- Personal freedom as a major external factor governing the
subset of experiences actually available to us - Temperament or personality as a major internal factor gov-
erning the subset of experiences actually available to us - Development as increasingly gene-directed, person-centered,
and insightful
1.Culture as a finite menu of possible life niches. The ability to
express or implement one’s abilities, interests, and other traits on
a sustained basis—to create a life niche comporting with them—
depends on the availability of cultural channels for their expression.
Stated another way, cultural roles and activities are the raw mate-
rials that genetically distinct individuals have for building their
preferred social niches. We must be public selves to be ourselves in
human society, but we must work within the menu of possible pub-
lic selves (jobs, family roles, and so on) that our particular culture
provides or allows. This point is made clearer by noting that tradi-
tional versus modern and agricultural versus postindustrial societies
provide very different such menus. Cultures provide many, but still
limited and Procrustean, possibilities for lives and selves.
2.Life course as a gradual, uncertain journey from birth niche to adult
niche. In democratic societies, we believe that people’s social origins
should not determine their destinies. The circumstances into which
we are born constitute, however, our default niche in life. In biologi-
cal families, people’s default niches are correlated to some extent
with their genotypes by virtue of receiving both genes and rearing
environments from their parents (passive gene–environment corre-
lation). Although this circumstance is likely to build in some degree
of person-environment fit from birth, the fit is often far from com-
fortable. We are, after all, genetically distinct from our parents,
because we share only 50 percent of our (segregating) genes with
each parent.
Were we to select randomly from the experiences available in
our default environments and resonate equally with all of them, we
would never drift far from our birth niche over time. But recall that
124 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT