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The Nature vs. Nurture Debate

Genetic and Environmental Influences and How They Interact

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Verywell / Joshua Seong

• Definitions
• Interaction
• Contemporary Views

Nature refers to how genetics influence an individual's personality, whereas nurture refers to how their environment (including relationships and experiences) impacts their development. Whether nature or nurture plays a bigger role in personality and development is one of the oldest philosophical debates within the field of psychology .

Learn how each is defined, along with why the issue of nature vs. nurture continues to arise. We also share a few examples of when arguments on this topic typically occur, how the two factors interact with each other, and contemporary views that exist in the debate of nature vs. nurture as it stands today.

Nature and Nurture Defined

To better understand the nature vs. nurture argument, it helps to know what each of these terms means.

• Nature refers largely to our genetics . It includes the genes we are born with and other hereditary factors that can impact how our personality is formed and influence the way that we develop from childhood through adulthood.
• Nurture encompasses the environmental factors that impact who we are. This includes our early childhood experiences, the way we were raised , our social relationships, and the surrounding culture.

A few biologically determined characteristics include genetic diseases, eye color, hair color, and skin color. Other characteristics are tied to environmental influences, such as how a person behaves, which can be influenced by parenting styles and learned experiences.

For example, one child might learn through observation and reinforcement to say please and thank you. Another child might learn to behave aggressively by observing older children engage in violent behavior on the playground.

The Debate of Nature vs. Nurture

The nature vs. nurture debate centers on the contributions of genetics and environmental factors to human development. Some philosophers, such as Plato and Descartes, suggested that certain factors are inborn or occur naturally regardless of environmental influences.

Advocates of this point of view believe that all of our characteristics and behaviors are the result of evolution. They contend that genetic traits are handed down from parents to their children and influence the individual differences that make each person unique.

Other well-known thinkers, such as John Locke, believed in what is known as tabula rasa which suggests that the mind begins as a blank slate . According to this notion, everything that we are is determined by our experiences.

Behaviorism is a good example of a theory rooted in this belief as behaviorists feel that all actions and behaviors are the results of conditioning. Theorists such as John B. Watson believed that people could be trained to do and become anything, regardless of their genetic background.

People with extreme views are called nativists and empiricists. Nativists take the position that all or most behaviors and characteristics are the result of inheritance. Empiricists take the position that all or most behaviors and characteristics result from learning.

Examples of Nature vs. Nurture

One example of when the argument of nature vs. nurture arises is when a person achieves a high level of academic success . Did they do so because they are genetically predisposed to elevated levels of intelligence, or is their success a result of an enriched environment?

The argument of nature vs. nurture can also be made when it comes to why a person behaves in a certain way. If a man abuses his wife and kids, for instance, is it because he was born with violent tendencies, or is violence something he learned by observing others in his life when growing up?

Nature vs. Nurture in Psychology

Throughout the history of psychology , the debate of nature vs. nurture has continued to stir up controversy. Eugenics, for example, was a movement heavily influenced by the nativist approach.

Psychologist Francis Galton coined the terms 'nature versus nurture' and 'eugenics' and believed that intelligence resulted from genetics. Galton also felt that intelligent individuals should be encouraged to marry and have many children, while less intelligent individuals should be discouraged from reproducing.

The value placed on nature vs. nurture can even vary between the different branches of psychology , with some branches taking a more one-sided approach. In biopsychology , for example, researchers conduct studies exploring how neurotransmitters influence behavior, emphasizing the role of nature.

In social psychology , on the other hand, researchers might conduct studies looking at how external factors such as peer pressure and social media influence behaviors, stressing the importance of nurture. Behaviorism is another branch that focuses on the impact of the environment on behavior.

Nature vs. Nurture in Child Development

Some psychological theories of child development place more emphasis on nature and others focus more on nurture. An example of a nativist theory involving child development is Chomsky's concept of a language acquisition device (LAD). According to this theory, all children are born with an instinctive mental capacity that allows them to both learn and produce language.

An example of an empiricist child development theory is Albert Bandura's social learning theory . This theory says that people learn by observing the behavior of others. In his famous Bobo doll experiment , Bandura demonstrated that children could learn aggressive behaviors simply by observing another person acting aggressively.

Nature vs. Nurture in Personality Development

There is also some argument as to whether nature or nurture plays a bigger role in the development of one's personality. The answer to this question varies depending on which personality development theory you use.

According to behavioral theories, our personality is a result of the interactions we have with our environment, while biological theories suggest that personality is largely inherited. Then there are psychodynamic theories of personality that emphasize the impact of both.

Nature vs. Nurture in Mental Illness Development

One could argue that either nature or nurture contributes to mental health development. Some causes of mental illness fall on the nature side of the debate, including changes to or imbalances with chemicals in the brain. Genetics can also contribute to mental illness development, increasing one's risk of a certain disorder or disease.

Mental disorders with some type of genetic component include autism , attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder , major depression , and schizophrenia .

Other explanations for mental illness are environmental. This includes being exposed to environmental toxins, such as drugs or alcohol, while still in utero. Certain life experiences can also influence mental illness development, such as witnessing a traumatic event, leading to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Nature vs. Nurture in Mental Health Therapy

Different types of mental health treatment can also rely more heavily on either nature or nurture in their treatment approach. One of the goals of many types of therapy is to uncover any life experiences that may have contributed to mental illness development (nurture).

However, genetics (nature) can play a role in treatment as well. For instance, research indicates that a person's genetic makeup can impact how their body responds to antidepressants. Taking this into consideration is important for getting that person the help they need.

Interaction Between Nature and Nurture

Which is stronger: nature or nurture? Many researchers consider the interaction between heredity and environment—nature with nurture as opposed to nature versus nurture—to be the most important influencing factor of all.

For example, perfect pitch is the ability to detect the pitch of a musical tone without any reference. Researchers have found that this ability tends to run in families and might be tied to a single gene. However, they've also discovered that possessing the gene is not enough as musical training during early childhood is needed for this inherited ability to manifest itself.

Height is another example of a trait influenced by an interaction between nature and nurture. A child might inherit the genes for height. However, if they grow up in a deprived environment where proper nourishment isn't received, they might never attain the height they could have had if they'd grown up in a healthier environment.

A newer field of study that aims to learn more about the interaction between genes and environment is epigenetics . Epigenetics seeks to explain how environment can impact the way in which genes are expressed.

Some characteristics are biologically determined, such as eye color, hair color, and skin color. Other things, like life expectancy and height, have a strong biological component but are also influenced by environmental factors and lifestyle.

Contemporary Views of Nature vs. Nurture

Most experts recognize that neither nature nor nurture is stronger than the other. Instead, both factors play a critical role in who we are and who we become. Not only that but nature and nurture interact with each other in important ways all throughout our lifespan.

As a result, many in this field are interested in seeing how genes modulate environmental influences and vice versa. At the same time, this debate of nature vs. nurture still rages on in some areas, such as in the origins of homosexuality and influences on intelligence .

While a few people take the extreme nativist or radical empiricist approach, the reality is that there is not a simple way to disentangle the multitude of forces that exist in personality and human development. Instead, these influences include genetic factors, environmental factors, and how each intermingles with the other.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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What Are Nature vs. Nurture Examples?

How is nature defined, how is nurture defined, the nature vs. nurture debate, nature vs. nurture examples, what is empiricism (extreme nurture position), contemporary views of nature vs. nurture.

Nature vs. nurture is an age-old debate about whether genetics (nature) plays a bigger role in determining a person's characteristics than lived experience and environmental factors (nurture). The term "nature vs. nature" was coined by English naturalist Charles Darwin's younger half-cousin, anthropologist Francis Galton, around 1875.

In psychology, the extreme nature position (nativism) proposes that intelligence and personality traits are inherited and determined only by genetics.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the extreme nurture position (empiricism) asserts that the mind is a blank slate at birth; external factors like education and upbringing determine who someone becomes in adulthood and how their mind works. Both of these extreme positions have shortcomings and are antiquated.

This article explores the difference between nature and nurture. It gives nature vs. nurture examples and explains why outdated views of nativism and empiricism don't jibe with contemporary views. 

Thanasis Zovoilis / Getty Images

In the context of nature vs. nurture, "nature" refers to genetics and heritable factors that are passed down to children from their biological parents.

Genes and hereditary factors determine many aspects of someone’s physical appearance and other individual characteristics, such as a genetically inherited predisposition for certain personality traits.

Scientists estimate that 20% to 60% percent of temperament is determined by genetics and that many (possibly thousands) of common gene variations combine to influence individual characteristics of temperament.

However, the impact of gene-environment (or nature-nurture) interactions on someone's traits is interwoven. Environmental factors also play a role in temperament by influencing gene activity. For example, in children raised in an adverse environment (such as child abuse or violence), genes that increase the risk of impulsive temperamental characteristics may be activated (turned on).

Trying to measure "nature vs. nurture" scientifically is challenging. It's impossible to know precisely where the influence of genes and environment begin or end.

How Are Inherited Traits Measured?

“Heritability”   describes the influence that genes have on human characteristics and traits. It's measured on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. Very strong heritable traits like someone's eye color are ranked a 1.0.

Traits that have nothing to do with genetics, like speaking with a regional accent ranks a zero. Most human characteristics score between a 0.30 and 0.60 on the heritability scale, which reflects a blend of genetics (nature) and environmental (nurture) factors.

Thousands of years ago, ancient Greek philosophers like Plato believed that "innate knowledge" is present in our minds at birth. Every parent knows that babies are born with innate characteristics. Anecdotally, it may seem like a kid's "Big 5" personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness) were predetermined before birth.

What is the "Big 5" personality traits

The Big 5 personality traits is a theory that describes the five basic dimensions of personality. It was developed in 1949 by D. W. Fiske and later expanded upon by other researchers and is used as a framework to study people's behavior.

From a "nature" perspective, the fact that every child has innate traits at birth supports Plato's philosophical ideas about innatism. However, personality isn't set in stone. Environmental "nurture" factors can change someone's predominant personality traits over time. For example, exposure to the chemical lead during childhood may alter personality.

In 2014, a meta-analysis of genetic and environmental influences on personality development across the human lifespan found that people change with age. Personality traits are relatively stable during early childhood but often change dramatically during adolescence and young adulthood.

It's impossible to know exactly how much "nurture" changes personality as people get older. In 2019, a study of how stable personality traits are from age 16 to 66 found that people's Big 5 traits are both stable and malleable (able to be molded). During the 50-year span from high school to retirement, some traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to increase, while others appear to be set in stone.

Nurture refers to all of the external or environmental factors that affect human development such as how someone is raised, socioeconomic status, early childhood experiences, education, and daily habits.

Although the word "nurture" may conjure up images of babies and young children being cared for by loving parents, environmental factors and life experiences have an impact on our psychological and physical well-being across the human life span. In adulthood, "nurturing" oneself by making healthy lifestyle choices can offset certain genetic predispositions.

For example, a May 2022 study found that people with a high genetic risk of developing the brain disorder Alzheimer's disease can lower their odds of developing dementia (a group of symptoms that affect memory, thinking, and social abilities enough to affect daily life) by adopting these seven healthy habits in midlife:

• Staying active
• Healthy eating
• Losing weight
• Not smoking
• Reducing blood sugar
• Controlling cholesterol
• Maintaining healthy blood pressure

The nature vs. nurture debate centers around whether individual differences in behavioral traits and personality are caused primarily by nature or nurture. Early philosophers believed the genetic traits passed from parents to their children influence individual differences and traits. Other well-known philosophers believed the mind begins as a blank slate and that everything we are is determined by our experiences.

While early theories favored one factor over the other, experts today recognize there is a complex interaction between genetics and the environment and that both nature and nurture play a critical role in shaping who we are.

Eye color and skin pigmentation are examples of "nature" because they are present at birth and determined by inherited genes. Developmental delays due to toxins (such as exposure to lead as a child or exposure to drugs in utero) are examples of "nurture" because the environment can negatively impact learning and intelligence.

In Child Development

The nature vs. nurture debate in child development is apparent when studying language development. Nature theorists believe genetics plays a significant role in language development and that children are born with an instinctive ability that allows them to both learn and produce language.

Nurture theorists would argue that language develops by listening and imitating adults and other children.

In addition, nurture theorists believe people learn by observing the behavior of others. For example, contemporary psychologist Albert Bandura's social learning theory suggests that aggression is learned through observation and imitation.

In Psychology

In psychology, the nature vs. nurture beliefs vary depending on the branch of psychology.

• Biopsychology:  Researchers analyze how the brain, neurotransmitters, and other aspects of our biology influence our behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. emphasizing the role of nature.
• Social psychology: Researchers study how external factors such as peer pressure and social media influence behaviors, emphasizing the importance of nurture.
• Behaviorism: This theory of learning is based on the idea that our actions are shaped by our interactions with our environment.

In Personality Development

Whether nature or nurture plays a bigger role in personality development depends on different personality development theories.

• Behavioral theories: Our personality is a result of the interactions we have with our environment, such as parenting styles, cultural influences, and life experiences.
• Biological theories: Personality is mostly inherited which is demonstrated by a study in the 1990s that concluded identical twins reared apart tend to have more similar personalities than fraternal twins.
• Psychodynamic theories: Personality development involves both genetic predispositions and environmental factors and their interaction is complex.

In Mental Illness

Both nature and nurture can contribute to mental illness development.

For example, at least five mental health disorders are associated with some type of genetic component ( autism ,  attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) ,  bipolar disorder , major depression, and  schizophrenia ).

Other explanations for mental illness are environmental, such as:

• Being exposed to drugs or alcohol in utero 
• Witnessing a traumatic event, leading to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Adverse life events and chronic stress during childhood

In Mental Health Therapy

Mental health treatment can involve both nature and nurture. For example, a therapist may explore life experiences that may have contributed to mental illness development (nurture) as well as family history of mental illness (nature).

At the same time, research indicates that a person's genetic makeup may impact how their body responds to antidepressants. Taking this into consideration is important for finding the right treatment for each individual.

 What Is Nativism (Extreme Nature Position)?

Innatism emphasizes nature's role in shaping our minds and personality traits before birth. Nativism takes this one step further and proposes that all of people's mental and physical characteristics are inherited and predetermined at birth.

In its extreme form, concepts of nativism gave way to the early 20th century's racially-biased eugenics movement. Thankfully, "selective breeding," which is the idea that only certain people should reproduce in order to create chosen characteristics in offspring, and eugenics, arranged breeding, lost momentum during World War II. At that time, the Nazis' ethnic cleansing (killing people based on their ethnic or religious associations) atrocities were exposed.

Philosopher John Locke's tabula rasa theory from 1689 directly opposes the idea that we are born with innate knowledge. "Tabula rasa" means "blank slate" and implies that our minds do not have innate knowledge at birth.

Locke was an empiricist who believed that all the knowledge we gain in life comes from sensory experiences (using their senses to understand the world), education, and day-to-day encounters after being born.

Today, looking at nature vs. nature in black-and-white terms is considered a misguided dichotomy (two-part system). There are so many shades of gray where nature and nurture overlap. It's impossible to tease out how inherited traits and learned behaviors shape someone's unique characteristics or influence how their mind works.

The influences of nature and nurture in psychology are impossible to unravel. For example, imagine someone growing up in a household with an alcoholic parent who has frequent rage attacks. If that child goes on to develop a substance use disorder and has trouble with emotion regulation in adulthood, it's impossible to know precisely how much genetics (nature) or adverse childhood experiences (nurture) affected that individual's personality traits or issues with alcoholism.

Epigenetics Blurs the Line Between Nature and Nurture

"Epigenetics " means "on top of" genetics. It refers to external factors and experiences that turn genes "on" or "off." Epigenetic mechanisms alter DNA's physical structure in utero (in the womb) and across the human lifespan.

Epigenetics blurs the line between nature and nurture because it says that even after birth, our genetic material isn't set in stone; environmental factors can modify genes during one's lifetime. For example, cannabis exposure during critical windows of development can increase someone's risk of neuropsychiatric disease via epigenetic mechanisms.

Nature vs. nurture is a framework used to examine how genetics (nature) and environmental factors (nurture) influence human development and personality traits.

However, nature vs. nurture isn't a black-and-white issue; there are many shades of gray where the influence of nature and nurture overlap. It's impossible to disentangle how nature and nurture overlap; they are inextricably intertwined. In most cases, nature and nurture combine to make us who we are. 

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By Christopher Bergland Christopher Bergland is a retired ultra-endurance athlete turned medical writer and science reporter. 

Nature vs. Nurture Debate In Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

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Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

The nature vs. nurture debate in psychology concerns the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities (nature) versus personal experiences (nurture) in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. While early theories favored one factor over the other, contemporary views recognize a complex interplay between genes and environment in shaping behavior and development.

Key Takeaways

• Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors.
• Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception, e.g., the product of exposure, life experiences, and learning on an individual.
• Behavioral genetics has enabled psychology to quantify the relative contribution of nature and nurture concerning specific psychological traits.
• Instead of defending extreme nativist or nurturist views, most psychological researchers are now interested in investigating how nature and nurture interact in a host of qualitatively different ways.
• For example, epigenetics is an emerging area of research that shows how environmental influences affect the expression of genes.

The nature-nurture debate is concerned with the relative contribution that both influences make to human behavior, such as personality, cognitive traits, temperament and psychopathology.

Examples of Nature vs. Nurture

Nature vs. nurture in child development.

In child development, the nature vs. nurture debate is evident in the study of language acquisition . Researchers like Chomsky (1957) argue that humans are born with an innate capacity for language (nature), known as universal grammar, suggesting that genetics play a significant role in language development.

