Populational Reshuffling
Populational rearrangement should be the default assumption when explaining social change
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
—C. S. LEWIS, The Magician's Nephew
One of the challenges of social sciences is to explain the relationship between micro-level phenomena and macro-level phenomena: how do facts about human psychology and individual psychological differences relate to larger social phenomena? How does one result from the other?
A related question is how to understand the existence of social change in the light of our knowledge about the relative stability of the individual—the stability of the individual’s psychological characteristics, as well as human nature—over time, as the findings from behavioral genetics, differential, and evolutionary psychology teach us? How to reconcile social variability with relative stability in, for example, personality traits and intelligence of an individual throughout his or her life? How to resolve the apparent paradox that “society” throughout history seems to change at a speed that human nature does not seem to follow?
Should the stability of the individual (behavioral genetics and personality psychology) and the slow changeability of human nature (evolutionary psychology) provide us with reason to expect that society, as a set of those individuals, also changes slowly? How to think about these issues on a very general level?
(For now, I will not get into its analysis, but will just note that the very concept of social change is ambiguous, and it may often appear that there is a drastic social change even though it may be a change only within some social group.)
It may be intuitively appealing to assume that social change implies a change in the individual or human nature as a whole. However, to assume this would mean to commit the fallacy of division, namely that what is valid for the whole is also valid for its component parts.
Despite this, we can say that although the basic psychological characteristics of a person (such as intelligence and personality) remain fairly stable during the lifetime, the person’s position in society changes: for example, at first he is a child who doesn’t have too much power and influence on others, later he becomes a worker, parent, and voter, only to lose the role of a worker at an advanced stage of life. Throughout life, an individual’s role changes, and his influence on larger society grows and declines as he moves through the social hierarchy and different social domains.
Consider chess as an example. Each individual piece retains the same basic properties throughout the game: knight’s and bishop’s way of moving on the board doesn’t change throughout the game, just like the king’s, queen’s, rook’s, or pawn’s. What does change is their position in the game. Depending on their position on the chessboard, the pieces acquire different importance and function. The dark-squared bishop can turn out to be the most important and, indeed, decisive piece at a certain point in the game even though that was not the case at the beginning of the game.
Compare change in the configuration of chess pieces to a “social change”.
What we see on the chessboard changes, but not by virtue of chess pieces changing their basic properties. The change of the whole does not imply a change in the fundamental attributes of the component parts. The only thing that changes is the position of each individual piece, and thus the relationship between the pieces. In order to explain a change in chess, one doesn’t need to suppose anything beyond that.
The properties of a chess piece, which are constant and present from the very start of the game, define the space of possibilities for the behavior of the piece—its possible movement on the board—but do not explain every change in its position. Which possibility will be realized is determined by the short-term and long-term goals or interests of the player (e.g. “occupy the center of the board” versus “checkmate the opponent”).
Likewise, when we talk about a change of a person, it can largely be explained by the change in a person’s position on the “board of life” in combination with the person’s stable properties, that is—traits.
The change in positionality can explain what we normally mean when we say that someone has “changed”.
It can also explain the similarity where one might expect a difference; namely in the behavior of different individuals or groups when they occupy the same social or institutional position. For example, it has been observed that the political left and the political right exhibit similar behavior when their position is “switched” in relation to institutional power. Their stance on free speech has changed throughout history in a way that tracks their relationship with institutional power. Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin expressed this strategic “inconsistency” by saying: “We sought freedom of the press, thought and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these freedoms to win power. Now that we have won, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties”.
In the long run, we should expect strategic behavior to be dynamically inconsistent because the values and preferences that enable an individual or a group to acquire resources or power are often not the same as the values and preferences that enable them to maintain resources and power.
These observable changes in the behavior of individuals could lead us to infer that there has been a change of the individual, but a more careful analysis shows that it is more accurate to speak of a change in the individual's position. As Haruki Murakami once said, “Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off”. Anne Enright expressed the same intuition when she wrote that “People do not change, they are merely revealed.”
Relevant concepts: stable properties (or traits), position, goals/interests, change in the position
How is it possible then to explain social change while assuming the stability of the actors of the change? Well, when we talk about change we care about, we are not just talking about people changing positions; we are also talking about changing the type of people in certain positions—what changes is which people are in which places; which people come to positions of power, how are different groups represented within institutions, different professions, and other social domains.
In order to understand an institution and predict its behavior, it is useful to know what type of people are entering or exiting the institution.
