Nature, Nurture and the Fault Lines of Character

What Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde made me wonder about the people we think we are.

I’m working on Fault Lines, the next novel featuring my fictional Victorian professor of Mental and Moral Science, Owain Morgan. Much of the background research involves exploring the ideas and discoveries that were shaping our understanding of the human mind towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Some of that research takes me into recorded history, while other avenues lead me back to fiction. Recently, I found myself revisiting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886.

It’s a story most of us are familiar with, even if we’ve never read the original novella. The respectable Dr Jekyll and his sinister alter ego, Edward Hyde, have become part of our everyday language, often invoked to describe someone who appears to possess two entirely different personalities.

But returning to the story, I became interested in something beyond the familiar struggle between good and evil.

Did Hyde reveal something that had always existed within Jekyll, concealed beneath the outward appearance of respectability? Or did the experience of becoming Hyde gradually change Jekyll’s character, transforming him into someone he could never previously have imagined becoming?

Perhaps both.

That thought led me back to the perennial debate about nature and nurture, and to a question I’ve been exploring while developing the characters in my novel.

Are the weaknesses in our character already present, shaped by temperament and experience, waiting for circumstances to expose them? Or can the pressures we encounter create vulnerabilities that weren’t there before?

The character we think we possess

We tend to describe character as though it were something relatively permanent. Someone is honest, courageous, generous, selfish, ambitious or weak. These qualities become part of how we understand other people and, perhaps more importantly, how we understand ourselves.

We develop a sense of our own character through experience. We know how we’ve behaved in the past, what we believe to be right and wrong, and how we imagine we would respond to particular situations.

But much of what we believe about ourselves is based upon circumstances we’ve already experienced. We may regard ourselves as courageous without ever having faced serious danger, or believe ourselves incorruptible without having encountered a sufficiently powerful temptation.

That doesn’t mean our beliefs are necessarily mistaken. It simply means they haven’t always been tested.

I’ve occasionally wondered how I might respond to circumstances entirely outside my experience. It’s easy enough to imagine doing the right thing when the consequences are hypothetical. Quite another matter when the decision involves something we desperately want to preserve.

Perhaps character is not quite as settled as we like to believe.

The fault lines beneath the surface

The expression fault line comes from geology, where fractures in the Earth’s crust can remain relatively undisturbed for enormous periods before accumulated stresses produce movement.

I find it an interesting metaphor for human character.

We all possess qualities that can be strengths in one set of circumstances and weaknesses in another. Determination can become obstinacy, confidence can develop into arrogance, loyalty can encourage complicity, and ambition can become an overwhelming need for recognition.

None of these transformations is inevitable. Nor does possessing a particular trait mean that someone is destined to behave badly. But perhaps there are vulnerabilities within our personalities that remain largely unnoticed until circumstances place them under pressure.

Consider someone who has always been admired for their determination and confidence. They have enjoyed considerable success, earned the respect of others and developed a strong sense of their own judgement. Then they encounter a situation in which their authority is challenged, their competence questioned or their reputation threatened.

One person might respond by reflecting upon the criticism and reconsidering their position. Another might experience the challenge as a personal humiliation and react with anger or aggression. The circumstances may be similar, but their psychological significance is very different.

Are those differences rooted in inherited temperament? Do they arise from childhood experiences, social expectations and the habits acquired over a lifetime? Or are they the result of a complex interaction between all these influences?

Modern psychology generally favours the latter explanation. Our biological dispositions and experiences are not separate forces competing for control of our personalities. They interact throughout our lives.

The divided self

Stevenson’s novella offers an imaginative way of exploring how those influences might shape our behaviour.

Dr Jekyll is a respectable physician who recognises conflicting impulses within himself. His scientific experiment allows him to separate aspects of his nature, creating Edward Hyde, who can indulge desires that Jekyll’s conscience and social position would otherwise restrain.

Initially, Jekyll believes he can control the transformation. He regards Hyde as a means of escaping the restrictions imposed by his respectable identity, while preserving the public reputation he values.

But the relationship changes. The transformations become increasingly difficult to control, and the distinction between the two identities begins to collapse.

We might argue that Hyde reveals something that was always present within Jekyll, impulses concealed beneath the outward appearance of respectability. But we might equally argue that repeatedly surrendering to those impulses changes Jekyll himself. What begins as an expression of an existing aspect of his character becomes a process through which that character is transformed.

The experience both reveals and changes him.

Stevenson was writing Gothic fiction, of course, not a psychological treatise. Nevertheless, he was exploring questions that were becoming increasingly important in the emerging science of psychology.

Psychology and the uncertain self

The late nineteenth century was a particularly interesting period in the study of human consciousness.

William James, whose The Principles of Psychology appeared in 1890, explored the complexity of the self and the relationship between consciousness, habit and behaviour.