Conversely, the behaviorist perspective, exemplified by Skinner (1957), emphasizes the role of environmental reinforcement and learning (nurture) in language acquisition.

Twin studies have provided valuable insights into this debate, demonstrating that identical twins raised apart may share linguistic similarities despite different environments, suggesting a strong genetic influence (Bouchard, 1979)

However, environmental factors, such as exposure to language-rich environments, also play a crucial role in language development, highlighting the intricate interplay between nature and nurture in child development.

Nature vs. Nurture in Personality Development

The nature vs. nurture debate in personality psychology centers on the origins of personality traits. Twin studies have shown that identical twins reared apart tend to have more similar personalities than fraternal twins, indicating a genetic component to personality (Bouchard, 1994).

However, environmental factors, such as parenting styles, cultural influences, and life experiences, also shape personality.

For example, research by Caspi et al. (2003) demonstrated that a particular gene (MAOA) can interact with childhood maltreatment to increase the risk of aggressive behavior in adulthood.

This highlights that genetic predispositions and environmental factors contribute to personality development, and their interaction is complex and multifaceted.

Nature vs. Nurture in Mental Illness Development

The nature vs. nurture debate in mental health explores the etiology of depression. Genetic studies have identified specific genes associated with an increased vulnerability to depression, indicating a genetic component (Sullivan et al., 2000).

However, environmental factors, such as adverse life events and chronic stress during childhood, also play a significant role in the development of depressive disorders (Dube et al.., 2002; Keller et al., 2007)

The diathesis-stress model posits that individuals inherit a genetic predisposition (diathesis) to a disorder, which is then activated or exacerbated by environmental stressors (Monroe & Simons, 1991).

This model illustrates how nature and nurture interact to influence mental health outcomes.

Nature vs. Nurture of Intelligence

The nature vs. nurture debate in intelligence examines the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to cognitive abilities.

Intelligence is highly heritable, with about 50% of variance in IQ attributed to genetic factors, based on studies of twins, adoptees, and families (Plomin & Spinath, 2004).

Heritability of intelligence increases with age, from about 20% in infancy to as high as 80% in adulthood, suggesting amplifying effects of genes over time.

However, environmental influences, such as access to quality education and stimulating environments, also significantly impact intelligence.

Shared environmental influences like family background are more influential in childhood, whereas non-shared experiences are more important later in life.

Research by Flynn (1987) showed that average IQ scores have increased over generations, suggesting that environmental improvements, known as the Flynn effect , can lead to substantial gains in cognitive abilities.

Molecular genetics provides tools to identify specific genes and understand their pathways and interactions. However, progress has been slow for complex traits like intelligence. Identified genes have small effect sizes (Plomin & Spinath, 2004).

Overall, intelligence results from complex interplay between genes and environment over development. Molecular genetics offers promise to clarify these mechanisms. The nature vs nurture debate is outdated – both play key roles.

Nativism (Extreme Nature Position)

It has long been known that certain physical characteristics are biologically determined by genetic inheritance.

Color of eyes, straight or curly hair, pigmentation of the skin, and certain diseases (such as Huntingdon’s chorea) are all a function of the genes we inherit.

These facts have led many to speculate as to whether psychological characteristics such as behavioral tendencies, personality attributes, and mental abilities are also “wired in” before we are even born.

Those who adopt an extreme hereditary position are known as nativists.  Their basic assumption is that the characteristics of the human species as a whole are a product of evolution and that individual differences are due to each person’s unique genetic code.

In general, the earlier a particular ability appears, the more likely it is to be under the influence of genetic factors. Estimates of genetic influence are called heritability.

Examples of extreme nature positions in psychology include Chomsky (1965), who proposed language is gained through the use of an innate language acquisition device. Another example of nature is Freud’s theory of aggression as being an innate drive (called Thanatos).

Characteristics and differences that are not observable at birth, but which emerge later in life, are regarded as the product of maturation. That is to say, we all have an inner “biological clock” which switches on (or off) types of behavior in a pre-programmed way.

The classic example of the way this affects our physical development are the bodily changes that occur in early adolescence at puberty.

However, nativists also argue that maturation governs the emergence of attachment in infancy , language acquisition , and even cognitive development .

Empiricism (Extreme Nurture Position)

At the other end of the spectrum are the environmentalists – also known as empiricists (not to be confused with the other empirical/scientific  approach ).

Their basic assumption is that at birth, the human mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate) and that this is gradually “filled” as a result of experience (e.g., behaviorism ).

From this point of view, psychological characteristics and behavioral differences that emerge through infancy and childhood are the results of learning.  It is how you are brought up (nurture) that governs the psychologically significant aspects of child development and the concept of maturation applies only to the biological.

For example, Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory states that aggression is learned from the environment through observation and imitation. This is seen in his famous bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1961).

Also, Skinner (1957) believed that language is learned from other people via behavior-shaping techniques.

Evidence for Nature

• Biological Approach
• Biology of Gender
• Medical Model

Freud (1905) stated that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality.

He thought that parenting is of primary importance to a child’s development , and the family as the most important feature of nurture was a common theme throughout twentieth-century psychology (which was dominated by environmentalists’ theories).

Behavioral Genetics

Researchers in the field of behavioral genetics study variation in behavior as it is affected by genes, which are the units of heredity passed down from parents to offspring.

“We now know that DNA differences are the major systematic source of psychological differences between us. Environmental effects are important but what we have learned in recent years is that they are mostly random – unsystematic and unstable – which means that we cannot do much about them.” Plomin (2018, xii)

Behavioral genetics has enabled psychology to quantify the relative contribution of nature and nurture with regard to specific psychological traits. One way to do this is to study relatives who share the same genes (nature) but a different environment (nurture). Adoption acts as a natural experiment which allows researchers to do this.

Empirical studies have consistently shown that adoptive children show greater resemblance to their biological parents, rather than their adoptive, or environmental parents (Plomin & DeFries, 1983; 1985).

Another way of studying heredity is by comparing the behavior of twins, who can either be identical (sharing the same genes) or non-identical (sharing 50% of genes). Like adoption studies, twin studies support the first rule of behavior genetics; that psychological traits are extremely heritable, about 50% on average.

The Twins in Early Development Study (TEDS) revealed correlations between twins on a range of behavioral traits, such as personality (empathy and hyperactivity) and components of reading such as phonetics (Haworth, Davis, Plomin, 2013; Oliver & Plomin, 2007; Trouton, Spinath, & Plomin, 2002).

Implications

Jenson (1969) found that the average I.Q. scores of black Americans were significantly lower than whites he went on to argue that genetic factors were mainly responsible – even going so far as to suggest that intelligence is 80% inherited.

The storm of controversy that developed around Jenson’s claims was not mainly due to logical and empirical weaknesses in his argument. It was more to do with the social and political implications that are often drawn from research that claims to demonstrate natural inequalities between social groups.

For many environmentalists, there is a barely disguised right-wing agenda behind the work of the behavioral geneticists.  In their view, part of the difference in the I.Q. scores of different ethnic groups are due to inbuilt biases in the methods of testing.

More fundamentally, they believe that differences in intellectual ability are a product of social inequalities in access to material resources and opportunities.  To put it simply children brought up in the ghetto tend to score lower on tests because they are denied the same life chances as more privileged members of society.

Now we can see why the nature-nurture debate has become such a hotly contested issue.  What begins as an attempt to understand the causes of behavioral differences often develops into a politically motivated dispute about distributive justice and power in society.

What’s more, this doesn’t only apply to the debate over I.Q.  It is equally relevant to the psychology of sex and gender , where the question of how much of the (alleged) differences in male and female behavior is due to biology and how much to culture is just as controversial.

Polygenic Inheritance

Rather than the presence or absence of single genes being the determining factor that accounts for psychological traits, behavioral genetics has demonstrated that multiple genes – often thousands, collectively contribute to specific behaviors.

Thus, psychological traits follow a polygenic mode of inheritance (as opposed to being determined by a single gene). Depression is a good example of a polygenic trait, which is thought to be influenced by around 1000 genes (Plomin, 2018).

This means a person with a lower number of these genes (under 500) would have a lower risk of experiencing depression than someone with a higher number.

The Nature of Nurture

Nurture assumes that correlations between environmental factors and psychological outcomes are caused environmentally. For example, how much parents read with their children and how well children learn to read appear to be related. Other examples include environmental stress and its effect on depression.

However, behavioral genetics argues that what look like environmental effects are to a large extent really a reflection of genetic differences (Plomin & Bergeman, 1991).

People select, modify and create environments correlated with their genetic disposition. This means that what sometimes appears to be an environmental influence (nurture) is a genetic influence (nature).

So, children that are genetically predisposed to be competent readers, will be happy to listen to their parents read them stories, and be more likely to encourage this interaction.

Interaction Effects

However, in recent years there has been a growing realization that the question of “how much” behavior is due to heredity and “how much” to the environment may itself be the wrong question.

Take intelligence as an example. Like almost all types of human behavior, it is a complex, many-sided phenomenon which reveals itself (or not!) in a great variety of ways.

The “how much” question assumes that psychological traits can all be expressed numerically and that the issue can be resolved in a quantitative manner.

Heritability statistics revealed by behavioral genetic studies have been criticized as meaningless, mainly because biologists have established that genes cannot influence development independently of environmental factors; genetic and nongenetic factors always cooperate to build traits. The reality is that nature and culture interact in a host of qualitatively different ways (Gottlieb, 2007; Johnston & Edwards, 2002).

Instead of defending extreme nativist or nurturist views, most psychological researchers are now interested in investigating how nature and nurture interact.

For example, in psychopathology , this means that both a genetic predisposition and an appropriate environmental trigger are required for a mental disorder to develop. For example, epigenetics state that environmental influences affect the expression of genes.

What is Epigenetics?

Epigenetics is the term used to describe inheritance by mechanisms other than through the DNA sequence of genes. For example, features of a person’s physical and social environment can effect which genes are switched-on, or “expressed”, rather than the DNA sequence of the genes themselves.

Stressors and memories can be passed through small RNA molecules to multiple generations of offspring in ways that meaningfully affect their behavior.

One such example is what is known as the Dutch Hunger Winter, during last year of the Second World War. What they found was that children who were in the womb during the famine experienced a life-long increase in their chances of developing various health problems compared to children conceived after the famine.

Epigenetic effects can sometimes be passed from one generation to the next, although the effects only seem to last for a few generations. There is some evidence that the effects of the Dutch Hunger Winter affected grandchildren of women who were pregnant during the famine.

Therefore, it makes more sense to say that the difference between two people’s behavior is mostly due to hereditary factors or mostly due to environmental factors.

This realization is especially important given the recent advances in genetics, such as polygenic testing.  The Human Genome Project, for example, has stimulated enormous interest in tracing types of behavior to particular strands of DNA located on specific chromosomes.

If these advances are not to be abused, then there will need to be a more general understanding of the fact that biology interacts with both the cultural context and the personal choices that people make about how they want to live their lives.

There is no neat and simple way of unraveling these qualitatively different and reciprocal influences on human behavior.

Epigenetics: Licking Rat Pups

Michael Meaney and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada conducted the landmark epigenetic study on mother rats licking and grooming their pups.

This research found that the amount of licking and grooming received by rat pups during their early life could alter their epigenetic marks and influence their stress responses in adulthood.

Pups that received high levels of maternal care (i.e., more licking and grooming) had a reduced stress response compared to those that received low levels of maternal care.

Meaney’s work with rat maternal behavior and its epigenetic effects has provided significant insights into the understanding of early-life experiences, gene expression, and adult behavior.

It underscores the importance of the early-life environment and its long-term impacts on an individual’s mental health and stress resilience.

Epigenetics: The Agouti Mouse Study

Waterland and Jirtle’s 2003 study on the Agouti mouse is another foundational work in the field of epigenetics that demonstrated how nutritional factors during early development can result in epigenetic changes that have long-lasting effects on phenotype.

In this study, they focused on a specific gene in mice called the Agouti viable yellow (A^vy) gene. Mice with this gene can express a range of coat colors, from yellow to mottled to brown.

This variation in coat color is related to the methylation status of the A^vy gene: higher methylation is associated with the brown coat, and lower methylation with the yellow coat.

Importantly, the coat color is also associated with health outcomes, with yellow mice being more prone to obesity, diabetes, and tumorigenesis compared to brown mice.

Waterland and Jirtle set out to investigate whether maternal diet, specifically supplementation with methyl donors like folic acid, choline, betaine, and vitamin B12, during pregnancy could influence the methylation status of the A^vy gene in offspring.

Key findings from the study include:

Dietary Influence : When pregnant mice were fed a diet supplemented with methyl donors, their offspring had an increased likelihood of having the brown coat color. This indicated that the supplemented diet led to an increased methylation of the A^vy gene.

Health Outcomes : Along with the coat color change, these mice also had reduced risks of obesity and other health issues associated with the yellow phenotype.

Transgenerational Effects : The study showed that nutritional interventions could have effects that extend beyond the individual, affecting the phenotype of the offspring.

The implications of this research are profound. It highlights how maternal nutrition during critical developmental periods can have lasting effects on offspring through epigenetic modifications, potentially affecting health outcomes much later in life.

The study also offers insights into how dietary and environmental factors might contribute to disease susceptibility in humans.

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Further Information

• Genetic & Environmental Influences on Human Psychological Differences

Evidence for Nurture

• Classical Conditioning
• Little Albert Experiment
• Operant Conditioning
• Behaviorism
• Social Learning Theory
• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory
• Social Roles
• Attachment Styles
• The Hidden Links Between Mental Disorders
• Visual Cliff Experiment
• Behavioral Genetics, Genetics, and Epigenetics
• Epigenetics
• Is Epigenetics Inherited?
• Physiological Psychology
• Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis
• So is it nature not nurture after all?

Evidence for an Interaction

• Genes, Interactions, and the Development of Behavior
• Agouti Mouse Study
• Biological Psychology

What does nature refer to in the nature vs. nurture debate?

In the nature vs. nurture debate, “nature” refers to the influence of genetics, innate qualities, and biological factors on human development, behavior, and traits. It emphasizes the role of hereditary factors in shaping who we are.

What does nurture refer to in the nature vs. nurture debate?

In the nature vs. nurture debate, “nurture” refers to the influence of the environment, upbringing, experiences, and social factors on human development, behavior, and traits. It emphasizes the role of external factors in shaping who we are.

Why is it important to determine the contribution of heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) in human development?

Determining the contribution of heredity and environment in human development is crucial for understanding the complex interplay between genetic factors and environmental influences. It helps identify the relative significance of each factor, informing interventions, policies, and strategies to optimize human potential and address developmental challenges.

Nature Vs. Nurture: What Matters Most?

Have you ever questioned how much of your personality or difficulties you’ve faced may be due to your biology, and how much may be due to the environment you’ve lived in and learned from? If so, you aren’t alone. This is one of the fundamental bases of nature vs nurture psychology, which has been studied by experts for decades. It’s even been featured in countless articles from publishers as prominent as the New York Times for decades.

The debate over what drives human culture, personality, and behavior is actually believed by many to go back thousands of years to Ancient Greece. It can involve cultural, philosophical, and scientific elements to identify a variant or a hypothesis of the primary force behind human nature. Understanding this element of scope and pursuing ongoing education in this area can help you to determine how either element affects your present-day experience and how you can live well in your current situation. 

Read on to learn more about the nature vs nurture debate in psychology and how both can affect your daily experiences. 

Nature vs. nurture psychology

Nature refers to inherent characteristics while nurture refers to outside factors. The topic has been debated for millennia, and many have found that science has yet to arrive at a definitive answer—possibly suggesting that human nature is complex and not easy to define with labels. 

The history of the nature vs. nurture debate

Galen, a philosopher in Ancient Greece, is thought by many to have first proposed that a person’s personality can arise from the levels of four types of bodily fluids (or “humors”), also known by many as the  humorism or humoralism  theory. 

Later on, in the 1870s, Sir Francis Galton is quoted in historical texts using the terms “nature” and “nurture” when explaining his theory that traits, like intelligence and personality, could be developed by genetics and inherited at birth. During the same period, philosopher John Locke proposed that children were born as blank slates, and their characters developed from what they learned.

According to medical history, many behavioral and psychoanalytic theories in the early 1900s relied on the assumption that learning, environment and experience might be the most critical elements that can contribute to a person’s mental health. However, as time progressed to the later years of the 20th century, genetics and neuroscience gained popularity—and many medical professionals may have shifted back toward the nature “side” of the argument. 

Current  research  generally indicates that individual differences in personality, behavior patterns, and mental health can all have intricate ties to genetic and environmental factors.   

The interactionist position in the nature–nurture debate

Many field experts appear to support the  interactionist position  in the nature vs nurture debate—which is thought to state that genetics and environmental factors work within a fully interactive system that can determine a person’s personality and overall mental well-being. 

As parents can provide someone with both genetic makeup and early environment and childhood lessons, in most cases, it can be argued that one of the most influential factors in human and child development—childhood caregivers—is, by definition, driven by both nature and nurture. 

“Nature vs nurture is one of the oldest questions in science. The answer is not an either/or, but rather it is both nature and nurture, acting in various degrees”. —  Grand Challenge: Nature Versus Nurture

Why does the nature vs nurture debate matter? 

Your opinion on what matters most may affect how you approach your mental health. For example: If you stand firmly on the nature side, you may feel powerless to change something you believe was determined before birth. If nurture is the basis of your philosophy, however, you may feel powerless in pursuit or ownership of your unique fusion of personality traits. 

Understanding both sides of the debate can give you an open mind regarding mental health treatment options, as you can change your experience in a range of ways. Those who favor the interactionist position may work with all the factors that could influence them—possibly empowering them to make an informed decision about improving their well-being with varied methods.  

