Evolutionary pedagogy

Why one size doesn’t fit all in raising and

educating children

Andreas Hofer
Introduction

Foundations of an Evolutionary Pedagogy

The hunter-gatherer vs farmer-herder hypothesis

The long reach of temperament

Orchids and dandelions

A model of mental disease and learning disabilities in neurodiverse children (hunter-gatherer

types)

The ODD thing about oppositional defiant disorder

Social development: of hypo- and hyper-social children

Learning styles: why conscientious and explorative learning styles can predict academic
success and failure

Right-brained vs left-brained children

The serotonin secret: jocks vs burnouts

Friendships, group dynamics and social anxiety rising

The psychology of online learning and teaching and born autodidacts

Parenting the different types of children

Teaching the different types of children

Bibliography
Books and publications
Web links
Introduction

I have been working as a teacher for 20+ years and I am raising four children. Both as a
teacher and as a parent I have soon realised that I one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to
raising and teaching children. As obviously true this may seem, as much we disregard our
children’s individuality. Standardization is the key word in most schools all over the world
and parenting books tell us you have to do it this way or that way in order to make your
children turn out right.

The truth is parents and teachers have far less influence on how children turn out. The
British geneticist Robert Plomin writes in Blueprint (2020) that parents do matter, but they
don’t make a big difference in their child’s personality. Most of our character traits have a
genetic inheritance of 50%, leaving 50% to epigenetics and the environment, of which
parents and teachers only take a small slice. This means that parents and teachers have
much less influence than commonly believed. Often parents and teachers work against a
child’s nature despite or because of their best intentions. One common problem for children
is that grown-ups tend to try to work on their weaknesses rather than their strengths. Many
children thus get the message they are somehow defective or not good enough. Parents and
teachers want to prepare their kids for an extroverted and competitive world when the
majority of children aren’t programmed for such a world. While some kids are naturally
ambitious, assertive and dominant the majority of kids are really much more cooperative.

While I do believe that a lot of our traits are in our genes, I am by no means a genetic
determinist. I wouldn’t have written this book. On the contrary, understanding the nature of a
child is important for understanding what environment the child needs to flourish. This is true
for all children, but in particular for “orchid children” (see Thomas Boyce, 2020), who
depending on the soil the grow on might become beautiful flowers or just fade away.
According to the central hypothesis of this book, I call these children “hunter-gatherer types”,
whereas “farmer-herder type” children are more typically “dandelions”, being able to flourish
more easily under adverse circumstances.

The focus of this book is on hunter-gatherer type children, as they are a minority that
typically find our school system more difficult to cope with than farmer children. In
discussions on the social network Quora people have been pointing out to me again and
again that our school system is not made for hunter-gatherer and herder children. Nor do
these freedom-loving children take easily to an authoritarian educational style. I will try to
make the reasons as clear as possible in this book.
Foundations of an Evolutionary Pedagogy

I have been a teacher for 20+ years now despite having been confronted with a lot of
pedagogical and methodological ideas and theories none of those had an evolutionary
approach to teaching. Peter Gray’s book Free to learn (2015) is a notable exception. Gray’s
ideas are based on learning in hunter-gatherer societies, in which there is no formal learning,
no coercion, little extrinsic motivation for learning (grades, “stars”, praise, etc.” and still
children become fully functioning members of their groups due to their inborn instincts to
survive, play and learn from older children and adults.

Formal teaching and schooling is basically an invention of agricultural societies as

agriculture made a certain degree of coercion necessary. Modern hunter-gatherers
consistently refuse to become farmers as it is too much trouble and work for them.

I have argued in my previous books and blog posts that modern people are more or less the
descendants of either early farmers or hunter-gatherers, genetically kept partially apart by
assortative mating through the past 12 millennia since the origin of agriculture. This
distinction corresponds roughly to the distinction between intuitives and sensors in the
Myers-Briggs/Jungian personality framework.

In pedagogy, I have often encountered opposing ideas that correspond to “farmer” vs

“hunter-gatherer” (HG) “instincts” or values in education. Here are some of them:

farmer values hunter-gatherer values

objective is the integration of the learner objective is the independence of the learner
into society

fosters conformity fosters independence

standardization individualization

Extrinsic motivation (grades, “stars”, Intrinsic motivation (passion), non-

praise), partially driven by competitive competitive (the only competition is the
thinking and comparison between students learner him/herself)

Learning is “work” attitude Learning is “growth” attitude

Sequential learning Big picture, integrated learning

Teacher-centred Student-centred

Rule-based learning Explorative learning

Mastery of sets of skills Lifelong learning and flexibility

Current trend towards more formal Current trend towards homeschooling or

schooling unschooling
Peter Gray is optimistic that in the near future the trends will shift towards hunter-gatherer
values and traditional schooling will be perceived as barbaric soon. Unfortunately, this is not
what I am experiencing as a teacher, the trends are more towards “farmer values”, i.e.
crammed curricula, more schooling and more (international) competitive thinking.

Apart from the fact that most students lose their curiosity, motivation and interest in the
subject matters themselves and study for grades and credits instead of developing a passion
for learning. This trend seriously hurts the “hunter-gatherer” kids, in particular, the highly
creative ones. These kids get filtered out by our school system because they have difficulties
with sequential learning, rote memorization and are often considered disorganized and lazy
by their teachers.

One can imagine that children who are programmed to learn freely struggle with the
coerciveness of elementary school. My gifted son who was able to read at age two and who
had been a highly curious child until elementary school suddenly became defiant and even
aggressive in first grade. He would rather cry an hour over homework that would have taken
him five minutes to do. This seemingly irrational behaviour can only be explained by inborn
instincts.

My research into personality types has led me to assume that the majority of children with
ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), ADHD and ASD children are probably among the
hunter-gatherer personality type and can therefore often be found in special ed. HG kids
might seem slow, lazy, dreamy and unmotivated in elementary school.

On the flip side also the majority of the gifted kids I have taught belong to the hunter-
gatherer group, which leads me to assume that hunter-gatherer children are very much the
same as “orchid children”, who might thrive or fade depending on their environment. They
might be hyperlexic (or at least early readers - pretty much all people I know who taught
themselves to read before school are HG people) or dyslexic. If my son hadn’t been able to
read fluently at age two, he might have easily turned out dyslexic. His teacher only saw a
slow, dreamy and sloppy kid in him and given his inattentive ADHD and defiant behaviour
this might easily have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The objective of an evolutionary pedagogy should have as a scope an evolutionary

perspective on learning styles, not just categorizing them by three different types of sensory
input or eight different kinds of intelligence. Sequential learning vs. pattern learning style
might be a more meaningful category or rule-based vs explorative learning styles, as well as
a preference for being taught vs self-directed learning.

HG children are different from “farmer” children in the following traits:

● Relatively immune to extrinsic motivation like grades

● High performers when intrinsically motivated
● Special interests/passions way beyond the ordinary (e.g. knowing the names of 300
instead of 30 dinosaurs)
● Criticism can be absolutely detrimental to learning motivation
● Coercion most likely causes defiant rather than compliant behaviour
● May appear physically younger and emotionally less mature than their peers
 ● Preference for self-directed learning
● Highly sensitive to noise, light and other physical stimuli
● Less stress-resistant or resilient

HG children suffer more from stress and react with higher cortisol levels, which can often
lead to physical illness such as allergies, asthma or anaemia (especially high in children with
ADHD). I am afraid that schools actually might be partly to blame for their ailments and hope
that scientists and polygenic scores will be able to shed more light on the matter.

In middle and high schools, HG children are much more likely to be among the students who
drop out, get bullied (they are generally non-violent and frequently loners), self-harm or even
commit suicide. On the other hand, they are also among the high performers and highly
creative (a trait that hardly matters in many schools) children. As HG children are big picture
thinkers it should be in the interest of schools, the economy and society that education for
them is an empowering experience rather than an obstacle in life.
The hunter-gatherer vs farmer-herder hypothesis

The hunter-gatherer hypothesis is an idea that has grown completely outside academia. It
was Thom Hartmann who first proposed the idea of hunter-minds living in a farmer society in
his book ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World (2019). He had the idea when observing his
son, whose ADHD made him hard to fit into the traditional school system. The basic idea
being that hunter-gatherer minds are a bit like radar devices that scan the environment
constantly and hyperfocus when they hit on something interesting, like a potential prey.
Farmer minds, on the other hand, are able to maintain a long focus on rote tasks that quickly
become boring for hunter-gatherer minds. That is why we think that hunter minds keep
zoning out and switching to new, more interesting stimuli. HGs may not only have difficulties
going through a normal school day, but also finding and maintaining a routine 9-5 job in a
‘farmer world' later in life.

One consequence for HG life-trajectories is that they might change schools and jobs more
frequently than farmer types. In the long run the problems people with ADHD face make it
much harder for them to lead a 'normal' life; job loss, divorce and and substance abuse are
not uncommon outcomes.

At the same time, people with ADHD can excel at novel and creative tasks as they have the
ability to hyperfocus like nobody else. Hyperfocus is the basis for innovative achievement.
Einstein would never have arrived at his theory of relativity had he not been thinking about it
day and night with an intensity that goes far beyond how people normally think about
problems.

