Postion Paper: Nature Vs. Nurture

The biggest controversy in psychology today is whether genetics or one’s environment plays a role in the behavior of the individual. Psychologists have researched and developed different theories to explain the reason for the way humans think and behave. The behavior of individuals is either inherited or learned. In my opinion, I believe that nurture plays a big role in the individual’s behavior. Kendra Cherry states, “Nurture refers to all the environmental variables that impact who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture” (1). People have become who there are because of the environment they were exposed to in their childhood years. The behavior of people is influenced be the environment that surrounds them and can changed many times through one’s lifetime. People have different personalities a person’s

One of the oldest debates in psychology is nature versus nurture. Nature is the inborn, innate character of an organism. (Spencer A. Rathus pg. 56) Nurture is the sum total of the environmental factors that affect an organism from conception onward. (Spencer A. Rathus pg. 56) Basically nature is what you have from heredity and nurture is you environmental influences.

When we compare nature to nurture, we have to know what they mean. Nature is looking at the genetics, and the biological way you are made. Something you have usually have no control over. There have been some serial killers in

Today, alcohol use continues to be regarded by many people, as a normal part of

As we grow from children to adulthood, we continue to have learned behavior that shows our personality profile and the relationship between different

What they don’t understand is that it takes a long time to get used to dealing with the after effects of a fifteen beer night. So they go out their first night, grab a cup, and start to drink. Sounds like fun until they try to walk home and they can’t remember where their dorm is. So they stumble around for a while, sometimes alone and other times with a group of friends. This goes on for a while until something finally happens.

“Cut from the same cloth”, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, “A chip off the old block”; most of us have heard these types of idioms at one point or another, ways of likening us to our parents. Sometimes they are right, while other times it couldn’t be farther from the truth; leaving us to wonder, “what is it that makes us who we are?” Are we simply the product of our environments, a collective sum of our interactions and experiences? Or, do our genetics pre-determine who we are, complex variations in our DNA that dictate our individual personalities? Some scientists argue on behalf of the nurture theory, that our personalities are continually changing and growing, influenced by the world and people around us. Others believe that we are pre-wired by genetics alone, that while external factors may magnify or diminish some aspects of that wiring, everything we are is already programmed into us from the moment of conception. So, who is right?

The history of the Nature vs. Nurture began with Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection. At one time, entire cultural groups were considered to be inferior or superior by nature and ethnicity. During the late Middle Ages, philosophers began to recognize differences among groups dependent on their socialization or nurture. Nature vs. Nurture began to be controversial in the 20th Century when the Nazis began to destroy humans of a certain nature to develop the perfect human race. This prompted psychological debate on whether human identity was by nature or subject to socialism by nurture. (Prien, Pitts, & Kamery, 2003, p. 51)

There are social norms surrounding the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, but it varies depending on the substance. For example alcohol doesn’t carry that heavy of a sigma towards society because it’s alcohol and about “half of Americans consume alcoholic beverages regularly” (Donatelle, 2016, p.232). People can drink socially, a positive social norm, to interact with other people comfortably and the alcohol takes the edge of anxiety. The consumption of tobacco holds a fairly negative stigma in society, it’s mostly known for causing a multitude of cancers and lung diseases in the users. Social norms within tobacco would be it decreases the stress in college students as well as to just relax the student, “students claim to also smoke when being presented in social situations, this is also

You've been through the same scenario a thousand times and truthfully, you're growing tired of all this back and forth. It is literally exhausting and emotionally draining and you wonder, when does it end? The answer is simple. Honestly, it ends when you say it ends, but we all know that's easier said than done.

Alcohol is a very common and addictive thing to some as others consider drinking a good

Based on the differential association theory, one's association with other people depends on what we learn to do or deviate. Like some of the people that I knew, smoking resulted because of the pressuring or convincing of other friends. Reasons why they liked to drink or get high would be because they enjoyed it, thought it was fun to do, took away any emotional pain, or was just relaxing. For me, I learned not to be involved in those deviant activities because, in many ways, it's bad. Everyone learns what it is that society wants from us and everyone has different reasons to justify what they

Nature vs. nurture has been discussed by philosophers in the past and by scientists more recently. Philosophers such as Plato argued that all knowledge was inherited from your parents and when you were told something you didn’t learn it you were just reminded of it. Aristotle however argued that all humans were born with a blank slate and built on it with influence from there environment. In the 1700’s the empiricists and the internalists took over the argument. They fought through letters explaining there point of views and denouncing the others. This leads to Pavlov coming up with the idea of behaviorism in the early 1900‘s. Behaviorism became the new wave of Psychology and influenced a lean towards the nurture side. It was not

Nowadays students are not only being pressured to smoke by their peers and by their surrounding, but they are also watching their parents smoke. Many teens have been influenced by

Another factor that leads teens to smoke without worrying about future health problems is their mentality of being “invincible.” They think that they will never get sick or that they should not be worrying about an illness that could happen so many years in the future. Studies have shown that this way of thinking is extremely harmful and is