Let’s unpack that statement:
to determine the “type of people” we need to have a good theory of individual differences, i.e. for the social sciences relevant behavioral dimensions on which people differ (intelligence and personality traits seem like good candidates)
by "institution" I mean things like the educational system, particular profession, government, or country as a whole
by “entry" and "exit" I mean everything from becoming a member (or ceasing to be a member) of an institution (such as admission to a college or a political party); immigration/emigration to/from a country, up to different reproduction rates, or mortality and birth rates, of different social groups. (An example of the latter would be Gregory Clark's theory of the differential birth rate between the richer and poorer strata of society as a causal precursor to the Industrial Revolution. A similar pattern as in Britain was observed in China.)
Here are some examples of “type of people” whose varying numbers can plausibly affect social change over time (diachronically), as well as differences between societies within the same time (synchronically):
Age: variation in the percentage of older or younger people. For example, according to the youth bulge theory, the “surplus” of the younger population, especially men, is associated with the outbreak of social unrest, wars, and terrorism, because “third and fourth sons” who do not find prestigious social positions, compensate their dissatisfaction by competing in the political or religious sphere (Gunnar Heinsohn)
Sex: different sex ratio in the general population, or in a particular institution or profession plausibly affects change within that domain. For example, increasing the share of women, or female influence, within an institution most likely leads to an emphasis on the importance of safety (safetyism) due to already existing sex differences in the valuation of safety (e.g. the so-called safe spaces in university campuses). In their recent book The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War, authors Trager and Barnhart show how women’s right to vote makes a country “less willing to fall in love with war as a noble end in itself”. (Conversely, Heinsohn's youth bulge theory, as we have seen, predicts that an increased proportion of young men in the population is associated with outbreaks of social unrest.)
Ethnicity: varying proportion of ethnic diversity (immigration/emigration): e.g. there is evidence that ethnic diversity reduces trust among members of society, social cohesion, and altruism (Robert Putnam). There is also the so-called deep-roots literature that shows how ancestry predicts modern economic development. As developmental economist William Easterly points out, the history of peoples matters more than history of places.
Education: variation in the number of highly educated: e.g. the theory of elite overproduction and intra-elite competition (Peter Turchin)
Intelligence: variation of the proportion of extremely intelligent is associated with various social outcomes (see smart fraction theory)
Personality: varying the proportion of people with certain personality traits; for example, according to one hypothesis, the United States owes its (original) individualistic culture to the fact that during the era of mass migration, it received a large number of immigrants with an individualistic mentality. Since individualists are more inclined to migrate than collectivists, their outflow from a country is assumed to make that country more collectivistic and the recipient country more individualistic. Findings like these show that migrants tend to bring their attitudes and worldview with them when they move from one country to another. A recent paper, covered by The Economist, provides an example of that by showing how the migration of millions of Southern whites in the 20th century shaped the cultural and political landscape across America: “these migrants hastened partisan realignment and helped to catalyze and bolster a New Right movement with national influence over the long run”, the authors of the paper write.
(There are many such examples and perhaps the ones mentioned are not the best ones—I’m using ones that are off the top of my head. Notice that among the above examples, there are groups formed on the basis of the psychological characteristics of their members (e.g. intelligence or personality traits) and those formed on the basis of age, sex, and ethnicity of their members. Although not determined by psychological characteristics per se, these latter groups could in principle be reduced to them. That is to say, we can interpret them as categories that summarize different distributions of behavioral characteristics, which are relevant to social science. For example, if the sexes differ in some psychological characteristics—such as the degree of aggression, agreeableness, and the like— we can in principle eliminate the talk about the “sex” in favor of talking about populations with different distributions of certain psychological characteristics.)
Therefore, the logic of explanation with many observed social changes can be: there are more or less such-and-such people in such-and-such places—population reshuffling. Change exists, but it doesn’t have to necessarily proceed by virtue of individuals or humanity changing their nature.
This type of explanation can also be understood as a middle-of-the-road explanation, situated between the two explanatory extremes: “materialistic” and “idealistic”. The first explanation is characteristic, for example, of Marxists who emphasize the importance of the “material” (economic) base in relation to which the intellectual world is only a spiritual superstructure and reflection. Psychology does not play a significant role in Marx's theory of society, and man is understood somewhat as a fluid entity, that is, an “ensemble of social relations”.