How can we be certain that some people belong to a separate neurotribe? Aren’t all people
the same and isn’t the brain a blank slate that is programmed by the environment? This view
has long fallen out of favour. Scientists now know that pretty much all of our behavioural
traits have an innate, genetic component and most psychological traits, like
conscientiousness have a heritability of 0.5. This means that ‘the phenotypic variation is
50% due to genetic variation. It does not imply that the trait is 50% caused by genetics’. In
the past 30 years it has become clear that the environment, say parents and peers, have
actually less influence on a character trait than a person’s genes. As hard it might be for us
to believe, but parenting has less influence on a child’s personality traits than her genes
(Plomin 2019).

Another interesting line of research: Helen Fisher (2011) has studied dating sites and found
that certain groups of people tend to choose each other as partners. This phenomenon is
called ‘assortative mating’. Everyone knows that people tend to choose partners who are
similar in looks and social class. Where things begin to get really interesting, assortative
mating also exists for personality and - surprise - even mental diseases. Fisher has found
four different temperament types, which roughly correspond to David Keirsey’s (1998)
division of Myers-Briggs personality types into temperament types. As our temperaments are
made up of our neurochemistry, Fisher also assigns a dominant hormone or
neurotransmitter to each type:
Temperament types according to Fisher and Keirsey (NT = Intuitive Thinking, NF = Intuitive
Feeling, SP = Sensing Perceiving SJ = Sensing Judging)

We are already familiar with extreme testosterone and extreme estrogen brains and have
previously identified them as hunter and gatherer minds, respectively. What is interesting
about Fisher’s research is that temperaments tend to choose partners from within their own
groups, only directors and negotiators tend to choose their partners from the opposite group
(but also from within their own group). Obviously directors (hunters) tend to be more often
male and negotiators (gatherers) tend to be female. Even so, it’s not uncommon that the
roles are reversed. These roles stem from our evolutionary history of men being providers
and women being caregivers. However, these roles were rarely strictly separated in our
hunter-gatherer past. Among Einstein’s sons, Hans-Albert (engineer) was a hunter type and
Eduard (the sensitive, poetic one who suffered from schizophrenia) was a gatherer type.

Directors, according to Fisher, are deep logical thinkers and highly systematic (systemizers).
This picture matches both Simon Baron-Cohen's description of autistic people as
systemizers and David Keirsey’s description of this group as ‘analysts’. Negotiators on the
other hand tolerate ambiguity, have strong mental flexibility, are agreeable, trusting,
empathetic, and emotionally expressive. They are truly altruistic and are highly skilled in
detecting subtle nuances in reading people’s faces and body language. Because of this,
negotiators make natural psychologists. Again, this picture of negotiators matches both
Keirsey’s characterization of them as 'idealists' and our analysis of them as high
empathizers.

If the evolutionary history of directors and negotiators lies in our hunter-gatherer past, where
do the two remaining temperaments come from? Builders (i.e. farmer types) are dominated
by serotonin. Serotonin generates caution because it suppresses dopamine levels.
Therefore, builders are relaxed, social, conscientious, steady, family and community
oriented. They are natural networkers and respect rules and authority in society. Explorers
(pastoralist type), on the other hand, are more rebellious in their nature because they enjoy
the risk of breaking social norms.

What builders and explorers have in common: they seem to come from hierarchical or
dominance oriented social backgrounds (and both rely on ‘Sensing’ of the Jungian stack).
Hunter-gatherers are completely egalitarian, and they would not easily assume a
subordinate role in a hierarchy, like Builders, nor would there be any need for them to be
rebellious and fight for an alpha position in the dominance hierarchy. If hunter-gatherer traits
like 'egalitarianism' are evolutionary adaptations to their subsistence economy, it seems
likely that also the traits of Builders and Explorers are derived from their respective
subsistence economies. The biggest change in human history has been the move from
foraging to farming and herding. Builders show all the traits that would have been
advantageous for early farmers and Explorers show all the traits that would have been
advantageous for early herders (nomadic pastoralists).

We arrive at the following picture of temperaments related to our evolutionary past:

Temperaments derived from our ancestral mode of subsistence (NT = Intuitive Thinking, NF =
Intuitive Feeling, SP = Sensing Perceiving, SJ = Sensing Judging)

The four dimensions of the MBTI model are:

So far, our analysis has been very speculative and hypothetical. Is there really any proof that
these temperaments are innate? Studies of Myers-Briggs types have shown that N (intuitive
or hunter-gatherer) types are indeed quite rare and make up only about 20%-25% of the
population. We should be able to find evidence that this percentage of the population is
indeed different in some aspects.

These types so far only regard temperament. However, we would expect that assortative
mating also includes physical features and appearance. There are no known studies
regarding temperament and preference for appearance. However, it may be a curious thing
to know that the ancient Indian Ayurveda distinguishes three body-mind types, that
correspond closely to our three types vata (ectomorph body type, hunter-gatherer type
temperament), pitta (mesomorph body type, pastoralist temperament) and kapha
(endomorph body type, farmer temperament). As body types themselves might play a less
important role in assortative mating than temperament it is hard to estimate how high the
correlation between them is. However, given the correspondence with Ayurvedic dosha
types and our types based on ancestral mode of subsistence, we can assume that it is
significant.

The following table provides an overview of the four temperament types in different
classification systems. Of course, many people may be mixed types and have traits of
different types.

Hunter-gatherer hypothesis hunter gatherer farmer pastoralist

Helen Fisher director negotiator builder explorer
Myers-Briggs/Keirsey NT NF SJ SP
Ayurveda vata vata kapha pitta
William Sheldon body type ectomorph ectomorph endomorph mesomorph
William Sheldon temperament cerebrotonic cerebrotonic viscerotonic somatotonic

How did hunter-gatherers maintain their egalitarian lifestyle for millennia when young
modern democracies seem to be falling apart all around the globe? The answer: it’s in their
genes. Hunter-gatherers have not had social constructs and have acted according to their
instincts. It is likely that in early farmers and herders those genes that ‘favoured’ out-group
(beyond kith and kin) egalitarianism were quickly selected against. That doesn’t necessarily
make early farmers and herders worse people, as they became more altruistic towards their
in-group and less altruistic towards their outgroup. What is more, they likely became more
collaborative, assuming inferior hierarchical positions in order to increase economic
productivity.

Early farmers had to work much harder than hunter-gatherers which required many traits
that hunter-gatherers didn’t possess: forward-planning, sustained focus on long routine work,
higher conscientiousness and status-seeking as well as subordination. We can expect a host
of genetic differences between farmer types and hunter-gatherer types regarding cognition,
social behaviour and even physical body build. Hunter-gatherer types more often belong to
the lightweight ectomorph type (adaptation to speed and agility) and farmers to the stronger-
built endomorph type (adaptation to prolonged work).
Geneticists have found that modern European populations are a mix of three ancient tribes:
Neolithic hunter-gatherers, early West Asian farmers and the Yamnaya (pastoralists with
some hunter-gatherer admixture). We are all genetically mixed, however assortative mating
makes it likely that some of us have preserved more hunter-gatherer genes than others and
we have argued that this group of people has a much higher incidence of mental disorders
(ADHD, ASD, etc.), giftedness and highly sensitive (orchids, high reactive) people. If the
hunter-gatherer hypothesis is true, it should be possible to find many genetically determined
traits predicted by life-history theory, such as űlater onset of puberty, higher than average
stress reactivity, increased physical sensitivity, higher sensitivity to criticism (potential threat
of ostracism) and even longevity.
Here are some differences we would expect to see between these two types:

Hunter-gatherer type Farmer type

High on personality trait ‘openness’, more High on personality trait

likely low on ‘conscientiousness’ ‘conscientiousness’, low on ‘openness’

Strongly (actively) egalitarian Status-seeking

Tendency towards out-group sociality, Tendency towards in-group sociality

more accepting of diversity (e.g. different (identifies more strongly with a core group,
sexuality, refugees, etc.) like family, religious group or sports team)

More liberal ideology More conservative ideology

Less sexual dimorphism More (display of) sexual dimorphism

Later onset of puberty Earlier onset of puberty

Tendency to wanting fewer children Tendency to wanting more children

Relaxed child-rearing attitude Authoritative child rearing

Night owls Early risers

‘Lazier’ (when it comes to physical work More hard-working

and chores)

Highly rebellious when feeling personal Individualistic, at the same time more
freedom and values being threatened conformist and highly loyal to their core
group

Less interest in small-talk (i.e.‘networking Higher interest in small-talk (‘networking

function’ of language) function’ of language)

The hunter-gatherer hypothesis also makes it clear why it is illusory to search for single
mutations causing autism or ADHD. The HG hypothesis states that neurodiverse people are
NORMAL people. Of course there are potentially many hurdles and pitfalls for HG types on
their path of developing into healthy adults in a farmer world, some of which we have pointed
out above, many of which are yet unknown. HG type children seem to be much more
vulnerable to early life adversity and developing disoriented insecure attachment than farmer
type children.
The long reach of temperament

Are some people really born different? Jerome Kagan (Kagan and Snidman, 2004) has
indeed found that some infants are born with a different temperament. About 23% of babies
he studied were high reactive babies. Four-month-olds who show high levels of motor
activity and distress at unfamiliar stimuli were found more likely to become inhibited in later
stages of development. 50% of babies were less reactive and generally easy babies later
developing into more self-confident children. The remaining infants were somewhere in
between these two extremes. The high reactive babies showed higher activation of the
amygdala and therefore a higher stress-response than the low reactive children.

