nature vs nurture

nature - behaviour is a product of innate factors (biological or genetic)

  • nativists - people who support the nature side of the debate and belive we are born woth genetic predispositions and pre programmed behaviours

  • descartes - human characteristics are innate and a result of heredity

  • support through twin studies: monozygotic twins and dizigotic twins. if there is a high concordance rate for a certain trait, it can suggest nature has conrtibuted to it (joseph 2004 schizophrenia)

  • evolution - natural selection suggests behaviours that promote survival are more likely to be passed on to fiture generatuion, so the genes for that behaviour are more liel yot be pased on (eg. bowlby’s monotropic theory)

nurture - behaviour is a produce of environmental factors (upbringing)

  • empiricists - people who suppoer the nurture side of the debate and believe all behavopr is the result of observation and experience

  • locke - we are born as a blank slate at birth, experience dictates who we are and how we behave

  • the behaviourist approach is strongly nrture as it assumes all behaviour is learned through experience (conditioning - pavlov + skinner, social learning theory - bandura)

  • alll types of environmental interactions can shape our behaviour eg. double blind theory (bateson et al 1956), receiving contradictory messages from parents

very deterministic debate

dr john money convinced david reimer to be raised as a female

diathesis-stress model - mental disorder is caused by a biological/genetic vulnerability(nature), however, the disorder only develops when an individual is exposed to an environmental trigger or stressor (nurture)

  • tienari et al (2004( found in a group of finnish adoptees, those more likely to develop schizophrenia had biological relatives with a history of the disorder (nature), which developed through their relationship with dysfunctional adoptive families (nurture)

epigenetics - change in our genetic activity without changing our genetic code, this is a process that happens throughout life and is caused bu interaction with the environment. these interactions leave ‘marks’ on our DNA which determine which genes to use or ignore, effectively switching them off. this is then passed down to future generations.