Makers and Learners

Two types of cognitive drives and the people who are influenced by them

Epistemic status: Some of this piece is speculation based on anecdata, but the anecdata comes from the two people I know best if that makes a difference.

For years now, I’ve been pondering why some people are driven by learning new facts and information, while others are motivated to create new things. These two sets of people aren’t necessarily disjoint, but I’ve observed enough individuals who primarily fall into one camp or the other that I think this personality difference is interesting and relevant.

I personally fall more into the former camp. I’m much more likely to fall into a rabbit hole of reading Wikipedia/an interesting author’s blog posts/books about a topic I’ve become fascinated by than I am to become obsessed with creating something. Granted, I still have this Substack (to which I haven’t posted anything in about 10 months), and I occasionally experience a desire to create music. But my mind just naturally gets captured by reading and absorbing information (including through podcasts) more readily than it does by the siren song of creating some new work.

Conversely, my wife falls into the latter camp. She’ll occasionally do deep dives into new topics, but these learning sprees are generally motivated by her desire to create something new. She frequently gets inspired to create new things during her day job and can get really sucked into pursuing her ideas for new work. She is also passionate about multiple artistic pursuits and will devotedly follow them when the creative mood strikes her (which happens often).

Understanding our different drives has been the primary motivator behind my desire to understand these personality differences. Though we’ve gotten accustomed to each other’s idiosyncrasies at this point, she’s had to adjust to my tendency to read on my phone when she wants to go to bed, and I’ve had to adjust to her obsessive creative sprees when she can’t stop thinking about a project and I want to spend quality time together.

But why are we so different in this respect? We have a lot of other personality traits in common. I’ve also wanted to be more like her: her creative drive has helped her career in some respects, and I see how much satisfaction and meaning she derives from her projects. In my lower moments, I sometimes feel like I’m just wasting my life consuming a bunch of information and that I’ll never do anything with it.

A brief interlude: need for cognition

As much as I’m focusing on the differences between makers and learners, I think that people who feel a strong pull towards either pursuit are generally strong in the need for cognition cognitive trait. This trait “refers to an individual’s tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive processing.” The linked paper found a strong correlation (r = .67, p < .0008) between need for cognition and the Openness to Ideas facet of the Big 5 trait openness¹. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the people with whom I’ve had interesting intellectual discussions tend to be drawn to at least one of learning or making of their own volition, in their free time. Thus, when I’m distinguishing between people who tend towards one trait or the other, I’m implicitly holding need for cognition constant.

Root causes of these differences: nature or nurture?

Though recent research has shown that most psychological traits are at least somewhat heritable, the amount of variation explained by genetic factors can vary. When I first started contemplating the causes of the maker/learner distinction, I actually thought that the differences might be influenced more by one’s familial environment than many other traits. If a child sees her father spending his free time reading books and interacting on forums about his special interests (as I did), it seems likely that the child would grow up to emulate that behavior. To me, this model seems similar to the model that explains why so many children enter their parents’ professions². They sit around the dinner table, hearing their parents' work stories (or stories about free time pursuits), and they're more motivated to learn more about these topics. They also have a free resource at home who can answer any relevant questions.

However, a recent study of twins in the US, the UK, Japan, Canada, Russia, and Germany casts some doubt on this assumption of mine. The researchers analyzed how levels of interest in various school subjects correlated across pairs of identical and fraternal twins. They found that for most combinations of subject/age/location, the portion of the variance in interest explained by shared environment was small. (It was 10% or less in all combinations except for Japanese eleven-year-olds in math [50%], German nine-year-olds in German [15%], and German thirteen-year-olds in German [15%]. The Japanese eleven-year-olds in math seem to be a fluke, since the numbers for Japanese students aged ten, twelve, thirteen, and sixteen are low.) The portion of variance explained by genetic factors, however, was generally relatively high. (It was above 20% for all combinations except for ten and eleven-year-old Japanese students in math. Again, I'm not sure what was going on with the Japanese students' fondness for math, since 69% and 49% of the variance in Japanese twelve and thirteen-year-olds' fondness for math, respectively, was explained by genetic variation.)

