nature-nurture

• Nature-nurture debate

  Debate about what causes behaviour and personality in individuals
• Nature debate

  • Behaviour is a product of biological genetic factors and heredity (genetic inheritance)
  • Stems from nativism which suggests humans are born with predispositions and pre-programmed behaviours
• Nature point of view in other psychological topics

  • Bowlby's Monotropic Theory of Attachment - humans have a predisposed, innate drive to form an attachment with one person
  • Evolutionary explanations of human reproductive behaviour and sexual selection - preferences in mates are passed down as to which traits are most likely to conceive offspring that will survive and reproduce
• The nature point of view is also supported by twin studies
• Nurture debate


  Belief that behaviour is the product of environmental influences (everything outside the body: people, events and the physical world)
• The nurture debate believes that humans are born with no innate behaviours, beliefs or personality, which are all created after birth - they are a blank slate

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  This view is the opposite of nativism
• Behavioural psychologists


  • Support the view that all behaviour, beliefs and personality are created after birth
• Attachment following classical conditioning


  1. Food (unconditional stimulus) associated with mother (neutral stimulus)

  2. Through repeated pairings, mother becomes conditioned stimulus which elicits conditioned response of love and happiness in child

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  This is often referred to as the 'cupboard love' theory
• Bandura's Social Learning Theory


  • Behaviour is explained in terms of vicarious reinforcement, being learnt from the imitation of role models, particularly if they identify with them or see them being rewarded or punished for specific behaviours
  • In Bandura's bobo doll experiment, children imitated aggressive models
• ao3 - alternatives: interactionist approach (1)


  Human behaviour is formed by the interaction of nature and nurture
• ao3 - alternatives: interactionist approach (2)


  The genetic disorder PKU (phenylketonuria) - caused by the inheritance of two recessive genes - is an example of the interactionist approach

  Should a child vulnerable to the disorder be put on a low-protein diet for the first 12 years of their life, they can avoid it's potentially life-threatening development

  This means PKU (nature) is not expressed due to an altered environment (nurture)
• ao3 - alternatives: interactionist approach (3)


  The diathesis-stress model is an interactionist model used to explain mental illness, emphasising the importance of both a genetic vulnerability (nature) and an environmental trigger (nurture)
• ao3 - applications and implications

  Understanding of the interactionist approach can result in improved health and a reduced inheritability of potentially harmful conditions

  For example, if a monozygotic twin was to develop a condition such as diabetes, it allows the other twin to be made aware of a potential genetic vulnerability and therefore alter their lifestyle and environmental influences (behaviour shaping) to ensure they have little risk of developing it
• ao3 - research support for nature (1)

  Twin studies can be used to identify a genetic influence in the development of disorders through concordance rates of monozygotic and dizygotic twins

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  This can be seen in Christiansen's (1977) investigation into whether criminality may be genetically determined and his discovery of a 54% concordance rate in monozygotic twins and a 22% concordance rate in dizygotic twins out of over 3000 twin pairs
• ao3 - research support for nature (2)

  Contradictory: it remains to be difficult to determine the roles of genes and environment, as these twins were raised together in similar households in eastern Denmark - reducing it's reliability and generalisability to other cultures
• ao3 - constructivism

  The notion that genes and environment interact is elaborated by constructivism - following the idea that people create their own nurture by actively selecting environments that are appropriate for their nature

  For example, an aggressive child is likely to feel more comfortable around children who show similar behaviours and will choose their environment accordingly, often resulting in the encouragement of such behaviour and an increase in it's intensity
• ao3 - issues and debates

  Both nature and nurture debates are entirely deterministic and reductionist - they fail to recognise the influence of other factors and their role on impacting behaviour, respectively falling into biological determinism and environmental determinism and largely ignoring the influence of free will and circumstance on personality and behaviour