When conformity fails: 1 (Clara B. Jones)

When Conformity Fails: 1

The poorest elements of society appear to be anonymous but, in fact, are incapable of purchasing and securing their own invisibility. Complex networks (e.g., of individuals, of groups) maintain cohesiveness of varying strengths (of nodes and of internodal lengths), and network components may become brittle over time and space. Each individual is born into one or more cultures, with the expectation that families will reinforce cultural norms, not deviating significantly from more or less average, learned patterns generating tactics and strategies for successfully navigating one or more societies*. In cooperative human social systems, similar in several ways to social insect and naked mole rat societies, selfish behavior by individuals, subgroups, or groups may be expressed, reinforcing or intensifying group conflict with the potential to perturb network stability.

Growing up, I was extremely well behaved, unhappy but not at all rebellious. As a child, I had a bedroom exclusive to myself that was a sanctuary filled with animals and other “treasures”…turtles, birds, lizards, insects. This space provided me with an escape from a dysfunctional family and a home whose climate was extremely tense. I was aware that my mother, as the dominant parent, wore many hats. However, I was, also, able to identify many of her weaknesses as a parental model. I was clear, then and later, that, should I bear children, my model of motherhood would be based upon that of my maternal grandmother who raised me until the age of five. Like most other females of my generation, a traditional nuclear arrangement including a “stay at home” mom caring competently for her children remained my goal, even after I bore three offspring. I tried with great effort to shape my own behavior in order to match that of the excellent mothers to whom I was exposed; however, with a sense of guilt and shame it is possible at this late stage of my life to confront the long-term costs to myself and to my children of my failures as a parent. My daughter has summed it up this way, “When you were good, you were very, very good; but, when you were bad, you were horrid.”

In 1979 (or, 1977, depending on who is doing the calibrating), I surrendered custody of my children to their father, a gregarious and charismatic man with more financial resources than I and with an extended family system that I believed would provide long-term support to my daughter and two sons. This decision required much deliberation during which I evaluated costs and benefits to my offspring and myself; however, ultimately, the benefits seemed in excess to the costs primarily because of my debilitating, recurrent mental health problems, as well as, my intense desire to have a single-minded and highly competitive career. Although I continue to be grateful to my former husband and his wife for parenting the children, I had (and continue to have) numerous reservations about the decision based upon differences between us in beliefs, attitudes, and values (e.g., his family’s tolerance of “recreational” drugs). These reservations are, in effect, moot, however, because my mental disorder escalated during the 1980s with numerous hospitalizations requiring interventions. During this decade, I was rarely accessible as a parent to my children, and, additionally, my career suffered significantly, with very few publications and minimal success as an employee since my psychoses, including episodes of mania or, rarely, depression, occurred every two or three years. Further, in 1979, I executed a very serious suicide attempt that further decreased my capacities for effective and healthy relationships with my children and others, as well as, myself. During this time I concluded that my children would benefit from distance rather than closeness with me, thus beginning a very long period of isolation and withdrawal from family and friends.

A mother’s service to the state is to police her children’s behavioral repertoire so that her offspring’s choices do not deviate too far from the cultural and/or sub-cultural norms*. As stated above, many citizens, especially the underclasses, exist on the margins of society and are tolerated as long as the phenotypes do not perturb mainstream networks. For my whole life, I have met only one other mother who yielded custody of her child(ren) for work. As a young mother in her late 20s who had her first child at 19 and who gave birth to three children within five years, I felt as though constant attention to others’ needs would literally suffocate me. I often had flashbacks to a game my father played with me when I was about five years old whereby he would place a pillow over my head, laughing, and I invariably felt that, during this “game”, I would die**. Motherhood, which I had always been ambivalent about, was certainly not my forté, and soon after the birth of my third child, I began to seek other models besides my maternal grandmother upon which to base a view of myself more authentic than the roles I found myself living.

My first choice was to have a tubal ligation (in 1967, husbands were required to give their signed consent). My second decision was to read autobiographies and biographies of professional women. Fortuitously, I read a New York Times review of Francoise Giroud’s autobiography, I Give You My Word, a text that changed my life. This book revealed the life of a woman who crafted her own, strong persona, becoming the first cabinet member for women’s issues in the French government. As a journalist and an editor of the newspaper, L’Express, Giroud worked tirelessly for progressive causes, including membership in the French resistance movement during World War II. As one expects for a French woman, Giroud’s autobiography reveals her to have had an elegant sense of style throughout her life despite several personal tragedies and bottlenecks (e.g., the death of her only son in a skiing accident, her abandonment by a long-term partner). For several years, I wanted to imitate Giroud; however, exposure to college courses and experience in the New World tropics ultimately led to the development of my own identity, forming the basis for a long, though not completely successful, career as a student of animal (including human) behavior.

