Nature vs. Nurture: Why are we the way we are?
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As one of the oldest questions in the history of psychology, the debate of nature vs nurture puts into question our very being. How is it that there are people like Nelson Mandela who live to help their people when there are psychopaths like the Zodiac Killer that can kill without batting an eye? Are all our differences merely a subject of the genetic lottery? Or are our culture and the interactions we make the reason for such unique differences in every individual? Studiers of the age-old question of nature vs. nurture seek to find that answer.
The premise of the nature vs. nurture debate is a simple one. It is the discussion of whether “nature” or “nurture” has a greater influence on one’s development as a human. The “nature” side refers to the biological and hereditary factors, while “nurture” refers to how someone is raised. These factors can include one’s environment, interactions with others, and surrounding culture. Though the debate was first coined and popularized by Victorian polymathFrancis Galton in the 1800s, it had been hypothesized much earlier than that, traceable back to even the ancient Greeks. Since then, various groups have formed that take a stand on this existential question.
On the extreme nature part of the debate, nativists take the radical stance that all defining traits of a human happen regardless of the environment they are put in. They claim that personality is innate and no different from something like eye color, all a result of someone's unique genetic code (not to be confused with political nativism). A modern example in support of this stance comes from a 2010 study from the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. In this experiment, infants less than a year old were shown a puppet play with an obvious “good” puppet and a “bad” puppet. Surprisingly, nearly all the babies picked the helper, despite their lack of experience and education. Seemingly, the babies appeared to have an innate moral compass, as if it were built into their genes.
On the other hand, there exist the empiricists and behaviorists. This group believes in the concept of the tabula rasa, the idea that every human is a blank slate, determined solely by our experiences. This group contends that anybody can become anyone, given the right conditions and environment. A popular experiment that supports this radical stance is the Bobo doll experiment. In this experiment, Albert Bandura, a canadian-american psychologist, and his colleagues exposed a group of children to violence and another group to no violence. The violent group had the adult enact acts of violence to a Bobo doll (hence, the name), while the other had the adult just play with the doll normally. When the children were released into the room with the same doll, those who saw the violence were more likely to repeat the aggression to the doll. As an empiricist might expect, the group of children that saw the violence was recorded to have more aggressive behavior, mirroring that of the adults.
Both positions of the debate are flawed and rather extreme in their respective stances. Though they may have their instances of proof, neither have definite evidence to support a claim of such extremism as the two sides. Because of this, many people like myself contend that the more contemporary and reasonable approach is finding a stance in the middle, where one believes that both sides play roles in determining the identity of an individual. Recently, an example that has found its way into supporting both sides of the debate is homosexuality. For the longest time, people believed that homosexual behavior was determined by the nature side of the debate. Also called the ‘gay gene’, it was the idea that a single gene was the determining factor of one’s sexuality. However, just three years ago in 2019, one of the largest genetic investigations was published that corrected the belief of the ‘gay gene’. Through countless studies, scientists proved that homosexual relationships are only genetically determined by 8% to 25%. As Nsikan Akpan, a writer for PBS, puts it, “sexuality cannot be pinned down by biology, psychology or life experiences, this study and others show, because human sexual attraction is decided by all these factors.” Similarly, many psychologists have applied this sort of stance to the entire debate. Our differences are not black and white, but rather a combination of our experiences and genetics. However, what still remains up to debate is which of the two plays a larger role. Until our technology advances in ways we can not comprehend, however, few expect this debate to be solved any time soon.