That said, I want to avoid concluding too much based off this single study. First, interest in a single school subject at one specific age doesn’t map neatly onto interest in learning new things in a self-directed way. For example, perhaps some of the twin pairs had different teachers, and one twin had a teacher who encouraged a love of math that year, while another’s math teacher made him/her dread the subject. But this non-shared environmental difference might not lead to a lasting difference between the twins’ love of self-directed learning.

Second, there are some critiques of the model these researchers used to partition sources of phenotypic variation. This paper in particular offers two specific criticisms that I think are worth taking seriously. The first critique is that the researchers’ model assumes that genetic variation, variation of the shared environment, and variation of the non-shared environment are independent, additive factors. But in reality, the three can influence each other. The second criticism is that the definition of shared environment used in the model is different than the one assumed by the lay reader. In the objective environmental definition (the commonly assumed one), the shared environment is any environmental influence to which all siblings are exposed. But in the effective environmental definition (the one used in the model), the shared environment is any environmental influence that makes siblings more similar. The authors suggest that a shared objective environment between twins could even make twins less similar if they want to seek our their own unique niches.

Higher-order mediators of these differences

Regardless of how much these differences are ultimately influenced by genetics or the shared family environment, genes and the environment don’t necessarily affect these traits directly. Here are a few different possible mediators that are influenced by genetic and childhood environmental factors and probably influence one’s propensity to be a maker or a learner in turn:

• Immediate reward from the activity. I personally experience a quick reward feedback when I learn something new and interesting. Conversely, I don’t generally experience much of a reward while I’m in the midst of creating something. I do sometimes feel a sense of accomplishment once I’ve finished something, but while I’m working on a creative project, I often feel some stress and pressure to get everything right. I’d predict that most makers experience more of a reward while they’re actively working on their creation. (I do, however, occasionally feel a deep need to make something, analogous to the need I feel to work out when I haven’t exercised in a couple of days. But this is more of a neutral compulsion rather than a positive feeling.)

• Self-efficacy. This is a psychological trait measuring your belief in your ability to act in ways that will achieve your goals. When I have an idea for a creative project, I often get bogged down worrying that it won’t be any good, and that any time spent on it will end up being a waste. I think my self-efficacy in some areas (eg learning and fitness) is decent, but for some reason, I have lower self-efficacy when it comes to completing creative projects.

• Peer pressure. If you’re surrounded by a bunch of creative people who are constantly making cool stuff, you’ll probably feel more compelled to produce more creations of your own³. Conversely, if your friends frequently discuss complex topics that require significant background knowledge to understand, you'll probably feel pressure to learn enough to hold your own in such conversations.

Conclusion

I don’t have any particularly deep closing thoughts on this subject, and I also don’t think this is my final post on it. But I wanted to make more people aware of these traits, and I’m curious to hear about others’ views on them. Do you see yourself as more of a maker or a learner? Have you tried to move yourself more towards the opposite category, and if so, what techniques have you found to be successful?

1. If anything, the true correlation between these traits might be even higher, due to a possible restriction of range effect, given that the sample in the paper consists of German college students. SAT verbal scores show a moderate positive correlation with openness, so it’s likely that people who pursue college are higher in openness than the general population (especially in a country like Germany where students of average or lower academic ability are discouraged from attending university).

2. Of course, this trend could also largely be explained by genetics. But in some fields, the rate at which children enter their parents’ professions exceeds what I’d expect due to genetics alone. For example, 20% of Swedish doctors born in the 80s have at least one parent who’s a doctor. But this effect differs among professions; only 7% of Swedish lawyers born in 1990 had at least one lawyer parent.

3. Unless, of course, you have tragically low self-efficacy with respect to creative projects and believe that nothing you make will ever measure up to your peers’ creations, so you might as well not try.