Perhaps, when you were taking political views tests such as PolitiScales, you encountered a scale such as constructivism–essentialism. If someone is unfamiliar with these concepts, we will briefly describe them in this post, including considering them from the perspective of the problems we are studying here.
The constructivist position is that a person is created by the environment (especially the social one) in which they are located, and their personality traits are acquired. In turn, essentialism claims that there are certain innate and natural characteristics that make a person who they are.
Constructivism can be easily traced when someone attempts to explain certain social phenomena, including social relationships between people, by referring solely to the social environment itself as the cause of their formation in the form in which we observe them. The USSR’s approach can be called extremely constructivist, consisting of creating a new “Soviet man” – changing the very psychology of people through their re-education in a new environment with the indoctrination of communist ideology. The same applies to the approach of gender studies currently conducted in the West, based on which the concepts of man and woman themselves are not biologically determined – one is not born a man or a woman, but becomes one. A similar approach is practiced regarding a person’s sexual orientation. In these and a number of other works, essentialism is subjected to enormous criticism, consisting of accusing this idea of fixing a biologically determined difference between men and women, different races, and ethnicities.
Constructivism can hardly be called a productive approach, at least for the reason that it ignores a truly scientific understanding of how a human is structured, their psychology and behavior. Much in a human is still biologically determined, and the environment participates in their development, including personality development, strictly in conjunction with innate biological predispositions, which most often mediate its influence. We will not now consider the confirmation of such a view in all possible forms of social phenomena, but we will nonetheless turn to the data we have on such a phenomenon in social relationships between people as violence.
For example, it is known that while the tendency toward reactive (affective and impulsive) aggression may be equally explainable by genetics and environment, proactive (instrumental and intentional) aggression is predominantly explainable by genetics, and the environment, if it leads to its emergence, generally does so in the presence of a genetic predisposition to it. Also, antisocial behavior in children in conjunction with certain characteristics of primary psychopathy, such as traits of callousness and insensitivity, is observed at an extremely high level of heritability. Furthermore, such behavior, which is often intentional, is extremely resistant to correction. At the same time, antisocial behavior on its own, without traits of callousness-insensitivity, has only moderate heritability, is often not intentional, and is easily corrected during the upbringing of children.
These and other similar evidence align well with the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism, according to which a healthy person possesses an innate tendency to feel aversion to causing harm to other people. And the absence of such a tendency should be regarded as a pathology, rather than something arising purely for social reasons. Of course, improving the social environment can significantly reduce the manifestation of such pathology. However, even in the matter of aggressive behavior, the environment does not influence the manifestation of its different forms equally. Therefore, to guarantee a solution to the problem, the pathology must also be treated, since individuals may appear in any environment who do not experience the slightest internal resistance to achieving their goals through the intentional infliction of harm on other people.
