social or cultural currency do tend to have, on average, more narcissistic traits, which I think is fascinating. It resonates with my anecdotal experience.
Mounk: It seems to be so to me as well. What would you say are some topics that, 10 years ago when you founded Quillette, were outside the realm of polite discourse, which now rightly have actually reached a broader audience and have been more broadly understood? And what do you think are some areas where there is a solid academic basis for believing in an idea or for taking it seriously as a candidate for consideration, where taboo still holds, or where we're still not willing to actually engage with those ideas?
Lehmann: I was very fascinated with psychological sex differences 10 years ago and still am. Surprisingly, that area of research was somewhat stymied within the academy, within psychology and particularly within neuroscience, because it was seen as having the potential to justify sexism. For example, if we look at neuroscience, we can see the brain activity on fMRI scans as being slightly different between men and women. There were some scholars who argued that that would justify women being excluded from the highest realms of economic and political activity.
This is very second-wave feminism; this idea that any differences between men and women would automatically lead to women being excluded or not given fair opportunities. But coming from my generation, it seemed silly and old fashioned to me to suppress or to frown upon any kind of empirical research for that reason. It just seemed self-defeating. In particular, as a woman, I was interested in this question. I actually want to know how my psychology, my personality, or my brain function may differ on average from men. It was just a fascinating question to me. I read all of the papers that I could and I spoke to scholars.
It was really heartbreaking to hear how scholars felt maligned and name-called as sexist for trying to study this very important topic. We know now that it's very important, particularly in neuroscience, for things like drug dosages. We know that men and women are sensitive to different drugs at different levels. But because it wasn't seen as important for female brains to be studied, women have just been receiving the male level of dosage for many drugs for decades. So there are real-world harms that come from stymieing research of this kind. Now I think the culture has shifted and more and more younger women are coming through, saying that they are interested in this topic and need to know about it. That older generation of academics, who are heavily influenced by the second-wave feminist ideas that men and women are interchangeable, are retiring and they're less powerful within the academy. So, I think it's a generational thing.
Mounk: That's very interesting. What are some of the findings in that literature that you think are true or that at least have some strong support? I think many listeners to this podcast probably do come from the starting point that men and women are, of course, different in all kinds of ways, but in the most important ways, our brains work the same way. We are all capable of reading the same text, of debating the same questions about the world and so on. The resistance to the idea that there are those biological differences obviously comes both from how long that fundamental equality has been denied and from the recognition that you can talk about the news and debate philosophy and talk about the other things that you’re interested in with your male as well as your female friends, and why should there be a difference? So, having read so much of the literature, where would you say, well, yes, but... here are some interesting differences that actually help us make sense of the world?
Lehmann: Well, there's much more overlap than there is difference. We know a lot more about psychological differences than we do about neuroscientific research and neuroscientific differences, because that research is in its infancy. But it is plausible that the differences we see in psychology will map onto neuroscience. So in psychology, obviously, one of the biggest differences is sexuality and sexual behavior. That's been established for decades through research done by David Buss in evolutionary psychology. When we talk about sexual differences, it's differences in sex drive, how many sexual partners we want to have over a lifetime, how engaged we are with short-term versus long-term mating. Men and women overlap in a lot of these areas, but there are differences on average. A particularly interesting area is personality psychology. Women tend to be, on average, more agreeable than men. That makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, because to be agreeable means to be a little bit more averse to conflict. That would be adaptive in a situation where you're looking after young children. So, to be agreeable means that you're a little bit more easily exploited. Anyone who's observed mothers with young children knows that young children love to exploit their mothers. So it would have been adaptive for women to develop a more agreeable personality on average.
