Hi
Very interesting questions, and quite difficult to see exactly
how to present it to students.
On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Stephen Black wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > That is, it makes little sense to say, however convincingly,
> > that parents have virtually NO influence on how their
> > children turn out< snip>
>
> The problem with this otherwise reasonable point of view is that
> there is data on the question, and the data argue otherwise. For
> example, Bouchard et al (1990) report the correlation on a
> personality test (the MMPI) for identical twins reared apart as
> 0.50, and for identical twins reared together as 0.49. For a test
> of religiosity, it's 0.49 for twins apart, and 0.51 for together;
> for social attitudes, it's 0.34 for apart, 0.28 for together. In
> other words, identical twins resemble each other in personality
> and social attitudes to the same extent whether brought up in the
> same family or different.
Would the 0 influence claim have problems with other evidence
that _appears_ to suggest family effects? I would expect that
religiosity, social attitudes, and like constructs would, for
example, vary in consistent ways across families. That is, some
families would tend to be religious and others not. Some violent
and others not. Is it a necessary corollary of the
0-family-influence model that all such effects are really genetic
or some other shared non-family-influence effects? Has it been
determined which?
Certainly at the most molecular level, there are extremely
striking effects of family. For example, whether one is
Episcopelian or Jewish or Anglican or [name your favorite sect]
is pretty much determined, I would guess, by the family into
which one is born. But now you are saying that if we throw
Atheists and Agnostics into the mix, the effect disappears.
That is, whether one falls into the superset of religious sects
(i.e., the many religious affiliations) or the superset of
non-religious sects (i.e., Atheists, Agnostics, ...) is not
determined by family. It just seems that something is fishy
here. And if it is fishy for religion, then what does that say
about the other constructs for which 0-family influence is
claimed?
And what does one do with beneficial effects of parent training
studies? That is, training parents in effective parenting
techniques has been demonstrated to have beneficial effects on
child behaviour (e.g., less disruption in the home or the
classroom). Must we assume that experimental manipulations of
such factors have demonstrated effects, while naturally occurring
variation in parenting practices have no discernible effects
other than those better accounted for by genetic influences?
That just does not seem very plausible at first blush.
Are such observations at all problematic for the 0-influence
conclusion or have they already been considered and dismissed?
Best wishes
Jim
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James M. Clark (204) 786-9757
Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg 4L05D
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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