What Did the Biophilia Hypothesis Get Wrong?
Cultural and individual differences challenge the idea of innate love of nature.
Updated December 18, 2025 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
I am a nature lover. When I was a kid, I spent hours flipping rocks looking for creepy-crawlies, and my wife and I have always lived in homes surrounded by woods. And these days, I like nothing better than kayaking deep the salt marsh creeks of the South Carolina low country. Thus, when I read E. O. Wilson’s 1986 book Biophilia, I was immediately convinced by his writing: “humans have an innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” He referred to this idea as the “ biophilia hypothesis .”
However, I have changed my mind about the origin of our love for nature. And I am in good company—Wilson also changed his mind. In a 1995 book , he clarified his view of biophilia, writing, “Biophilia is not a single instinct but a complex of learning rules that can be teased apart and analyzed individually.”
Biophilia and the Nature-Nurture Debate
Arguments over the origins of biophilia exemplify a persistent issue in psychology—the nature-nurture debate. For example, in a recent Psychology Today post, blogger and biophilia proponent Dana Klisanin takes the nature view. In a post titled Are We Born to Love Nature? she wrote of biophilia, “Emerging research suggests that we may inherit an emotional and biological bond with nature.”
Several new lines of research, however, indicate that, for our species, attraction to the wild things is driven at least as much by culture and learning as by genes .
Cultural Differences in Connectedness with Nature
If biophilia were an instinct, like smiling or an aversion to sex with close relatives, it should be culturally universal. But this is not the case. The University of Derby's Miles Richardson and his colleagues published the results of a massive cross-cultural study on attraction to nature. They surveyed 57,000 people in 60 countries using the Connectedness to Nature Scale (sample question, “I think of the natural world as a community to which I belong”). The researchers found large differences in the degree to which people in different countries valued the natural world. The relative status of a country’s rank on the connectedness-to-nature measures was largely related to four factors.
Nations in which people were highly connected with nature:
As shown in this graph, nations in which people scored high on nature connectedness tended to be from Asia and Africa. In contrast, citizens from affluent Western countries such as Britain, Germany, Japan, and Spain were much less biophilic.
Matthias Kleespies and Paul Dierkes found similar results in a 2023 cross-cultural study of nature connectedness . They studied 4,200 university students in 41 countries. Individuals living in poorer countries scored higher on measures of connections to nature. Students from Africa and South America scored higher on nature scales than students from other parts of the world. The researchers suggested that a stronger connection to nature in these countries reflects the fact that people in poorer nations are more likely to grow up in rural areas and spend more time in natural settings
Individual Differences in Connectedness to Nature?
In a 2023 paper , Vanessa Woods and Melina Knuth at Duke University proposed a revised view of our connection to nature. They called it the “biophilia reactivity hypothesis.” (Read about it here .) They argued that biophilia is not a unitary instinct but, rather, a temperament trait with large individual differences. Their theory predicts that individual differences in attraction to diverse natural environments should, like personality traits, be normally distributed and follow a normal (bell-curve) distribution.
Woods and her colleagues recently developed the Backyard Biophilia Scale to test this idea. The scale has 10 items that fall into two categories ( factors in stat-speak). They are “ gardening for wildlife” (Sample question: “I like gardens that attract all kinds of wildlife.”) and “lawn and order” (Sample question: “I like well-manicured lawns”). The 2,000 participants also completed a measure of fear of animals as well as a scale that assessed their degree of concern for the environment .
Here are the results.
Other studies also support Wood’s and Knuth’s view that differences in biophilia resemble differences in personality traits. For example, a 2020 meta-analysis (a statistical method of summarizing the results of multiple studies) found that individuals who score high on the personality traits of " openness to experience ” and “honesty-humility” feel more connected to nature and have more pro-environmental attitudes.
The Behavior Genetics of Biophilia
Like personality differences, individual differences in affiliation with nature are influenced by genes. Hundreds of studies have explored the degree to which our personalities are shaped by heredity and environmental factors. Most of these have compared the similarities and differences between pairs of identical and fraternal twins . These studies have found that genes are responsible for 40 to 50 percent of individual differences in personality traits such as extroversion and openness to new experiences.
If biophilia is a trait, the impact of genes should also hold for differences in our need to affiliate with nature. This is the case according to a 2022 study of over 1,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins. Behavior geneticists use the term “heritability” to describe the percentage of individual differences in a trait that can be attributed to genetic influences. The researchers found that genetic factors accounted for 46 percent of individual differences in nature orientation scores, 48 percent of differences in the frequency people visited public nature parks, 34 percent of garden visits, and 38 percent of time spent visiting gardens.
Here are the main takeaways.
A common criticism of Wilson’s original, strongly innate version of the biophilia hypothesis is that it was impossible to falsify. Yet the fact that cultures and individuals widely differ in the extent to which they value the natural world indicates that, as a species, love for nature is not a hardwired component of human nature.
Rather, as with most human behaviors, our connections with the natural world are a product of a complex interaction between genetic predispositions and environmental experiences.
Woods, V., Schmid, L., Chen, H., & Knuth, M. (2025). Backyard Biophilia: A Survey Instrument to Measure an Attraction to Biodiversity in the Home Garden. HortScience , 60 (9), 1478-1485.
Chang, C. C., Cox, D. T., Fan, Q., Nghiem, T. P. L., Tan, C. L., Oh, R. R. Y., ... & Carrasco, L. R. (2022). People’s desire to be in nature and how they experience it are partially heritable. PLoS biology , 20 (2), e3001500.
Kleespies, M. W., & Dierkes, P. W. (2023). Connection to nature of university students in the environmental field—An empirical study in 41 countries. Biological Conservation , 283 , 110093.
Richardson, M., Lengieza, M., White, M. P., Tran, U. S., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., & Swami, V. (2026). Macro-level determinants of nature connectedness: An exploratory analysis of 61 countries. Ambio , 55 (1), 80-100.
Soutter, A. R. B., Bates, T. C., & Mõttus, R. (2020). Big Five and HEXACO personality traits, proenvironmental attitudes, and behaviors: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 15 (4), 913-941.
Wilson, E. O. (1986). Biophilia . Harvard university press.
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Hal Herzog, Ph.D., is the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard To Think Straight About Animals.
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