A Question of Purpose: On the Debate of the Effects of Nature and Nurture, Essay Example

When the perpetrators of a school shooting or serial homicide are discovered, the first question asked is generally, “What didn’t their parents teach them?”. As Myers (2005) wrote in the sixth edition of Exploring Psychology, “Believing that parents shape their children as a potter molds clay, people readily praise parents for their children’s virtues and blame them for their children’s vices” (86). However, recent scientific advances regarding biology, genetics, and prenatal development have ironically questioned the biological role of the woman as the gatherer of food, the nurturer. Our discussion will briefly explain some aspects of the nature and nurture theories and produce a conclusion based upon our examination of the text.

The two major “nurture” schools of Psychology are Skinner’s Behaviorism and Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. The “blame the parents” view falls in the realm of Behaviorism, which maintains that values are reinforced through operant conditioning, i.e. reinforcement and punishment (Steinberg, 2008). However, social interaction can also have a strong effect upon peer behavior. According to the Social Learning Theory, this other form of conditioning is seen in the global variance in the concepts of personal space and timeliness or in the spread of cultural trends within the school system (Myers, 2005). These examples place identity and development in a continuum of constant observation and adjustment to social perceptions (Steinberg, 2008). These two theories revitalize their own internal debate as to whether parents or peers ultimately have a greater environmental effect upon minors.

On the other hand, curricular education often favors the Organismic theories of cognitive development made popular by Freud, Erikson, and Piaget, which all provide age ranges, stage categorizations, and characteristics according to a naturalistic theory of developmental influence. However, it is difficult to analyze their usefulness when a consensus in the specifics was never reached, and all three theorists could not account for the full range of cognitive development (Myers, 2005). With an extreme preference for the natural explanation, one biosocial theorist branching from Darwin’s theories, G. Stanley Hall, proposed that the life cycle of a person mirrors the evolutionary development of mankind in the area of instinctual refinement. One of the most famous legacies from his Recapitulation Theory was the idea that, like in the conflict-ridden early stages of civilization, adolescent development was unavoidable and structurally prone to “storm and stress” (Steinberg, 2008, 15).  Scientific research today generally supports Hall’s concept of “storm and stress”- but connects the theory’s biological basis only to susceptibility in young adults (Steinberg, 2008). Although subtle differences in fingerprint patterns can provide a genetic predisposition for the development of homosexuality, they do not determine sexual orientation (Myers, 2005).

“Evidence” can arbitrarily be applied without understanding the ramifications. While experiential and scientific knowledge is not altogether a lost cause, the misapplication of such knowledge has been responsible for such infamous errors as the long-held beliefs that the heart was literally the center of thought and emotion and that Columbus would literally fall of the face of the planet. This fact alone supports the idea of nurture- just as the development of science is not inborn but develops from perspectives of the past and further influences the future. Regardless of the stance taken on the nature versus nurture debate, humans need to believe that there is something we can do to make a better future for ourselves. If all aspects of behavioral development are to be relegated to impulse and biological programming, then we relinquish our right to responsibility along with all non-reproductive purposes for human interaction.

References

Myers, D. (2005). Exploring Psychology: Sixth Edition in Modules. New York, NY: Worth Publishers. Print.

Steinberg, L. (2008). Adolescence. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Print.