To help you to determine your own set of personal beliefs, we’ve listed a summary of both nature- and nurture-related elements below. 

Nature: Biological factors

Nature can refer to your genetics and other biological factors that can influence your mental health and personality development. 

Elements included on the nature side of the debate

While there can be a range of elements included in this area of the nature vs nurture argument, some of the most  includes: 

• Genetic diseases and disorders
• Appearance-related elements, such as eye, hair or skin color 

How does nature affect you?

In a 2021 study , researchers sought to determine genetic influence on one’s experience and understanding of self with the removal of the environmental factors provided by parents to avoid errors related to causation. As a result, they suggested using the Familial Control Method as a workaround when genetically sensitive information isn’t available. 

This could be a plausible measure to determine how nature truly can affect you. Per current psychological understanding, your genetic code is thought to be the source of your nature—while your genes might determine your brain structure, and your individual neurochemistry may shape your thought patterns, emotions and behaviors. 

Nurture: Environmental factors

Nurture generally refers to the environmental factors, such as relationships, experiences and culture, which can impact who you are and how your mental health develops. 

Elements included on the nurture side of the debate

Many people might have common nurture-related experiences, such as: 

• Parenting and attachment style variations during childhood
• Learned experiences (facilitated by school or extracurricular activities) 
• Social relationships 
• Culture-related achievements (variable) 

How does nurture affect you?

As you might imagine, your experiences and everything you’ve been through can impact your life and experiences. For example: Your experiences as an infant and throughout childhood substantially influence who you become, from your attachment style affecting how you form and maintain relationships to traumatic experiences changing how you react to certain situations. 

Can nurture be changed?

Psychotherapy is generally defined as a proven method to help change one’s behavior and thought patterns. It can be regarded as an effective treatment for various mental health conditions. 

Many may have nearly limitless ways to alter your environment—and psychotherapy can help you rebuild your cognitive pathways , according to data presented in a 2017 study. This published work alone shows the potential of change that nurture can hold, encouraging those who may wish to change facets of their personality or thought processes over time. 

What are examples of nature vs. nurture in psychology? 

You can see practical examples of nature vs nurture in everyday life, specifically in the area of behavioral psychology. Many believe that rather than showing definitive evidence for one side or the other, the evidence can show how integral and widespread the connection between nature and nurture truly is. 

Nature vs nurture: Abusive behaviors

If a person exhibits abusive behavior, is it because they learned it by observing violence during their formative years, or is it due to being born with violent tendencies? This can be a common topic that’s brought up in the nature vs nurture debate. 

If you or a loved one is experiencing abuse, contact the Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Support is available 24/7.

If you are experiencing trauma, support is available. Please see our Get Help Now page for more resources.

Nature vs nurture: Intelligence

Does a person who demonstrates a high level of intelligence owe that to their genetic makeup or years of studying? How do we account for people who are born geniuses? 

Looking to improve your mental health? Speak with a licensed therapist

Nature vs nurture: personality.

Twins can offer a unique view into how genetics and environment can shape your personality, mental health and emotional stability. For example, why would identical twins develop separate personalities and interests when they have the exact same genetics? Or how could children adopted into a home develop personality characteristics like their non-biological siblings?

Nature vs nurture: Mental health conditions

Some mental health conditions, like schizophrenia, might have a significant genetic component, while others can be directly caused by experiences—such as post-traumatic stress disorder. There are several brain issues, like Huntington’s disease, known to be passed on through genetics as well. What role would nature vs nurture have in these instances? How would one account for that? 

Nature vs. nurture debate status

According to a 2018 study the medical community suggests that there’s not a single answer to the nature vs. nurture debate . The solution for many may be to allow both nature and nurture to interact throughout your life, shaping you into the person you are and influencing your mental health and stability in many complex ways. 

How can online therapy help you establish mental stability

Mental health conditions can often leave you feeling overwhelmed. This level of overwhelm can make it difficult for you to leave the home, especially to confront your nervousness head on through in-person therapeutic intervention. Working with a licensed therapist online through  virtual therapy platforms like BetterHelp can empower you to work on your mental health from the convenience and comfort of your own home—possibly offering a sense of safety when speaking about vulnerable topics. 

Is online therapy effective? 

Studies published by the American Psychological Association (APA) suggest that online therapy can be a viable, affordable option for many mental health conditions. It can also effectively boost the overall mental well-being of people who are not currently diagnosed with a mental condition. The APA has been quoted stating that virtual options for therapy can make treatment available in areas that did not previously have in-person option, possibly maximizing the amount of benefit that a larger pool of people can gain. 

Why is Nature Vs Nurture important to psychology?

The nature versus nurture debate is the extent to which aspects of our behavior are the product of either inherited (i.e., nature) or learned (i.e., nurture) influences. Nature is what we think of as what we are pre-destined to become and is influenced by genetic inheritance (i.e., hair color). On the other hand, nurture is the influence of external factors after conception (i.e., personality characteristics).

Breaking down nature versus nurture within the psychological science disciplines involves a discussion around the two extreme schools of thought – Nativism and Empiricism. The first is nativism. Eye color, hair texture, skin pigmentation and predisposition to genetic diseases are all a function of the genes we inherit. These facts have led nativists to speculate whether psychological characteristics such as behavioral tendencies, personality attributes, and mental abilities are also genetically influenced. The basic assumption amongst nativists is that the characteristics of the human species is entirely a product of evolution and individual differences can be explained by each person’s unique genetic code.

Empiricism is the opposite of nativism in that it takes the extreme nurture position. Their basic assumption is that at birth, the human mind is a blank slate, or a tabula rasa, and that it is gradually filled as a result of experience. Psychological characteristics and behavioral differences that emerge from birth through childhood are the results of learning and being part of an environment.

Researchers in the field of behavioral genetics study how genes affect behavior and therefore relate variation in behavior between people. Behavioral genetics allows psychology to quantify just how much nature and nurture impact  specific psychological traits. Adoption also acts a natural experiment that allows researchers to determine whether certain traits are more or less a product of either nature or nurture or a combination of the two. Studies have consistently shown that adopted children show greater physical resemblance to their biological parents , rather than their adoptive parents.

Another way researchers have studied nature versus nurture is through twin studies. Like adoption studies, twin studies support that psychological traits are extremely inheritable, about 50% on average. In a  Twins in Early Development Study , there was found to be correlations between twins on a range of behavioral traits such as personality (empathy and hyperactivity) and the reach of phonetics.

Nature versus nurture is just one way that developmental psychology tries to explain and understand the differences in human behavior and how genetic and environmental factors contribute to those differences.

Is Developmental Psychology a nature or nurture?

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of changes that occur in human beings over the course of their lives and examines change and development across a broad range of topics, such as motor skills, cognitive development, problem-solving skills, personality and emotional development, among others.

When explaining development, considering both nature and nurture is important. Developmental psychology seeks to answer two big questions around nature versus nurture. The first is how much weight does each contribute? And the second is how do nature and nurture interact? Developmental psychology considers both nature and nurture when it comes to explaining human development since they are both seen as playing a crucial role in determining the development of personality and other behaviors.

Was Freud nature or nurture?

Sigmund Freud stated that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality characteristics. Freud was of the belief that parenting is of primary importance to a child’s development. These aspects of the theory led Freud to believe early childhood was crucial to the development of personality as an adult. In fact, he focused primarily on the first five years of life as being critical to healthy outcomes.

While Freud was primarily interested in how nurture influences a person’s behavior, Freud’s theory of aggression is steeped in nature. Freud believed that aggression was an innate drive propelled by thoughts and feelings of the subconscious mind. Unlike his belief that personality traits are influenced by a person’s environment during early childhood, he saw aggression as something that was innate in everyone.

Despite Freud’s flourishing success and contributions to the psychology field, it is clear that even he struggled with the nature versus nurture debate.

How does nature and nurture affect personality?

As discussed above, there are various schools of thoughts around whether nature or nurture influence personality. However, the contemporary school of thought is that person’s personality is multi-faceted and is therefore a combination of both influences, rather than one being solely responsible.

Personality is not determined by any single gene. Rather, genes work together to determine certain actions. There is no “IQ gene” that determines intelligence. Genes are also not so powerful that they can control or create our personalities solely by themselves. In the same way that personality is not determined solely by genes, it is also not solely determined by environmental influences. Personality is affected by both genetic and environmental influences and because of this, it is something that can continue to be shaped throughout a person’s life.

How does nature and nurture affect intelligence?

Intelligence is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that cannot simply be boiled down to whether one’s genetics or environment influence intelligence.

Throughout the history of psychology, the nature versus nurture debate has caused quite a bit of controversy. Eugenics, for example, was a movement heavily influenced by the nativist approach.

Psychologist Francis Galton , a cousin of naturalist Charles Darwin, coined the terms nature versus nurture as well as eugenics and believes that intelligences were the result of genetics. Galton believed that intelligent individuals should be encouraged to marry and have many children, while less intelligent individuals should be prevented from reproducing.

Today, the majority of experts believe that a combination of nature and nurture impact behavior and development, including intelligence.

How does nature and nurture influence child development?

In the past, children were viewed as blank slates, which led to parents believing they could mod their child’s development solely through their actions. The idea put a lot of pressure on parents as it suggested that any decision would impact their child. We now know that this is not the case as their genetic makeup influences aspects of their behavior and personality. Beginning at conception, how a child develops and behaviors is partly influenced by the genes they inherit. Examples of nature influencing characteristics include sleeping behavior and parts of a child’s personality. However, the child’s environment plays a crucial role in influencing which genetic influences play a prominent role.

The reality is that nature and nurture both play a crucial role in influencing child development. In fact, new research demonstrates that environmental influences can actually affect genetic expression and whether or how the genes are expressed in the first place. The research found that adverse fetal and early childhood experiences can, and oftentimes do, lead to physical and chemical changes in the brain that can last a lifetime. Additionally, the study found that variations in DNA sequences between individuals influences the way genes are expressions, but the environment in which one develops, before and soon after birth, provides an impactful experience that chemically modify certain genes.

What are the 6 principles of nurture?

The six principles of nurture include: environmental variables, childhood experiences, how we were raised, social relationships, surrounding culture, and having a sense of belonging.

Is anxiety caused by nature or nurture

Around 40 million people are diagnosed with anxiety annually. When it comes to mental illness, the nature nurture debate can be quite helpful in shedding light on why some people develop issues whereas others do not. Anxiety researchers cite social learning theory as significant to the development of clinical anxiety conditions. Four ways the development of anxiety can be explained is:

• Exposure to a traumatic event can lead to fear and anxiety.
• Anxiety and fear are learned by people through watching the reactions and experiences of those around them.
• Simply talking about situations, objects, or people can lead to fear or anxiety.
• Children may negatively reinforce anxiety by avoiding it, which can lead to the development of a clinically significant anxiety condition.

On the other side of the debate, nature plays a pivotal role in understanding anxiety. Twin studies on anxiety disorders have found a genetic foundation for developing anxiety . However, gene-mapping findings have been less clear. This has led researchers to believe that there may be different genes responsible for the development of specific anxiety disorders, such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

When it comes to the nature nurture discussion for just about any topic, it becomes clear that both likely play a role in determining why certain behaviors and health problems arise.

Is aggression Nature or nurture?

Examples of nature influencing aggression include Sigmund Freud’s belief that aggression is innate and therefore is influenced by nature. In contrast to this view, Albert Bandura’s social learning theory states that aggression is learned from the environment through observation and imitation. In 1961, Bandura sought to prove this through his famous Bobo Doll experiment. During the experiment, 24 children were shown an aggressive model, 24 children were shown a non-aggressive model, and 24 children were shown no model. The study found that children are able to learn social behavior such as aggression through the process of observing another person’s behavior.

Is high IQ nature or nurture?

A high IQ is not determined by nature or nurture, rather it is a combination of the two. As stated previously, there is no single “IQ gene” that will predetermine whether a person is destined to have a higher IQ than someone else. Rather, it is a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental influences that truly impact a person’s IQ.

Does nature affect intelligence?

Intelligence is a complex trait that is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Intelligence is strongly influenced by the environment a person grows up in. Many psych reports show that factors related to a child’s home environment and parenting, education and availability of learning resources, and nutrition are just some of the environmental contributions to a person’s intelligence. Examples of nature influencing intelligence have been studied extensively , however the studies have not conclusively identified any genes that play a major role in differences in intelligence.

Which one is more important between nature and nurture?

The current school of thought is that nature and nurture are equally important and that both influence a person’s overall behavior and personality.

Why is nurture important?

While certain genetic factors may create an increased chance for a particular illness or behavior, the probability that a person develops either is oftentimes dependent on environment. One example of this is that the basis for addiction is not thought to be entirely genetic by most researchers. Environmental aspects, such as the habits of parents, friends, or a partner might also be significant factors contributing to whether a person develops an addiction. Similarly, researchers found that while a family history of mental health conditions was the second strongest predictor of mental illness, the strongest predictors were life events and experiences, such as childhood bullying, abuse, or other trauma. Nurture plays a crucial role in how we develop and evolve into who we are in the world.

How do you nurture yourself?

There are many ways to nurture yourself and doing so will have many positive impacts. A technique for treating yourself better is by developing your “ Inner Nurturing Parent .” Even if you did not have the most nurturing of familial relationships, you can create your inner nurturing parent by forgiving your past mistakes, making every effort to keep yourself healthy and safe,to love and support yourself. Some tips to get started include telling yourself “I love you and appreciate who you are” at the end of each day or saying “I believe in you” when you’ve had a particularly tough day. Making time each day for things you enjoy and prioritizing your health and well-being by starting a weekly exercise routine are other ways to begin to nurture yourself.

What is a nurturing woman?

There is no one “right” way to be a nurturing person. However, some characteristics of a nurturing person is someone who makes an effort to keep loved ones healthy and safe, listens to and acknowledges their feelings, forgives mistakes, and lets their loved ones know how loved they are. A nurturing person makes mistakes, lets others know when they have made a mistake and accepts responsibility for those mistakes.

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Nature versus nurture

By Michael Marshall

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The phrase “nature versus nurture” refers to a long-standing debate in human biology: to what extent is our behaviour shaped by our genes (nature) or by the environment in which we grow up and live (nurture)? The short answer is that it is a bit of both.

Many pre-scientific thinkers argued that the human brain was a blank slate or tabula rasa. In other words, they believed that babies were born without any pre-existing knowledge, habits or skills and had to learn everything through experience. This idea can be found in the writings of the philosophers Aristotle and Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) and more recently in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke. Believers in the blank slate model also emphasised the role of nurture in shaping human behaviour.

The opposing viewpoint emphasising the role of nature is called innatism. With this perspective, babies are thought to be born with certain built-in knowledge and ideas. This view was held by Plato and later by René Descartes. The strongest versions of this pro-nature viewpoint hold that experience doesn’t create new knowledge, but merely helps us unearth knowledge that our brains already contain.

The truth seems to be a complicated mish-mash of both ideas. We are shaped by both our genes and by our experiences , and the two interact in complex ways: it isn’t so much “nature versus nurture” as “ nature with nurture ”.

On the nature side, there is clear evidence of genetic influences on many of our behaviours. For instance, it appears that facial expressions are at least partially inherited . Our genes seem to affect how well we do in exams . Perhaps reassuringly for parents who are struggling to do what is best for their children, there is some evidence that how kids are raised and schooled doesn’t seem to affect their achievements much, provided they aren’t severely neglected or abused. As people get older, their inherited propensities appear to outweigh the effects of childhood experiences .

However, the evidence that the environment affects us is equally powerful. Most dramatically, there are cases of children who have lived in the wild with minimal human contact. They typically struggle to learn to speak and can prefer to walk on all fours.

Similarly, children who are neglected as babies often have developmental difficulties . There is also evidence that abuse changes youngsters’ brains , making them more likely to be abusive as adults. Furthermore, while male and female brains may not be identical, there is evidence that parents treat boys and girls differently , leading to greater differences in behaviour than the innate differences alone could generate. Even our risk of disease, which we often think of as being heavily influenced by our genes, is much more strongly connected to the microorganisms and other experiences to which we are exposed.

One way of thinking about this is that our genes shape our temperament , but the specific choices we make are much more closely linked to our experiences.

What’s more, nature and nurture can interact. One mechanism for this is epigenetics – our experiences can affect our genes , at least temporarily. For example, mice that learn to fear a particular smell seem to pass that knowledge on to their descendants. These epigenetic changes start early in life, so if we could run our lives over , we might well turn out differently.

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Nature versus Nurture Debate in Psychology by Hunter Honeycutt LAST MODIFIED: 12 January 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0305

The nature-nurture dichotomy is a long-standing and pervasive framework for thinking about the causal influences believed to be operating during individual development. In this dichotomy, nature refers to factors (e.g., genes, genetic programs, and/or biological blueprints) or forces (e.g., heredity and/or maturation) inherent to the individual that predetermine the development of form and function. Nurture generally refers to all the remaining, typically “external,” causal factors (e.g., physical and social conditions) and processes (e.g., learning and experience) that influence development. The nature versus nurture debate in psychology deals with disagreements about the extent to which the development of traits in humans and animals reflects the relative influence of nature and nurture. It is commonly stated that psychologists have moved on from asking whether traits (or variation in traits) develop from nature or nurture, to recognize instead that both nature and nurture work together or “interact” to produce outcomes, although exactly how to view the interaction is a matter of much debate. While acknowledging the interaction of nature and nurture, one’s theoretical models and research focus might emphasize the prominence of one over the other. Thus, nativists focus more on the importance of innate factors or forces operating on development, whereas empiricists focus more on experiential or environmental factors. However, not everyone finds value in thinking about development in terms of nature and nurture. By the middle of the twentieth century, some psychologists, biologists, and philosophers began to view nature-nurture as a conceptually deficient and biologically implausible dichotomy that oversimplifies the dynamics of behavior and development. Such people espouse some variant of “developmental systems theory” and seek to eliminate or otherwise fuse the nature-nurture division.