But I think the difference in agreeableness explains a lot of variance that we see in occupational preferences. I'm an entrepreneur and I work in business. I'm a minority when it comes to founders. I have had an office in the Sydney Startup Hub and I meet a lot of founders. They tend to be mostly male. And in the business world, people will try and exploit you. If they see that you're making money, they'll try and get a chunk of it. They'll try and exploit you. They'll try and cut a deal that is not in your favor. There's a lot of zero-sum activity. It's easy for me to see how someone who is more agreeable than me wouldn't thrive in that kind of environment. So, from my point of view, it's understandable why there aren't more female founders, for example. When it comes to brain function and the neuroscience of sex differences, this research is still in its very early stages. I can't say with much confidence what the differences actually are. There's a great neuroscientist called Larry Cahill who has been investigating this question for decades. He does find that there are differences in the brain, in the structure and activity that would map onto personality differences, and subtle differences have meaningful behavioral manifestations.
Mounk: One of the things that I always find interesting in these kinds of discussions is not just that political goals end up taking precedence over scientific curiosity, but also that people have a very mistaken intuitive model of how best to serve the political goals. So, let's say that you are concerned about the fact that female founders are underrepresented in the tech world or in startups more broadly. You're trying to solve that. I think if people hear that perhaps women tend to be more agreeable and that is one of the things that results in them being underrepresented in that world—there’s the possibility of them hearing, hang on a second, this seems to give a natural biological explanation for what is going on. So then, perhaps it justifies it. Or perhaps, they'll want to send women back into the kitchen and say, your job is in the home.
I think that that overestimates the agency of academics, writers, intellectuals, and so on. It thinks that naming an idea—if it is true, I haven't read the research, I don't know what it is—and being open about it somehow is going to have this huge impact, in part because the kinds of people who are engaged in this want to flatter themselves into having a huge impact in the world.
At the same time, I think they give too little weight to the idea that, well, that's one of the things that's going on and perhaps there are fixes around that. Whether that's training programs or ways of changing some of the rules around startups that might actually make being disagreeable less important to being a startup founder, that might be a good thing. That might also encourage some men who are more agreeable to be startup funders, and they too may have a good contribution to make. Also, perhaps if we select successful startup founders less on being disagreeable, that might have all kinds of positive impacts on how they run the giant businesses that come out of that.
Lehmann: Exactly. I think it comes back to this deep-seated cultural narrative that people are blank slates. Language does influence the culture, we know that. But as you would know in the humanities, it's just conventional wisdom that discourses produce power. So if you're having these discussions around personality traits, or if you're giving scientific labels to clusters of human behavior, that somehow this will then manifest in the world and be self-fulfilling is a Foucaultian idea. I think there's a hesitancy from some intellectuals and academics to engage with scientific literature because they think it will then shape the world in ways that they don't want. Quite literally, they think that the labels will manifest more strongly in people. I think that's a false idea.
Mounk: Let's touch more broadly on this idea of the blank slate. One of the objections that came to my mind that I'm sure many people will have when they hear something like research on agreeableness is precisely that. Yes, of course, if you give a personality test to women today, women are going to be more agreeable than men. I think probably few people have real resistance to accepting that part of it. A lot of resistance is going to come by people saying, But that's because of sexist norms in society. That's because women from a young age are trained to be agreeable. That's because if a four-year-old boy stands up for himself, people applaud and say, good, you're going to grow up to be such a self-confident man. And when a four-year-old girl stands up for herself in that way, adults might say, be careful, you're being a little bit bitchy, or you're really not being very feminine, and you shouldn't be so unpleasant to people.
What do you think? Is there reason to think that some of these differences aren't just conventional or just about our social norms? And more broadly, why is it that we tend to have a preference for explanations that assume that sex or other differences are based on contingent social norms when, I believe, in your view they are often more biologically hardwired?
Lehmann: The reason we know that these traits are not socially constructed is because there's different forms of evidence coming from different areas. We have convergent evidence. There's research by people like David Schmidt and David Geary that shows that sex differences in personality actually increase in more gender-egalitarian countries. If you survey men and women's personalities in Scandinavia, for example, they will have bigger differences in traits like agreeableness than in countries where gender egalitarianism is not the norm. You'll still find differences in countries where gender egalitarianism is not encoded in law, but the differences become larger in more gender equal countries. The theory behind this is that when you open up opportunities and remove legal barriers, people's natural inclinations are more able to manifest openly.
