Classic Studies The Role Of Nature And Nurture

Question 1

Sherif et al

Answer 1

Nature: prejudice has a natural bias as it emerges spontaneously in the presence of competition e.g the innate nature of prejudice
- both groups of boys developed similarly, had a hierarchy with a leader, so nature to form different levels
Nurture: we are influenced by the ideals and opinions of those around us
- response to environment

Question 2

Baddley

Answer 2

Nature: born with a hardwire to have a capacity to perform certain functions
Nurture: different languages have different capacities as encoding is different due to language
Nature: ability to code semantically or acoustically into LTM due to nature
Nature: encoding different due to different brain structures so due to nature

Question 3

Raine et al

Answer 3

Nature: different brain structure and functioning so due to nature (lower activity in prefrontal cortex)
Nurture: Jim gallon found that brain profile not enough and environmental triggers also needed to display aggression/murderous tendencies
Nature: had lower glucose metabolism in corpus callous than control so predisposed to aggression

Question 4

Watson and Rayner

Answer 4

Nature: unconditioned response
Nurture: conditioning of a phobia and then generalised to white objects
Nature: built off of work on Pavlov who demonstrated how conditioning can trigger biological responses that are inherited genetically
Nurture: was previously a fearless child

Question 5

Rosenhan

Answer 5

Nurture: when the pseudo patients got diagnosed it was hard to be viewed as anything else e.g writing in a diary was seen as abnormal
Nature: used the same biological symptoms/basis of sz
Nurture: rosenhan explored how environment and stigma led to fulfilling the ‘role’ of mentally ill