The works in this section are mostly trade books that provide general introductions to the nature-nurture debate across a variety of topical areas in psychology, all of which would be suitable for use in classes with undergraduate students at all levels. Goldhaber 2012 contrasts four popular perspectives on the nature-nurture issue and would be a good place to start for anyone unfamiliar with the nature-nurture debate in psychology. Nativist perspectives are represented by Pinker 2002 , Plomin 2018 , and Vallortigara 2021 . An empiricist-leaning position on behavior development is put forth in Schneider 2012 . Developmental systems theory is promoted in Blumberg 2005 and Moore 2002 . Two edited books are included and both are better suited for advanced undergraduate- or graduate-level students. The first edited book, Coll, et al. 2013 , focuses on the nature-nurture issue across a range of topics and perspectives in psychology. The other, Mayes and Lewis 2012 , presents empiricist (or environmentalist) perspectives on child development.

Bateson, P. 2017. Behaviour, development and evolution . Cambridge, UK: OpenBook Publishers.

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0097

Written by a distinguished ethologist who draws extensively from his work on animal behavior, this book argues that the nature-nurture division is neither valid nor helpful in capturing the complex system of factors that influence behavioral development. Topics include imprinting and attachment, parent-offspring relations, the influence of early-life experiences on later-life outcomes, problems with genetic determinism, and the role of behavior in evolutionary change.

Blumberg, M. S. 2005. Basic instinct: The genesis of novel behavior . New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Consistent with developmental systems theory, Blumberg presents an overview of the conceptual and empirical limitations of nativism in explanations of behavioral and neural development in animals and cognitive development in humans.

Coll, C. G., E. L. Bearer, and R. M. Lerner, eds. 2013. Nature-nurture: The complex interplay of genetic and environmental influences on human behavior and development . New York: Psychology Press.

The contents of this edited volume are almost entirely original works with commentary that span multiple disciplines (psychology, biology, economics, philosophy) and multiple perspectives (behavioral genetics and developmental systems theory) on the nature-nurture issue.

Goldhaber, D. 2012. The nature-nurture debates: Bridging the gap . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139022583

Goldhaber reviews four major perspectives (behavior genetics, environmentalism, evolutionary psychology, and developmental systems theory) on the nature-nurture issue. He argues we should reject reductionist views based on either genetic determinism or environmental determinism in favor of more holistic, interactionist approaches.

Mayes, L. C., and M. Lewis, eds. 2012. The Cambridge handbook of environment in human development . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

This handbook explores a wide variety of ways in which the environment influences child development. Chapters cover conceptual frameworks and methodological issues in thinking about and studying environmental influences as well reviewing ways in which environmental contexts and systems influence specific aspects of child development.

Moore, D. S. 2002. The dependent gene: The fallacy of nature vs. nurture . New York: Henry Holt.

This book provides an introduction to the developmental systems theory take on the nature-nurture issue particularly as it relates to genetic determinism, heritability and heredity.

Pinker, S. 2002. The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature . New York: Viking.

In this best-selling book, Pinker draws on evidence from behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive psychology to argue for a nativist position concerning human nature.

Plomin, R. 2018. Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Plomin reviews traditional and more modern evidence from behavioral genetics to argue that genes are the primary factor in bringing about psychological differences between people. Moreover, he argues that many “environmental” factors operating on development are themselves strongly influenced by genetic differences.

Schneider, S. M. 2012. The science of consequences: How they affect genes, change the brain, and impact our world . Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Schneider presents a view grounded in behavior analysis to argue for the critical role that the consequences of genetic activity, neural activity, and behavioral activity play in individual development. While emphasizing environmental (or experiential) factors influencing development, this book also highlights the systemic and interactive nature of developmental systems across multiple levels of analysis.

Vallortigara, G. 2021. Born knowing: Imprinting and the origins of knowledge . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14091.001.0001

Drawing upon research in comparative cognition and comparative neuroscience, much of it his own, Vallortigara argues that animals, including humans, enter the world with a set of unlearned, innate or instinctive behaviors and neural circuits that bias or predispose subsequent learning and development.

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Nature vs. Nurture

The nature versus nurture debate is about the relative influence of an individual's innate attributes as opposed to the experiences from the environment one is brought up in, in determining individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. The philosophy that humans acquire all or most of their behavioral traits from "nurture" is known as tabula rasa ("blank slate").

In recent years, both types of factors have come to be recognized as playing interacting roles in development. So several modern psychologists consider the question naive and representing an outdated state of knowledge . The famous psychologist, Donald Hebb, is said to have once answered a journalist's question of "Which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"

Comparison chart

Nature vs. nurture in the iq debate.

Evidence 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 (almost 0.0). Consequently, in the context of the "nature versus nurture" debate, the "nature" component appears to be much more important than the "nurture" component in explaining IQ variance in the general adult population of the United States .

The TEDx Talk below, featuring renowned entomologist Gene Robinson , discusses how the science of genomics strongly suggests both nature and nurture actively affect genomes, thus playing important roles in development and social behavior:

Nature vs. Nurture in Personality Traits

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 wane off 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.

Moral Considerations of the Nature vs. Nurture Debate

Some observers offer the criticism that modern science tends to give too much weight to the nature side of the argument, in part because of the potential harm that has come from rationalized racism. Historically, much of this debate has had undertones of racist and eugenicist policies — the notion of race as a scientific truth has often been assumed as a prerequisite in various incarnations of the nature versus nurture debate. In the past, heredity was often used as "scientific" justification for various forms of discrimination and oppression along racial and class lines. Works published in the United States since the 1960s that argue for the primacy of "nature" over "nurture" in determining certain characteristics, such as The Bell Curve, have been greeted with considerable controversy and scorn. A recent study conducted in 2012 has come up with the verdict that racism, after all, isn't innate.

A critique of moral arguments against the nature side of the argument could be that they cross the is-ought gap. That is, they apply values to facts. However, such appliance appears to construct reality. Belief in biologically determined stereotypes and abilities has been shown to increase the kind of behavior that is associated with such stereotypes and to impair intellectual performance through, among other things, the stereotype threat phenomenon.

The implications of this are brilliantly illustrated by the implicit association tests (IATs) out of Harvard . These, along with studies of the impact of self-identification with either positive or negative stereotypes and therefore "priming" good or bad effects, show that stereotypes, regardless of their broad statistical significance, bias the judgements and behaviours of members and non-members of the stereotyped groups.

Homosexuality

Being gay is now considered a genetic phenomenon rather than being influenced by the environment. This is based on observations such as:

• About 10% of the population is gay. This number is consistent across cultures throughout the world. If culture and society — i.e., nurture — were responsible for homosexuality, the percentage of population that is gay would vary across cultures.
• Studies of identical twins have shown that if one sibling is gay, the probability that the other sibling is also gay is greater than 50%.

More recent studies have indicated that both gender and sexuality are spectrums rather than strictly binary choices.

Epigenetics

Genetics is a complex and evolving field. A relatively newer idea in genetics is the epigenome . Changes happen to DNA molecules as other chemicals attach to genes or proteins in a cell. These changes constitute the epigenome. The epigenome regulates activity of cells by "turning genes off or on", i.e., by regulating which genes are expressed. This is why even though all cells have the same DNA (or genome), some cells grow into brain cells while others turn into liver and others into skin.

Epigenetics suggests a model for how the environment (nurture) may affect an individual by regulating the genome (nature). More information about epigenetics can be found here .

Philosophical Considerations of the Nature vs. Nurture Debate

Are the traits real.

It is sometimes a question whether the "trait" being measured is even a real thing. Much energy has been devoted to calculating the heritability of intelligence (usually the I.Q., or intelligence quotient), but there is still some disagreement as to what exactly "intelligence" is.

Determinism and Free Will

If genes do contribute substantially to the development of personal characteristics such as intelligence and personality, then many wonder if this implies that genes determine who we are. Biological determinism is the thesis that genes determine who we are. Few , if any, scientists would make such a claim; however, many are accused of doing so.

Others have pointed out that the premise of the "nature versus nurture" debate seems to negate the significance of free will. More specifically, if all our traits are determined by our genes, by our environment, by chance , or by some combination of these acting together, then there seems to be little room for free will. This line of reasoning suggests that the "nature versus nurture" debate tends to exaggerate the degree to which individual human behavior can be predicted based on knowledge of genetics and the environment. Furthermore, in this line of reasoning, it should also be pointed out that biology may determine our abilities, but free will still determines what we do with our abilities.

• Wikipedia: Nature versus nurture
• Nature vs Nurture: Racism isn't Innate - National Journal
• Nature vs. Nurture: The Debate on Psychological Development - YouTube
• Epigenetics - PBS

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Comments: Nature vs Nurture

Anonymous comments (5).

October 10, 2012, 8:50am Somewhere, someone has to be scratching their head and saying...what about free will? What about man's ability to reason? Nature and nurture do not complete the picture. They are influences, but we should not reduce the human mind and spirit to such base concepts. — 69.✗.✗.87

September 13, 2012, 1:25pm we were assigned to be on the "nature" side, to defend it. and the information I got from here made me "encouraged" to win on our debate, and has provided me a chance of having a high grade tomorrow. thanks.. — 109.✗.✗.162

February 28, 2013, 7:28pm nature all the way — 170.✗.✗.19

June 18, 2009, 1:54pm we were assigned to be on the "nature" side, to defend it. and the information I got from here made me "encouraged" to win on our debate, and has provided me a chance of having a high grade tomorrow. thanks.. — 124.✗.✗.255

May 9, 2014, 2:03pm Nurture an nature can change becose it is unchangeble to the personality. — 141.✗.✗.231

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Nature vs Nurture: Genes or Environment

Categories Development

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The nature versus nurture debate focuses on the question of whether genetic or environmental factors matter most in the course of human development.

What is it that makes you who you are? Some might say that it is your genes that have the greatest influence in controlling your personality and preferences. Others might say that it is your environment and the unique experiences you have had over the course of your life that have a greater role.

In this article, learn more about the nature vs. nurture debate and what research has found about the contributions of genetic and environmental factors.

Table of Contents

What Is the Nature vs Nurture Debate?

The nature vs. nurture debate is often described as one of the big philosophical and scientific questions facing psychologists. So what exactly does this debate mean? Why is it important for understanding the human mind and behavior?  

Let’s start by learning more about each of these factors.

• Nature: This side of the debate argues that genes have the greatest influence over who we are, from the way we look to the way we behave. Genes determine physical traits such as height, eye color, hair color, and face shape, but they can also contribute to other attributes such as your personality traits and cognitive abilities.
• Nurture: This side of the debate argues that environmental variables such as how we were raised, individual experience, and other social relationships play a more important role. Your upbringing, your early social interactions, school, and peers all play a role in shaping who you are and how you behave.

Let’s consider an example. If a student excels at math, is it because they inherited that ability from their parents or is it because they work hard to learn the subject?

Nature would suggest that they do well because they are genetically inclined to do so, while nature argues that their talent stems from their upbringing and educational background.

History of Nature vs. Nurture

The debate over nature and nurture predates psychology and goes back to the days of the ancient philosophers. In philosophy, this is often referred to as the nativism versus empiricism debate. What do these two terms mean and how do they relate to nature and nurture.

The nativist approach suggests that inheritance plays the greatest role in determining characteristics. Nativism proposes that people’s characteristics, both physical and mental, are innate. These are things that are passed down genetically from our ancestors. The nativist approach essentially espouses the nature side of the argument.

Noam Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition is one of the best-known examples of nativism in psychology.  Chomsky suggested that language develops as a result of an innate language acquisition device. He believed that people are able to learn language because they have an innate, hard-wired capacity for what he referred to as universal grammar.

Empiricism represents the nurture side of the debate. The empiricist approach suggests that all learning is the result of experience and environmental factors.

The philosopher John Locke took an empiricist approach and proposed a concept known as tabula rasa, which means “blank slate.” This approach that the mind is essentially that —a blank slate—and that it is through learning and experience that all knowledge, skill, and behavioral patterns are acquired.

Behaviorism is one example of an empirical approach to understanding human behavior. Behaviorists such as John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner believed that all human behavior was the result of conditioning, either classical (associative) or operant ( reinforcement and punishment ).

Watson was famously known for proclaiming that he could train anyone to be anything using the principles of conditioning, regardless of that individual’s genetics and background.

Approaches to Psychology

While few contemporary psychologists take an extreme, hard-lined empiricist or nativist approach, different branches of psychology do sometimes tend to emphasize one influence over the other.

Biological Psychology

Biological psychology, for example, tends to focus more on the nature side of the debate. This area of psychology focuses on how biological factors influence human behavior, so things such as the brain, neurons, and neurotransmitters are of greater interest than external factors.

Behavioral Psychology

Behavioral psychology tends to take the nurture side of the debate, focusing on how environmental factors and learned associations contribute to how people think and act.

Health Psychology

Health psychology is an example of an approach that tends to lie somewhere in the middle. Health psychologists are focused on understanding how both biological and environmental factors contribute and interact to affect an individual’s health.

Examples of Nature vs. Nurture

Looking at examples can be helpful to understand why the nature vs nurture debate has been so crucial throughout psychology’s history. The topic is not just an important philosophical debate. It has been critical for understanding what factors influence different aspects of human behavior and has been the source of considerable controversy at times.

Consider the long debate over the factors that influence intelligence. Those on the nature side of the debate suggest that the greatest influence on IQ is inheritance. Some early thinkers such as Francis Galton believed that intelligence could largely be attributed to genetic factors.

Such views have been used to justify discriminatory social policies and attitudes. When some research suggested that some groups of people had lower IQ scores, for example, some researchers interpreted such results to suggest that these individuals scored lower as a result of genetics.

Those taking the nurture side of the debate point out that other factors such as biased test construction, racism, and systemic discrimination impacting educational access and quality play a more important role.

Inequality, discrimination, and lack of access play a role in shaping how well people perform on intelligence tests and other assessments of educational outcomes.

Gender Differences and Education

Sex differences in school performance and attainment is another area where the debate between the contributions of nature vs nurture comes into play. Girls often perform better on verbal tests but less well on math. As they advance in school, girls also become less likely to enter STEM courses and STEM fields.

Those taking a nature perspective might suggest that girls are inherently less capable in these subjects. Nature advocates, however, would point out that social variables including gender stereotypes and discrimination have a greater influence.

Many researchers today believe that human behavior is influenced by both nature and nurture, and that it is often the interaction of the two variables that is even more important.

Impact of the Nature and Nurture Debate

Few modern psychologists would take an extreme nature or nurture position. Rather than asking which one controls specific variables, researchers are more likely to wonder about the degree to which each of these forces plays a role. So what exactly are the relative contributions of nature and nurture?

According to the research, the answer is about 50/50. Researchers collected the results of nearly every twin study conducted over the last half-century. Doing this allowed them to determine which factors played a role in determining certain characteristics.

Twin studies examine similarities and differences by looking at twins who are either raised together or raised apart. This allows researchers to determine the impact of genes versus the environment.

Researchers analyzed more than 2,700 twin studies involving a whopping 14.5 million pairs of twins from 39 different countries and discovered that genes and environment share a roughly equal role in determining who we are.

Variations in personality traits and disease were determined to be 49% due to genetics and 51% due to environment.

One important thing to note is that while the research suggests a 50/50 split, the findings did reveal that genes do play a greater role in the risk of certain diseases. Bipolar disorder, for example, was found to be approximately 70% heritable.

How Nature and Nurture Interact

Today, many experts suggest that we should be more concerned with how nature and nurture interact to determine how we develop. We might be genetically inclined toward a certain trait, for example, but our experiences can determine to what degree that trait is expressed.

Height is a good example of how genes and the environment can interact to make you who you are. Even if you inherit genes for tallness, proper nourishment is important for reaching that height. Kids who come from tall families might not become tall if they do not receive proper nutrition during their childhood.

So while we know that both factors are equally important, the question we are left to ponder is just how much of a role each factor plays in the development of certain characteristics. As the research suggests, some diseases are more strongly linked to genetics than to the environment.

As researchers continue to explore how nature and nurture interact, we will continue to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to who we are.

Haworth CM, Davis OS, Plomin R. Twins Early Development Study (TEDS): a genetically sensitive investigation of cognitive and behavioral development from childhood to young adulthood .  Twin Res Hum Genet . 2013;16(1):117-125. doi:10.1017/thg.2012.91

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Article contents

Nature and nurture as an enduring tension in the history of psychology.

• Hunter Honeycutt Hunter Honeycutt Bridgewater College, Department of Psychology
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.518
• Published online: 30 September 2019

Nature–nurture is a dichotomous way of thinking about the origins of human (and animal) behavior and development, where “nature” refers to native, inborn, causal factors that function independently of, or prior to, the experiences (“nurture”) of the organism. In psychology during the 19th century, nature-nurture debates were voiced in the language of instinct versus learning. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was widely assumed that that humans and animals entered the world with a fixed set of inborn instincts. But in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, the validity of instinct as a scientific construct was challenged on conceptual and empirical grounds. As a result, most psychologists abandoned using the term instinct but they did not abandon the validity of distinguishing between nature versus nurture. In place of instinct, many psychologists made a semantic shift to using terms like innate knowledge, biological maturation, and/or hereditary/genetic effects on development, all of which extend well into the 21st century. Still, for some psychologists, the earlier critiques of the instinct concept remain just as relevant to these more modern usages.