Which life trajectories did the children with different temperaments take? The high reactive
infants often developed into shy, inhibited children, whereas the low reactive children were
relaxed and outgoing. At around two years old, the high reactive children turned out to be
much more fearful than the low reactive ones. At four years old, almost half of the high
reactive children were timid and less sociable and talkative during play with unfamiliar
children. Again at seven years old almost half of the high reactive children showed signs of
increased anxiety levels. Even those high reactive children who didn’t state they were more
fearful, tended to avoid eye contact. When the inhibited children were evaluated again
between 12 and 14 years old they were much more likely to show signs of social anxiety
than the uninhibited children. Kagan notes that the children with the inhibited temperament
also tended to possess a different body build: lean with narrow faces (apparently of the
ectomorph body type).

Kagan notes that the life trajectories of high and low reactive children might be completely
different. A low reactive child is unlikely to end up as a frightened recluse. High reactive
children seem to have a vulnerability to anxiety disorders like phobias and post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD).

These high reactive children have an amygdala that fires more intensely than the amygdala
of low reactive children. They secrete higher amounts of stress hormones (e.g. cortisol). As
adults they often startle more easily than low-reactives. Randolph Nesse (2020) compares
this high reactivity to a smoke detector that is calibrated incorrectly and activates the alarm
when there is no fire. From an evolutionary point of view, such miscalibration is potentially a
high indication of an environmental mismatch. Could those 23% of high reactive infants have
been programmed for a different environment? Children in farmer communities had much
more protection than hunter-gatherer children: living in houses and villages surrounded by
fences. From the point of view of evolutionary psychology it makes therefore perfect sense
that hunter-gatherer infants react more strongly to unfamiliar stimuli than farmer infants.

Farmer types (Builders/SJ) make up about 50% of the population, a figure that corresponds
with Kagan's figure for low reactive infants whereas the 23% of high reactive children
correspond roughly to the number of hunter-gatherer types (Intuitives,
Directors/Negotiators).

A similar classification of infant temperament is made by Chess and Thomas (1984):

 ● Easy babies: 40% of infants; adjust easily to new situations, quickly establish
routines, are generally cheerful and easy to calm.
● Difficult babies: 10% of infants; slow to adjust to new experiences, likely to react
negatively and intensely to stimuli and events.
● Slow-to-warm-up babies: 15% of infants; somewhat difficult at first but become easier
over time
● The remaining group that was hard to classify

Again the more cautious, difficult and slow-to-warm up babies amount to 25% (same figures
we had for our Intuitives or HGs) and the easy babies are the vast majority of babies
(note:our survey had a few questions around the above temperaments in infancy as well).
Research had shown that the more difficult babies tended to become more sociable if they
were securely attached to their caregivers. It was insecure attachment that predicted future
anxiety and depression.

Researchers generally recognized three types of insecure attachment:

types of insecure attachment

The most problematic type of insecure attachment is disoriented attachment. These are the
children who appear least resilient and who have a variety of potentially long-term problems:

● Low-self esteem and/or distorted self-image

● Behavioural problems, in particular anti-social (ODD)
● Anxiety and depression
● Problems with attention (ADHD)

As this is a cluster of symptoms that is often typical for hunter-gatherer types it is not unlikely
that high reactive children often end up as a disorganized type when insecurely attached.
Orchids and dandelions

So far I have only discussed the ‘dark side'’ of being a hunter-gatherer in a farmer world.
Here are the arguments I have made so far:

● ADHD minds are ancient adaptation to hunting as mode of subsistence

● ADHD is usually comorbid with a host of other mental problems, such as ASD and
ODD
● These neurodiverse people have a high likelihood of being part of a hunter-gatherer
neurotribe
● About 20%- 25% of the population have hunter-gatherer minds/are intuitives in the
Myers-Brigg personality inventory
● About 20%- 25% of the population are born with a high reactive amygdala that
makes them vulnerable to mental problems like anxiety and depression

However, having a hunter-gatherer mind is not merely about having higher vulnerability to
mental problems. Highly intelligent people, talented and gifted people are frequently part of
the hunter-gatherer neurotribe. Gifted people often have the very same problems described
above: social awkwardness and anxiety, shy temperament as well as problems with focus
and hyperfocus. It has become common to use the term 2e (twice exceptional) for gifted
people with diverse strengths and challenges.

2e strength and challenges (from Kenndey et al, 2011)

Ruth Karpinski et al. (2018) have studied members of the high IQ club Mensa and have
found a high number of vulnerabilities among them, that do not only include the mental
problems discussed so far, but also vulnerabilities to physical problems, such as
inflammations, allergies and autoimmune diseases. They call their model the ‘Hyper Brain -
Hyper Body’ model. The basic idea is that hyper brains are overexcitable and that can easily
cause physiological overexcitabilities due to increased secretion of stress hormones
(cortisol). That model would explain why some many geniuses in history had been sickly
children.

A line of research that is related to all the previous ideas is Thomas Boyce’s (2019) work on
orchid and dandelion children. Boyce usually illustrates the idea by comparing his own life-
tractectory to that of his younger sister’s. Both were very imaginative and happy children in
early childhood. He describes his sister Mary as more sensitive, introverted and intelligent
than himself. When the family moved twice during their teens and family troubles began,
Mary became increasingly withdrawn, became physically ill, suffered from anorexia and
finally got diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was never able to return to a normal life,
whereas her brother had a flourishing career as a pediatrician and a happy and stable
marriage. Boyce coined the term ‘orchid children’ for children like his sister who needed a
very special soil to be able to grow, versus children who could thrive anywhere ‘dandelion
children’.

Orchid children aren’t that hard to identify. We have come across them already, they are the
difficult babies and children with the shy temperament. Even though hunter-gatherer
children, or those orchid children with shy-temperament might not always be exactly the
same, there is most likely considerable convergence between them. As pediatrician Boyce
found out that the orchid children were the ones with high stress reactivity. Moreover, they
tended to be sick often. He found that in classrooms the shy and the sickly children were
often identical.

So far it may appear that Boyce’s research has not added much to our hunter-gatherer
hypothesis. There is, however, an interesting twist. Orchids were not only more often among
the sickly, they were also more often among the healthiest kids. When orchids grew up in
the right conditions, they didn’t just thrive, they were flying high. The same can be said in
other domains, like careers, as well. Orchids might end up never being able to hold on to a
job, or they might become eminent scientists, journalists, or published authors.
 bifurcating orchid life-trajectories

We have come across this bifurcation of orchid life trajectories before, when hunter-gatherer
types can either suffer from mental diseases or shine as gifted people. Of course the most
interesting question to us now would be: what exactly is this fertile soil that orchids need to
be able grow and not wither away?

Boyce identifies several factors that contribute to the making or breaking of orchid children:

1. Position in the dominance hierarchy

Children as young as three or four years old start establishing dominance hierarchies in
kindergarten. Orchids often end up at the bottom of the hierarchy. Our hypothesis is that
hunter-gatherer types are not programmed to establish alliances to achieve higher positions
in the hierarchy and that is why they tend to arrive at the bottom. Lower status creates a lot
of stress for egalitarian HG minds.

2. Bullying
Bullying can be extremely stressful in particular for HG minds. For hunter-gatherers this
would mean ostracism, which is the worst life-outcome in a hunter-gatherer society. It’s not
only the bully’s words or deeds that hurt, but even more not being defended by the
community (or bystanders), that makes bullying feel like social ostracism. Children and
teenagers who were bullied have a significantly higher risk of committing suicide, inlcuding
later in life long after the bullying took place.

3. Teacher’s pedagogical style

Whether orchid children do well at school depends mostly on the teacher’s style of teaching.
When the teacher is authoritarian, orchid children tend to do worse than dandelions, when
the teacher has an egalitarian style they tend to do better than dandelions.

All three of these conditions for fertile/infertile soil have got to do with egalitarianism. One
characteristic of gifted children is they have a highly developed sense of justice and are
extremely egalitarian (we will explore this aspect later on in more detail). One trait that
comes with egalitarianism is distrust of authority. This is probably the root cause of ODD in
gifted children, children with ADHD and ASD, as a distrust of authority is a common
occurrence.
A model of mental disease and learning disabilities in
neurodiverse children (hunter-gatherer types)

The starting point for this model is the resemblance and overlap of many mental problems
ranging from ADHD to ASD as well as their frequent comorbidities, such as social anxiety,
sensory processing disorder and depression. The objective is to unify different models of
neurodiversity.

Thom Hartmann’s hunter-hypothesis for ADHD is widely known. It’s core idea is that
people with ADHD have a different type of cognition, in particular attention focus. While early
farmers had to be able to focus on long routine work, hunter-gatherers were better off with a
a “radar mind”, that hyperfocused when, say, a deer was spotted. The difference is therefore
bouts of hyperfocus on high interest objects vs constant focus on boring routine work. This
hyperfocus can also be observed in people with ASD when they engage with their special
interest, as well as in gifted and highly intelligent people, who tend to reflect much longer on
unexplainable phenomena than neurotypicals.