I visited the tropics for the first time in the early 1970s when my father represented the US State Department at various locations throughout the world. Because of my long-term interest in plants and animals, I was aware of the floral and faunal differences between Jamaica, Trinidad/Tobago and the Northeastern United States. As a novice graduate student in Biopsychology at Cornell University, I was honored with the opportunity to conduct field work in Latin America with the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). During the same summer (1973), I, also, visited two additional field sites in Panama and the Colombian Amazon. I initiated study with bracken ferns, orb-weaving spiders, semi-terrestrial fish, and howler monkeys, and, for logistical reasons, ultimately decided to conduct my dissertation research in 1976 and 1977 on golden mantled howler (or, howling) monkeys (Alouatta palliata Gray) at La Pacifica, a cattle ranch in Cañas, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. Having finalized my divorce in 1974, chosen a research subject and study site for my Ph.D. studies, and obtained funding for an extended period of time, I now found myself detached from the network policing wives, choosing, instead, to attempt excellence in the academic domain that became a passion and a priority above all other commitments and roles.

I deserve poor grades as a wife, a mother, and, to a lesser degree, a scientist. Nonetheless, in each of these guises, I have excelled in certain ways. American society has very high expectations of women, regardless of their marital and motherhood status or their decision to bear or not to bear children. I married at a very young age to a 21 year old about to graduate from college. I haven’t a clue why he asked me to marry him***; though I am quite certain that I walked down the aisle in order to escape my mother’s control. Having married a Catholic, I was fertile and prepared to have children. They came quickly…three in five years. Almost from the beginning of parenthood, I felt stressed and overwhelmed, experiencing strong needs to isolate and to escape maternal duties as often as possible. For these reasons, I began to take college classes again which partially relieved my guilt, humiliation, anxiety, and sadness. Increasing my uneasiness about my failure to conform to expectations, I began early in my marriage to realize the enormity of my error in choice of husband. We were a terrible fit, and I wanted an escape.

I considered clinical psychology, law school, a doctorate in botany or psychology. However, the opportunity to visit the tropics in 1973, the exposure to a variety of habitats and their plant and animal occupants, my very high performance in the OTS Tropical Ecology course, and the ease with which I adapted to a vigorous regimen of study and research, were components of an almost immediate cognizance that animal behavior and behavioral ecology would occupy my future to the exclusion of any other role that I might play. I had finally fallen in love—and I never looked back.

Fundamentally, though I was very competent in the profession, I very much disliked teaching and rarely respected my students and most of my colleagues at the HBCUs. I always valued research very highly and would have been a good fit for a career as a Research Associate. My essentially solitary nature was never comfortable with sustained social interactions or responsibilities, and, with each employment opportunity, I ultimately resigned (quit) or, in one instance coincident with a very serious bipolar episode with progressively serious symptoms lasting more than two years and described in some detail above, was fired.

Once, at a professional meeting in New Mexico, two colleagues approached me and asked, “What accounts for your career success.” My answer: “I never played the sex or the race cards.” It has been very important for me to be identified as a “scientist,” not a black or female scientist (or, a disabled one). I always wanted to compete with men, with the best men in my field (evolution and behavioral ecology of social behavior in eutherian mammals, in particular, primates). Often, I have said of myself: “I am very competitive, but not very ambitious.” Except during periods of mania or depression (when I burned many bridges), I have been intensely focused on research and writing, producing an impressive number of publications (including, 5 books), many of which I would evaluate as better than mediocre. I am led to consider, however, the extent to which I have conformed to the best papers and books in behavioral ecology and realize that small sample sizes in many of my publications compromised the leverage of my scientific work. Ultimately, in science, as in most professions, one is not the ultimate evaluator or arbiter of one’s output. Thus, my peers and subsequent generations of my peers’ students will determine the quality of the products generated by my efforts and my data. I remain relatively certain, however, that I am known primarily as an “idea person”, and that a significant body of my work has been useful in generating productive thinking for others’ creative projects. The Panopticon Network that is academia is, at its best, a very rigorous and judgmental policing body of (mostly) men and (a small proportion of) women whose standards are met by few but whose standards and rules I claimed as my own.

*Success is generally defined in Psychology texts as the ability to get what you want in socially-acceptable ways.

