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Jesse J. Prinz

Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind Paperback – Illustrated, March 17, 2014

by Jesse J. Prinz (Author)

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“A loud counterblast to the fashionable faith of our times: that human nature is driven by biology . . . urgent and persuasive.”―Sunday Times (London)

In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible.

Print length

416 pages
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English
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W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

March 17, 2014
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5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
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9780393347890
ISBN-13

978-0393347890
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“From start to finish this book is a fine, balanced, enormously learned and informative blast on the trumpet of common sense and humane understanding.”
- New Statesman

“Challenges the tenets of modern evolutionary psychology.”
- Wall Street Journal

“Science writing done right.”
- Daily Beast

“Sophisticated but accessible reading for the Pinker/Damasio/Dennett set.”
- Library Journal

About the Author

Jesse J. Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He lives in New York.

Product details

ASIN : 0393347893
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 17, 2014)
Language : English
Paperback : 416 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780393347890
ISBN-13 : 978-0393347890
Item Weight : 11.5 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #932,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,515 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #2,531 in Popular Psychology Personality Study
- #3,663 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
27 ratings

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4 star		30%
3 star		6%
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pow

Nature v. Nurture

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2014

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For the most part persuasive, although at times difficult to follow. The first chapter on why overemphasizing the role of genes could lead us astray as a society is important - it details the history of Social Darwinism and the assumptions in the past (some not so distant) as to the role of inheritance v. culture. The discussion of the intelligence of men vs. women with regard to the sciences, the subject of controversy in the 1990s absorbing.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2016

Verified Purchase

Fabulous - a very interesting, accessible and pertinent read.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Even if you don't agree, you should know the arguments (and refute them if you can)

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2014

The book is about two scientific positions that exist since the times of the old Greeks, often reduced to the ‘nature-nurture’ issue. Emotions, language, traits and values – are they part of human nature, genetically determined and hard-wired in our brains, or are they the product of culture? Of course, neither nature nor culture can exist completely without the other, but how great a part each plays has been and is still the point of many academic debates.
Prinz states early on, that he is on the side of culture, so the reader knows what to expect. If you have been a naturist so far, see if he can convince you. If you are a nurturist, see if his arguments are similar to yours. And if you never thought about the issue, then prepare for a roller coaster ride of ideas and reasoning! Prinz structures each chapter around a question (e. g. “Where does thinking come from?”), and answers it first by summarising the arguments of the naturist side. Then he takes them apart, step-by-step. He points at flaws in research methods, logical problems, over-interpretation of results and offers alternative explanations. To underpin his arguments, he quotes about 250 scientific studies from psychology, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, but he gathers these in form of end notes at the end of the book, which makes the text easier to read than a traditional psychological text (which quotes the names of the researcher in parentheses in the text). Sometimes he also speculates, but when he does he tells you, and as the speculations agree with the quoted research results, he thus shows that there are alternative ways to interpret the data, so more and cleverer research is needed.
Reading original research is often hard for an outsider. Each discipline has more or less developed their own lingo (one reason why they don’t collaborate interdisciplinary), but Prince has succeeded well in translating the different dialects into normal English. His choice of examples and titles is often witty. And no matter what side one is on: there is some gymnastics for the brain in following his dialectic argumentation, and more than once did I have to revise my own convictions several times within minutes. Utterly exciting.
The only critics I have is that Prinz obviously fell for one of Chomsky’s ideas, otherwise I cannot understand why he does not cite Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in the language chapter. And I also think adding some dynamic system thinking, which has appears also in developmental psychology could improve the argument.
So I highly recommend this book for everybody who likes a bit of an intellectual challenge.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Simon Laub

Culture and experience matters, not only biological determinism

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2014

Sure, we are a product of biology, but we are also a product of culture and experience.
There is indeed something after genetics and evolution.
And we have have heard way to little about this in recent years.

So, imho this is long overdue, and in this very complelling book by
Jesse J. Prinz we get "the other side". I.e. a lot about how culture and history turns us into the people we are.
The story takes us from babies dressed up in pink or
in blue, and being treated by parents accordingly.
To morality in hunter gatherer societies versus
agricultural societies. Where is it moral
to be a cannibal, and where can you
have slaves?
Language is what allows us to talk about the
whole thing - and Prinz makes a good case
for statistical learning as the basis
of language - instead of an innate language module, it convinced me.

There is a lot less innate than
we usually think, and a lot more learned than we usually think.
I take a lot of the critique of this book to be about
where nature nature starts and nurture takes over,
and I think this books finds a much better balance
than we see in other books.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Cebes

Powerful Critique of Biological Determinism

Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2013

Today the dominant trend in the study of human nature is genetic and neural determinism, especially the latter. Ten years ago, coming up with a gene for everything - the gay gene, the God gene, the art gene - was all the rage, and the sequencing of the human genome was expected to finally reveal all the secrets of human nature. When that didn't pan out, the trend switched to the hot new field: neuroscience. Now everyone is coming up with a brain region for everything, and a fancy full-color fMRI to prove it.

Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at CUNY, presents a sustained argument against any sort of simple biological determinism, genetic, neural, or anything else. He systematically points out the fallacies in such an approach. While genes have clear influence on simple physical traits (eye color, height, etc.), there is little evidence of their direct influence on psychological or behavioral traits. Similarly, there is little good evidence that the brain is "hard-wired" for particular traits or tendencies, such as Chomsky's "universal grammar" or intelligence/IQ. Prinz is at his best providing a critique of particular studies that purport to demonstrate evidence of fixed "human nature"; he demolishes in two pages for example the claim that there is a "cheater detection" module built into our brain. He criticizes psychologists in particular for their basic methodological assumption that there is a fixed human nature, and that the best way to understand behavior is to study the brain and the genes. This is philosophy at its best, scientifically informed and critiquing the assumptions and hasty conclusions of innumerable psychological studies.

Prinz makes the overall point that the evidence clearly indicates that the essential, evolved feature of human nature is its flexibility and adaptability, not its fixity. Really, this should have been obvious from the start, given the enormous range of diversity of cultures and of individual behavior within cultures. To understand human behavior, the best place to look is not neuroscience or genetics, but sociology and history. There is nothing "soft" or "unscientific" about this approach; it is quite consistent with evolutionary biology to hold that human uniqueness consists in our ability to use culture to adapt our behavior to the circumstances. Whether it is religion, art, or gender, the source of our behavior is culture, not biology. Or more precisely, you cannot separate the two: it is our biology that empowers us to use culture to control our behavior.
Not everything about the book is equally high quality. Prinz is at his weakest when he defends his own favorite position, moral relativism. For him, morality is just an emotional preference, and there is no objective basis for any moral principles. He loses his critical edge when he credulously accepts scientific studies that support his view of morality, such as Joshua Greene's flawed experiments on the trolley problem. And Prinz's moral relativism infects much of the book, so that we are given a highly cynical, materialistic, reductionist view of human nature and history, in which moral ideals play no role. All examples of moral progress, even the elimination of slavery, come down in Prinz's view to economic and selfish motives. He insists that the demise of slavery was due to the rise of industrial capitalism, making it no longer profitable. This is just bad history and economics, and it is rather willful denial of the fact that the abolitionist movement in Britain and the US were largely motivated by moral principles not economic self-interest. On the topic of morality, you would do much better to read Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, which includes a far more accurate account of the demise of slavery.

Other than this one area of shortsightedness, Prinz's book is an important corrective to the current deterministic trends in psychology. The book will be highly controversial, as Prinz is fighting against a powerful tide of biologism, and attacks a lot of reputable scientists. But don't believe all the negative reviews, as many of them are pure defensiveness. This is a thoughtful and well-informed book.

19 people found this helpful

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S P Mead

A mildly interesting book on nature vs nurture

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 30, 2016

Verified Purchase

This is an effort to explore the problem of human nature from a philosophical point of view. The author offers an interesting and occasionally engaging discussion on how, as a social animal, we exist outside of - or 'beyond' - Nature. Or, how we construct our own nature - based on our own thoughts and actions.

The book concerns the nature vs nurture debate, and it sides with the importance of nurture. I'm inclined to agree ... but I think that the role of society, and in turn the way society is made and remade, needed to be explored much more thoroughly. As it is, major contributors to knowledge are omitted. For instance, the ideas of Karl Marx - who said a great deal about these issues - are not looked at. These are several such omissions.

It's as if the author had only a partial knowledge of the subject matter, or perhaps he refused - for ideological reasons - to refer to certain works.

Overall, a fascinating book. But it is not a significant addition to the debate.

One person found this helpful

Dr. Glockenspiel

Why empiricism is good science

Reviewed in Canada on July 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

Beyond Human Nature offers a counterweight to the genetic causalism that pervades much books, articles, and scientific-minded lay talks nowadays, while also showing that cultural psychology (which dates from Tomasello's The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition) and the empiricist view of the human mind both make for a good alternative.

Jesse puts much of the intensely debated cases under closer scrutiny (IQ and the bell curve, racial and sexual differences in intellectual skills, language impact upon thought, mental illness). He shows how the naturist side, allowing genes to account for the evidences period , often rests on bad science : neglecting environmental impacts on development, ignoring disparities in outcomes and standards of living, and the like.

This work shines in honesty, rigor, and intellectual breadth - going from a thorough critique of the language of thought, to the exprimental supports given to the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, to the holistic vs individualistic cultures framing of perceptions and information processing... And lot more.