If people with ADHD have ancient hunter-minds, why not also people who have one of the
related mental disorders? We know that mental diseases run in families. What is often
surprising is that it is hard to predict which mental disease will appear in a family. If a father
has autism, one of his children might well end up with schizophrenia or major depressive
disorder. Einstein had a hunter-mind and was almost certainly on the spectrum, comorbid
with ADHD (inattentive). Einstein’s first son, Hans-Albert became a successful engineer and
university professor, not uncommon for hunter-minds. Einstein’s second son Eduard was
highly sensitive and poetically inclined - suffered from schizophrenia, less common for
hunter-minds, but perhaps more common for ancient gatherer (female, caregiving-profile)
minds.

The pattern that emerges here is that giftedness and mental diseases often run in families
and that while they may co occur in the same person, they may also bifurcate, creating a
successful life-trajectory or one that makes a successful life-trajectory very hard to achieve.
These hunter-gatherer minds might be the very same people that Thomas Boyce (2020)
identified as orchid children, who in turn might be the very same individuals who had highly
reactive temperaments as babies (Kegan, 2004). These highly reactive or difficult babies are
known to have a shy temperament later on and have a higher vulnerability to mental
disease. Another convergent line of research is Ruth Karpinski’s (2018) model of hyperbrain
and hyperbody. It states that high IQ people have high risk for diseases, both mental and
physical (autoimmune, allergies, inflammations), due to high stress reactivity and high
cortisol levels.

Some people seem to be more prone to autism, whereas others seem to me more prone to
schizophrenia. Simon Baron-Cohen (2004) has noticed that people with autism often have
an extreme male-systemizing brain. This is true for the majority of both male and female
persons with ASD. The famous Temple Grandin, for example, has a highly systemizing and
visual mind. Such an extreme male brain often goes together with a lack of social and verbal
skills. Testosterone could influence the trajectory of a mental disorder. ASD, ADHD and
ODD are all more common in males than in females. If there is an extreme male brain that
has a higher risk of mental disorders, could there also be an extreme female brain
susceptible to mental disorders? In Baron-Cohen’s model the opposite of an extreme
systemizing brain is an extremely empathizing brain, dominated by estrogen. In fact,
empaths (more often women than men) and highly sensitive people have a higher risk of
mental problems (in particular related to depression and anxiety) and make up the majority
of people in psychotherapeutic treatment (Elaine Aron, 2017). Men can also have a more
“feminized” brain, which is often correlated with a feminized digit (2D:4D) ratio, whereas
women can have a more masculinized brain that correlates with a lower digit ratio.

Henry Markram is another researcher who has postulated that brains of people with ASD
feel rather too much rather than too little (overexcitability). This is called the intense-world
theory of autism. I agree with Markram’s analysis. Hunter-gatherer type minds in general
are highly excitable with deep neural processing and a hyperactive amygdala (stress-
response). These traits are most likely adaptations to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that were at
least partially lost or modified when people took to farming.

Crespi and Badock (2008) have developed a model of ASD and psychosis as diametrical
disorders of the social brian. In their model social cognition is underdeveloped in autism
spectrum disorders and overdeveloped in psychotic spectrum disorders (schizophrenia,
bipolar disorder and major depression). Their model is therefore highly congruent with ours.
We would subsume ASD, ADHD and ODD under the “hunter-type disorders, as in all three
of them males are overrepresented and it therefore likely that testosterone plays an
important role in their development. Anxiety disorders are more common among females
than males, however the bias is not as strong as for ASD and depression.

From all the above research the following model of hyper-systemizing hunter and hyper-
empathizing gatherer brains with differential risk to mental diseases can be derived: .
I estimate that about 20% of the population are neurodiverse, with more than half of those
people unaware of the fact themselves. This is the reason why people with ASD are often
intiallally relieved when they receive their diagnosis. All their life long they had had a feeling
that there was something wrong with them. Unfortunately this initial relief doesn’t last long
when it becomes obvious that a diagnosis doesn’t change anything about their misery. The
20% mark is a recurrent one: 20% of babies are highly reactive, 20% of people are highly
sensitive and about 20% of people are intuitives in the Myers-Briggs inventory.

All this is not to say that other neurotypes - i.e. farmer and herder according to our ancestral
modes of subsistence - can’t suffer from any of these mental problems, they are just much
less likely to do so.
The ODD thing about oppositional defiant disorder

Before my oldest son started elementary school we had the best father-son relationship
imaginable. We read books together, went for walks together, which we called “missions”
and often played imaginary games during those missions. This all changed with schooling.
He became defiant and withdrawn. Doing homework was a nightmare as he refused to do
most of it. He would rather cry for an hour than do homework he could have done in less
than five minutes.

My son never developed full-fledged ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). However, he

displayed a lot of symptoms typical for ODD. Among them:

● Refusal to do any schoolwork

● Lying and cheating
● Refusing to comply with requests from authority figures (his teacher)
● Not paying attention during classes
● Being touchy and easily annoyed
● Being angry and resentful
● Running away from home

This behaviour just seemed irrational to me, until I started to hear similar stories from my
students who have the same or a similar personality type (NP in MBTI) as my son. I was
working on the idea that NP types preserve much of the original hunter-gatherer minds on
many levels, among them having a different kind of focus (intermittent attention with
hyperfocus on objects of interest) than “farmer minds” (constant focus on rote tasks) and a
different kind of sociality (higher level of egalitarianism). These two factors may account a lot
regarding the roots of ODD - difficulties in school (easily bored and learning difficulties due to
loss of focus) as well as feeling treated as not “equal”. Douglas A. Riley writes in his book
The Defiant Child (1997) that children with ODD “believe themselves to be equal to their
parents” (or teacher). That is indeed odd, how can children have such an assumption when
everybody knows that children and parents/teachers clearly have an asymmetrical
relationship. I hypothesise that children with ODD have an inborn instinct that makes them
behave as if they were equal and to defy behaviour that would denigrate their equal status.

If that is true then egalitarian and kind behaviour should lessen the symptoms of ODD much
more than the opposite strict and authoritarian behaviour. And indeed it helped me connect
again with my son. Our relationship is more often much more like friendship, even though I
occasionally have to remind him that as a parent I am at least partially responsible for his
academic success as well.

Are there any other indications that children with ODD have hunter-gatherer minds? Children
with ODD have in more than 50% of all cases an ADHD (ADD in the case of my son)
comorbidity. Conversely, ODD is highly prevalent in children with ADHD. Thom Hartmann
has famously established a connection between ADHD and “hunter-minds”. ADHD
comorbidities include:
One has to bear in mind that children with ODD (passive aggressive) aren’t usually callous
like children with conduct disorder (active aggressive). On the contrary, children with ODD
are much more sensitive and vulnerable and suicide is a frequent outcome. “Waging a war”
against a child with ODD is therefore the wrong strategy, the child will more likely run away
from home than comply.
Social development: of hypo- and hyper-social children

One of the most amazing experiences both for parents and scientists is observing how
children develop. Psychologists will tell you that already from kindergarten on children form
social hierarchies and the kids are aware of who the “alpha pups” are. Some time later, in
elementary school you will find the first cliques that are relatively impermeable to new
members and, in which kids who had previously been friends are suddenly excluded..

It is my hypothesis, however, that some children are not genetically programmed to form in-
groups and social hierarchies and that among these children the majority of gifted, ASD and
ADHD cases can be found. Gifted children notoriously hate authority and have a high sense
of justice. These children are often hypersocial, as they are less likely to have any group
boundaries such as “my team”. These children might have inherited a greater amount of
hunter-gatherer genes as egalitarianism and out-group sociality are typical features of
hunter-gatherer societies. On the other hand, these hunter-gatherer children can also be
extremely hyposocial. The difference is often determined by introversion or extraversion.

Hyper-social kids: extraverted hunter-gatherer children typically want to be friends with

everyone. They call every kid they get to know at the playground their “friends”. When asked
what the name of their new friends is, they are likely not to know it. Frequently, these
hypersocial kids get rejected and are sad, because they don’t understand why everybody
wants to be friends with them They will tell you that they have many friends, but in reality
their number of friends is quite small. Parents of such children are often stressed because
their children want to invite over dozens of children or often invite themselves. Moreover,
they might have low social anxiety and easily start to talk to strangers, which may add to the
parents’ worries.

Hpyo-social kids: introverted hunter-gatherer children. Everyone has seen one of them.
The kid at the playground who is overseeing the other kids closely rather than participating in
the play. They are often extremely shy, completely reluctant to talk to strangers, and often
take a long time to “warm-up”. My oldest son would remain seated in the car for half an hour
when we visited friends - only then he was ready to engage in social activities. What makes
kids behave this way? Depriving themselves of childhood fun, learning possibilities and
changes to make friends? The feeling of being different and not being able to trust everyone.
As others are programmed differently it is hard to rely on them and predict their behaviour.

Hunter-gatherer children a like real hunter-gatherers behaving in the presence of farmers:

from : Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin

These two descriptions of African hunter-gatherer tribes (Baka and Aka) and their behaviors
among Bantu farmers might equally well apply to my two sons. At school they are quiet,
withdrawn, avoid eye contact and are serious and fearful. At home, however, they are totally
“normal” kids, however. They are relaxed, fool around and play and laugh a lot.