The tension in nature-nurture debates is commonly eased by claiming that explanations of behavior must involve reference to both nature-based and nurture-based causes. However, for some psychologists there is a growing pressure to see the nature–nurture dichotomy as oversimplifying the development of behavior patterns. The division is seen as both arbitrary and counterproductive. Rather than treat nature and nurture as separable causal factors operating on development, they treat nature-nurture as a distinction between product (nature) versus process (nurture). Thus there has been a longstanding tension about how to define, separate, and balance the effects of nature and nurture.

• nature–nurture
• development
• nativism–empiricism
• innate–learned
• behavioral genetics
• epigenetics

Nature and Nurture in Development

The oldest and most persistent ways to frame explanations about the behavioral and mental development of individuals is to distinguish between two separate sources of developmental causation: (a) intrinsic, preformed, or predetermined causes (“nature”) versus (b) extrinsic, experiential, or environmental causes (“nurture”). Inputs from these two sources are thought to add their own contribution to development (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. The traditional view of nature and nurture as separate causes of development. In the traditional view, nature and nurture are treated as independent causal influences that combine during development to generate outcomes. Note that, during development, the effects of nature and nurture (shown in horizontal crossing lines) remain independent so that their effects on outcomes are theoretically separable.

Because some traits seem to derive more from one source than the other, much of the tension associated with the nature–nurture division deals with disagreements about how to balance the roles of nature and nurture in the development of a trait.

Evidence of Nature in Development

Evidence to support the nature–nurture division usually derives from patterns of behavior that suggest a limited role of environmental causation, thus implying some effect of nature by default. Table 1 depicts some common descriptors and conditions used to infer that some preference, knowledge, or skill is nature based.

Table 1. Common Descriptors and Associated Conditions for Inferring the Effects of Nature on Development

It is important to reiterate that nature-based causation (e.g., genetic determination) is inferred from these observations. Such inferences can generate tension because each of the observations listed here can be explained by nurture-based (environmental) factors. Confusion can also arise when evidence of one descriptor (e.g., being hereditary) is erroneously used to justify a different usage (e.g., that the trait is unlearned).

The Origins of Nature Versus Nurture

For much of recorded history, the distinction between nature and nurture was a temporal divide between what a person is innately endowed with at birth, prior to experience (nature), and what happens thereafter (nurture). It was not until the 19th century that the temporal division was transformed into a material division of causal influences (Keller, 2010 ). New views about heredity and Darwinian evolution justified distinguishing between native traits and genetic causes from acquired traits and environmental causes. More so than before, the terms nature and nurture were often juxtaposed in an opposition famously described by Sir Francis Galton ( 1869 ) as that between “nature versus nurture.”

Galton began writing about heredity in the mid-1860s. He believed we would discover laws governing the transmission of mental as well as physical qualities. Galton’s take on mental heredity, however, was forged by his desire to improve the human race in a science he would later call “eugenics.” In the mid- 19th century , British liberals assumed humans were equivalent at birth. Their social reform efforts were geared to enhancing educational opportunities and improving living conditions. Galton, a political conservative, opposed the notion of natural equality, arguing instead that people were inherently different at birth (Cowan, 2016 ), and that these inherited mental and behavioral inequalities were transmitted through lineages like physical qualities. Because Galton opposed the widely held Lamarckian idea that the qualities acquired in one’s lifetime could modify the inherited potential of subsequent generations, he believed long-lasting improvement of the human stock would only come by controlling breeding practices.

To explain the biological mechanisms of inheritance, Galton joined a growing trend in the 1870s to understand inheritance as involving the transmission of (hypothetical) determinative, germinal substances across generations. Foreshadowing a view that would later become scientific orthodoxy, Galton believed these germinal substances to be uninfluenced by the experiences of the organism. His theory of inheritance, however, was speculative. Realizing he was not equipped to fully explicate his theory of biological inheritance, Galton abandoned this line of inquiry by the end of that decade and refocused his efforts on identifying statistical laws of heredity of individual differences (Renwick, 2011 ).

Historians generally agree that Galton was the first to treat nature (as heredity) and nurture (everything else) as separate causal forces (Keller, 2010 ), but the schism gained biological legitimacy through the work of the German cytologist Auguste Weismann in the 1880s. Whereas Galton’s theory was motivated by his political agenda, Weismann was motivated by a scientific, theoretical agenda. Namely, Weismann opposed Lamarckian inheritance and promoted a view of evolution driven almost entirely by natural selection.

Drawing upon contemporary cytological and embryological research, Weismann made the case that the determinative substances found in the germ cells of plants and animals (called the “germ-plasm”) that are transmitted across generations were physically sequestered very early in embryogenesis and remained buffered from the other cells of the body (“somato-plasm”). This so-called, Weismann’s barrier meant that alterations in the soma that develop in the lifetime of the organism through the use or disuse of body parts would not affect the germinal substances transmitted during reproduction (see Winther, 2001 , for review). On this view, Lamarckian-style inheritance of acquired characteristics was not biologically possible.

Galton and Weismann’s influence on the life sciences cannot be overstated. Their work convinced many to draw unusually sharp distinctions between the inherited (nature) and the acquired (nurture). Although their theories were met with much resistance and generated significant tension in the life sciences from cytology to psychology, their efforts helped stage a new epistemic space through which to appreciate Mendel’s soon to be rediscovered breeding studies and usher in genetics (Muller-Wille & Rheinberger, 2012 ).

Ever since, psychology has teetered between nature-biased and nurture-biased positions. With the rise of genetics, the wedge between nature–nurture was deepened in the early to mid- 20th century , creating fields of study that focused exclusively on the effects of either nature or nurture.

The “Middle Ground” Perspective on Nature–Nurture

Twenty-first-century psychology textbooks often state that the nature–nurture debates have been resolved, and the tension relaxed, because we have moved on from emphasizing nature or nurture to appreciating that development necessarily involves both nature and nurture. In this middle-ground position, one asks how nature and nurture interact. For example, how do biological (or genetic) predispositions for behaviors or innate knowledge bias early learning experiences? Or how might environmental factors influence the biologically determined (maturational) unfolding of bodily form and behaviors?

Rejection of the Nature–Nurture Divide

For some, the “middle-ground” resolution is as problematic as “either/or” views and does not resolve a deeper source of tension inherent in the dichotomy. On this view, the nature–nurture divide is neither a legitimate nor a constructive way of thinking about development. Instead, developmental analysis reveals that the terms commonly associated with nature (e.g., innate, genetic, hereditary, or instinctual) and nurture (environmental or learned) are so entwined and confounded (and often arbitrary) that their independent effects cannot be meaningfully discussed. The nature–nurture division oversimplifies developmental processes, takes too much for granted, and ultimately hinders scientific progress. Thus not only is there a lingering tension about how to balance the effects of nature and nurture in the middle-ground view, but there is also a growing tension to move beyond the dichotomous nature–nurture framework.

Nativism in Behavior: Instincts

Definitions of instinct can vary tremendously, but many contrast (a) instinct with reason (or intellect, thought, will), which is related to but separable from contrasting (b) instinct with learning (or experience or habit).

Instinct in the Age of Enlightenment

Early usages of the instinct concept, following Aristotle, treated instinct as a mental, estimative faculty ( vis aestimativa or aestimativa naturalis ) in humans and animals that allowed for the judgments of objects in the world (e.g., seeing a predator) to be deemed beneficial or harmful in a way that transcends immediate sensory experience but does not involve the use of reason (Diamond, 1971 ). In many of the early usages, the “natural instinct” of animals even included subrational forms of learning.

The modern usage of instincts as unlearned behaviors took shape in the 17th century . By that point it was widely believed that nature or God had implanted in animals and humans innate behaviors and predispositions (“instincts”) to promote the survival of the individual and the propagation of the species. Disagreements arose as to whether instincts derived from innate mental images or were mindlessly and mechanically (physiologically) generated from innately specified bodily organization (Richards, 1987 ).

Anti-Instinct Movement in the Age of Enlightenment

Challenges to the instinct concept can be found in the 16th century (see Diamond, 1971 ), but they were most fully developed by empiricist philosophers of the French Sensationalist tradition in the 18th century (Richards, 1987 ). Sensationalists asserted that animals behaved rationally and all of the so-called instincts displayed by animals could be seen as intelligently acquired habits.

For Sensationalists, instincts, as traditionally understood, did not exist. Species-specificity in behavior patterns could be explained by commonalities in physiological organization, needs, and environmental conditions. Even those instinctual behaviors seen at birth (e.g., that newly hatched chicks peck and eat grain) might eventually be explained by the animal’s prenatal experiences. Erasmus Darwin ( 1731–1802 ), for example, speculated that the movements and swallowing experiences in ovo could account for the pecking and eating of grain by young chicks. The anti-instinct sentiment was clearly expressed by the Sensationalist Jean Antoine Guer ( 1713–1764 ), who warned that instinct was an “infantile idea” that could only be held by those who are ignorant of philosophy, that traditional appeals to instincts in animals not only explained nothing but served to hinder scientific explanations, and that nothing could be more superficial than to explain behavior than appealing to so-called instincts (Richards, 1987 ).

The traditional instinct concept survived. For most people, the complex, adaptive, species-specific behaviors displayed by naïve animals (e.g., caterpillars building cocoons; infant suckling behaviors) appeared to be predetermined and unlearned. Arguably as important, however, was the resistance to the theological implications of Sensationalist philosophy.

One of the strongest reactions to Sensationalism was put forward in Germany by Herman Samuel Reimarus ( 1694–1768 ). As a natural theologian, Reimarus, sought evidence of a God in the natural world, and the species-specific, complex, and adaptive instincts of animals seemed to stand as the best evidence of God’s work. More so than any other, Reimarus extensively catalogued instincts in humans and animals. Rather than treat instincts as behaviors, he defined instincts as natural impulses (inner drives) to act that were expressed perfectly, without reflection or practice, and served adaptive goals (Richards, 1987 ). He even proposed instincts for learning, a proposal that would resurface in the mid- 20th century , as would his drive theory of instinct (Jaynes & Woodward, 1974 ).

Partly as a result of Reimarus’ efforts, the instinct concept survived going into the 19th century . But many issues surrounding the instinct concept were left unsettled. How do instincts differ from reflexive behaviors? What role does learning play in the expression of instincts, if any? Do humans have more or fewer instincts than animals? These questions would persist well into the first decades of the 20th century and ultimately fuel another anti-instinct movement.

Instinct in the 19th Century

In the 19th century , the tension about the nature and nurture of instincts in the lifetime of animals led to debates about the nature and nurture of instincts across generations . These debates dealt with whether instincts should be viewed as “inherited habits” from previous generations or whether they result from the natural selection. Debating the relative roles of neo-Lamarckian use-inheritance versus neo-Darwinian natural selection in the transmutation of species became a significant source of tension in the latter half of the 19th century . Although the neo-Lamarckian notion of instincts as being inherited habits was rejected in the 20th century , it has resurged in recent years (e.g., see Robinson & Barron, 2017 ).

Darwinian evolutionary theory required drawing distinctions between native and acquired behaviors, and, perhaps more so than before, behaviors were categorized along a continuum from the purely instinctive (unlearned), to the partially instinctive (requiring some learning), to the purely learned. Still, it was widely assumed that a purely instinctive response would be modified by experience after its first occurrence. As a result, instinct and habit were very much entangled in the lifetime of the organism. The notion of instincts as fixed and unmodifiable would not be widely advanced until after the rise of Weismann’s germ-plasm theory in the late 19thcentury .

Given their importance in evolutionary theory, there was greater interest in more objectively identifying pure instincts beyond anecdotal reports. Some of the most compelling evidence was reported by Douglas Spalding ( 1844–1877 ) in the early 1870s (see Gray, 1967 ). Spalding documented numerous instances of how naïve animals showed coordinated, seemingly adaptive responses (e.g., hiding) to objects (e.g., sight of predators) upon their first encounter, and he helped pioneer the use of the deprivation experiment to identify instinctive behaviors. This technique involved selectively depriving young animals of seemingly critical learning experiences or sensory stimulation. Should animals display some species-typical action following deprivation, then, presumably, the behavior could be labeled as unlearned or innate. In all, these studies seemed to show that animals displayed numerous adaptive responses at the very start, prior to any relevant experience. In a variety of ways, Spalding’s work anticipated 20th-century studies of innate behavior. Not only would the deprivation experiment be used as the primary means of detecting native tendencies by European zoologists and ethologists, but Spalding also showed evidence of what would later be called imprinting, critical period effects and evidence of behavioral maturation.

Reports of pure instinct did not go unchallenged. Lloyd Morgan ( 1896 ) questioned the accuracy of these reports in his own experimental work with young animals. In some cases, he failed to replicate the results and in other cases he found that instinctive behaviors were not as finely tuned to objects in the environment as had been claimed. Morgan’s research pointed to taking greater precision in identifying learned and instinctive components of behavior, but, like most at the turn of the 20th century , he did not question that animal behavior involved both learned and instinctive elements.

A focus on instinctive behaviors intensified in the 1890s as Weismann’s germ-plasm theory grew in popularity. More so than before, a sharp distinction was drawn between native and acquired characteristics, including behavior (Johnston, 1995 ). Although some psychologists continued to maintain neo-Lamarckian notions, most German (Burnham, 1972 ) and American (Cravens & Burnham, 1971 ) psychologists were quick to adopt Weismann’s theory. They envisioned a new natural science of psychology that would experimentally identify the germinally determined, invariable set of native psychological traits in species and their underlying physiological (neural) basis. However, whereas English-speaking psychologists tended to focus on how this view impacted our understanding of social institutions and its social implications, German psychologists were more interested in the longstanding philosophical implications of Weismann’s doctrine as it related to the differences (if any) between man and beast (Burnham, 1972 ).

Some anthropologists and sociologists, however, interpreted Weismann’s theory quite differently and used it elevate sociology as its own scientific discipline. In the 1890s, the French sociologist Emil Durkheim, for example, interpreted Weismann’s germinal determinants as a generic force on human behavior that influenced the development of general predispositions that are molded by the circumstances of life (Meloni, 2016 ). American anthropologists reached similar conclusions in the early 20th century (Cravens & Burnham, 1971 ). Because Weismann’s theory divorced biological inheritance from social inheritance, and because heredity was treated as a generic force, sociologists felt free to study social (eventually, “cultural”) phenomena without reference to biological or psychological concerns.

Anti-Instinct Movement in the 1920s

Despite their differences, in the first two decades of the 20th century both psychologists and sociologists generally assumed that humans and animals had some native tendencies or instincts. Concerns were even voiced that instinct had not received enough attention in psychology. Disagreements about instincts continued to focus on (the now centuries old debates of) how to conceptualize them. Were they complex reflexes, impulses, or motives to act, or should instinct be a mental faculty (like intuition), separate from reasoning and reflex (Herrnstein, 1972 )?

In America, the instinct concept came under fire following a brief paper in 1919 by Knight Dunlap titled “Are There Any Instincts?” His primary concern dealt with teleological definitions of instincts in which an instinct referred to all the activities involved in obtaining some end-state (e.g., instincts of crying, playing, feeding, reproduction, war, curiosity, or pugnacity). Defined in this way, human instincts were simply labels for human activities, but how these activities were defined was arbitrarily imposed by the researchers. Is feeding, for instance, an instinct, or is it composed of more basic instincts (like chewing and swallowing)? The arbitrariness of classifying human behavior had led to tremendous inconsistencies and confusion among psychologists.

Not all of the challenges to instinct dealt with its teleological usage. Some of the strongest criticisms were voiced by Zing-Yang Kuo throughout the 1920s. Kuo was a Chinese animal psychologist who studied under Charles Tolman at the University of California, Berkeley. Although Kuo’s attacks on instinct changed throughout the 1920s (see Honeycutt, 2011 ), he ultimately argued that all behaviors develop in experience-dependent ways and that appeals to instinct were statements of ignorance about how behaviors develop. Like Dunlap, he warned that instincts were labels with no explanatory value. To illustrate, after returning to China, he showed how the so-called rodent-killing instinct in cats often cited by instinct theorists is not found in kittens that are reared with rodents (Kuo, 1930 ). These kittens, instead, became attached to the rodents, and they resisted attempts to train rodent-killing. Echoing the point made by Guer, Kuo claimed that appeals to instinct served to stunt scientific inquiry into the developmental origins of behavior.

But Kuo did not just challenge the instinct concept. He also argued against labeling behaviors as “learned.” After all, whether an animal “learns” depends on the surrounding environmental conditions, the physiological and developmental status of the animal, and, especially, the developmental (or experiential) history of that animal. Understanding learning also required developmental analysis. Thus Kuo targeted the basic distinction between nature and nurture, and he was not alone in doing so (e.g., see Carmichael, 1925 ), but his call to reject it did not spread to mainstream American psychologists.

By the 1930s, the term instinct had fallen into disrepute in psychology, but experimental psychologists (including behaviorists) remained committed to a separation of native from acquired traits. If anything, the dividing line between native and acquired behaviors became more sharply drawn than before (Logan & Johnston, 2007 ). For some psychologists, instinct was simply rebranded in the less contentious (but still problematic) language of biological drives or motives (Herrnstein, 1972 ). Many other psychologists simply turned to describing native traits as due to “maturation” and/or “heredity” rather than “instinct.”

Fixed Action Patterns

The hereditarian instinct concept received a reboot in Europe in the 1930s with the rise of ethology led by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and others. Just as animals inherit organs that perform specific functions, ethologists believed animals inherit behaviors that evolved to serve adaptive functions as well. Instincts were described as unlearned (inherited), blind, stereotyped, adaptive, fixed action patterns, impervious to change that are initiated (released) by specific stimuli in the environment.

