Nature vs Nurture debate Flashcards
What is the interactionist approach?
- The interaction of nature and nurture and how they both influence our lifes
- John Bowbly stated that attachment type is determined by warmth and contuity if parental love and kagan argued that a babies innates personality also affects attachment type.
- Therefore, nature creates nurture and environment and heredity interact
What is the diathesis - stress model?
- Suggests that behaviour is caused by a biological or environmental trigger (stressor)
- A person who inherits a genetic vulnerability for OCD may not develop the disorder but combined with a psychological trigger this can result in the disorder appearing
What is epigenetics?
Refers to a change in our genetic activity without changing the genes themselves.
This is a process that happens throughout life and is caused by interaction with the environment
Aspects of our lifestyle or events that we encounter such as smoking, trauma and war can leave marks on our DNA which can switch genes on and off
This explains how smoking can have a lifelong influence even after you stop.
These epigenetic changes can go on and influence the genetic codes of our children and introduces a third element into the nature - nuture debate
What is the nature debate?
- Refers to the inherited influence or heredity
- Early nativits such as Rene Descartes argued that all human characteristics and knowledge are innate
- Psychological characteristics like intelligence or personality are determined by biological factors (genes), just as physical characteristics are
What is the nurture debate?
- the influence of experience and the environment
- Empiricists like John Locke argued that the mind is a blank slate at birth which is shaped by the environment.
- Lerner identified different different levels of the environment. This includes Prenatal factors such as smoking or music affecting a foetus. It also includes postnatal influences such as social conditions children grow up in
How do you measure nature and nurture?
- The degree to which people are similar can be represented by a correlation co efficient and is called concordance
- concordance can provide estimates on the extent to which a trait is inherited. This is called heritability
- Heritability is the proportion of differences between individuals in a population.
- the heritability for IQ Is around 0.5 across studies, this means half of a persons intelligence is determined by genetics and the other half is environmental
What is a strength of the nature nature debate?
- One strength is that the nature - nurture debate is used in adoption studies
- Adoption studies are useful as they separate the influences of nature and nurture.
- If adopted children are found to be more similar to their adoptive parents then the environment is a bigger influence. Vice versa
- A meta analysis by Rhee and Waldman found that genetic influences accounted for 41% of variance in aggression.
- This shows research can seperate the influences of nature and nuture
C = This approach may be misguided as nature and nurture can not be easily seperated. Plomin stated that people pick their nuture by picking environments suitable for their nature. This is called niche picking. An example is that a aggressive child is likely to feel more comfortable with aggressive individuals. Therefore, their companions influence their development
What is another strength? (E)
- Another strength of the debate is that there is support for epigenetics and how the environment can affect the expression of genes
- For example, In WW2 Nazis blocked the distribution of food to the Dutch people and 22,000 died is starvation which become known the dutch hunger winter
- Susser and Lin reported that women who became pregnant during the famine went on to have low birth weight babies and were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia when they grew up
- This shows that life experiences of previous generations can leave epigenetic markers which influence the health of offspring
What is a further strength of the nature - nurture debate? (RWA)
- There are real world applications
- For example, OCD is a highly heritable mental disorder
- Nesdat put the heritability rate of OCD at 0.76
- Such understandings can inform genetic counselling to help prevent the development of a disorder
- This means that people with a high genetic risk of OCD because of their family background can recieve advice of their likelihood of developing the disorder
- The debate is important and practical and can help prevent the development of disease
What are the implications of the nature/nurture debate?
- Nativists believe that anatomy is destiny and genetic make up determines our characteristics and behaviour
- This can lead to controversy and can link ethnicity and genetics to the application of eugenic policies
- empiricists can also lead to behavioural shaping with desirable characteristics being reinforced and undersirable being punished. This can lead to complete social control?
