Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-pfhbr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T22:32:26.680Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Self-Selection and Social Life: The Neuropolitics of Alienation—The Trapped and the Overwhelmed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Elliot White
Elliot White*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Temple University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
Get access

Abstract

This article proposes an interactional model in which individuals may actively seek suitable environments. Rejecting either a hereditarian or an environmentalist emphasis, this approach recognizes that both genetic endowment and social background determine the mobility of the individual. The article treats the following five topics: the basic biosocial assumptions underlying the interaction model; the operation of self-selection as an integral part of this model; the capacity of individuals to envision alternative environments; an examination of three basic genotype-environment interactions; the political ramifications of these interactions both on an individual and on a societal level.

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , February 1989 , pp. 154 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. While I do not want to urge this proposition too strenuously, listen to the following testimony by Malcolm X and by Milovan Djilas, respectively: “I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college.” (Autobiography of Malcolm X, New York, Grove, 1966:184); and “Prison is a unique place in which a strong, healthy man, able to resist, can discover his own capabilities,” New York Times, May 16, 1972.Google Scholar

2. Emerging technologies have had their own impact on academia. Thus Sternberg (1985:110) speaks of the “need to bring developments in cognitive research into the area as of current technology.” As Bruner (1984:63) states: Google Scholar