This transformation between home and public life is amazing and hard to explain. The only
explanation I have is that somehow hunter-gatherer kids try to figure out who is part of their
“tribe” and who isn’t. One common phenomenon seen among autistic children is that they
only allow certain people to be touched or even would not talk to people if they don’t trust
them.

One thing is certain, however, this kind of child non-involved behaviour must have been rare
in our past. I don’t find it surprising that clumsiness is very widespread among children with
ASD, ADHD and gifted children as many do not engage in play that requires dexterity with
other children.

A lot needs to be done in research to find out more. As these hunter-gatherer children are
programmed to be egalitarian they reject authority and might therefore fail at school and
develop oppositional defiant disorder. One out of five children with ODD goes on to develop
sociopathy. This can easily happen when the parents or teacher don’t understand the child
and force her to comply, which will only generate more defiance. Our world doesn’t want to
produce sociopaths when many of them would have the potential to become creative and
highly valuable members of society.

Early signs of hunter-gatherer minds in children may be:

● frequent tantrums
● frequently as why they have to do something and question rules
● are often touchy and easily annoyed, angered or saddened by other people’s
behaviour
● frequent absent mindedness, living in their own heads
● frequent nightmares and sleep problems
● imaginary friends
If the early years are difficult for hunter-gatherer children, the teens may be even worse.
There is considerable variation as to the onset of puberty. It is reasonable to assume that
this variation has at least partially evolutionary origins and I have argued that it depends on
our ancestral mode of subsistence and the expected lifespan related to it:

r/K theory and life history studies would predict the following traits (at least among males):
Shortest lifespan (pastoralist) medium (farmer) Long lifespan (HG)

Most risk-taking/least fearful Least risk-taking/most fearful

Low empathy/low sensitivity High empathy/high sensitivity

Earliest onset of puberty Latest onset of puberty

Least paternal investment Most paternal investment

Most sociosexual Most pair-bonded

Higher sexual dimorphism Lower sexual dimorphism

Most in-group social Most out-group social

As can be seen from this table pastoralist types are typically early bloomers, whereas
hunter-gatherer types are typically late bloomers. This pattern might be broken, i.e. by the
absence of a father, which typically accelerates the onset of puberty.

Here are some typical behavioural patterns:

Early bloomers (herder types): tend to neglect school and social norms due to high risk-
taking potential, become status aware and interested in status symbols (branded clothes,
motorbikes, etc.) and show off how cool they are (use of illegal drugs, etc.) tend to form
cliques and gangs; due to high in-group sociality tend to exclude “losers” (i.e. teens not cool
enough).
Late bloomers (hunter-gatherer types): typically continue their childhood, read comics while
their early bloomer peers already go out, smoke and drink alcohol. As they are cautious and
non-risk taking, they actually might become intimidated and socially withdrawn.

Late bloomers might typically lose their former early-bloomer friends who start to mock them
for not being cool, e.g. wearing the wrong clothes when girls, or being “gay” when male. The
late bloomers are typically out-group social, i.e. they are unlikely to be part of any group or
clique. If the late bloomers are introverts they might end up with no friends at all and become
easy victims for early bloomers, who enjoy displays of status to their peers. Often these
bullies are actually quite intelligent who start to do badly at school due to a lack of interest
and blame the nerds (typically late bloomers) for setting high standards in class.

Even when not being bullied, the hunter-gatherer types might become extremely insecure
and shy due to a feeling of not belonging or being weirdos not understanding mating
behaviour. As late bloomers tend to be more monogamous or at least more choosy, they
easily become disgusted by their peers’ mating behaviour, which often involves frequently
changing partners and might decide to stay out of the “mating-market” (at least for a few
more years).

Hunter-gatherer types are typically less sensitive to gossip and trends, they accentuate their
gender less and are cautious. These traits make them less attractive for teenagers who are
highly sensitive to social rejection and strive to have cool friends. Hunter-gatherer females
often don’t understand why their peers suddenly are so “bitchy and often start to feel more
comfortable around boys. The same is true for hunter-gatherer males who do not necessarily
share their peers’ passion for talking about girls, football and cars.

These developments usually take their toll on hunter-gatherer type self-esteem and
perceived reproductive potential. Being egalitarian other teenagers who are less so are often
perceived as a threat and social anxiety and depression might be a frequent outcome.
Learning styles: why conscientious and explorative learning
styles can predict academic success and failure

The most common distinction in learning styles is the visual/verbal/kinesthetic one. The
visual/verbal distinction corresponds largely to T/F in the Jungian/Myers-Briggs framework.
When I ask my T students if they prefer languages or math, they usually reply that they have
a preference for math and it’s the other way round with my F students.

T visual math science sports politics

F verbal language(s) humanities non-competitive games history

This doesn’t mean that all T students are good at math, there are more factors at play. In my
20 years as a teacher, I have noticed two more different learning styles that are highly
relevant for a student’s success. There are students who focus really hard on their
weaknesses and there are students who tend to give up on a subject when they start to fail
them. Recently I have found out that these two types correspond roughly (though not
exactly) to the two categories of Judgers (J) vs Perceivers (P) personality traits, introduced
by Myers and Briggs in their famous personality test.
Here are some characteristics of each type:

Only by looking at these personality traits it is easy to predict which type is more successful
in school, conscientious (J) learners or explorative learners (P).

My J learners tend to
● Hand in everything on time
 ● Do well on tests
● Soldier on when the goings get tough
● be organized (including beautiful handwriting
● Do their work first and then relax
● Work to an extreme when under stress
● Be good at most subjects
● Excel at almost all subjects when gifted

My P learners tend to
● forget to hand in homework on time (or don’t care)
● do worse at tests
● give up more easily when things get hard
● be disorganized in general (including bad handwriting)
● relax first and then do the homework
● procrastinate to an extreme when under stress
● to be unilaterally gifted
● be twice-exceptional when gifted more frequently than J-types

For teachers, who for obvious reasons most frequently belong to the J-type, P learners
easily might seem a bit stupid, disorganized and lazy. However, there is a pattern here and if
you look closely the truth is, they are a bit cleverer (teachers don’t know that) than the J kids,
still disorganized (that is what the teachers get right) and work hard at something they are
good at, be it gardening, sports, coding or robotics (that is what teachers typically can’t see).

I can base my claim that P types more intelligent than J types both on statistics as well as
my personal experience. As you can see from this table (study about gifted people) that P
types consistently rank higher (with the exception of ISTJ types) than their corresponding J
types.
Let me explain. I am P-type (yeah, that’s really rare for a teacher, as you can imagine! ;)
and at university, I taught myself Romanian and a J friend of myself Hungarian (both of us
being passionate autodidacts). My J friend did every unit very conscientiously and he did
not move on to the next unit until he had learned absolutely everything from the unit. As a P
learner, I find this way of learning horribly boring. Being and explorative learning I moved on
quickly from unit to unit until I got to unit 8 or so and could not understand much anymore.
Instead of going back to previous units, I would rather buy myself a new textbook then get
bored with the old stuff.
Naturally, I progressed much more quickly than my J friend. However, now image we both
had started our languages at school and been tested after unit 1, unit 2, etc. How would
have performed better? Obviously my J friend for many units! It would have taken me much
more time to finally outperform him. Eventually, I would have outperformed him. Or would I?
No, I wouldn’t have. Remember, P types focus on their strengths rather than their
weaknesses. After each unit, I would have got the signal than I am worse at language
learning than my friend and I would have become disinterested in the subject and focused
on one of my strengths instead.

I have a gifted son, who was a super learner before he started school at the age of five. He
learned to read at the age of two, multiply at the age of three and knew about 200 dinosaurs
including their habitats and periods at the age of five. When he started school, me and my
wife expected his teacher to be raging with joy about him, instead she went raging with
anger. She told us that our son was stupid, lazy, and crying all the time. How, come? She
showed us a drawing he had to color in and told us that he couldn't do it and he shouldn’t
have started school a year early. It looked like this:
It was true, he couldn’t color in a circle properly because his fine motor skills always lagged
behind his cognitive skills. When I pointed this out the teacher only replied that “I
overestimated my son”. All she saw was a lazy and horrible kid who would start to cry when
he had to color in a picture.
Now, imagine a gifted kid who has no support from their parents. You can easily see him or
her ending up in special education, can’t you?

Being a P-person I have understood that the opera is not my cup of tea - I am wild, and I
hate tuxedos and ties and all that other J stuff about operas (even the music). I’d rather go
for a walk in the rain than spend a night at the opera. This corresponds way more to my idea
of a fun time.

Being a P-person, my son quickly understood that school was not his cup of tea. Being
perfectionist as most gifted kids are and feeling he was not good enough was plainly painful
to him. Being a P-person he prioritized relaxing to working and would rather cry for an hour
than do his homework. When he understood that he was not only misunderstood in school,
but also by his parents who made him feel bad about not doing his homework he started to
withdraw and not learn anything anymore at all. He refused to do anything that remotely
resembled school. What he did enjoy though was open work. At least he could finish that
easily in school and not have any homework.