**I do not intend to imply that the two events/experiences were directly, or, even, indirectly, correlated.

***In my opinion, he asked me to marry him in order to avoid the Vietnam War.

a. A Female Academic’s Dilemma: Policing By Male Peers

It appears to me that, in every academic discipline for which I have some information, males dominate females. This observation, if accurate, is especially valid in disciplines requiring theoretical (mathematical and/or statistical—any quantitative) expertise. Females seem to be clustered in the social sciences and in the non-theoretical areas of the “hard” sciences (chemistry and physics). I have written in the past, and continue to believe, that female scientists (especially, perhaps, fieldworkers) who intend to combine full-time work, marriage, caretaking, and motherhood would benefit from marketable and higher-order quantitative skills because these techniques are more easily adapted to the demands imposed by other roles (e.g., the stop and start requirements of child care). I have spoken to a significant number (dozens) of young women in academia moving through the tenure bottleneck , and not one of these wish or plan to work the “80-hour week” (or more*) characteristic of many men who successfully rise to positions of prominence in science. One young, married, mother-scientist told me proudly that she chose a certain animal model on which to base her studies because it was a favorite of her son. While the model may have been an appropriate one given the questions addressed in her laboratory, it remains likely that such decisions represent compromises that male scientists find unnecessary if not ill-advised.

In my own career, because of my decision in ~1979 to yield custody of my children to their father, I encountered, it is my assessment, fewer decisions requiring constraints on my time and energy budgets than many women in my career cohort. Purchasing the space and time to initiate and complete long-term projects without interruptions (i.e., focus!) imposed by others, in my case, husband and children, proved particularly beneficial for my publication record, for example, producing five books, including two special issues of the journal, Primate Report. In addition, I am comfortable enough with statistics and simple mathematical modeling to have been able to incorporate my modest skills into a number of my papers and book chapters. It is not clear to me the extent to which I may be exaggerating or, perhaps, underestimating constraints on the alternative tactics and strategies available to females in science, including the extent to which males in these disciplines are the leverage brokers notwithstanding advances that have been made since the 1970s and the “woman’s movement.” Nonetheless, it seems possible to me that alternative responses by women to academic conventions and expectations (e.g., publication records, standards for determining tenure) are evaluated by male colleagues and supervisors as mediocre if not inconsequential attempts to modify academia in ways more sensitive to the requirements and, perhaps, ultimate success of females.

*I do not intend to imply that the “80-hour week” is a necessary measure of “success,” nonetheless, sometimes, it may not be sufficient.

b. Are the Power Brokers in the Panopticon Network More Intelligent Than Their Subordinates?

My experiences suggest that it is not a given that subordinates, those “on the margins,” and/or the underclass to be less intelligent than their superiors. However, many choices made by these three, and, sometimes overlapping, populations, may destine them to be less successful than dominants in their networks. During my years of teaching at two “historically black” colleges, I was fortunate to work with two female students with the motivation and acuity to choose among a variety of competitive career goals with the expectation of success. Both of these young women, one Caucasian and one non-immigrant African-American, planned to apply to doctoral programs at competitive research universities, one in human factors and one in clinical psychology, respectively, the former field one of the most challenging and quantitative areas of applied psychology. As graduation approached, however, both females modified their goals to include marriage, and one female chose a master’s program rather than pursuit of doctoral work. One male student from Jamaica, a high-performing and self-driven young man with an infectious sense of humor, applied to prestigious programs combining social psychology and law and is currently completing his degrees. It is difficult to determine what factors may have accounted for the differential outcomes of these students or to measure the extent to which females may be “hard-wired” in such a way to favor “hearth and home.” Nonetheless, as a popular professor with excellent evaluations by students and superiors, the failure to stimulate the most promising in my classes generated disappointments and gradual detachment from what might have been pleasures as a college teacher.

Some of the challenges that I faced are endemic to any college or university with an “open door” policy and an ethic of “social promotion.” These values, in my experience, are particularly characteristic of institutions with a large proportion of minorities, working class, or underclass students. Interestingly, these values prevail, also, at “progressive” and alternative institutions of higher education (e.g., The New School of Social Research, Antioch College [now defunct], Middlebury College); however, students at these schools are drawn primarily from the upper middle-class, unless I am mistaken.