At the other extreme, we have “idealistic” explanations that construe social change in terms of the circulation of ideas between people: person A conveys an idea to person B, person B conveys it to person C…, and their behavior changes in accordance with that idea, which constitutes a “social change”. But that explanation is likewise insufficient without taking psychology into account, given that the circulation of ideas is determined by the specifics of the system for processing ideas (information), namely the cognitive limitations of human brains; for example, ideas whose understanding requires a cognitive threshold above the population average will not be widespread. This explains, by the way, why string theory is such a rare topic in bars!
In addition to cognitive limitations and biases, which affect the circulation of ideas in the population, people exhibit higher receptivity toward some ideas rather than others, both for reasons of interest (“It is difficult to make a person understand something when his salary depends on it that he doesn't understand it”), but also because of their personalities.
The “idealist” theory of social change also faces a challenge that stems from the fact that people are not so inclined to change their minds about many things, despite the evidence that tells them they should, as well as the fact that “ideas” often come as rationalizations of already existing behavioral tendencies or interests.
Moreover, even in the field that seems to be the best example of the “marketplace of ideas,” a place where ideas meet and compete with each other and the best ones win, namely the sciences, it is not very clear how well reality matches the desired ideal. Physicist Max Planck famously expressed this doubt by saying that new scientific truths triumph not by convincing their opponents and making them see the light, but because the opponents of those ideas eventually die out, and a new generation familiar with those ideas grows up. There is some scientific evidence of this.
In this sense, we can distinguish at least two extreme possibilities:
Social change is the result of competition among ideas; the best win, people internalize them, change their behavior, and as a result changes occur in society
Social changes are the result of competition between different groups of people with conflicting interests who differ in some ideas. The group that eventually wins will ensure that its ideas triumph, but that group’s “victory” was not necessarily the result of its ideas, nor did these ideas have stronger argumentative or evidential support compared to the ideas of the opposing group. Given that there is a correlation between “winning ideas” and the group’s “victory,” it is not difficult to see why confusion could arise and assign a much larger causal power to ideas.
Consider the recent case of El Salvador, a country that had a serious crime problem that made life difficult for the non-criminal population. Ordinary people did not have access to restaurants or taxis because doing business in such crime-ridden communities carried large business risks. What did Salvador do to solve the problem? Did non-governmental organizations spread the message of peace and intellectuals write new ethical treatises whose norms were internalized by criminals, making them law-abiding? Actually no. The government imposed a state of emergency, suspended constitutionally guaranteed rights, and put 60,000 criminals behind bars. Given that crime is often followed by a Pareto distribution where a small number of causes are responsible for a large number of events (80-20 rule), it follows that by eliminating a small number of causes, most of the consequences of a problem can be solved. So the main source of change at a societal level was achieved by the fact that a smaller part of the population “emigrated” from the public domain— that is, through populational reshuffling.
(By the way, it is not improbable that the human species domesticated itself in a similar, but a bit more drastic way!)
The “populational" explanation—in contrast to the materialistic or idealistic one— takes into account the specifics of the psychology of the transmitters of ideas, as well as the interests determined by the actor's position on the big chessboard of life.
Indeed, populational reshuffling should perhaps be considered as a primary source of social change with other explanations (about the change of the individual, or of human nature) sought insofar as populational rearrangement shows itself to be insufficient.
Despite being, as I reckon, one of the main drivers of “social change”, this type of explanation is not very popular in academia, as far as I can see. There are several reasons for this, I think. First, the logic of the explanation sounds somewhat banal: to explain a certain social phenomenon with the logic of “there are more or less such-and-such people in such-and-such places” doesn’t seem like the best way to signal your intelligence.
Second, the explanation relies on the assumption that there are indeed “types of people” or stable individual differences. This may sound “problematic” for people who assume too much malleability of human nature or individual’s character, or for those egalitarians who tend to deny the reality or importance of individual psychological differences.
And lastly, many intellectuals tend to overestimate the power of ideas, arguments, and reasoning to bring about social change—it is a self-serving bias of the profession, after all. They tend to see social conflicts as a kind of intellectual disagreement; the controversy surrounding the legality of abortion is called the “abortion debate”, for example.
And they have every incentive to believe that! If social conflicts really do lie on the level of ideas and arguments (instead of e.g. interests or personalities), ideas and arguments can resolve them, which means the demand for their services will increase— together with their social status. Populational explanations, as we have seen, curb one’s optimism regarding the ability of ideas and arguments to bring about social change, and so may be deemed threatening and hence undesirable by the intellectual class.