The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

Socialisation means learning how to fit in with other people of your own age. Children acquire their habits, their accents, their favoured language, and most of their culture from their peers. They spend a lot of time learning to be similar to these peers. In forming relationships, however, they learn to discriminate between different people, adopting different behaviours with different individuals. And then in their teens they begin to assess their relative status within their peer group. In the case of men, this mostly means working out how tall, strong and domineering you are, and adjusting your ambitions and personality accordingly. There’s a fascinating finding in economics that taller men earn more money throughout their careers, but that it is their height at sixteen, not at thirty, that best predicts their earnings. The reason for this, as other studies have shown, is that this is when men decide their status, and shape their personalities accordingly. So what employers are rewarding are the attributes of self-confidence and ambition that came partly from being a tall, strong football player at school, rather than the height of the person today. Women tend to decide their status based largely on relative attractiveness, and they judge their attractiveness based on how others seem to judge them. In both sexes therefore, says Harris, there is a tendency to settle some aspects of your personality in the mid-teens, based on how high you think your relative status is am...