A good part of the book is showing how the empiricist's view of the mind, as being made of associations between mental images (copies of sensory experiences) and emotions, fare better than its rival in accounting for abstract ideas, for the productivity of thought, and for its overall context-sensitivity and dependence. A return to empiricism is also a way to stress how cautiously we should be in terms of hypothesis and explanations building : if one trait can be shown to be unteachable, unlearnable; and if the proper environment to learn the trait from experience and from teaching can be shown to be lacking or esle unexistant, than that trait should be viewed as innate. But it is heavily clear, when reading the works criticized by Prinz (on moral belief, naive physics and emotions among other things), that genetic causation/necessity/suffiency claims are straighforward and easy going as far as these unlearnability et al. condition are concerned.

Of special interest is the way empiricism fosters a careful analysis of basic emotions (Ekman's Big Six), once taken as universal, analysis that unravel how these, given their cultural variability, are likely to be grounded on the associations of simpler, more primitve affects.

Beyong Human Nature is a pretty good, enjoyable and thoughtful work.

markr

fascinating account of why we are the way we are

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2012

Verified Purchase

This is a very enjoyable and informative account of the factors which shape human beings. Jesse Prinz deals here with the debate about whether nature or nurture is the more important in determining the kind of people we become. Through wide ranging analyses of research into genetics, including the development of the human genome, of cultures across time, and of socialisation in a wide range of communities and national groups, Prinz concludes that nurture is the predominant factor.

This is a scholarly work, which in the main is also highly enjoyable for the general reader. I must admit i found the early chapters, in which Prinz systematically refutes studies which proport to show that nature and evolution are the only, or most, important determinants, to be quite heavy going. For me the book came alive in the last two thirds, when many examples of how culture is so significant are given. In these chapters the author deals a with wide range of cultural factors including language, and how this can effect the way we think and perceive; emotions, and how they are displayed; love, and what drives sexual preference; and taboos, including why they have been formed; and the effects of these factors on individuals and societies.

The conclusions reached are balanced - showing that nature and nurture are both important, and suggesting lines of further enquiry.

A highly enjoyable book then, which, but for the rather academic approach in the early chapters, would have been a five star review.

Recommended

16 people found this helpful

Dumitru Novac

Libro okay, consegna no

Reviewed in Italy on October 22, 2020

Verified Purchase

Il libro è perfetto, però per quanto riguarda la consegna, per la seconda volta questa settimana il pacco è stato letteralmente lanciato oltre il cancello senza nemmeno citofonare, rischiando così di rovinare il contenuto del pacco!

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Fresh brise for the brain

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

I don’t often write reviews. The reason is that I am very lazy, and usually other people have already written what I wanted to say. But now I have two motives to write a review anyway: I have just finished to read the best book I have read for a long time – and then I only find a single review here, and I profoundly disagree.
The book is about two scientific positions that exist since the times of the old Greeks, often reduced to the ‘nature-nurture’ issue. Emotions, language, traits and values – are they part of human nature, genetically determined and hard-wired in our brains, or are they the product of culture? Of course, neither nature nor culture can exist completely without the other, but how great a part each plays has been and is still the point of many academic debates.
Prinz states early on, that he is on the side of culture, so the reader knows what to expect. If you have been a naturist so far, see if he can convince you. If you are a nurturist, see if his arguments are similar to yours. And if you never thought about the issue, then prepare for a roller coaster ride of ideas and reasoning! Prinz structures each chapter around a question (e. g. “Where does thinking come from?”), and answers it first by summarising the arguments of the naturist side. Then he takes them apart, step-by-step. He points at flaws in research methods, logical problems, over-interpretation of results and offers alternative explanations. To underpin his arguments, he quotes about 250 scientific studies from psychology, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, but he gathers these in form of end notes at the end of the book, which makes the text easier to read than a traditional psychological text (which quotes the names of the researcher in parentheses in the text). Sometimes he also speculates, but when he does he tells you, and as the speculations agree with the quoted research results, he thus shows that there are alternative ways to interpret the data, so more and cleverer research is needed.
Reading original research is often hard for an outsider. Each discipline has more or less developed their own lingo (one reason why they don’t collaborate interdisciplinary), but Prince has succeeded well in translating the different dialects into normal English. His choice of examples and titles is often witty. And no matter what side one is on: there is some gymnastics for the brain in following his dialectic argumentation, and more than once did I have to revise my own convictions several times within minutes. Utterly exciting.
The only critics I have is that Prinz obviously fell for one of Chomsky’s ideas, otherwise I cannot understand why he does not cite Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in the language chapter. And I also think adding some dynamic system thinking, which has appears also in developmental psychology could improve the argument.
So I highly recommend this book for everybody who likes a bit of an intellectual challenge. And I don’t care what hair colour Prince has.

4 people found this helpful

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