Nature Vs Nurture Essay

537 Words2 Pages

Nature VS nurture is a part of developmental psychology. It is the issue of the degree to which environment and heredity influence behavior (Feldman, 2013). They call this the age old question of psychology. With all of the research that has been done, people now believe that it is not one of these factors that that determine a person’s development, but both. The magazine article that I picked is basically talking about the development of children or nature VS nurture. There were some misguided theories before, when it comes to why children turn out the way they do. I thought one of the examples used in the article was a very good one. Smithstein used autism as an example. It was thought that autism was caused by a more or less a bad mother, …show more content…

If we are hard wired a certain way, and our environment accounts for the other half, how are we in control of what we do and do not do? For example, if a child has a genetic predisposition towards violent behavior, and was raised by parents who kept him around violent behavior, or maybe even abused him, how is that child responsible if he commits a violent crime? Many people that have committed violent crimes will simply argue it was in their nature to do so. Psychologist Lisa Aspinwall, conducted an experiment. It suggested if a judge is presented with testimony saying the defendant's violent behavior is partly caused by genetics and they are presented with research, (psychopath’s brain versus non psychopath’s brain), the judge is likely to give a lighter sentence. Although this is only one experiment, it shows that judges may give lighter sentences if they are convinced the person’s genes made him do it. For many years people have gone back and forth in the debate of nurture VS nature. This is no longer a debate. Most scholarly work concludes that genes provide potential for our behavior, but without environmental factors, these predispositions will never be realized. As Ridley reminds us, “these genes are at the mercy of our behavior, not the other way

Open Document