Ethologists in 1930s and 1940s were united under the banner of innateness. They were increasingly critical of the trend by American psychologists (i.e., behaviorists) to focus on studying on how a limited number of domesticated species (e.g., white rat) responded to training in artificial settings (Burkhardt, 2005 ). Ethologists instead began with rich descriptions of animal behavior in more natural environments along with detailed analyses of the stimulus conditions that released the fixed action patterns. To test whether behavioral components were innate, ethologists relied primarily on the deprivation experiment popularized by Spalding in the 19th century . Using these methods (and others), ethologists identified numerous fascinating examples of instinctive behaviors, which captured mainstream attention.

In the early 1950s, shortly after ethology had gained professional status (Burkhardt, 2005 ), a series of challenges regarding instinct and innateness were put forth by a small cadre of North American behavioral scientists (e.g., T. C. Schneirla, Donald Hebb, Frank Beach). Arguably the most influential critique was voiced by comparative psychologist Daniel Lehrman ( 1953 ), who presented a detailed and damning critique of deprivation experiments on empirical and logical grounds. Lehrman explained that deprivation experiments isolate the animal from some but not all experiences. Thus deprivation experiments simply change what an animal experiences rather than eliminating experience altogether, and so they cannot possibly determine whether a behavior is innate (independent of experience). Instead, these experiments show what environmental conditions do not matter in the development of a behavior but do not speak to what conditions do matter .

Lehrman went on to argue that the whole endeavor to identify instinctive or innate behavior was misguided from the start. All behavior, according to Lehrman, develops from a history of interactions between an organism and its environment. If a behavior is found to develop in the absence of certain experiences, the researcher should not stop and label it as innate. Rather, research should continue to identify the conditions under which the behavior comes about. In line with Kuo, Lehrman repeated the warning that to label something as instinctive (or inherited or maturational) is a statement of ignorance about how that behavior develops and does more to stunt than promote research.

Lehrman’s critique created significant turmoil among ethologists. As a result, ethologists took greater care in using the term innate , and it led to new attempts to synthesize or re-envision learning and instinct .

Some of these attempts focused on an increased role for learning and experience in the ontogeny of species-typical behaviors. These efforts spawned significant cross-talk between ethologists and comparative psychologists to more thoroughly investigate behavioral development under natural conditions. Traditional appeals to instinct and learning (as classical and operant conditioning) were both found to be inadequate for explaining animal behavior. In their stead, these researchers focused more closely on how anatomical, physiological, experiential, and environmental conditions influenced the development of species-typical behaviors.

Tinbergen ( 1963 ) was among those ethologists who urged for greater developmental analysis of species-typical behaviors, and he included it as one of his four problems in the biological study of organisms, along with causation (mechanism), survival value (function), and evolution. Of these four problems, Tinbergen believed ethologists were especially well suited to study survival value, which he felt had been seriously neglected (Burkhardt, 2005 ).

The questions of survival value coupled with models of population genetics would gain significant momentum in the 1960s and 1970s in England and the United States with the rise of behavioral ecology and sociobiology (Griffiths, 2008 ). But because these new fields seemed to promote some kind of genetic determinism in behavioral development, they were met with much resistance and reignited a new round of nature–nurture debates in the 1970s (see Segerstrale, 2000 ).

However, not all ethologists abandoned the instinct concept. Lorenz, in particular, continued to defend the division between nature and nurture. Rather than speaking of native and acquired behaviors, Lorenz later spoke of two different sources of information for behavior (innate/genetic vs. acquired/environmental), which was more a subtle shift in language than it was an actual change in theory, as Lehrman later pointed out.

Some ethologists followed Lorenz’s lead and continued to maintain more of a traditional delineation between instinct and learning. Their alternative synthesis viewed learning as instinctive (Gould & Marler, 1987 ). They proposed that animals have evolved domain-specific “instincts to learn” that result from the its genetic predispositions and innate knowledge. To support the idea of instincts for learning, ethologists pointed to traditional ethological findings (on imprinting and birdsong learning), but they also drew from the growing body of work in experimental psychology that seemed to indicate certain types of biological effects on learning.

Biological Constraints and Preparedness

While ethology was spreading in Europe in the 1930s–1950s, behaviorism reigned in the United States. Just as ethologists were confronted with including a greater role of nurture in their studies, behaviorists were challenged to consider a greater role of nature.

Behaviorists assumed there to be some behavioral innateness (e.g., fixed action patterns, unconditioned reflexes, primary reinforcers and drives). But because behaviorists focused on learning, they tended to study animals in laboratory settings using biologically (or ecologically) irrelevant stimuli and responses to minimize any role of instinct (Johnston, 1981 ). It was widely assumed that these studies would identify general laws of learning that applied to all species regardless of the specific cues, reinforcers, and responses involved.

Challenges to the generality assumption began to accumulate in the 1960s. Some studies pointed to failures that occurred during conditioning procedures. Breland and Breland ( 1961 ), for example, reported that some complex behaviors formed through operant conditioning would eventually become “displaced” by conditioned fixed action patterns in a phenomenon they called “instinctive drift.” Studies of taste-aversion learning (e.g., Garcia & Koelling, 1966 ) also reported the failure of rats to associate certain events (e.g., flavors with shock or audiovisual stimuli with toxicosis).

Other studies were pointing to enhanced learning. In particular, it was found that rats could form strong conditioned taste aversions after only a single pairing between a novel flavor and illness. (This rapid “one trial learning” was a major focus in the research from Niko Tinbergen’s ethological laboratory.) Animals, it seemed, had evolved innate predispositions to form (or not form) certain associations.

In humans, studies of biological constraints on learning were mostly limited to fear conditioning. Evidence indicated that humans conditioned differently to (biologically or evolutionarily) fear-relevant stimuli like pictures of spiders or snakes than to fear-irrelevant stimuli like pictures of mushrooms or flowers (Ohman, Fredrikson, Hugdahl, & Rimmö, 1976 ).

These findings and others were treated as a major problem in learning theory and led to calls for a new framework to study learning from a more biologically oriented perspective that integrated the evolutionary history and innate predispositions of the species. These predispositions were described as biological “constraints” on, “preparedness,” or “adaptive specializations” for learning, all of which were consistent with the “instincts to learn” framework proposed by ethologists.

By the 1980s it was becoming clear that the biological preparedness/constraint view of learning suffered some limitations. For example, what constraints count as “biological” was questioned. It was well established that there were general constraints on learning associated with the intensity, novelty, and timing of stimuli. But, arbitrarily it seemed, these constraints were not classified as “biological” (Domjan & Galef, 1983 ). Other studies of “biological constraints” found that 5- and 10-day old rats readily learned to associated a flavor with shock (unlike in adults), but (like in adults) such conditioning was not found in 15-day-old rats (Hoffman & Spear, 1988 ). In other words, the constraint on learning was not present in young rats but developed later in life, suggesting a possible role of experience in bringing about the adult-like pattern.

Attempts to synthesize these alternatives led to numerous calls for more ecologically oriented approaches to learning not unlike the synthesis between ethology and comparative psychology in the 1960s. All ecological approaches to learning proposed that learning should be studied in the context of “natural” (recurrent and species-typical) problems that animals encounter (and have evolved to encounter) using ecologically meaningful stimuli and responses. Some argued (e.g., Johnston, 1981 ) that studies of learning should take place within the larger context of studying how animals develop and adapt to their surround. Others (Domjan & Galef, 1983 ) pointed to more of a comparative approach in studying animal learning in line with behavioral ecology that takes into account how learning can be influenced by the possible selective pressures faced by each species. Still, how to synthesize biological constraints (and evolutionary explanations) on learning with a general process approach remains a source of tension in experimental psychology.

Nativism in Mind: Innate Ideas

Nativism and empiricism in philosophy.

In the philosophy of mind, nature–nurture debates are voiced as debates between nativists and empiricists. Nativism is a philosophical position that holds that our minds have some innate (a priori to experience) knowledge, concepts, or structure at the very start of life. Empiricism, in contrast, holds that all knowledge derives from our experiences in the world.

However, rarely (if ever) were there pure nativist or empiricist positions, but the positions bespeak a persistent tension. Empiricists tended to eschew innateness and promote a view of the mental content that is built by general mechanisms (e.g., association) operating on sensory experiences, whereas nativists tend to promote a view of mind that contains domain-specific, innate processes and/or content (Simpson, Carruthers, Laurence, & Stich, 2005 ). Although the tension about mental innateness would loosen as empiricism gained prominence in philosophy and science, the strain never went away and would intensify again in the 20th century .

Nativism in 20th Century Psychology: The Case of Language Development

In the first half of the 20th century , psychologists generally assumed that knowledge was gained or constructed through experience with the world. This is not to say that psychologists did not assume some innate knowledge. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, for example, believed infants enter the world with some innate knowledge structures, particularly as they relate to early sensory and motor functioning (see Piaget, 1971 ). But the bulk of his work dealt with the construction of conceptual knowledge as children adapt to their worlds. By and large, there were no research programs in psychology that sought to identify innate factors in human knowledge and cognition until the 1950s (Samet & Zaitchick, 2017 )

An interest in psychological nativism was instigated in large part by Noam Chomsky’s ( 1959 ) critique of B. F. Skinner’s book on language. To explain the complexity of language, he argued, we must view language as the knowledge and application of grammatical rules. He went on to claim that the acquisition of these rules could not be attributed to any general-purpose, learning process (e.g., reinforcement). Indeed, language acquisition occurs despite very little explicit instruction. Moreover, language is special in terms of its complexity, ease, and speed of acquisition by children and in its uniqueness to humans. Instead, he claimed that our minds innately contain some language-specific knowledge that kick-starts and promotes language acquisition. He later claimed this knowledge can be considered some sort of specialized mental faculty or module he called the “language acquisition device” (Chomsky, 1965 ) or what Pinker ( 1995 ) later called the “language instinct.”

To support the idea of linguistic nativism, Chomsky and others appealed to the poverty of the stimulus argument. In short, this argument holds that our experiences in life are insufficient to explain our knowledge and abilities. When applied to language acquisition, this argument holds children’s knowledge of language (grammar) goes far beyond the limited, and sometimes broken, linguistic events that children directly encounter. Additional evidence for nativism drew upon the apparent maturational quality of language development. Despite wide variations in languages and child-rearing practices across the world, the major milestones in language development appear to unfold in children in a universal sequence and timeline, and some evidence suggested a critical period for language acquisition.

Nativist claims about language sparked intense rebuttals by empiricist-minded psychologists and philosophers. Some of these retorts tackled the logical limitations of the poverty of stimulus argument. Others pointed to the importance of learning and social interaction in driving language development, and still others showed that language (grammatical knowledge) may not be uniquely human (see Tomasello, 1995 , for review). Nativists, in due course, provided their own rebuttals to these challenges, creating a persistent tension in psychology.

Extending Nativism Beyond Language Development

In the decades that followed, nativist arguments expanded beyond language to include cognitive domains that dealt with understanding the physical, psychological, and social worlds. Developmental psychologists were finding that infants appeared to be much more knowledgeable in cognitive tasks (e.g., on understanding object permanence) and skillful (e.g., in imitating others) than had previously been thought, and at much younger ages. Infants also showed a variety of perceptual biases (e.g., preference for face-like stimuli over equally complex non-face-like stimuli) from very early on. Following the standard poverty of the stimulus argument, these findings were taken as evidence that infants enter the world with some sort of primitive, innate, representational knowledge (or domain-specific neural mechanisms) that constrains and promotes subsequent cognitive development. The nature of this knowledge (e.g., as theories or as core knowledge), however, continues to be debated (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 ).

Empiricist-minded developmental psychologists responded by demonstrating shortcomings in the research used to support nativist claims. For example, in studies of infants’ object knowledge, the behavior of infants (looking time) in nativist studies could be attributed to relatively simple perceptual processes rather than to the infants’ conceptual knowledge (Heyes, 2014 ). Likewise, reports of human neonatal imitation not only suffered from failures to replicate but could be explained by simpler mechanisms (e.g., arousal) than true imitation (Jones, 2017 ). Finally, studies of perceptual preferences found in young infants, like newborn preferences for face-like stimuli, may not be specific preferences for faces per se but instead may reflect simpler, nonspecific perceptual biases (e.g., preferences for top-heavy visual configurations and congruency; Simion & Di Giorgio, 2015 ).

Other arguments from empiricist-minded developmental psychologists focused on the larger rationale for inferring innateness. Even if it is conceded that young infants, like two-month-olds, or even two-day-olds, display signs of conceptual knowledge, there is no good evidence to presume the knowledge is innate. Their knowledgeable behaviors could still be seen as resulting from their experiences (many of which may be nonobvious to researchers) leading up to the age of testing (Spencer et al., 2009 ).

In the 21st century , there is still no consensus about the reality, extensiveness, or quality of mental innateness. If there is innate knowledge, can experience add new knowledge or only expand the initial knowledge? Can the doctrine of innate knowledge be falsified? There are no agreed-upon answers to these questions. The recurring arguments for and against mental nativism continue to confound developmental psychologists.

Maturation Theory

The emergence of bodily changes and basic behavioral skills sometimes occurs in an invariant, predictable, and orderly sequence in a species despite wide variations in rearing conditions. These observations are often attributed to the operation of an inferred, internally driven, maturational process. Indeed, 21st-century textbooks in psychology commonly associate “nature” with “maturation,” where maturation is defined as the predetermined unfolding of the individual from a biological or genetic blueprint. Environmental factors play a necessary, but fundamentally supportive, role in the unfolding of form.

Preformationism Versus Epigenesis in the Generation of Form

The embryological generation of bodily form was debated in antiquity but received renewed interest in the 17th century . Following Aristotle, some claimed that embryological development involved “epigenesis,” defined as the successive emergence of form from a formless state. Epigenesists, however, struggled to explain what orchestrated development without appealing to Aristotelean souls. Attempts were made to invoke to natural causes like physical and chemical forces, but, despite their best efforts, the epigenesists were forced to appeal to the power of presumed, quasi-mystical, vitalistic forces (entelechies) that directed development.

The primary alternative to epigenesis was “preformationism,” which held that development involved the growth of pre-existing form from a tiny miniature (homunculus) that formed immediately after conception or was preformed in the egg or sperm. Although it seems reasonable to guess that the invention and widespread use of the microscope would immediately lay to rest any claim of homuncular preformationism, this was not the case. To the contrary, some early microscopists claimed to see signs of miniature organisms in sperm or eggs, and failures to find these miniatures were explained away (e.g., the homunculus was transparent or deflated to the point of being unrecognizable). But as microscopes improved and more detailed observations of embryological development were reported in the late 18th and 19th centuries , homuncular preformationism was finally refuted.

From Preformationism to Predeterminism

Despite the rejection of homuncular preformationism, preformationist appeals can be found throughout the 19th century . One of the most popular preformationist theories of embryological development was put forth by Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s (Gottlieb, 1992 ). He promoted a recapitulation theory (not original to Haeckel) that maintained that the development of the individual embryo passes through all the ancestral forms of its species. Ontogeny was thought to be a rapid, condensed replay of phylogeny. Indeed, for Haeckel, phylogenesis was the mechanical cause of ontogenesis. The phylogenetic evolution of the species created the maturational unfolding of embryonic form. Exactly how this unfolding takes place was less important than its phylogenetic basis.

Most embryologists were not impressed with recapitulation theory. After all, the great embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer ( 1792–1876 ) had refuted strict recapitulation decades earlier. Instead, there was greater interest in how best to explain the mechanical causes of development ushering in a new “experimental embryology.” Many experimental embryologists followed the earlier epigenesists by discussing vitalistic forces operating on the unorganized zygote. But it soon became clear that the zygote was structured, and many people believed the zygote contained special (unknown) substances that specified development. Epigenesis-minded experimental embryologists soon warned that the old homuncular preformationism was being transformed into a new predetermined preformationism.

As a result, the debates between preformationism and epigenesis were reignited in experimental embryology, but the focus of these debates shifted to the various roles of nature and nurture during development. More specifically, research focused on the extent to which early cellular differentiation was predetermined by factors internal to cells like chromosomes or cytoplasm (preformationism, nature) or involved factors (e.g., location) outside of the cell (epigenesis, nurture). The former emphasized reductionism and developmental programming, whereas the latter emphasized some sort of holistic, regulatory system responsive to internal and external conditions. The tension between viewing development as predetermined or “epigenetic” persists into the 21st century .

Preformationism gained momentum in the 20th century following the rediscovery of Mendel’s studies of heredity and the rapid rise of genetics, but not because of embryological research on the causes of early differentiation. Instead, preformationism prevailed because it seemed embryological research on the mechanisms of development could be ignored in studies of hereditary patterns.

The initial split between heredity and development can be found in Galton’s speculations but is usually attributed to Weismann’s germ-plasm theory. Weismann’s barrier seemed to posit that the germinal determinants present at conception would be the same, unaltered determinants transmitted during reproduction. This position, later dubbed as “Weismannism,” was ironically not one promoted by Weismann. Like nearly all theorists in the 19th century , he viewed the origins of variation and heredity as developmental phenomena (Amundson, 2005 ), and he claimed that the germ-plasm could be directly modified in the lifetime of the organism by environmental (e.g., climactic and dietary) conditions (Winther, 2001 ). Still, Weismann’s theory treated development as a largely predetermined affair driven by inherited, germinal determinants buffered from most developmental events. As such, it helped set the stage for a more formal divorce between heredity and development with the rise of Mendelism in the early 20th century .