Now, think of all P kids (not only gifted ones) who understood early on that school was not
their cup of tea. Sometimes this happened sometimes right from the start. or with a change
of teacher, All that talent that got lost, due to a stifling J school system. Often the problem
isn't the teacher, but our modern times. P kids need more time to compensate for their
weaknesses, but they aren't given this time anymore. All the groups have to be
homogenous, and if they aren't the kids get "fixed" with additional classes, such as
logotherapy or fine motor therapy. When I went to school, kids had more time to develop
than today. All these developments only lead to kids shutting down earlier and earlier in our
school system resulting in kids only learning for grades and not the subjects. This trend is
extremely counterproductive, as most kids don't want to go on with any field resembling the
subject after school.
Is there any way to solve this problem? Yes, there have been myriads of proposals:
Montessori, project-based learning, e-learning, and many more. These solutions aren’t just
employed often enough at schools to make all P kids stay at school and not drop out.

All this doesn’t mean that J students are always happy or favoured by our school system.
Even though they usually try to catch up with their weaknesses, they often hurt themselves
with their perfectionism. They often sacrifice free time and friends and don’t have a life
anymore. I had a J student who, even though she had already decided not to go on to
university and look for a job instead after high school, spent so much time studying for her
final exams that she put on some 20 pounds to finish them with straight As.
Right-brained vs left-brained children

One thing a lot of teachers have been told about to understand the differences between
children is left vs right-brained dominant children. Unfortunately, matters are much more
complex than this.

As I wrote above verbal/visual is probably most closely connected to the T/F dimension. Also
other traits in this distinction do correspond to different personality dimensions. Here is an
overview:

● T/F: visual/logic vs verbal/emotional

● S/N: detail-oriented vs intuitive/holistic perception
● J/P: sequential (planning)l vs explorative (creative)

The most “kinaesthetic learners” are typically herder types (SP). The
extraversion/introversion dimension itself may not have many effects on learning styles,
except that extraverts obviously prefer learning in social settings, whereas introverts tend to
prefer to learn on their own. The greatest autodidacts are, however, hunter-gatherer types
(in particular NPs).

Still, as a shorthand left and right-brained might come in handy. I teach multimedia classes
that have extremely high numbers of hunter-gatherer and herder type students. Most of
these test as “right-brained”. They typically tend to be “messy” (with the exception of NJ
students) and have messy desks. Also, all of my left-handed (indication of right brained)
students so far have been either hunter-gatherer or herder types.
The serotonin secret: jocks vs burnouts

Most people tend to think academic success is mostly determined by IQ. This is utterly
wrong. Of course, academic success is determined by IQ, it is just not the most important
factor. As a teacher, I have seen many underperformers, bright kids who dropped out of
school or barely managed to finish their final exams. I have seen overperformers too, teens
who would get up at 5 am on Saturday to cram from an exam on Monday and teens who
would study so much for the final exams that they put on ten pounds of weight during the
course of their studies.

So what is more important than IQ in predicting academic success? In the Big 5 personality
inventory, one trait sticks out big time: conscientiousness. Kids with higher levels of
conscientiousness display the following sub-traits:

● Hard-working
● Orderly
● Organized
● Good planners
● Reliable (handing in coursework in time, etc.)
● Stick to the rules
● Good focus on rote work

These are the kids who are (almost) every teacher’s dream come true. Some of these kids
even enjoy school. And these are the kids who finish high school with good grades,
naturally. Who would disagree that they don’t deserve it? I, as a teacher, would not. Of
course, it is fair that the hard-working kids get good grades, after all, hard work is what will
count later on in their jobs as well, merely being intelligent isn’t good enough.

However, if we dig deeper, there is something odd here. I have argued that the above traits
have evolved as a bundle of traits that served early farmers well and that might have been
driven by higher levels of serotonin. So, these students might be just “lucky” enough to have
inherited the right serotonin genes for school??? Serotonin promotes Stability and Stability
represents the shared variance of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and low Neuroticism
(source). Based on these traits it is not hard to see how students high in serotonin display all
of the above characteristics.

What about the other students who do not show these traits, like disruptive or ADHD
students? These students are more dominated by dopamine? Does that mean that they are
worse learners?

Dopamine facilitates exploration, approach, learning, and cognitive flexibility in response to

unexpected rewards and cues indicative of the possibility of reward. (source)
No. They are more flexible learners. One could argue even better learners, just not in a
school setting. High dopamine makes explorative learners more quickly bored with rote
learning and sitting still for hours. These are the kids that are often sarcastically referred to
as the “creative kids”, but this is what they really are. And of course, they perform worse than
the high serotonin kids in most cases: years of boredom, inattention, neglected homework
and low motivation take their toll. In some cases gifted kids get through school with average
grades because they are intelligent enough, in some cases, they drop out. As you can see in
the table below J (high serotonin) types completely dominate GPA scores. With ACT (tests
for which students can’t really prepare) the pattern is at least partially reversed: it is
dominated by two P (explorative, high dopamine) types and the P types often fare better
than their corresponding J types (e.g. ISTP better than ISTJ, ISFP better than ISFJ, etc.).

So, which traits do the gifted, highly intelligent kids have? I have argued that they have
typically hunter-gatherer, traits, i.e. they are highly egalitarian (dislike authority and therefore
often get in trouble in school), they are out-group social (not identifying with and conform to
any group and might therefore easily become outsiders) and they often have poor focus on
rote learning, but hyperfocus when they are interested. Their dominant trait in the Big 5
inventory is “openness”, which is the only personality trait significantly correlated with IQ.

Ironically, the traits openness alone, even though significantly correlated with IQ, does not
have a strong effect on school performance, as can be seen in the GPA scores (ENTJ best-
performing personality profile vs ENFP worst-performing profile). The best performance at
school is predicted by high conscientiousness and high openness (NJ in Myers-Briggs)
combined, as can be seen from the average GPA levels in the table). High openness and
low conscientiousness (NP) has relatively poor performance. It is not a coincidence that low
conscientiousness and high openness are also somewhat predictive for ADHD. It was Thom
Hartmann who actually first proposed a connection between ADHD and hunter minds.

By valuing orderliness and compliance (conscientiousness) higher than creativity

(explorative and openness) schools have an inherent bias against creative students. The
majority of creative scientists (Darwin, Einstein, Richard Feynman, etc.) and creative artists
(Van Gogh, Picasso, Shakespeare, Orwell, etc.) belonged to the low-conscientious, high
open profile. Consequently, you will find almost no Nobel Laureates who actually enjoyed
school.
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk Do schools kill creativity? Is a warning that schools do indeed
kill creativity. They definitely kill curiosity, not only in hunter-gatherer children but in all
children. And they actively filter out the highly creative ones. Unfortunately for schools and
teachers, those are the ones that do not fit easily into a school system based on rigorous
rules and rote learning. For parents of such children, the best advice is to homeschool if
possible or to look for alternative schools, such a Montessori school. Maria Montessori was
of the low consciousness/high openness hunter-gatherer profile herself and understood that
at least certain kids needed a different type of schooling.

My categorisation of students into J (high-serotonin, farmer types, hunter-gatherer types with

high serotonin) and P (hunter-gatherer-types and herder types) is somewhat simplistic, but
not overly so. A famous study by Penelope Eckert from Stanford university found that
students could be divided into two groups by the way they spoke, the jocks (adapted to
school life) and the burnouts (struggling with school life).
Of course, reality is much more complex than this. I have had many P students who did
really well in school and some J students who really struggled. However, as a rule of thumb
P students run a high risk of becoming burnouts.

Friendships, group dynamics and social anxiety rising

In a highly interesting paper Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler describe that
people tend to find their friends among genetically similar people. That means that friends
are more related to each other (the equivalent of fourth cousins) than to people outside their
circle. There might be several possible reasons for this phenomenon. The possibility that
fascinates me most is selection via personality types, i.e. people choose other people with a
similar personality type as friends and partners.

I do the Myers-Briggs test with all of my classes and each time I find a similar picture: similar
types sit next to each other. The ones who have the same MBTI often tell me that they have
been friends since early childhood.

What you can see that from this seating chart is that personality types tend to “bond” like
molecules. The more similar two individuals are the more similarly they tend to experience
the world and the more easily they bond. There is an empty seat between two types that are
opposites (ENFP/ISTJ) and an empty seat between the outsider (INTJ) who hasn’t found
anybody to bond with and the rest of the classmates in the back row.

Outsiders are almost always IN types, most typically INTJ/INFJ with social anxiety. These
students are often extremely difficult when it comes to collaborating with other classmates or
giving a presentation in front of the whole class. In general, the quiet students are introverts
(no big surprise) and occasionally also extroverted intuitive (EN) who haven’t found anybody
to bond with and are quasi outsiders despite being extroverts.

The “alphas” are usually extroverts sensors (ES), in particular ESTJ and ESTP. Extraverted
intuitives tend not to be alphas, as they are more egalitarian. When it comes to class and
school presidents, it is often the F types, who are more popular, so ESFJ and ENFJ are
overrepresented among them.
Typically the hardest types to mix are N/S (hunter-gatherer vs farmer/pastoralist). N types
generally mix well with S types that do not try to dominate them, i.e. often I/F, but also the
respective T types, when treated like a friend rather than a rival. If there is a conflict between
the two major groups in class, the two groups are usually made up like this: one group in
which ES types are predominant and usually led by one or more ST types, with the other
group more “egalitarian”, typically without a leader, made up of mixed N/IS/SF types.

