Issue and Debates - Nature and nurture Flashcards
What is the environment?
Everything that is outside our body, including people, events and the physical world. Any influence on behaviour is non-genetic.
What did Lerner identify?
Different ‘levels’ of the environment, which ranged from pre-natal experiences (during pregnancy) to post-natal experiences (the socio-historical context within which the child grew up in).
What is nature?
The influence on behaviour which is genetic e.g the action of genes, neurochemistry, neurotransmitters and neurological structures.
What is heredity?
The process by which traits are passed from parents to their offspring , usually referring to genetic inheritance.
What is the heritability coefficient?
The heritability coefficient can be used to quantify the extent to which a characteristic has a genetic basis.
What is the interactionist approach with reference to the nature-nurture debate?
This is the view that the processes of nature and nurture work together rather than in opposition. They are linked in such a way that it does not make sense to separate the influences of the two.
What is the nature-nurture debate?
The argument as to whether a person’s development is mainly due to their genes or to environmental influences. Most researchers accept that behaviour is a product of the interaction between nature and nurture.
Give examples of the influence of nature
Genetic explanations - concordance rates for schizophrenia is 40% for MZ and 7% for DZ. This illustrates how nature plays a part in contributing to the disorder. However cr are not 100% for MZ even though they are identical. This suggests nurture also plays a role in development.
Evolutionary explanations - Based on the principle that a behaviour which promotes survival will be naturally selected e.g running away from fire or avoiding deep water.
Give examples of the influence of nurture?
Behaviourism - behaviourists assume that all behaviour can be explained in terms of experience alone. Skinner and Pavlov (oc and cc).
SLT - Bandura proposed that behaviour is acquired indirectly through oc and cc but also directly through vicarious reinforcement.
Schizophrenia - The double bind theory suggests that schizophrenia develops in children who frequently receive contradictory messages from parents and these conflicting messages prevents the child from developing an internal consistent construction of reality.
What are the strengths of nature-nurture debate?
+ Diathesis- Stress Model - A diathesis is a biological vulnerability. However not everyone with these candidate genes will develop a disorder.
+ Nurture affects nature = Maguire et al study of London taxi drivers showed that the region of their brains with spatial memory was bigger than in controls, this is because the hippocampi had responded this way. There was a positive correlation between increasingly pronounced changes and an increasing length of time that individuals had been taxi drivers. This demonstrates the interactionist nature of empiricism and nativism, and gives further reason as to why the influences of the two cannot be separated.
+ Constructivism - Plomin suggested that an individual’s ‘nature’ would determine their ‘nurture’ through niche-picking and niche-building. For example, a naturally aggressive child would be more likely to play with and befriend other aggressive children. This in turn would increase the aggressiveness of the child . The idea of constructivism further emphasises the multi-layered relationship between nature and nurture.
What are the limitations of the nature-nurture debate?
- Nature side of the debate takes an extreme deterministic stance which has led to controversy, such as linking IQ to race and intelligence, and the application of eugenic policies and justification of discriminatory practices in the workplace and wider society