Mendel’s theory of heredity was exceptional in how it split development from heredity (Amundson, 2005 ). More so than in Weismann’s theory, Mendel’s theory assumed that the internal factors that determine form and are transmitted across generations remain unaltered in the lifetime of the organism. To predict offspring outcomes, one need only know the combination of internal factors present at conception and their dominance relations. Exactly how these internal factors determined form could be disregarded. The laws of hereditary transmission of the internal factors (e.g., segregation) did not depend on the development or experiences of the organism or the experiences the organism’s ancestors. Thus the experimental study of heredity (i.e., breeding) could proceed without reference to ancestral records or embryological concerns (Amundson, 2000 ). By the mid-1920s, the Mendelian factors (now commonly called “genes”) were found to be structurally arranged on chromosomes, and the empirical study of heredity (transmission genetics) was officially divorced from studies of development.

The splitting of heredity and development found in Mendel’s and Weismann’s work met with much resistance. Neo-Lamarckian scientists, especially in the United States (Cook, 1999 ) and France (Loison, 2011 ), sought unsuccessfully to experimentally demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characteristics into the 1930s.

In Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, resistance to Mendelism dealt with the chromosomal view of Mendelian heredity championed by American geneticists who were narrowly focused on studying transmission genetics at the expense of developmental genetics. German biologists, in contrast, were much more interested in the broader roles of genes in development (and evolution). In trying to understand how genes influence development, particularly of traits of interest to embryologists, they found the Mendelian theory to be lacking. In the decades between the world wars, German biologists proposed various expanded views of heredity that included some form of cytoplasmic inheritance (Harwood, 1985 ).

Embryologists resisted the preformationist view of development throughout the early to mid- 20th century , often maintaining no divide between heredity and development, but their objections were overshadowed by genetics and its eventual synthesis with evolutionary theory. Consequently, embryological development was treated by geneticists and evolutionary biologists as a predetermined, maturational process driven by internal, “genetic” factors buffered from environmental influence.

Maturation Theory in Psychology

Maturation theory was applied to behavioral development in the 19th century in the application of Haeckel’s recapitulation theory. Some psychologists believed that the mental growth of children recapitulated the history of the human race (from savage brute to civilized human). With this in mind, many people began to more carefully document child development. Recapitulationist notions were found in the ideas of many notable psychologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., G. S. Hall), and, as such, the concept played an important role in the origins of developmental psychology (Koops, 2015 ). But for present purposes what is most important is that children’s mental and behavioral development was thought to unfold via a predetermined, maturational process.

With the growth of genetics, maturational explanations were increasingly invoked to explain nearly all native and hereditary traits. As the instinct concept lost value in the 1920s, maturation theory gained currency, although the shift was largely a matter of semantics. For many psychologists, the language simply shifted from “instinct versus learning” to “maturation versus practice/experience” (Witty & Lehman, 1933 ).

Initial lines of evidence for maturational explanations of behavior were often the same as those that justified instinct and native traits, but new embryological research presented in the mid-1920s converged to show support for strict maturational explanations of behavioral development. In these experiments (see Wyman, 2005 , for review), spanning multiple laboratories, amphibians (salamanders and frogs) were exposed to drugs that acted as anesthetics and/or paralytics throughout the early stages of development, thus reducing sensory experience and/or motor practice. Despite the reduced sensory experiences and being unable to move, these animals showed no delays in the onset of motor development once the drugs wore off.

This maturational account of motor development in amphibians fit well with contemporaneous studies of motor development in humans. The orderly, invariant, and predictable (age-related) sequential appearance of motor skills documented in infants reared under different circumstances (in different countries and across different decades) was seen as strong evidence for a maturational account. Additional evidence was reported by Arnold Gessell and Myrtle McGraw, who independently presented evidence in the 1920s to show that the pace and sequence of motor development in infancy were not altered by special training experiences. Although the theories of these maturation theorists were more sophisticated when applied to cognitive development, their work promoted a view in which development was primarily driven by neural maturation rather than experience (Thelen, 2000 ).

Critical and Sensitive Periods

As the maturation account of behavioral development gained ground, it became clear that environmental input played a more informative role than had previously been thought. Environmental factors were found to either disrupt or induce maturational changes at specific times during development. Embryological research suggested that there were well-delineated time periods of heightened sensitivity in which specific experimental manipulations (e.g., tissue transplantations) could induce irreversible developmental changes, but the same manipulation would have no effect outside of that critical period.

In the 1950s–1960s a flurry of critical period effects were reported in birds and mammals across a range of behaviors including imprinting, attachment, socialization, sensory development, bird song learning, and language development (Michel & Tyler, 2005 ). Even though these findings highlighted an important role of experience in behavioral development, evidence of critical periods was usually taken to imply some rigid form of biological determinism (Oyama, 1979 ).

As additional studies were conducted on critical period effects, it became clear that many of the reported effects were more gradual, variable, experience-dependent, and not necessarily as reversible as was previously assumed. In light of these reports, there was a push in the 1970s (e.g., Connolly, 1972 ) to substitute “sensitive period” for “critical period” to avoid the predeterminist connotations associated with the latter and to better appreciate that these periods simply describe (not explain) certain temporal aspects of behavioral development. As a result, a consensus emerged that behaviors should not be attributed to “time” or “age” but to the developmental history and status of the animal under investigation (Michel & Tyler, 2005 ).

Heredity and Genetics

In the decades leading up to and following the start of the 20th century , it was widely assumed that many psychological traits (not just instincts) were inherited or “due to heredity,” although the underlying mechanisms were unknown. Differences in intelligence, personality, and criminality within and between races and sexes were largely assumed to be hereditary and unalterable by environmental intervention (Gould, 1996 ). The evidence to support these views in humans was often derived from statistical analyses of how various traits tended to run in families. But all too frequently, explanations of data were clouded by pre-existing, hereditarian assumptions.

Human Behavioral Genetics

The statistical study of inherited human (physical, mental, and behavioral) differences was pioneered by Galton ( 1869 ). Although at times Galton wrote that nature and nurture were so intertwined as to be inseparable, he nevertheless devised statistical methods to separate their effects. In the 1860s and 1870s, Galton published reports purporting to show how similarities in intellect (genius, talent, character, and eminence) in European lineages appeared to be a function of degree of relatedness. Galton considered, but dismissed, environmental explanations of his data, leading him to confirm his belief that nature was stronger than nurture.

Galton also introduced the use of twin studies to tease apart the relative impact of nature versus nurture, but the twin method he used was markedly different from later twin studies used by behavioral geneticists. Galton tracked the life history of twins who were judged to be very similar or very dissimilar near birth (i.e., by nature) to test the power of various postnatal environments (nurture) that might make them more or less similar over time. Here again, Galton concluded that nature overpowers nurture.

Similar pedigree (e.g., the Kallikak study; see Zenderland, 2001 ) and twin studies appeared in the early 1900s, but the first adoption study and the modern twin method (which compares monozygotic to dizygotic twin pairs) did not appear until the 1920s (Rende, Plomin, & Vandenberg, 1990 ). These reports led to a flurry of additional work on the inheritance of mental and behavioral traits over the next decade.

Behavioral genetic research peaked in the 1930s but rapidly lost prominence due in large part to its association with the eugenics movement (spearheaded by Galton) but also because of the rise and eventual hegemony of behaviorism and the social sciences in the United States. Behavioral genetics resurged in the 1960s with the rising tide of nativism in psychology, and returned to its 1930s-level prominence in the 1970s (McGue & Gottesman, 2015 ).

The resurgence brought with a new statistical tool: the heritability statistic. The origins of heritability trace back to early attempts to synthesize Mendelian genetics with biometrics by Ronald Fisher and others. This synthesis ushered in a new field of quantitative genetics and it marked a new way of thinking about nature and nurture. The shift was to no longer think about nature and nurture as causes of traits in individuals but as causes of variation in traits between populations of individuals. Eventually, heritability came to refer to the amount of variance in a population sample that could be statistically attributed to genetic variation in that sample. Kinship (especially twin) studies provided seemingly straightforward ways of partitioning variation in population trait attributes into genetic versus environmental sources.

Into the early 21st century , hundreds of behavioral genetic studies of personality, intelligence, and psychopathology were reported. With rare exceptions, these studies converge to argue for a pervasive influence of genetics on human psychological variation.

These studies have also fueled much controversy. Citing in part behavioral genetic research, the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen ( 1969 ) claimed that the differences in intelligence and educational achievement in the United States between black and white students appeared to have a strong genetic basis. He went on to assume that because these racial differences appeared hereditary, they were likely impervious to environmental (educational) intervention. His article fanned the embers of past eugenics practices and ignited fiery responses (e.g., Hirsch, 1975 ). The ensuing debates not only spawned a rethinking of intelligence and how to measure it, but they ushered in a more critical look at the methods and assumptions of behavioral genetics.

Challenges to Behavioral Genetics

Many of the early critiques of behavioral genetics centered on interpreting the heritability statistic commonly calculated in kinship (family, twin, and adoption) studies. Perhaps more so than any other statistic, heritability has been persistently misinterpreted by academics and laypersons alike (Lerner, 2002 ). Contrary to popular belief, heritability tells us nothing about the relative impact of genetic and environmental factors on the development of traits in individuals. It deals with accounting for trait variation between people, not the causes of traits within people. As a result, a high heritability does not indicate anything about the fixity of traits or their imperviousness to environmental influence (contra Jensen), and a low heritability does not indicate an absence of genetic influence on trait development. Worse still, heritability does not even indicate anything about the role of genetics in generating the differences between people.

Other challenges to heritability focused not on its interpretation but on its underlying computational assumptions. Most notably, heritability analyses assume that genetic and environmental contributions to trait differences are independent and additive. The interaction between genetic and environmental factors were dismissed a priori in these analyses. Studies of development, however, show that no factor (genes, hormones, parenting, schooling) operates independently, making it impossible to quantify how much of a given trait in a person is due to any causal factor. Thus heritability analyses are bound to be misleading because they are based on biologically implausible and logically indefensible assumptions about development (Gottlieb, 2003 ).

Aside from heritability, kinship studies have been criticized for not being able to disentangle genetic and environmental effects on variation. It had long been known that that in family (pedigree) studies, environmental and genetic factors are confounded. Twin and adoption studies seemed to provide unique opportunities to statistically disentangle these effects, but these studies are also deeply problematic in assumptions and methodology. There are numerous plausible environmental reasons for why monozygotic twin pairs could resemble each other more than dizygotic twin pairs or why adoptive children might more closely resemble their biological than their adoptive parents (Joseph & Ratner, 2013 ).

A more recent challenge to behavioral genetics came from an unlikely source. Advances in genomic scanning in the 21st century made it possible in a single study to correlate thousands of genetic polymorphisms with variation in the psychological profiles (e.g., intelligence, memory, temperament, psychopathology) of thousands of people. These “genome-wide association” studies seemed to have the power and precision to finally identify genetic contributions to heritability at the level of single nucleotides. Yet, these studies consistently found only very small effects.

The failure to find large effects came to be known as the “missing heritability” problem (Maher, 2008 ). To account for the missing heritability, some behavioral geneticists and molecular biologists asserted that important genetic polymorphisms remain unknown, they may be too rare to detect, and/or that current studies are just not well equipped to handle gene–gene interactions. These studies were also insensitive to epigenetic profiles (see the section on Behavioral Epigenetics), which deal with differences in gene expression. Even when people share genes, they may differ in whether those genes get expressed in their lifetimes.

But genome-wide association studies faced an even more problematic issue: Many of these studies failed to replicate (Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2015 ). For those who viewed heritability analyses as biologically implausible, the small effect sizes and failures to replicate in genome-wide association studies were not that surprising. The search for independent genetic effects was bound to fail, because genes simply do not operate independently during development.

Behavioral Epigenetics

Epigenetics was a term coined in the 1940s by the developmental biologist Conrad Waddington to refer to a new field of study that would examine how genetic factors interact with local environmental conditions to bring about the embryological development of traits. By the end of the 20th century , epigenetics came to refer to the study of how nongenetic, molecular mechanisms physically regulate gene expression patterns in cells and across cell lineages. The most-studied mechanisms involve organic compounds (e.g., methyl-groups) that physically bind to DNA or the surrounding proteins that package DNA. The addition or removal of these compounds can activate or silence gene transcription. Different cell types have different, stable epigenetic markings, and these markings are recreated during cell division so that cells so marked give rise to similar types of cells. Epigenetic changes were known to occur during developmental periods of cellular differentiation (e.g., during embryogenesis), but not until 2004 was it discovered that these changes can occur at other periods in the life, including after birth (Roth, 2013 )

Of interest to psychologists were reports that different behavioral and physiological profiles (e.g., stress reactivity) of animals were associated with different epigenetic patterns in the nervous system (Moore, 2015 ). Furthermore, these different epigenetic patterns could be established or modified by environmental factors (e.g., caregiving practices, training regimes, or environmental enrichment), and, under certain conditions, they remain stable over long periods of time (from infancy to adulthood).

Because epigenetic research investigates the physical interface between genes and environment, it represents an exciting advance in understanding the interaction of nature and nurture. Despite some warnings that the excitement over behavioral epigenetic research may be premature (e.g., Miller, 2010 ), for many psychologists, epigenetics underscores how development involves both nature and nurture.

For others, what is equally exciting is the additional evidence epigenetics provides to show that the genome is an interactive and regulated system. Once viewed as the static director of development buffered from environment influence, the genome is better described as a developing resource of the cell (Moore, 2015 ). More broadly, epigenetics also points to how development is not a genetically (or biologically) predetermined affair. Instead, epigenetics provides additional evidence that development is a probabilistic process, contingent upon factors internal and external to the organism. In this sense, epigenetics is well positioned to help dissolve the nature–nurture dichotomy.

Beyond Nature–Nurture

In the final decades of the 20th century , a position was articulated to move beyond the dichotomous nature–nurture framework. The middle-ground position on nature–nurture did not seem up to the task of explaining the origins of form, and it brought about more confusion than clarity. The back-and-forth (or balanced) pendulum between nature- and nurture-based positions throughout history had only gone in circles. Moving forward would require moving beyond such dichotomous thinking (Johnston, 1987 ).

The anti-dichotomy position, referred to as the Developmentalist tradition, was expressed in a variety of systems-based, metatheoretical approaches to studying development, all of which extended the arguments against nature–nurture expressed earlier by Kuo and Lehrman. The central problem with all nativist claims according to Developmentalists is a reliance on preformationism (or predeterminism).

The problem with preformationism, they argue, besides issues of evidence, is that it is an anti-developmental mindset. It presumes the existence of the very thing(s) one wishes to explain and, consequently, discourages developmental analyses. To claim that some knowledge is innate effectively shuts down research on the developmental origins of that knowledge. After all, why look for the origins of conceptual knowledge if that knowledge is there all along? Or why search for any experiential contributions to innate behaviors if those behaviors by definition develop independently of experience? In the words of Developmentalists Thelen and Adolph ( 1992 ), nativism “leads to a static science, with no principles for understanding change or for confronting the ultimate challenge of development, the source of new forms in structure and function” (p. 378).

A commitment to maturational theory is likely one of the reasons why studies of motor development remained relatively dormant for decades following its heyday in the 1930–1940s (Thelen, 2000 ). Likewise, a commitment to maturational theory also helps explain the delay in neuroscience to examine how the brain physically changes in response to environmental conditions, a line of inquiry that only began in the 1960s.

In addition to the theoretical pitfalls of nativism, Developmentalists point to numerous studies that show how some seemingly native behaviors and innate constraints on learning are driven by the experiences of animals. For example, the comparative psychologist Gilbert Gottlieb ( 1971 ) showed that newly hatched ducklings display a naïve preference for a duck maternal call over a (similarly novel) chicken maternal call (Gottlieb, 1971 ), even when duck embryos were repeatedly exposed to the chicken call prior to hatching (Gottlieb, 1991 ). It would be easy to conclude that ducklings have an innate preference to approach their own species call and that they are biologically constrained (contraprepared) in learning a chicken call. However, Gottlieb found that the naïve preference for the duck call stemmed from exposure to the duck embryos’ own (or other) vocalizations in the days before hatching (Gottlieb, 1971 ). Exposure to these vocalizations not only made duck maternal calls more attractive, but it hindered the establishment of a preference for heterospecific calls. When duck embryos were reared in the absence of the embryonic vocalizations (by devocalizing embryos in ovo ) and exposed instead to chicken maternal calls, the newly hatched ducklings preferred chicken over duck calls (Gottlieb, 1991 ). These studies clearly showed how seemingly innate, biologically based preferences and constraints on learning derived from prenatal sensory experiences.

For Developmentalists, findings like these suggest that nativist explanations of any given behavior are statements of ignorance about how that behavior actually develops. As Kuo and Lehrman made clear, nativist terms are labels, not explanations. Although such appeals are couched in respectable, scientific language (e.g., “X is due to maturation, genes, or heredity”), they argue it would be more accurate simply to say that “We don’t know what causes X” or that “X is not due to A, B, or C.” Indeed, for Developmentalists, the more we unpack the complex dynamics about how traits develop, the less likely we are to use labels like nature or nurture (Blumberg, 2005 ).

On the other hand, Developmentalists recognize that labeling a behavior as “learned” also falls short as an explanatory construct. The empiricist position that knowledge or behavior is learned does not adequately take into account that what is learned and how easily something is learned depends on (a) the physiological and developmental status of the person, (b) the nature of the surrounding physical and social context in which learning takes place, and the (c) experiential history of the person. The empiricist tendency to say “X is learned or acquired through experience” can also short-circuit developmental analyses in the same way as nativist claims.