Many students at historically black colleges and universities and many students of higher socioeconomic status share traits in common. One of these, in my experience, is a sense of privilege that seems to embody the belief that they are owed a college education. These students are extremely savvy about manipulating, if not exploiting, the system of higher education with rationalizations and excuses for failures to achieve, if not excel, in college. In defense of these students, many perform poorly because of burdens and baggage brought to the higher educational environment. A not insignificant proportion of my students were single mothers, many worked part- or full-time jobs, many had significant responsibilities to parents (particularly mothers, grandmothers, and siblings). All of these demands weighed heavily on my students’ ability to concentrate, focus, prioritize, and succeed in my student-friendly classes. I often had the feeling that students were eager to be entertained with small bits of cleverly delivered information, and, in response, I attempted to concentrate not only on material that would sustain their attention but on skills to enhance their ability for “learning to learn”.

I never characterized my students as not intelligent; although, many seemed to struggle with what Piaget called “formal operational thought.” The importance of “learning to learn” is demonstrated in the large literature in experimental psychology and learning theory on “transfer of training” whereby rules (not facts) learned in one situation are transferred to other cognitive and behavioral contexts. For some psychologists, “transfer of training” is one component of general intelligence (G), and I am inclined to agree. However, It does not seem to me that adequate tests are available to measure G in students who have not “learned to learn” but who have the potential to do so*. Professors are significant power brokers in students’ lives, sometimes determining, via the system of grading, students’ options over the short-, medium-, and long-terms. Social promotion is not an elixir for the problems created by poverty, exposure to aggression and violence, inadequate parenting, poor education, etc., an opinion that many have debated in addition to the relative social value of continuing non-private support for historically black institutions. A single course and four years of college, I would suggest, are “too little too late” to significantly modify behavior after puberty, a view supported strongly by empirical data**. It is consistent with the views expressed herein to hold that historically black colleges and universities remain on the margins of the Panopticon Network because these institutions facilitate conformity and rather effectively police a population that otherwise may perturb social stability. A similar and not unrelated effect occurred when affirmative action placated disruption during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

*...or, students, like myself, who are “late-bloomers”

**If I recall correctly, intervention programs with children of the non-immigrant African-American underclass must occur before 3^rd grade in order to make a significant difference in outcomes.

c. Specialized Phenotypes as Adaptations to Networks

Policing by authorities in the Panopticon Network takes place by persuasion, coercion, or force. Many mammals display (relatively) generalized phenotypes permitting a broad range of responses to environmental events (simple or complex patterns of stimuli occurring across time and/or space). Human breeding systems, for example, may vary from nuclear arrangements with or without helpers (e.g., grandmothers, nannies, and the like) to extremely social structures meeting all three of the requirements for eusocial classification—overlap of generations, cooperative breeding, and (“totipotent”/reversible), sometimes, temporal (age-dependent) division of labor (e.g., castes, classes, or roles). With the exception of post-menopausal females, mammals are totipotent—capable of exhibiting a variety of sex-typical roles across a lifespan. Behavioral flexibility (and/or, phenotypic plasticity) is a feature of generalized phenotypes, and humans may be the premier example of this trait, not only because of the post-menopausal “caste” but also because of the recursive nature of human phenotypic combinations, in particular, the capacity for specialized and generalized division of labor. Phenotypic plasticity, for example, may permit humans to express subordinance in one set of situations or dominance in others, non-reproductive responses in response to some conditions, reproductive behavior in others.

Every adaptation is characterized by costs and benefits that will differentially facilitate the individual’s lifetime survival and reproductive success. Generalized phenotypes are beneficial in heterogeneous regimes since plasticity of the phenotype will “map” onto environmental unevenness, or, be robust to same, not only decreasing heterogeneity—smoothing the landscape —but, also, tracking variations in heterogeneity across space (e.g., from center to edge) and/or time. When it is not detrimental to submit to control by the Panopticon Network, a specialized phenotype will usually be to the individual’s advantage in order to optimize efficiency of time and energy (division of labor: role, task) within one or a few networks. I have responded to the challenges of my life by adopting a very specialized phenotype and by devoting virtually all of my efforts into one path. Abiding disappointments remain, however, because of several severe episodes of mental illness which not only truncated my career trajectory but also negatively influenced several significant relationships important to my reputation and personal life*.

From mid-2004 (?) to mid-2009 I was delusional, with varying degrees of severity, and, at times, fully detached from reality. This was the most severe psychotic episode of my life, the effects of which may never return me to “normal.”—physically, or, otherwise. Even now, I often feel that I have been hit by a Mack truck and that I am on life-support. A few “evolutionary psychologists” have suggested that mental illness benefits individual inclusive fitness; but, no “hard” evidence supports this view. If accurate, it seems to me that mental illness evolves by altruism (deleterious to the mentally ill but beneficial to recipients of the behaviors) or spite (deleterious to both mentally ill and recipients), although it is possible that mental illness is favored as a mechanism promoting conformity in local, including personal, networks. How would this work? The mentally ill, similar to the incarcerated, are isolated in institutions or treatment centers imposing narrow boundaries for behavioral expression. With repetitive methods of behavioral psychology—conditioning, individuals are re-programmed for potential re-entry into society. Professionals acting on behalf of the larger society assume responsibility for the re-shaping of phenotypes, and though, in mental facilities as well as prisons, some individuals fail to return to a state acceptable to the Panopticon Network, many, with time and a significant monetary cost, ultimately, are successful.

*To paraphrase an anonymous quote, “People you don't want to live without but have to let go....”

d. Epigenetic Effects

Epigenetic effects are environmental mechanisms (e.g., “parental effects”, pheromones, temperature) influencing the behavior and or expression of genes without changing the structure of DNA. It is a rather straightforward suggestion that early influences on children having effects later in life (e.g., psychopathology, substance abuse, trauma) might have been the result of epigenetics, processes only recently investigated in mammals. I experienced many traumas early in life in addition to being in the constant presence of a very “high strung” and unpredictable mother. I recall seeing a friend hit by a car when I was about ten years old and his wails of, “Ma…ma!”, from his place on the ground. My thought was: “Why would he call for his mother?”, acknowledging, not completely consciously, that my own was not a source of comfort. The feelings generated by this event were unique in all my life, a combination of mild stomach upset and sadness. It was not unusual, however, for me to experience nausea* in the presence of my mother, a response like feeling ill on the first day of kindergarten, with the first day occurring over and over again throughout childhood.

It is easy to imagine how simple mechanisms of learning explain so much of what is characteristic of behavior, in particular, the responses of children. Habituation, sensitization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, “matching,” are, it seems to me, more important than higher cognitive factors for an understanding of all human behavioral phenomena. One of the games played in introductory psychology classes is: “How much of human behavior do you think classical conditioning [etc.] explains?” This exercise is usually wildly popular, eliciting numerous examples and counterexamples from students. At some point, epigenetics will be integrated with learning theory, neuropsychology (“anatomy…location, location, location”, as Kandel would say), and genetics for a more complete understanding of how and why humans behave as they do, including the etiology of action patterns and language.

In my own life, several traumas, including sexual ones, occurred in close proximity and, it seems to me, another occurred before the previous one(s) were resolved. Perhaps I never recovered from leaving my maternal grandmother’s care, transferred to a new home a few blocks away and to the primary care of a 15 year old who, also, assumed responsibility for my new baby brother. Strangely, my mother often displayed a phlegmatic helplessness (languorious mood swings and “Julian siestas”) in addition to frequent outbursts of hostility and egocentrism. I think that my personality and persona developed somewhat like a biological origami, with folds and twists on rigid lines folded very, very tight to encase the imposed order and form. My increasingly serious (?) bipolar episodes erupt like an origami gone awry, snapping and popping out of structure and function, no longer making sense or a witness to the discipline of the master. But, then, nobody promised me a rose garden, and everyone has crosses to bear.

Ultimately, the Panopticon Network, by way of its representatives, especially “minted” professionals, intervene to repair all types of disorders within it, and mechanisms of learning (e.g., punishment, reward, incentives in general), again, are primary modes of influencing epigenetic effects and other modifications in behavior. The multi-level, multi-system architecture of social networks, sometimes referred to as a society, has developed and increased in complexity over the past 50,000 years or more of human evolution. Early man lived in small kin networks (“families,” clans), developing the ability to resolve conflict and promote cooperation within these units. Over time, what must have been intense intra- and inter-group conflict was followed by the evolution of conflict-resolution mechanisms**, perhaps the exchange of food or females. The capacity for groups to resolve conflict and repress competition among themselves in larger and larger numbers created the capacity for larger and larger societies, though, in my opinion, all human societies, to varying degrees are hierarchical (compare Aztecs with Efe), none, truly, egalitarian*** (try, for example, resolving conflict via “participatory democracy”).

*I, also, experienced nausea late in my marriage whenever my husband touched me. I do not wish to imply that the two circumstances are directly or indirectly associated.

**...or, more likely, conflict-resolution mechanisms evolved first and/or along with or in complement with increases in group size and networks of interactions...

***Animal behaviorists, especially primatologists, have classified some animal societies, “egalitarian.” I don't think this topic is well understood, nor do I think the terminology is clear or standardized.