Even if you don't subscribe to that interpretation, the findings do contradict the social role theory, which is that women are trained—as little girls—to be more agreeable because that's what society wants. If you've got little girls in Sweden, Australia and other countries—where gender egalitarianism is promoted—still expressing these personality differences, there's something going on there other than social constructionism. There are also good evolutionary reasons for these personality traits to exist. I know that many people still resist the idea that evolution may have impacted our psychology. But it doesn't make any sense for us to believe that evolution has shaped our bodies but has stopped at the neck, and hasn't shaped our brains.
Mounk: By the way, I think the reason for that resistance is precisely the one that we've been talking about in various guises now throughout this conversation. Some of the same students who I mentioned earlier who didn't want to engage with this example of how to think about democracy in ethnically divided societies also really rebelled when I assigned a chapter from The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology written certainly in the last few decades. And it was precisely because they were saying, well, evolutionary psychology is just sort of unserious as a field. It's interesting how students sometimes pick up on these slogans. Again, the reason here is that there are a lot of bad evolutionary psychology arguments, particularly in the popular science realm, which say that because women have historically done X and men have historically done Y, it's good for men to be in charge and for women to be the sex that just accedes to whatever men want. So, I think perhaps on TikTok or on social media, there are some people making those kinds of claims and they seem to be making references to evolution. So anything that's trying to use evolutionary explanations for how modern humans might think about the world must be politically suspect in the same way; therefore, let's just deny the legitimacy of the entire methodological enterprise.
Lehmann: Yeah, and I think it's unfortunate that basic statistics is not taught at the high school level. It should be a part of any educated person's vocabulary to know the difference between an average and an outlier. I will read the literature on psychological sex differences and I know that the average doesn't apply to me because I'm not the average female. I'm an outlier. I have different interests and behaviors than the average. So it's very easy for me to not take offense at this notion that the average looks like this. But I think for some people who aren't familiar with basic statistics, such as the normal distribution, variance and standard deviations, I think it can be a bit challenging or even a bit offensive. They might see themselves as being pigeonholed into a description that they disagree with. But the thing is, it's just very interesting to know that there's a distribution in human behavior and we all sit on a spectrum. I find it very empowering and liberating to understand more about these descriptions. So, I think statistical illiteracy might have something to do with the pushback.
Mounk: Let me return for a second to that question: insofar as there are gender differences, what are they rooted in? I'm struck by two things. One is just the observation that I think many people make when they have children. They're trying really hard to give the same toys to their sons and their daughters. They're giving little cars to the girls and dolls to the boys. But the boys want to, on average, play with the toy cars, and the girls, on average, to play with the dolls. Obviously there's outliers. Some of my friends are quite skeptical about evolutionary biology and are trained in sociology. They tend to prefer these kinds of contingent cultural explanations and they have been really struck by the behaviors of their own children. It's obviously not statistically significant sample sizes, but it's just kind of interesting.
In one of the most powerful texts on gender equality, which is by John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women, he makes a very strong argument to his contemporaries that they have a bunch of assumptions about what women are like and what women are capable of, but a lot of that is because in any society of which we have much experience, they have been disqualified legally and through social norms from being able to engage in all of these activities. So, we don't really know what women are and what women are capable of, because we've only seen them in these extremely conscribed circumstances. Now, of course, the inverse of that, which I hadn't thought about until what you were saying, is that, as we build societies that aren't perfectly equal, but in which there's much more equality than there was in the past—in which women are certainly empowered legally, but also in terms of social norms—that does allow us to observe a little bit more about what women actually are like. If it turns out that some of those gender differences are stronger today in Sweden than they are in Egypt, for example, in terms of the occupations of women, then that actually gives us very interesting information that wasn't available to John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.
