Nature_vs_Nurture

 My personality is determined by my nature, not my nurture. True or False' Give reasons for your view and consider the major theories of personality and the evidence discussed in the text. It has been a constantly debated topic over history, ceaseless, and more often than not, without reaching any conclusion at all. There was a time when whole scientific efforts were concentrated mainly on the science involved behind birth, growth and death. As time went by, logically unexplainable human acts ranging from the most bizarre to the most evil have blotted the pages of time thus defining important chapters in our human history. From life-changing and awe inspiring great human souls to mass murdering and narcissistic despots, people, or rather psychologists and others in the field alike, started pondering on what made these inventors,heroes, dictators or despots act or think in such ways. What caused them to make such decisions' What was it that spurred them to use their intelligence to terrific effect, whether it be for good or evil' We all can safely assume that one's individual and unique personality, which stamps its individuality even on similar genome sharing twins, is the major driving force behind one's action and the answer to these questions. Unfortunately, the ultimate question that has torn apart many, from the layman to the esteemed psychologist, is that what is it that creates and shapes this thing called personality' Is it Nature or Nurture' World reknowned psychologist, Donald Hebb once responded that " to pose this question is akin to what contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width'" when asked if nature or nurture contributed more to the development of personality. So many years later, even with far more impressive technological advances, we are still left wandering, with Hebb's brilliant quote still whispering in our ears. Researchers have constantly been divided between these two factors, results very often swinging either way but coming back to rest above the same spot in the middle. Whats the reason for stagnation in this particular area of research' Technologically speaking, we are relatively highly advanced then half a century ago. Psychologically speaking, the questions that we seek answers for, are fundamentally still similar to those from that time frame. The metaphorical rectangle as quoted by Hebb, cannot be understood by only its length or width alone. It would not make sense. If one group only researches the length, and one group only researches the width, no one would understand much about rectangles. So maybe it is time for an integrated approach whereby studying the relationship between Nature and Nurture, the interaction between both could lead to determining the more overpowering factor in personality development, A persons innate qualities( i.e. nativism, innatism) would be Nature and a person's personal experiences (i.e. empiricism or behaviorism) would be Nurture. The view that all humans get their behavorial traits from nurture is known as 'tabula rasa' (blank slate). Its considered to be an outdated state of knowledge since both factors play interactive roles in development. In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker, who argue that we are born with certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as language). For example, children demonstrate a facility for acquiring spoken language but require intense training to learn to read and write. In The Blank Slate, Pinker cites this as evidence that humans have an inborn facility for speech acquisition (but not for literacy acquisition). A number of other theorists have disagreed with these claims. Instead, they have outlined alternative theories of how modularization might emerge over the course of development, as a result of a system gradually refining and fine-tuning its responses to environmental stimuli. However, Nativism is sometimes perceived as being too vague to be falsifiable, as there is no fixed definition of when an ability is supposed to be judged "native" or "innate" .As Jeffrey Elman and colleagues pointed out in Rethinking Innateness, it is unclear exactly how the supposedly innate information might actually be coded for in the genes. Similarly, Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth and thus asserting that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses. However Innatism refers to the philosophy of Plato and Descartes who assumed and believed that such knowledge and wisdom were imparted by a Higher authority/ God. Which of course does not really bode well with the school of science. However the fundamental idea is similar to that of Nativism, which opposes ideas such as empricism. Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," as strongly opposed to nativism/innatism.Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas (except in so far as these might be inferred from empirical reasoning, as in the case of genetic predisposition). The term "empirical" was originally used to refer to certain ancient Greek practitioners of medicine (Empiric school) who rejected adherence to the dogmatic doctrines of the day (Dogmatic school), preferring instead to rely on the observation of phenomena as perceived in experience. The notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") dates back to Aristotle, and was developed into an elaborate theory by Avicenna and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail. The doctrine of empiricism was later explicitly formulated by John Locke in the 17th century. He argued that the mind is a tabula rasa (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experiences leave their marks. Such empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable without reference to experience. Behaviorism (or behaviourism), also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors. The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without resource either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind. Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling). Various experiments have been carried out in the past with regards to this topic. Twins and siblings(adopted as well) have proven to be very favourable subjects for alot of this experiments. One of it, done to determine the heritability of IQ suggests that family environmental factors may have an effect upon childhood IQ, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. On the other hand, by late adolescence this correlation disappears, such that adoptive siblings are no more similar in IQ than strangers. Moreover, adoption studies indicate that, by adulthood, adoptive siblings are no more similar in IQ than strangers (IQ correlation near zero), while full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.86), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0). Now the raging question in particular would personality traits being heritable or not, of course IQ playing a part in personality too. The experiment done on the siblings, twins and all, also gave scientists an opportunity to observe the effects of the environment on the siblings' personalitites on top of the genes. Personality is a frequently cited example of a heritable trait that has been studied in twins and adoptions. Identical twins reared apart are far more similar in personality than randomly selected pairs of people. Likewise, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins. Also, biological siblings are more similar in personality than adoptive siblings. Each observation suggests that personality is heritable to a certain extent. However, these same study designs allow for the examination of environment as well as genes. Adoption studies also directly measure the strength of shared family effects. Adopted siblings share only family environment. Unexpectedly, some adoption studies indicate that by adulthood the personalities of adopted siblings are no more similar than random pairs of strangers. This would mean that shared family effects on personality are zero by adulthood. As is the case with personality, non-shared environmental effects are often found to out-weigh shared environmental effects. That is, environmental effects that are typically thought to be life-shaping (such as family life) may have less of an impact than non-shared effects, which are harder to identify. One possible source of non-shared effects is the environment of pre-natal development. Random variations in the genetic program of development may be a substantial source of non-shared environment. These results suggest that "nurture" may not be the predominant factor in "environment" and that nurture itself does not only mean the protection and guidance of parents and family alike. Calvin Hall in his seminal chapter remarked that the discussion opposing nature and nurture was fruitless. If an environment is changed fundamentally, then the heritability of a character changes, too. Conversely, if the genetic composition of a population changes, then heritability will also change. As an example, we may use phenylketonuria (PKU), which causes brain damage and progressive mental retardation. PKU can be treated by the elimination of phenylalanine from the diet. Hence, a character (PKU) that used to have a virtually perfect heritability is not heritable any more if modern medicine is available. Similarly, within, say, an inbred strain of mice, no genetic variation is present and every character will have a zero heritability. If the complications of gene-environment interactions and correlations (see above) are added, then it appears to many that "heritability", the epitome of the nature-nurture opposition, is "a station passed". So where does all this debating and swinging about lead us' Is it true that my personality is determined by my nature, not my nurture' False. From the various studies and experiments done over time, we realise that as we tweak some of the age old questions, keeping the fundamentals the same of course, to match the current technological advancements, we realise that it isnt exactly Nature vs Nurture, rather its Nature and Nurture interacting,entwining and dancing an intricate tango, leaving trails which shape our personalities as highly sentient individuals. # Karmiloff-Smith, Annette (1996). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0262611147. # ^ Elman, J.L., Bates, E.A., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Johnson, M.H., Parisi, D. & Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: Connectionism in a Developmental Framework. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. # Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6. # ^ a b Sini, Carlo (2004), "Empirismo", in Gianni Vattimo et al. (eds.), Enciclopedia Garzanti della Filosofia. # ^ a b Sajjad H. Rizvi (2006), Avicenna/Ibn Sina (CA. 980-1037), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy # ^ a b G. A. Russell (1994), The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 224-62, Brill Publishers, ISBN 9004094598 .# Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., McClearn, G. E. and McGuffin, P. (2001). Behavioral Genetics (4th Ed.). New York: Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-5159-3. # ^ Bouchard TJ Jr. Genetic and environmental influences on adult intelligence and special mental abilities. Hum Biol. 1998 Apr;70(2):257-79 # C. S. Hall (1951) The Genetics of Behavior, in Handbook of Experimental Psychology, by S. S. Stevens (Ed.) New York, NY, USA: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 304-329 # ^ W. E. Crusio (1990) Estimating heritabilities in quantitative behavior genetics: A station passed. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 127-128