Nature Vs Nuture

Nurture (Environment) Points & Evidence

  1. Socialisation

    • Behaviour is learned from family, peers, education.
    • Evidence: Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment (children exposed to aggressive models were more likely to imitate the aggression, including novel aggressive acts, and use a toy hammer aggressively. This highlights observational learning).
    • Evidence: Feral children like Genie lived in extreme isolation, showing severe deficits in language acquisition, social skills, and cognitive development despite later intervention, demonstrating the critical period for socialisation.

  2. Cultural differences

    • Norms vary across societies, showing environment shapes behaviour.
    • Evidence: Mead’s study of Samoan vs. American adolescents found that Samoan adolescents experienced a much smoother transition to adulthood with less stress and rebellion, attributed to more relaxed sexual norms and communal upbringing, contrasting with the "storm and stress" typically associated with Western adolescence.

  3. Life experiences / trauma

    • Experiences shape personality and behaviour.
    • Evidence: Studies linking childhood abuse or neglect to adult aggression or mental health issues (e.g., Widom’s longitudinal study found that individuals who experienced childhood abuse or neglect were at a significantly higher risk for later aggressive behavior, criminal activity, and mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, PTSD, illustrating long-term environmental impact).
Nature (Biology/Genetics) Points & Evidence

  1. Genetic influences

    • Heredity affects traits like intelligence, aggression, mental health.
    • Evidence: Gottesman twin studies on schizophrenia showed higher concordance rates for schizophrenia in monozygotic (MZ) twins (e.g., 4848%) compared to dizygotic (DZ) twins (e.g., 1717%), suggesting a strong genetic component, but not 100100%, indicating environmental influence.

  2. Biological predispositions

    • Some behaviours are innate.
    • Evidence: Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar proposes that humans are born with an innate capacity for language acquisition, a "Language Acquisition Device (LAD)," which allows them to understand and produce grammatical sentences regardless of the language they are exposed to.
    • Evidence: Lorenz’s imprinting in goslings where goslings innately form a strong bond with the first large moving object they see shortly after hatching, typically their mother, demonstrating a critical period for developing an innate behavioral pattern essential for survival.

  3. Physiological factors

    • Hormones, brain structures influence behaviour.
    • Evidence: Testosterone linked to aggressive behaviour in males (Dabbs et al., prison studies found higher testosterone levels in male offenders convicted of violent crimes compared to those convicted of non-violent crimes, suggesting a correlation between a specific hormone and aggression).
    • Evidence: Amygdala activity linked to aggression (Raine et al., brain scans of violent offenders using fMRI scans have shown reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, associated with impulse control, and increased activity in the amygdala, involved in processing emotions like fear and aggression, in violent psychopaths).
Evaluation / Interactionist Approach
  • Evidence: Diathesis-stress model explains psychological disorders as a result of an inherited genetic predisposition (diathesis) interacting with environmental stressors. For example, a genetic vulnerability for depression may only manifest if an individual experiences significant life stress.
  • Twin studies show both genes and environment matter (identical twins not 100100% concordant for traits). Even in identical twins who share 100100% of their genes, if one twin has a disorder, the other does not always have it, demonstrating that environmental factors play a crucial role alongside genetic predispositions.