Nature Vs Nurture

→ Nature:

• The argument that biological factors have the strongest influence on development. Any capabilities or limitations are innate.

→ Nurture:

• The argument that environmental factors have the strongest influence on development. Environmental influences: family, school, peers & culture.

→ The debate:

• How do biological factors interact with events, in the person’s environment, to determine the course of that person’s development?

• Is a child’s development mostly influenced by genetics (NATURE) or the environment (NURTURE)?

• John Locke - he rejected the idea that children were miniature adults who arrived in the world fully equipped with abilities and knowledge and simply had to grow for these characteristics to appear. He believed that the mind of a newborn is a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate. According to him, all knowledge comes through experience through the senses, and there’s no built-in knowledge.

• Charles Darwin - his theory of evolution (1859) emphasized that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. This led many theorists to emphasise heredity.

→ Concepts used in nature vs nurture debate

→ Stages:

• All children go through the same stages in the same order.

• Behaviour at a given stage are: organised around a dominant theme/a coherent set of characteristics & qualitatively different from behaviours at earlier/later stages.

• Environmental factors may speed up or slow down development, but the order of the stages doesn’t vary.

→ Maturation:

• The emergence of individual and behavioural characteristics through growth processes over time.

• Through this process, our genetically predetermined innate characteristics develop.

• This process is a sequence of growth and change that’s relatively independent of external events.

→ Motor development:

• Refers to the development of a child’s bones, muscles and ability to move around and manipulate his or her environment.

• Practice or extra stimulation can accelerate the onset of motor behaviours to some extent.

→ Speech development:

• Generally, all human infants learn to speak, but not until they’ve attained a certain level of neurological development.

• The environment affects the rate at which children acquire the skills, not the ultimate skill level.

→ Critical periods:

• These are crucial time periods in a person’s life when specific events occur if development is to proceed normally.

→ Sensitive periods:

• Periods that are optimal for a particular kind of development. If certain behaviours aren’t well established during this sensitive period, they may not develop to its full potential.

• The first year of life is a sensitive period for the formation of close attachments.

• The preschool years may be especially significant for intellectual development and language acquisition.

→ Are gender differences related to nature or to nurture?

In the area of sexuality, men and women report different attitudes and behaviours, with men, in general, expressing more interest in sex. In the area of physical aggression, men generally are more physically aggressive compared to women. In the area of cognitive abilities, males tend to do better on tests of math and spatial abilities and females typically score higher on  tests of verbal skills.

• Biological perspectives - focus on the different levels of sex hormones, which have the biggest impact during prenatal development and puberty.

• Environmental perspectives - males and females have different life experiences because of how others treat them. This is the process of socialization. Gender roles = sex-typed behaviours promoted by social learning; Gender schemas = beliefs about men and women that influence the way people perceive themselves and others.

• Biosocial theory - identifies the differences between male and females concerning physical strength and reproductive capacity, and how these differences interact with expectations from society about social roles. This interaction produces the differences we see in gender.

→ How do we study the debate, Nature vs Nurture?

• Family studies - studies that estimate genetic influences through similarities of family members who vary in their degree of genetic relatedness.

• Twin studies - a method of testing nature and nurture by comparing pairs of identical and fraternal twins of the same sex.

• Adoption studies - a method of testing nature and nurture by comparing twins and other siblings reared together with those separated by adoption.

→ Nature research:

• The role of genetic factors is shown by the extent to which identical twins are more similar to each other than fraternal twins.

• When raised together, monozygotic (identical) twins are more similar than dizygotic twins. Monozygotic twins raised apart are almost as similar to each other as those living in the same home.

→ Other studies of twins & adoptees:

• Genetic factors account for some differences in intelligence, verbal and spatial abilities, criminality, vocational interests, and aggressiveness.

• The studies of twins and adoptees also support the importance of environmental influences. Genetic differences usually account for less than 50 percent of variation in personality, while environmental factors account for the rest.

• A study done with adoptive children raised in the same house had very similar IQs, even though these kids were in no way genetically related. The environment that they were raised in provided them with similar abilities for learning and for retaining information (Kagan & Havermann, 1976).

→ Evidence for nurture:

• If children don’t get care and attention in their early, formative years, whatever innate intelligence they have never gets a chance to develop properly and they remain developmentally backward.

• On the other hand, in a supportive background, a child will be encouraged to do well and will have more opportunities in which to succeed.

• It seems that the right environment triggers off the expression of genes that can influence the development of particular traits.

→ Modern view:

• Today most psychologists agree not only that both nature and nurture play important roles but also that they interact continuously to guide development.

• The newborn infant has an estimated 100 billion neurons in their brain but relatively few connections between them. The connections between neurons develop rapidly after birth, and the infant triples in weight in the first 3 years after birth.

→ Conclusion: Psychologists nowadays believe in the role of Interactionism (Hebb 1949):

• Genes may give a person an advantage when it comes to the development of intelligence. However, a nurturing environment is necessary for that person to utilise that advantage.

• Both nature and nurture influence development, but one may be predominant at a certain point in life. Heredity and environment cannot be separated, but maybe they shouldn’t be.