Anybody working with a lot of young people nowadays knows that social anxiety has
been increasing in the past twenty years or so. Many possible causes have been
proposed, from smartphones to genetics. While I don’t think that smartphone “abuse”
is a cause (rather a symptom) I do think the genetic part has a lot to do with
personality.

The following personality traits (OCEAN) are linked to social anxiety:

● Neuroticism
● Introversion
● Openness to experience

The “People who are introverts and very open to new experience tend to have the
highest levels of social anxiety” (see here). While neuroticism and introversion are
perhaps no big surprise, openness seems to be in need of an explanation.

Openness correlates strongly with the trait “intuition” or “N” in the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator (MBTI, not recognized by most scientists, but easier to operate with than
the OCEAN).

About 10-15% of preschoolers are already painfully shy, so there definitely seems to
be a strong genetic component. This figure also corresponds to the number of
introverted intuitive (IN) types. IN types are rare and many often realise when kids
they are different from the majority of people, probably increasing their inborn social
sensitivity. When I started using MBTI for my research I quickly found out that it was
not only me (INFP) who was very shy as a kid, but also pretty much of my IN friends,
my two IN sons and many of my IN students at school.I take the test with all of my
classes, and the very shy students are almost always IN, occasionally also IS and to
my initial surprise also EN students, as I didn’t expect extraverted teens to suffer
from social anxiety.

So, what’s the story? My sons, even though a bit shy (which is not unusual for little
kids) didn’t seem to display unusual social behaviour until they started kindergarten
and school. My oldest son was a gifted kid and couldn’t really connect to anyone in
kindergarten and neither later in school. My younger son (INTJ) seemed to be more
“normal”. He did have two friends in kindergarten but suddenly found himself more
isolated in elementary school. He does have two boys he talks to, but otherwise
doesn’t talk to anybody else and calls himself “asocial”. What happened?

My hypothesis is that social anxiety depends a lot on (not) making connections with
others. In kindergarten, my INTJ son had an INTJ best friend and an ENFP friend
who he did like a lot, but grew tired of more quickly. IF you see the four letters as
“magnets'' that attract each other, it is easy to see how kids connect with each other.
Both boys were rather technologically minded (T) and had hunter-gatherer minds
(N). The biggest difference was that my son was more careful, less active and
wanted to have fewer social interactions due to his introversion. In elementary
school, the kids he gets along best with is ISTP, so much more different than him
already. In Myers-Briggs the biggest obstacle for a successful relation is the N/S
dimension.

Basically, this is what happend to my oldest son. He couldn’t find any other (I)N
types with similar interests and therefore didn’t find anybody to connect to. IN kids
therefore are already aware early on that they are different and become shy because
the have a feeling of non-belonging. A lot of people on the social network Quora
have told me that they felt like aliens in their childhood, some of them desperately
waiting for a UFO to pick them up and take them to their “species”.

If childhood can be bad for IN kids, their teens can be much worse. IN kids often look
younger and may show delayed bodily development compared to other kids. What
happens is, that the precious kids (often SPs) tend to establish a social hierarchy
with bullying and teasing and their easiest victims are the IN kids, as they are both
behind in development and “egalitarian”, i.e. they are not “programmed” to fight for
an “alpha position” or to fight at all. It is easy to see how shyness can quickly
develop into social anxiety under such circumstances. Even without bullying social
isolation can get worse as IN kids can’t understand the other kids obsession with
sex, cars, competitive sports, branded clothes, make-up, etc.

The same can be true for extraverted intuitives (EN). Even though they might have
many friends in elementary school, they increasingly don’t understand them and
become isolated, too. Whereas their IN counterparts might have already been
diagnosed with ASD in childhood, the EN kids might get diagnosed with ASD now
that they are in their early teens, because they didn’t show many signs of social
isolation before.

Why is social anxiety rising? Because kids are less and less connected in early
childhood: fewer siblings, fewer possibilities to get connected, particularly if they are
introverted. In that case even their parents' encouragement to make or meet friends
are often futile. One father told me that he had to bribe his son with buying video-
games for him if he agreed to meet kids from his school. He said it cost him a lot of
money, but it did help in the end.
The psychology of online learning and teaching and born
autodidacts

I have been teaching with digital media for more than 15 years now and something that has
always surprised me is that in each school only a few teachers are really enthusiastic about
it, with a lot of teachers trying to avoid it altogether. What is more, even though the myth of
the digital native has been quite pervasive in the past ten years or so, there are still
teenagers who would prefer not to learn digitally and do it the old fashioned way with paper
and pen.
COVID-19 has changed a lot about this situation. As I am writing this I am in my second
2020 lockdown and teaching all of my classes online and digitally. Most teachers have been
able to learn the necessary digital tools in a short time, but many of them wouldn’t have if
there had been no necessity. And while I, as an introvert, actually enjoy teaching from home,
most of my colleagues don’t like it at all. So, what is it that makes some people drawn to
online learning and teaching and others hate it?
I started out in the early 2000s with creating my own websites with HTML and web-editors.
This was admittedly very geeky and I could understand that not all teachers wanted to invest
time in learning and creating their own websites. As technology made it increasingly easier
to put content online (in chronological order: Moodle, YouTube, Blogs, Google Docs, Google
Classroom, Microsoft Teams, just to name a few of my favourite online tools) the numbers of
teachers using these tools did not increase significantly to my surprise.
A year ago, I started on a quest to find out why this is so and I struck gold with personality
psychology. The two most important traits that make somebody interested in online learning
or teaching are in terms of the Big Five inventory:
● openness to experience
● introversion
These relevance of these two personality traits are actually quite easy to understand:
Introverts tend to spend more time alone and therefore also use their digital devices.
Extroverts prefer to spend more time in social settings and also tend to prefer peer learning,
whereas introverts tend to prefer to learn on their own and they find plenty of possibilities
online, be it blogs, wikis or video tutorials. As far as teachers are concerned: the
overwhelming majority of teachers are extroverts. Typical subjects for introverted teachers
are IT and art.
Openness to experience is also pretty straightforward: these are people who like to try out
new things, technology, methods, etc. whereas the opposite would be routine-loving and
traditional people.

As there the Big Five inventory isn’t very operational I turned to Myers-Briggs and asked
many eLearning colleagues to take this ten minute test: https://www.16personalities.com/.
There was a single most important trait that predicted use of digital media in classrooms: N
(Intuition), with introversion as runner-up.
My continued online research showed the same results: INs (introverted intuitives) were the
dominant personality group online. Here is one statistic about online gamers (and it probably
wouldn’t look very different for online learners/teachers):

The bigger picture regarding online teaching I got from my research:

INTXs: technological innovators, creators of learning sites, apps, etc.

This group comprises classical geeks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, as well as a lot
of people with Asperger’s or ASD.

Elon Musk: INTX personality, the epitome of the classical geek. He was a bookworm who
devoured books and encyclopedias as a child. He taught himself programming and wrote a
computer game at the age of 12.
INFXx: very early adopters of new technology and pedagogical innovators, creators of new
learning scenarios, like e-portfolios, flipped classroom, etc.

ENXXs: the extroverted intuitives tend to be early adopters and avid promoters of online
learning.

Here is a tentative list of how Myers-Briggs personality traits influence online teaching:

E/I: extroverts tend to be in the foreground; e.g. they love doing flipped classroom videos;
introverts tend to work out innovative scenarios in the background

N/S: Ns tend to be visionary, S tend to create “practical scenarios”, i.e. their emphasis is on
saving time, efficiency, etc. rather than innovative and creative aspects of online learning

T/F: Ts tend to be more interested in the technological challenges, whereas Fs tend to focus
on pedagogy.

P/J: P: love trying out new technology and are therefore among the earliest adopters. Plus,
they tend to get bored with one tool, so they use a lot of different online tools. Js tend to be
more conscientious, but less explorative than Ps, so they tend to focus on fewer tools for
which they become experts, e.g. Microsoft Office 365.

To give a concrete example: my own personality profile is INFP/INTP borderline. I have been
using online services and the internet since my teens (early adopter), created websites for
my students in HTML, been on YouTube users since year 1 and even created tutorials for
my own students, therefore being both a “YouTuber” and “Flipped Classroom Teacher” even
before these terms became widely known. However, as an introvert I feel a bit uncomfortable
with being in the limelight on YouTube, so I prefer writing blogs. I have even programmed
online quizzed for my students and set up alpha versions of Moodle servers that supported
mobile devices (my T side). Last, but not least, I get bored with doing the same projects
again and again, so I try out at least a few new tools as well as trying to develop at least one
new teaching scenario each school year (my P side).

As I have noticed differences in affinities towards online learning in my students, I try to

teach them differentially; e.g. I leave them the option if they want to turn in homework
digitally or on paper, if they want to do a presentation in class or if they want to record it, or if
they study vocabulary via the Quizlet app or traditional vocabulary lists on paper.

