Debates - Nature/nurture (GREY) Flashcards
What is the nature vs nurture debate based on?
Is behaviour due to inherited or acquired characteristics?
What is nature?
Sees behaviour as due to genes “nativism”.
What is nurture?
Sees behaviour as due to learning from the environment “empiricism”.
What is the interactionist approach?
Modern psychology looks for the interaction between nature vs nurture and the extent to which each side influences behaviour.
What does the Diathesis-Stress model illustrate?
The interaction of genes and environment together cause our behaviour.
As nature and nurture interact, what are the 3 stages people pass through?
Passive
Evocative
Active
What is the passive stage?
During infancy, individual’s environments are provided by their parents. The rearing environmental reflects the parents’ genes, so it is genetically suitable for the child.
What is the evocative stage?
The child’s genes will influence the way the environment treats them: prizes at school, praise for success.
What is the active stage?
The child seeks out experiences which suits its genes and actively shapes its own nurture. Eg. joins the debating team, reads widely for pleasure, seeks out similarly curious friends.
What is constructivism?
During this active phase, people construct their own nurture through the experiences they choose according to their nature.
The innately friendly child seeks more interaction with others.
The innately aggressive child seeks similar children and gets into fights.
This is called niche picking and niche building.
Overtime this means that children become more whatever it is their genes predispose them to be.
What did Maguire do in her study of the hippocampi of taxi drivers and what did she find?
She scanned brains of taxi drivers and measured their hippocampi.
She found that taxi driver’s hippocampi were larger compared to controls.
She also found that taxi drivers that had been driving longer had larger hippocampi.
What is a criticism about the fact that taxi drivers had larger hippocampi than controls?
Maybe those with very developed hippocampi choose the job of taxi driving. It could just be a case of ‘niche picking’ - example of nature affecting nurture.
What does the fact that the longer taxi drivers had been in their jobs, the larger their hippocampi suggest?
Suggests that the environment (experience) changes the hippocampi and makes them larger - example of nurture affecting nature.
What are epigenetics?
This refers to a change in how our genes work but the genetic code stays the same.
This is possible through the activation of ‘switches’ which turn genes on or off.
We can inherit these switch positions from our parents and grandparents.
So the experiences of our parents and grandparents can alter our behaviour because of the physical changes they cause.
