Beyond the Universal and the Culturally Determined Human: Reframing the Biosocial Problem Under Neo-Structuration

The biosocial problem concerns how biological and sociocultural factors condition human mentality and development. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was framed primarily in terms of the relative influence of nature and nurture: biology ensured stability, whereas culture operated as a transformative force. The rise of cross-cultural, indigenous, culture-inclusive, and global psychologies added another question: whether psychological characteristics presented as universal by mainstream theories are in fact culturally specific. Yet both formulations focused on how biology and culture shape human beings. We argue that the growth of the pace of societal transformations due to changes of their causal forces in the context of neo-structuration require a new formulation of the biosocial problem. Biology and culture remain causally consequential, but their direct conditioning power is increasingly mediated by human agency. Agency becomes an ontologically irreducible causal factor, as human beings not only develop within biological and cultural conditions but also select, recombine, and transform those, thereby reshaping themselves and their technological, cultural, and institutional environments. To reconstruct conceptual resources for this argument, we draw on theories focusing on the transformability of the human in the history of psychology and in contemporary discourse. Soviet theories recognized human plasticity but generally presumed that the direction of transformation was institutionally prescribed, though Rubinstein's concept of Subjekt and Ananiev's account of self-determination and individuality offer resources for moving beyond this limitation. We propose a recursive model in which biology and culture condition human development but agentic action transform those, thereby changing subsequent living contexts.