When to Kill

Deprive a man of food for three days and he will respond biologically. Then give him a chance to steal a loaf of bread and he will respond culturally. But where biology stops and culture begins is a question over which sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists have quarreled long & loud. In essence their dispute is the ancient one of Nature v. Nurture, of Instinct v. Conditioning, of Heredity v. Environment. Dr. Gordon Willard Allport of Harvard feels that there have been too few concrete demonstrations of how much truth there is on each side. Such a demonstration he published last week in Character & Personality.

Over a period of five years Dr. Allport and his associate presented a homicidal questionnaire to 200 Harvard students and no young women of Radcliffe. The psychologists laid down eight possible motives for taking human life, asked their subjects to list them in order, from what they considered the most justified to the least.

The ranking : 1) Defense of Self 2) Defense of Family 3) Defense of Another 4) Defense of Country 5) Defense of Honor of Family 6) Defense of Honor of Self 7) Defense of Property against Burglars 8) Defense of Property against Tres passers Interpreting, Dr. Allport pointed out that the situations at the top are those with the strongest biological or instinctive basis. Personal safety is first. An unconditioned baby will struggle against physical restraint. That defense of family, defense of another, defense of country rank next seems to show an instinctive linking of personal safety with community security, as in primitive societies. The physical origins are less apparent in the "honor" situations, least apparent in protection of property. But the investigators note that women show a stronger urge than men to defend "honor of self" -- an attitude whose biological implications are obvious. Otherwise their ranking is the same as for men.

Attitudes, Dr. Allport says, have no cultural origins. But the cultural milieu exerts influences which account for wide variations. Thus defense of country was ranked at the top by some subjects, at the bottom by others, reflecting the conflict of nationalist and internationalist ideologies. When the Allport questionnaire was given to 106 Southerners at Duke University, it was observed that they differed from the Northern subjects in putting defense of family honor ahead of defense of country.

Conclusions: "To express the matter in the language of William James, the Self is first and foremost a physical self. . . . The more primitive the situation in the biological sense, the more intense and the less variable is the attitude. . . . The origin of attitudes, in a functional sense, then, is always biological. The model upon which they are fashioned is often, though not always, cultural."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.