One last remark, as far as online learners are concerned: online learning seems to be quite
successful among special education students. I am not too experienced with special ed
students, but I have noticed that a lot of them also tend to be introverted and intuitive. This is
particularly true for ASD and Asperger’s students.
Parenting the different types of children

There has been very little “practical advice” on how to parent and teach the different types of
children. It is because I do not believe in “recipes”. It’s essential to understand the child first.
Recipes are fine, but it’s important to try to understand the child first when they don’t work.
Hunter-gatherer type children, in general, hate rote learning, memorization, and repetitive
learning and yet they are much better at it than other children if they develop a passion for
an area of interest (called “special interest” in ASD). My INTJ son hates memorizing poems,
but can easily tell you all the elements of the periodic table with many of their properties. My
INFP son is the other way round, he hates memorizing science-related stuff but loves
memorizing songs, poems and memes.

Just like their children have inborn traits, so do parents. Their parenting style is often
“instinctive”, based on their own personality type. F types tend to be warmer and more
loving (majority women), whereas T types tend to be lower in warmth. When it comes to
setting limits farmer types are typically stricter than herder and hunter-gatherer types, who
are more relaxed and permissive when it comes to parenting. NJs are often an execution, as
they can be the strictest of all types Especially NTJ teachers are often dreaded among their
students.

Farmer type parents who have herder or hunter type children often become very strict as
these two types are very freedom-loving and less compliant/obieniend than farmer type
children. However, being authoritarian does not go down well with hunter type children, who
might easily become more defiant and develop ODD (see above). Hunter-gatherer bands
have permissive parenting styles all over the world. They don’t coerce or discipline their
children, who are usually eager to help and contribute to their community.

Herder type parents might often find that their farmer type children aren’t lively enough and
too cautious and want them to take more risks. Farmer type children tend to be very dutiful.
A boy in my neighbourhood was so afraid of coming late to his class when taking the school
bus that he insisted that his parents drive him to school.

Understanding your children’s personality type can be useful in many situations.

Understanding conflict and cooperation among siblings is one of them. Farmer type parents
might have a gatherer type daughter who generally gets along great with almost everyone
and wants to be friends with almost everyone. However, when it comes to her herder type
brother there is a lot of friction and frequent fights.

The more different traits parents have from their children the harder they tend to understand
them. To give an real life example: an ESFP mother constantly tried to give (loving) advice to
her INTJ son because she thought he wasn’t social enough, trying to get him to go to parties
and different kinds of events. The message that her son got was that he was somehow
“defective” and not normal. This is actually what his mother told me: “I just want him to be
normal and fit in”. Hunter type children like INTJs are hardly ever “normal” and often struggle
to fit in. However, getting this message from his parents is highly disturbing for an INTJ as it
almost seems like ostracism. The right way of reacting for his mother would have been
accepting him totally the way he is and helping him explain how other people are different.

There is no room in this book to discuss all the characteristics of the different types of
children. There are good books out there that discuss the relationship between parents and
their children in terms ob Myers-Briggs types, e.g. Keirsey (2009). Furthermore, there are a
lot of free online resources, like the following website:

https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/2018/03/01/recognizing-myers-briggs-personality-types-
childhood/
Teaching the different types of children

What is true for parenting and parenting styles is mostly also true for teaching and teachings
styles. However, contrary to the possibilities parents have it is impossible for every teacher
to do justice to every student’s learning style and individuality. However, it should help a lot if
teachers are aware of the different personality traits that lead to widely different behaviour
and outcomes among their students. Teachers may react a lot more kindly if they
understand that the child who constantly blurts out irrelevant answers is most likely to be
neurodiverse (even if not diagnosed with ADHD) and be an ENTP or ENFP.

Most teachers use themselves as a yardstick to measure their students’ behaviour.

Extroverted teachers tend to find introverts who don’t speak up a bit lazy and not trying hard
enough. Herder type teachers might find farmer type children a bit too well-behaved and
boring.

A lot of criticism of the traditional school system comes from hunter-gatherer type people.
The late Sir Ken Robinson (INTJ) had a lot to criticize our school system: standardization,
focus on rote learning and putting children in segregated age groups. For many of us, putting
children into the same age group may seem the most logical and obvious way of organizing
school. That is because we are used to it, often not being aware of the problem it creates.
Children in hunter-gatherer bands learn mostly from their older peers. This is actively
prevented by putting children in same-age groups. Another problem is that there is a higher
chance of bullying involved as this short passage from Diary of a Wimpy Kid illustrates:

Let me just say for the record that I think middle school is the dumbest idea ever invented.
You got kids like me who haven't hit their growth spurt yet mixed in with these gorillas who
need to shave twice a day. And then they wonder why bullying is such a big problem in
middle school. (Greg Heffley, INTP)

As discussed above, hunter-gatherer type children are likely to have their growth-spurts
(puberty) later than their peers. That combined with their out-group sociality (not forming
alliances) makes them easy victims for bullies, often herder types who have their puberty
early. To put things into perspective, the majority of herder type children do not become
bullies and often those who do aren’t actually aware of the damage they cause. Victims of
bullying have a high risk of suicide. They typically belong to the highly sensitive gatherer
types. These often misinterpret rough and tumble play as acts of aggression as they have a
thinner skin than their herder peers.

When it comes to teaching hunter-gatherer type children, many methods have already been
invented by hunter-gatherer type personalities. Perhaps most famously by Maria Montessori
(ENTP) who suffered herself from a “farmer” school system and who tried to reform it. Just
by having a look at the eight principles it becomes clear that these are motivated by “hunter-
gatherer instincts” (movement, freedom, choice, intrinsic motivation)
Eight Principles of Montessori Education
● Movement and Cognition.
● Choice.
● Interest.
● Extrinsic Rewards are Avoided.
● Learning with and from Peers.
● Learning in Context.
● Teacher Ways and Child Ways.
● Order in Environment and Mind.

While traditional classrooms can’t be easily transformed to fit the needs of hunter-gatherer
type children, the future of learning is definitely personalised learning made possible by
digital tools. I personally love combining exercise (movement) and listening to audiobooks;
this is the way I get most of my reading done nowadays.

As far as teachers are concerned, they can’t change the rules of the education game, but
they can try to understand their students and they can help to understand them themselves.
I do the MBTI test with all of my students. It only takes 10-15 minutes of my teaching time.
Here are the four dimensions again:

The test can be taken for free on websites like:

https://www.16personalities.com/

Many MBTI die-hard fans criticize such online tests for not being accurate enough. From my
experience most students get their correct profile (many students might also be “mixed”).
About 10-20% tend to get one of the dimensions wrong. They typically find out when their
type descriptions are a bit off.
If a teacher prefers to leave out the personality and focus on the learning styles instead the
can take the Felder Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire:

https://www.webtools.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/

My own result corresponds very much to my MBTI personality type: INFP

The last dimension is named a bit unfortunately. I would prefer the term “explorative” (see
above) as “global” might easily be confused with “big picture”/intuitive. In fact, the test may
be rather confusing here, as almost all intuitive sequential types (NJs) I have asked got
“global” as a result, some even 100% global, despite having a preference for structure and
order.

CONCRETE SEQUENTIAL SJ
This learner likes:
§         order
§         logical sequence
§         following directions, predictability
§         getting facts
They learn best when:
§         they have a structured environment
§         they can rely on others to complete
this task
§         are faced with predictable situations
§         can apply ideas in pragmatic ways
What's hard for them?
§           Working in groups
§           Discussions that seem to have no
specific point
§           Working in an unorganized
environment
§           Following incomplete or unclear
directions
§           Working with unpredictable people
§           Dealing with abstract ideas
§           Demands to "use your imagination"
§           Questions with no right or wrong
ABSTRACT SEQUENTIAL NJ
This learner likes:
§         his/her point to be heard
§         analyzing situations before making
a decision or acting
§         applying logic in solving or finding
solutions to problems
They learn best when:
§        they have access to experts or
references
§        placed in stimulating environments
§        able to work alone
What's hard for them?
§        Being forced to work with those of
differing views
§        Too little time to deal with a subject
thoroughly
§        Repeating the same tasks over and
over
§        Lots of specific rules and regulations
§        "sentimental" thinking
§        Expressing their emotions
§        Being diplomatic when convincing
others
 answers
.
CONCRETE RANDOM SP
This learner likes:
§experimenting to find answers
§take risks
§use their intuition
§solving problems independently
They learn best when:
§they are able to use trial-and-error
approaches
§able to compete with others
§given the opportunity to work through the
problems by themselves.
What's hard for them?
§            Restrictions and limitations
§            Formal reports
§            Routines
§            Re-doing anything once it’s done
§            Keeping detailed records
§            Showing how they got an answer
§            Choosing only one answer
§            Having no options
 
§        Not monopolizing a conversation
 
ABSTRACT RANDOM NP
This learner likes:
§        to listen to others
§        bringing harmony to group situations
§        establishing healthy relationships with
others
§        focusing on the issues at hand
They learn best when:
§        in a personalized environment
§        given broad or general guidelines
§        able to maintain friendly relationships
§        able to participate in group activities
What's hard for them?
§        Having to explain or justify feelings
§        Competition
§        Working with dictatorial/authoritarian
personalities
§        Working in a restrictive environment
§        Working with people who don’t seem
friendly
§        Concentrating on one thing at a time
§        Giving exact details
§        Accepting even positive criticism
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