Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

The Nature of Human Nature

The “hardwiring” of human nature is a mixture of structures and capacities that emerge, more or less automatically, as we grow in and beyond the womb. Most basic needs and a bunch of cognitive capacities, such as face recognition and the production of language, fall into this category. Our toolkit also includes a series of biases for programmability—things that we will readily learn if given an appropriate environment. Many of our more social motives and potentialities, such as the capacity for loving relationships or our striving for status, develop in this way. Nature and nurture are not opposing forces. Nurture makes possible the expression of nature and gives it form.

Here is a brief overview of what we know about ...