PSYC 190 - Nature vs Nurture

Why is science the best choice for informing our parenting choice?

1. We don’t have much choice

2. We make choices because we think they matter

3. the truth will set us free

What age do our closest living relatives (Chimpanzees) reach physical maturity?

age 8 or 9

What age do humans reach maturity?

Humans continue to mature both physically and cognitively into their 20s with major structures still changing and affecting life choices

What could have possibly caused the increased focus in parenting?

The increased focus on scientific research on child development and parenting

Psychologist Jean Piaget

Revolutionized the study of child development

What does the new science focus on?

focuses on the correlations between children’s behaviors and the behaviors of their parents

(ex. parents who are violent have violent kids)

What is the nature versus nurture debate?

Do we turn out the way we do because our destiny is written in our genes or because we were shaped like clay by our environment

Why is the nature versus nurture debate misunderstood?

In part because it is described as opposite & equally implausible extremes

It can lead us to gross oversimplifications or to prematurely throw out the idea as junk science

What is a misunderstand regarding the nature vs nurture debate?

1. Framing the nature vs. nurture debate as an either/or question

2. Nature vs nurture has moral implications

Rebuttal for misunderstanding #1 of Nature vs. Nurture

Language: to learn a language an infant needs a distinctly human genome which makes them able to learn a human language but they also need to be exposed to words and sentences in their environment

What was Psychologist Steven Pinker take on the Nature vs Nurture debate

He believed that the debate wasn’t an either/or question but rather focused on why? Why we vary?

Charles Darwin

proposed the theory of evolution

Francis Galton

he is credited with coining the term nature versus nurture but is also known for many different contributions to science including the first personality test, the first weather maps techniques for analyzing fingerprints and even the statistical concept of correlation

he may be best known for his work on eugenics

He reasoned that we should be able to perform artificial selection

What is Eugenics?

proposed the selective breeding humans with what people deemed to be desirable traits while preventing people with less desirable traits from breeding

It isn’t a scientific proposal, it’s a proposal for how to act based on a human judgment

What is variability?

it is an objective fact, the choice to manipulate it is a subjective human prescription for how to act

What is behaviorism?

focused on the role of learning human psychology

Who is John B Watson?

he was famous for many things but among these was the notorious claim that human nature was almost entirely malleable, a behaviorist

his wager was that if he were given a dozen healthy infants in his perfect world, he could take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist

Who is BF Skinner?

a famous behaviorist, proposed a type of behaviorist utopia called Walden Two

What is Walden Two?

A utopian community envisioned by B.F. Skinner, founded on principles of behaviorism where social practices are based on scientific behavior modification and reinforcement.

assumed that human traits and behaviors were fully determined by the environment and those could be controlled by behavioral engineering

What is phenotype?

the end result of genes & environment interacting

What is genotype?

the genetic constitution of an individual, determining potential traits and characteristics.

the specific genes and alleles that exert their influence on the traits

Height correlation

Francis Galton famously showed that the height of children is strongly correlated with the height of the their parents by obtaining the heights of children and parents

What does it mean for two measures to be perfectly correlated?

this means that knowing the value of one measurement should let you predict with 100% accuracy the value of the other

to be perfectly correlated, its not necessary for both numbers to be the same, only knowing one allows you to figure out the other with 100% accuracy

What is the measurement of prediction error called?

a residual

In statistics, a residual is the difference between the observed value and the predicted value of a variable, indicating the error in prediction.

what is R²?

this value tells us the strength of a correlation

What was the Brummelman et al. 2015 study?

Study: how praising children can cause them to become little narcissists

participants: 565 children and parents

ages: 7-11 at beginning

tested 4 times

methods: for kids it was a personality test

for adults it was a questionnaire

finds of the study: parents who scored higher on the over valuation questionnaire scored higher on the narcissism test

What is a possible explanation for a study where two things are correlated?

Variable A causes B but Variable B caused A

it’s also possible that a third factor or in fact many other untested factors might have caused both A and B

(ex: too much praise caused kids to praise themselves but its also possible that when kids have confidence their parents rate them more positively)

What can we do to overcome the issues with correlational data?

Conduct a Randomized Controlled Trial (RTC) which can help us interpret the correlation more strongly

What is a randomized controlled trial (RTC)?

randomized: create groups assigning subjects randomly to one group (e.g., the experiment/control group)

controlled: control the exposure of subjects to a treatment (e.g., amount of coffee or amount of praise)

assigning one group to receive one treatment and another group some other treatment