Sebastian Sahlman

Last Wednesday, Professor of Social Sciences Samuel Putnam delivered his inaugural lecture as the A. Myrick Freeman Chair in Social Sciences, titled “The Outer Edges of Nature and Nurture.” Speaking in Mills Hall, Putnam discussed his research on cross-cultural differences in social and emotional expression and what this may mean for the “nature versus nurture” debate.

Following an introduction from President Safa Zaki, Putnam began by expressing his gratitude for the Freeman chair appointment, emphasizing that it is an endowed position in the social sciences, not just psychology.

“I think it’s important that this is a chair in social sciences. My work really is interdisciplinary,” Putnam said. “It borrows a ton from anthropology, from sociology and especially psychology, and I’m grateful that an economics major did not limit this award to economics.”

Before diving into his research, Putnam stressed that psychology is not about nature or nurture but, rather, nature and nurture.

“You can think of the individual as existing between two poles,” Putnam said. “We have culture that’s filtered out through different layers to impact an individual. From inside, we have the genetic influences that are being filtered out, and our behavior, our person, meets somewhere in the middle.”

Putnam studies children’s temperament using parent questionnaires. Specifically, he studies three factors: surgency (which often correlates with extraversion), negative affectivity and regulatory capacity.

While Putnam has conducted several studies comparing temperaments across cultures, the need to build trust locally with parents and children has meant these studies compared only a few countries. Looking to broaden his research, he began the Global Temperament Project, collaborating with researchers from around the world. In total, the project included 83,000 children from 300 samples across 59 nations.

“The number of participants in my earlier studies capped out at around 1,500,” Putnam said. “I can’t tell you how gracious my colleagues around the world were.… The generosity of my colleagues was humbling.”

The scale of this project stood out to attendee Ahmed Sulieman ’28.

“I found it really great and really surprising that [the study] had so many people, like 80,000 over 50 countries. That’s just wild to think about,” Sulieman said.

After highlighting broad geographic trends identified in the project, Putnam discussed several aspects of culture that could help explain these societal differences, including whether a culture favors individualism or collectivism and if it has a long- or short-term orientation. These also intersect with factors like personal wealth and the acceptability of expressing negative emotions in a culture.

Across the three temperament factors, analyses indicated that cultural differences accounted for an average of 14 percent of the variance in temperament. In comparison, gender accounted for an average of two percent in this analysis, and prior research shows parenting accounts for about four percent.

While gender differences accounted for a small portion of the variance, they were generally consistent across cultures, a pattern Putnam hopes to explore further.

“One regret I had about this paper is that I tried to squeeze too much into it. I think these are maybe the most fascinating findings in this paper, and I wish that I would have accentuated them a little more by publishing them separately,” he said.

Lastly, Putnam returned to the nature and nurture dichotomy, explaining that the two factors are intertwined. In particular, genes may play a role in how people in different cultures behave, shaping the societal norms they pass on to their children.

“What I propose in this most recent paper is the idea of a culture-trait-gene coevolution, such that certain gene pools, certain groups of people, have propensities that cause people to behave a certain way. They cause cultural orientations to develop within those cultures—the people who are successful in certain types of cultures are the ones who survive, reproduce and thrive, strengthening that relationship,” Putnam said. “So genes and environment are intimately related not just on the individual level but on the level of the nation.”

Attendee Hannah Smart ’27 appreciated the opportunities for further exploration that Putnam raised during the lecture.

“He articulated his work really well and had this active curiosity,” she said. “He already found these [results], and he still has so much curiosity about what they mean and what he could do further with them.”

Highlighting Putnam’s interdisciplinary approach to psychology, attendee Ari Faulkner ’28 reflected on the importance of liberal arts research in the social sciences.

“I liked how much he acknowledged the value of being at a liberal arts institution,” Faulkner said. “Given that he sees his work as an intersection between psychology and anthropology and a number of other fields, I think it’s great that he’s going to continue pursuing and understanding the impacts of his work.”