The French psychologist Pierre Janet investigated dissociation and psychological processes that could operate outside ordinary conscious awareness.

Frederic W. H. Myers developed ideas about what he called the subliminal self, suggesting that conscious experience represented only part of our mental activity.

Their theories differed considerably, and some of their conclusions have not survived subsequent scientific investigation. Nevertheless, they were all grappling with questions about the nature and unity of human consciousness.

Was the mind a coherent whole? How much of our behaviour was governed by processes of which we were unaware? And to what extent did we understand the motives behind our own actions?

One idea that particularly interests me is the extent to which we construct explanations for our own behaviour.

We like to believe that we understand why we do things. Yet our explanations may sometimes be influenced by the need to preserve a favourable image of ourselves.

Someone who behaves aggressively might subsequently convince themselves that they were merely defending their position. Someone who acts dishonestly might come to regard their deception as necessary or even justified.

The behaviour has occurred, but the story we tell ourselves about it continues to evolve.

Psychologists would later explore aspects of this process through theories such as cognitive dissonance, introduced by Leon Festinger in 1957.

When our actions conflict with our beliefs about ourselves, we may experience psychological discomfort and attempt to resolve it by changing our attitudes, justifying our behaviour or reconsidering our understanding of events.

An unexpected act may therefore do more than reveal a previously hidden vulnerability. The way we subsequently interpret and justify that act may influence the person we become.

Does pressure reveal character or change it?

There’s a familiar expression that someone’s true character emerges under pressure. I can understand the attraction of that idea. When circumstances become difficult, social conventions and everyday habits may no longer be enough to guide our behaviour. We discover how people respond when their values, interests or sense of identity are threatened.

But I’m not convinced that pressure necessarily reveals some fixed, authentic self that has been concealed all along.

Consider someone who has behaved honourably throughout their life but commits a serious moral transgression during a moment of fear or anger.

Does that single action reveal their true character, making their previous conduct somehow less genuine? Or does it demonstrate that human beings can possess sincere moral convictions and nevertheless act against them?

The reverse is equally interesting. Someone who has always regarded themselves as timid may demonstrate extraordinary courage when confronted with danger. Was that courage present all along, waiting for the right circumstances to reveal it? Or did the situation itself help create a capacity they had never previously possessed?

I suspect both explanations may sometimes be valid.

Character is not necessarily a finished product. Our experiences influence our dispositions, but our dispositions also influence how we experience the world. Some vulnerabilities may deepen through repeated experience, particularly when we reinforce patterns of behaviour through habit or self-justification. Others may become less significant as we develop greater self-awareness or learn to respond differently to familiar pressures.

Perhaps we should think of character less as a fixed collection of qualities and more as something that develops throughout our lives.

Understanding isn’t excusing

There’s another complication.

If our personalities are influenced by inherited dispositions, upbringing and circumstances, to what extent are we responsible for the choices we make?

It’s a question that takes us from psychology into philosophy and the long-running debate about free will.

If someone’s aggression is influenced by temperament, reinforced by childhood experience and triggered by humiliation, does understanding those influences diminish their responsibility?

I don’t think explanation and justification are necessarily the same thing. We can attempt to understand why someone behaved as they did without concluding that their behaviour was acceptable or inevitable.

But the question becomes more difficult when we consider how much of our own behaviour arises from influences we neither chose nor fully understand. We may possess the capacity for reflection and self-restraint, but those capacities themselves are shaped by temperament, experience and circumstance.

It’s an uncomfortable problem, and one that philosophers have debated for centuries without reaching a universally accepted conclusion.

Who are we when circumstances change?

I’ve spent much of my life interested in what makes people behave as they do. The more I read about psychology and philosophy, the less convinced I become that human character can be explained through simple categories.

We are capable of generosity and selfishness, courage and cowardice, honesty and self-deception. These qualities do not necessarily belong to different kinds of people. They can coexist within the same individual, sometimes in ways that seem contradictory.

Stevenson dramatised that possibility through the extraordinary relationship between Jekyll and Hyde. Modern psychology offers more sophisticated explanations of the interactions between temperament, experience, emotion and behaviour.

We construct an understanding of our character from the lives we’ve lived and the choices we’ve made. Yet there may be circumstances we have never encountered, pressures we have never experienced and aspects of ourselves we have never had reason to examine.

Some experiences may reveal qualities we didn’t know we possessed. Others may change our attitudes, beliefs and behaviour in ways we could never have anticipated.

Perhaps the most interesting possibility is that both processes can occur together.

The fault lines in our character may be shaped by everything that has gone before, but what happens when they are tested can also influence everything that follows.

And that leaves me wondering whether the familiar expression about someone’s true colours tells us quite as much as we imagine.

When someone behaves in a way that surprises us, have we finally discovered who they really are?

Or have we witnessed a moment in the continuing process of who they are becoming?