"Homo Administrans" reports on a recent trend to bring the methods of hard science to business studies, such as MBAs. As in many other social science areas, business schools have traditionally taught on the assumption that the skills required for success in business can be taught to anyone, and that they depend on cultural or social factors, such as education, to be developed. But the report says that this is false. In common with most other areas of human behaviour, a person's genetic make-up will exert a very significant effect on skills such as leadership, sales and other business factors. The article warns that this area of study is very recent, and cautions that further study is needed, but the preliminary results of genetic testing and studies of identical and fraternal twins nevertheless suggest that this field of human activity is no different to any other: that the bundles of DNA in our cells account for something like 50% of the variation between people.
I think that research like this teaches a valuable lesson: that just because something is widely believed does not make it true. For most of the past 50 years, it was believed that the social environment, culture and the like, was what made people the way they were: aggressive or peaceful, happy or miserable, intelligent or not, good at mathematics or literature, and so on. But that was wrong. Most surprising, and worrying, there was never any good evidence to believe it, only a lot of bad evidence badly used. For example, people correctly noted that children growing up in violent homes turned out more likely to be violent and do badly at school, and assumed that the correlation was causal, but when more careful analyses were done, it was discovered that violent parents had violent children not because of what they did but simply because they passed on genes that predisposed to violence. And business schools, like psychology, sociology and similar human disciplines used to until recently, still seem to assume that any one can be turned into a successful business person with appropriate leadership, management, sales skills and so on by giving them the right education and environment to develop in.
I think the same sort of false ideas are still very common today: people think that playing Mozart to their kids makes them more intelligent, or that the mother staying at home to look after them makes children better behaved or more successful at school, but those sort of ideas largely lack any good evidence, and are usually wrong.
As an antidote, I would like to see philosophy taught in schools. It might not make people more intelligent, but the habits of critical thinking it inculcates might at least help to make bad and false ideas less likely to be accepted and to spread. (I know my response isn't about business, but that was never why the article interested me; it is, remember, in the Science & Technology section, not the Business section.)
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