Lehmann: Yeah, and I think the differences should be welcomed. So for example, if you go to any modern university today, you'll find that girls outnumber boys in medicine, in psychology, in any profession that is dealing with people, and that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing that women want to go into the caring professions and are not as interested in perhaps computer science. I think that one of the issues I've had with second-wave feminism or mainstream feminism is this idea that whatever is male must be the gold standard. From my point of view, if women's career preferences or life paths differ somewhat, or if they're not as competitive when it comes to their trajectory, if they're not outearning men in executive fields or whatever, that's not necessarily a bad thing. We've fallen into this trap of thinking of the male life track as being the gold standard and that any deviation from that is somehow inferior. I think it is just completely wrong. We could completely re-imagine that and see the female life track and female preferences as the gold standard and there's actually something wrong with men. I don't believe that. I think we're just different and we have different preferences for different evolutionary reasons. But, you know, I really resist this idea that just because women are doing something different, that that means they're either oppressed or inferior.
Mounk: Broadening this question of a blank slate out beyond gender differences between men and women, I'm struck by how little people have taken on board the importance and the power of twin studies. It is just striking—across a huge variety of areas—how strongly the degree of relatedness predicts outcomes. You can see that twins reared apart, for example, have very similar life outcomes despite growing up in quite different households. Conversely, you can see that siblings that don't share the same parents but grew up in the same household—either because they're half siblings or because one of them is adopted and therefore doesn't share the genetics of their siblings—have really dissimilar life outcomes. Obviously the distinction between the mean and the outliers applies. But in the mean, the twins reared apart are going to have life outcomes, on most important metrics, that are much more similar than non-genetically related siblings reared together. That just seems to put a pretty dispositive end to a lot of the basic social outlook that I certainly would have had when I was 16 or 18, which might seem to have political implications that are preferable.
Lehmann: Yeah, I'm continually surprised. I believe that I already accept the reality of genetics, but there's always some new study coming out, which surprises me. I read a study a few months ago. I don't know the names of the authors of the paper, but they looked at memories of childhood. So, if you go into an AA meeting, for example, and you survey recovering alcoholics in an AA meeting, you'll find that something like 70% of them remember an abusive childhood. This study was very novel and I might be getting the description wrong, but if you compare that sample with another sample of either recovering alcoholics or the siblings of the alcoholics, you'll find that the siblings of the alcoholics don't remember an abusive childhood. Once you control for some kind of shared genetic influence, what appears to be happening is that people with certain genes, perhaps for neuroticism or something else, remember more negative experiences from their childhood than other people might, even though they might have grown up in the same environment. This shared trait, whether it's neuroticism or something else, both predicts remembering negative experiences and alcoholism. There's always new work coming out that falsifies this very popular cultural narrative that we have about being completely shaped by our experiences as children, whether it's trauma or our social environment. I think genes play a much larger role than what we're ready to accept culturally.
Mounk: That is absolutely fascinating. Of course, there's going to be households where everything is wonderful and the parents are always perfect. There are probably very, very few of those. There's going to be some number of households that are extremely abusive. Probably anybody—whatever their psychological dispositions—that grows up in such a household is going to remember the abuse and that is going to influence them very negatively throughout their lives. But just statistically, let's assume that the majority of households don't fall into either category. The majority of households are going to have loving parents who care about their children and who often mess up in one way or the other. So, it is actually not unintuitive once you think about it.
I wouldn't have guessed it before you told me about the study, that in that middle range some people are going to focus on the good things and say, my dad was great. Yes, every now and again, he got angry in ways that weren't great, he messed up in some ways. But on the whole, he treated me well. And people with a different set of psychological dispositions might focus on the time when the dad or the mom somehow messed up and that becomes the defining memory of childhood. We had Emily Oster on the podcast recently, and one of the themes of that conversation was that parents always overestimate the extent to which they shape their children and the extent to which every little choice they make really matters. Of course, what's interesting here is that it implies that genetic variation can make a child hyper-focus on the negative experiences. They're going to find something to latch onto in their childhood. There's no way to avoid having some conflict with your child over the course of 18 years or over the course of 30 or 40 years. Conversely, if they have psychological makeup that's pretty resilient, even if you do mess up a couple of times, or don't live up to your own standards of what you're expecting from your parenting a few times, they're going to be just fine.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Claire discuss COVID restrictions and online reactions to them, and explore why many heterodox thinkers are now Donald Trump supporters. This part of the episode is reserved for paying subscribers…
