The nature versus nurture debate is a debate concerning the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities versus personal experiences in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. The phrase “Nature versus nurture” in its modern sense was coined by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton in discussion of the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement. To disentangle the effects of genes and environment, behavioral geneticists perform adoption and twin studies. These seek to decompose the variance in a population into genetic and environmental components.
This move from individuals to populations makes a critical difference in the way we think about nature and nurture. This difference is perhaps highlighted in the quote attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb who is said to have once answered a journalist’s question of “which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?” by asking in response, “Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?” For a particular rectangle, its area is indeed the product of its length and width.(Nature vs Nurture (2008)) Moving to a population, however, this analogy masks the fact that there are many individuals, and that it is meaningful to talk about their differences. Scientific approaches also seek to break down variance beyond these two categories of nature and nurture. Thus rather than “nurture”, behavior geneticists distinguish shared family factors and nonshared factors. To express the portion of the variance due to the “nature” component, behavioral geneticists generally refer to the heritability of a trait. In the argument of Nature scientists and behaviorists look at traits labeled the big five and personality traits such as substance abuse, eating disorders, narcissism, psychopathy, depression, marijuana dependence, aggression, and anti-social personality disorder (Charles G. Morris pp347).
The big five refer to the traits: extraversion, agreeableness, dependability, emotional stability, and openness to experience (Charles G. Morris pp. 345). These five traits capture the most salient dimensions of human personality and because they are hardwired into your brain they affect your everyday life in the way you act to who you socialize with and how employable you are. (Charles G. Morris pp. 345) These three everyday actions can affect your life there for nature is clearly the answer to the big debate. Of course there is a simpler more significant effect to your life and how you view the world. Which is the counter argument, nurture; can the way a person is brought up greatly effect major decisions in a person’s life? If a person is taught to be racist and ends up hating the different race for the rest of their life that is obviously nurture someone has to be taught that a certain race is different and should be treated so. Or if a person is raised by two homosexual parents and would be homosexual except the environment outside of home, like school, people around teased that person about being raised by homos so he was peer pressured into being straight. This also of course is not hard wired into them it’s how the environment made that person turn out to be like. So in this case nurture is obviously the right answer for this debate. No one will ever truly know the big answer to life’s big debate, is it nature or nurture that truly influences a person’s personality, view of the world, and even they’re intelligence. Both sides have good arguments so I’m convinced of neither is the big factor in a person’s life. References:
Charles G. Morris. Understanding General Psychology (10th edition) Nature vs Nature (2008) Retrieved October 12, 2013, from http://www.diffen.com/difference/Nature_vs_Nurture
