Equal Time for Psychological and Biological Contributions to Human Variation

The recent increase in the number of studies designed to document the contributions of biological processes to human psychological variation has been accompanied by a decreased interest in discovering the particular experiences that are associated with class of rearing and identifications that contribute to the same outcomes. This editorial suggests 4 reasons for this state of affairs. They are the technological advances in biology; the favorable attitude toward materialistic explanations; the failure by earlier generations of social scientists to acknowledge the influences of temperamental biases and identifications with family, class, and ethnicity; and an emerging sentiment characterized by a reluctance to assign responsibility to victims for their states of distress.