Still, Developmentalists appreciate that classifying behaviors can be useful. For example, the development of some behaviors may be more robust, reliably emerging across a range of environments and/or remaining relatively resistant to change, whereas others are more context-specific and malleable. Some preferences for stimuli require direct experience with those stimuli. Other preferences require less obvious (indirect) types of experiences. Likewise, it can still be useful to describe some behaviors in the ways shown in Table 1 . Developmentalists simply urge psychologists to resist the temptation to treat these behavioral classifications as implying different kinds of explanations (Johnston, 1987 ).

Rather than treat nature and nurture as separate developmental sources of causation (see Figure 1 ), Developmentalists argue that a more productive way of thinking about nature–nurture is to reframe the division as that between product and process (Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2015 ). The phenotype or structure (one’s genetic, epigenetic, anatomical, physiological, behavioral, and mental profile) of an individual at any given time can be considered one’s “nature.” “Nurture” then refers to the set of processes that generate, maintain, and transform one’s nature (Figure 2 ). These processes involve the dynamic interplay between phenotypes and environments.

Figure 2. The developmentalist alternative view of nature–nurture as product–process. Developmentalists view nature and nurture not as separate sources of causation in development (see Figure 1 ) but as a distinction between process (nurture) and product (nature).

It is hard to imagine any set of findings that will end debates about the roles of nature and nurture in human development. Why? First, more so than other assumptions about human development, the nature–nurture dichotomy is deeply entrenched in popular culture and the life sciences. Second, throughout history, the differing positions on nature and nurture were often driven by other ideological, philosophical, and sociopolitical commitments. Thus the essential source of tension in debates about nature–nurture is not as much about research agendas or evidence as about basic differences in metatheoretical positions (epistemological and ontological assumptions) about human behavior and development (Overton, 2006 ).

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Nature versus nurture: how modern science is rewriting it

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Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Development, UCL

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Kevin Mitchell has received funding from Science Foundation Ireland, The Wellcome Trust, and the Irish Health Research Board.

Uta Frith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The question of whether it is genes or environment that largely shapes human behaviour has been debated for centuries. During the second half of the 20th century, there were two camps of scientists – each believing that nature or nurture, respectively, was exclusively at play.

This view is becoming increasingly rare, as research is demonstrating that genes and environment are actually interconnected and can amplify one another. During an event at Berlin Science Week on November 7, organised by the Royal Society , we discussed how the debate is changing as a result of recent findings.

Take literacy. Making language visible is one of the most extraordinary achievements of human beings. Reading and writing is fundamental to our ability to thrive in the modern world, yet some individuals find it difficult to learn. This difficulty can arise for many reasons, including dyslexia, a neuro-developmental disorder. But it turns out neither genes nor environment are fully responsible for differences in reading ability.

Genetics and the neuroscience of reading

Reading is a cultural invention and not a skill or function that was ever subject to natural selection. Written alphabets originated around the Mediterranean about 3,000 years ago, but literacy only became widespread from the 20th century. Our use of the alphabet, however, is grounded in nature. Literacy hijacks evolved brain circuitry to link visible language to audible language – by letter-sound mapping.

Brain scans show that this “reading network” is apparent in pretty much the same place in the brain in everybody. It forms when we learn to read and strengthens connections between our brain’s language and speech regions, as well as a region that has become known as the “visual word form area”.

The design for building the underlying circuitry is somehow encoded in our genomes. That is, the human genome encodes a set of developmental rules that, when played out, will give rise to the network.

However, there is always variation in the genome and this leads to variation in the way these circuits develop and function. This means there are individual differences in ability. Indeed, variation in reading ability is substantially heritable across the general population, and developmental dyslexia is also largely genetic in origin .

This is not to say that there are “genes for reading”. Instead, there are genetic variations that affect how the brain develops in ways that influence how it functions. For unknown reasons, some such variants negatively affect the circuits required for speaking and reading.

Environment matters too

But genes are not the whole story. Let’s not forget that experience and active instruction are needed for the changes in brain connectivity that enable reading to occur in the first place – though we don’t yet know to what extent.

Research has shown that most often problems with literacy are likely underpinned by a difficulty in phonology – the ability to segment and manipulate the sounds of speech. It turns out that people with dyslexia also tend to struggle with learning how to speak when infants. Experiments have shown that they are slower than other people to name objects. This also applies to written symbols and relating them to speech sounds.

And here nurture comes in again. Difficulties in learning to read and write are particularly visible in languages with complex grammar and spelling rules, such as English. But they are far less obvious in languages with more straightforward spelling systems, such as Italian. Tests of phonology and object naming, however, can detect dyslexia in Italian speakers too.

So the difference that is found in dyslexic brains is likely the same everywhere, but will nevertheless play out very differently in different writing systems.

Amplification and cycles

Nature and nurture are traditionally set in opposition to each other. But in truth, the effects of environment and experience often tend to amplify our innate predispositions . The reason is that those innate predispositions affect how we subjectively experience and respond to various events, and also how we choose our experiences and environments. For example, if you are naturally good at something you are more likely to want to practice it.

This dynamic is especially evident for reading. Children with greater reading ability are more likely to want to read . This will of course further increase their reading skills, making the experience more rewarding. For children with lower natural reading ability, the opposite tends to happen – they will choose to read less, and will fall farther behind their peers over time.

These cycles also offer a window of intervention. As we have seen in the case of Italian readers, nurture can mitigate the effects of an adverse genetic predisposition. Similarly, a good teacher who knows how to make practice rewarding can help poor readers by allowing short cuts and mnemonics for spelling. In this way, dyslexic readers can become good readers – and enjoy it. Reward and practice enhance each other, leading to more motivation and more practice in a positive feedback loop.

So instead of thinking of nature and nurture as adversaries in a zero sum game, we should think of them as feedback loops where a positive influence of one factor increases the positive influence of the other – producing not a sum but an enhancement. Of course, the same applies to negative feedback, and so we have both virtuous and vicious circles.

Because inheritance (genetic as well as cultural) matters, this effect is also visible on a larger scale spanning several generations. In the past, parents who sent their children to school created an advantageous environment for them and their grandchildren. But in turn, the parents benefited from the existence of a culture that invested in schools. Of course, such investments are not always spread evenly and may flow more towards those already in an advantageous position. Such a circle is sometimes referred to as the “Matthew effect” – good things come to those who already have them.

The interactive loops between nature and nurture extend beyond the lives of individuals, playing out across communities and over generations. Recognising these dynamics gives us some power to break these feedback loops, both in our own lives and more widely in society and culture.

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The Nature Vs. Nurture Debate And What It Means For Raising Your Children

When you observe your child's traits and behavior, you may well wonder where they got them. Are they something you passed down to them, or are they the product of the way you're raising them? These questions fall under the umbrella of the nature vs. nurture debate. 

There's quite a bit of information out there about just what nature vs. nurture means, and there's been a lot of research done to try to understand what makes kids the way they are. As you might expect, there are plenty of people on each side of the debate.

In this article, we'll begin by examining what this debate is all about, then we'll talk about what you can do to help raise your child to become a well-rounded adult, no matter where you fall in the debate.

What is nature vs. nurture?

When it comes down to it,  the debate of nature vs. nurture is about which aspect of your child's life has the most influence on their personality and how they turn out. Researchers have done many studies related to this, and they've worked hard at figuring out just how to create the most well-adjusted and healthy children. What they've found is that, for the most part, there's a little bit of everything that goes into turning your children into whoever they are going to be.

Nature takes the side that your children are born with some innate characteristics. These are determined by genetics (what they get from you and your partner) and other things that are inherently them. These things can't be changed (or can be very difficult to change) because they're already hard-wired into your child from the time they are born. These innate characteristics could explain why your child is so much like you, or they could explain why your child is so much different from you because they get some characteristics from genetics and some that occur on their own.

On the other hand, Nurture takes the side that your child becomes who they are because of the environment they are in. That means that the way that you and your partner parent play a part in how your child develops into an adult. It means the siblings they have, the lifestyle they experience, their friends, their community, and everything that is outside of them. The idea is that if you take any child and put them in a similar environment, they will turn out similarly based on the understanding that their environment shapes them as they grow.

So which is right?

The truth is that  we don't know which of these has the bigger influence. What research suggests, however, is that both of them are very important to your child. There are several ways that you can use nurture to help your child with areas that they innately seem to struggle with. Your child could be very shy and quiet, but by nurturing them and helping them throughout their life, you may help them become more outgoing. On the other hand, there is evidence that seems to suggest that no matter what kind of environment your child grows up in, they could turn out a specific way just because that's who they are.

It seems apparent that there is something to the nature of a person who can triumph over how they are raised. Yet, we all know children who go from being troubled youth to being well-adjusted and successful adults by going from a difficult home life to a healthy home life, which shows that nurture definitely can't be discounted.

Raising your children in the best way

So, what does this mean for you? If there's no consensus on whether nature or nurture has the strongest influence, how are you supposed to know what to do as a parent? How are you supposed to make sure that your children are getting the best possible care and that they'll turn into the best possible adults? Well, the best thing you can do is to work on nurturing them. After all, the nature part has already been done, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about that.

From the time your children are born, they are soaking up the nurturing that you provide to them. This means that everything you're doing is going to influence them in some way. Now, that doesn't mean those little mistakes that you made as a new parent or even throughout their life will stay with them forever. You don't need to beat yourself up over the fact that you forgot to put sunscreen on their arms, and they got sunburned when they were an infant at the beach, or that you used to let the dog lick their face, or that you let them sleep on their back or their stomach instead of the way they were supposed to.

Even though the things you do will impact them and influence their lives, children are also resilient. There are always going to be things that will affect them in the moment but won't influence the entirety of their lives. Punishing yourself or believing that everything you do could hurt your children irreparably is only going to make things harder on you, and that could make it harder for you to be a good parent.

Supporting your child

When it comes down to it, giving your  children love and attention will be the most important thing that you can do for them. Showing them that you care, doing things with them, and just encouraging the things they love will help them become healthy and happy individuals. Also, understanding that they will be their own person and not an extension of you is a crucial aspect to making sure your child loves the person they already are, not just who they could become.

That doesn't mean just sitting back and letting your child do their own thing all the time. If your child struggles with making friends on their own, you could help them learn new ways to make friends, for example. There are some things that your child may struggle with because of their nature, but through nurturing, you could help them along. In a similar way to getting a tutor for a child struggling in school, you can work with them to develop new skills and habits that will help them improve themselves.

Ask your child what they need, as well. It's not just about what you think your child wants or what you may have wanted when you were their age. Instead, it's about helping them to feel more comfortable and happier with themselves. Of course, it's also about not getting too overwhelmed. Getting wrapped up in the idea of raising the "perfect child" can be stressful for a parent, and it can be completely overwhelming for a child. They want to enjoy their life and have fun, and constantly trying to micromanage them to be perfect is only going to make them stressed and unhappy.

We all want what's best for our children, and we all want to make sure that they have all the opportunities that we didn't get to have as children. We all want to make sure that they are happy and healthy and have plenty of friends and experiences. We want them to grow up to be successful, well-adjusted adults. 

Getting professional help

If you struggle with how to be a good parent to your child, you may want to seek professional help to find out more about where that struggle is coming from. A mental health professional may help relieve some of your stress or figure out new methods of parenting that will be more successful for your health and happiness—and your child's. If your child seems to be struggling in any way, you could also help them with mental health support. The stigma around mental health keeps many people from seeking help when they're uncertain or have questions, and that's why it's so important that you reach out and get the help you need.

Online therapy has worked for both adults and children. It can be a convenient method of getting the help you need. Sessions can take place anywhere there's internet access, and they can be scheduled at a time that works best for everyone. Research is showing that online therapy can be as effective as in-person therapy, and that children, especially, do well with online therapy, since they tend to be comfortable with technology.

Regain is one way that you can get the help you need to have a healthy and successful relationship with your child and make sure that your child gets the love and support they need throughout their lives. Licensed Regain therapists can work with you alone or with your partner to address anything causing you stress—be it parenting or something else going on in your lives.

There is no such thing as a "perfect child" or a "perfect parent," and relieving some of that stress from both of you can make life a great deal better. It's all about recognizing the things that make both of you perfect for each other and how you can use nurturing to help along the way.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

What is the debate of nature vs. nurture?

The nature vs. nurture debate tries to determine which aspects of a person’s behavior should be attributed to inherited or acquired influences. The nature-nurture debate has been a long-argued staple of psychology, and there are many scientists and professors on both sides of the debate.

Those on the nature side believe that people are a product of their genetics. Nature refers to the things that are inherently inside of us that are pre-wired to make us act and behave the way we do.

Those on the nurture side of the debate believe that people are products of the environment they are raised in and believe that external influences provide more to a person than any genetic factors would.

However, psychologists have come a long way with research regarding the nature vs. nurture debate, and the majority now fall somewhere in the middle. Studies have shown that in most cases, nature and nurture interact and together help form a person’s behavior and character.

There are still a few psychologists that lean heavily in one direction or the other. These nature and nurture positions are called Nativism and Empiricism, respectively.

The nativist approach (extreme nativist) assumes that all of the characteristics of a person are the product of evolution and that the minute differences we exhibit are due to our genetic code.

Opposite to the extreme nativist approach is the empiricism approach. This approach believes that all people are born a completely blank slate and that everything that we are is taught to us by our environment that we are raised in.

What is the general conclusion of the nature vs. nurture debate?

The general consensus is that nature and nurture interact together to form the characteristics of a person. Nature and nurture occur simultaneously, and “nurture builds upon what nature provides.” The nature versus nurture debate continues, but for the most part, both sides have come to a middle-ground agreement.

The nature versus nature debate goes back hundreds of years to the Middle Ages, where doctors believed that an abnormality in the body's humors was what caused a person to be ill. We now know that there is no such thing as humor in the body and that they have no impact on a person’s well-being.

Likewise, while both sides of the nature versus nurture debate believed that they had solid proof for their side at the beginning of the century, science has now disproven the majority of those early theories, and the ones that we believe now may very well be disproven in another hundred years.

That is the beauty of science; we always learn more about the human condition and all the things that make a person a person. Currently, science shows that nature and nurture are both equally responsible for the way a person develops and for the characteristics that they develop over the course of a lifetime.

What are some examples of nature vs. nurture?

While there are some  specific examples of nature versus nurture, the vast majority of things combine the two schools of thought. Certain biological aspects are directly tied to nature (nature refers to genetics), such as skin color and eye color, and some diseases such as sickle cell anemia.

In the nature versus nurture debate, it isn't easy to point to a specific example of nurture being the sole factor in a person’s characteristics. There have been numerous studies involving twins separated at birth and the impact of their environment on how they grew up. These aren’t conclusive evidence, however.

Which is stronger: nature vs. nurture? 

In terms of nature versus nurture, there is no clear winner. Neither is particularly stronger than the other—nature and nurture work together within a person. The newer field of  epigenetics is beginning to show that genes do not operate independently of context. Genes react how they do and evolve the way they do because of external factors and stimuli that guide them to change.

At this point in history, the nature-nurture debate is effectively over. Nature versus nurture and vice versa is a moot point because we have come so far in understanding human characteristics and personalities that it is impossible to deny that nature-nurture is a system that works together.

We can no more deny the issues with our nature side than deny the events and situations that shaped us into who we are today.

What is a nature-nurture personality?

Nature-nurture personality is the currently widely accepted school of thought that neither nature nor nurture is more important or influential than the other. The two concepts work simultaneously together to shape the personality and characteristics of a person. While there are still some holdouts on one side or the other of the nature versus nurture debate, it is impossible to deny the science and the studies that have shown their interaction.

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The End of Nature Versus Nurture

Image: Oxford University Press

This article was originally published on  The Psych Report  before it became part of the  Behavioral Scientist  in 2017.

How do we become who we are? Traditionally, people’s answers have placed them in one of two camps: nature or nurture. The one says genes determine an individual while the other claims the environment is the linchpin for development. Since the 16th century, when the terms “nature” and “nurture” first came into use, many people have spent ample time debating which is more important, but these discussions have more often led to ideological cul-de-sacs rather than pinnacles of insight.

New research into epigenetics—the science of how the environment influences genetic expression—is changing the conversation. As psychologist David S. Moore explains in his newest book, The Developing Genome , this burgeoning field reveals that what counts is not what genes you have so much as what your genes are doing . And what your genes are doing is influenced by the ever-changing environment they’re in. Factors like stress, nutrition, and exposure to toxins all play a role in how genes are expressed—essentially which genes are turned on or off. Unlike the static conception of nature or nurture, epigenetic research demonstrates how genes and environments continuously interact to produce characteristics throughout a lifetime.

We spoke with Moore to find out more about the science of epigenetics, its impact on the nature versus nurture debate, and the hopes and cautions that come with such a potentially revolutionary line of research.

Evan Nesterak: How does the science of epigenetics change the seemingly age-old nature versus nurture debate?

David Moore: For the longest time, the nature-nurture debate has been cast as a kind of contest between genes and experiences. The thought was that we might have some characteristics that are caused primarily by genetic factors and other characteristics that are caused primarily by experiential factors. What epigenetics is making clear is that’s a faulty way to think about the situation, because it’s not true that genes do things independently of their contexts. Instead, genes do what they do because of the contexts that they’re in. Nature and nurture are always working together to produce all of our traits.

EN: Can you describe a study that you feel illustrates the science of epigenetics? 

DM: The one that has drawn the most attention has been the one done by a team of researchers led by Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf at McGill University. These researchers watched how rat mothers interacted with their babies. They discovered that some mothers naturally lick and groom their baby rats more than other mothers do. They also noticed that the mothers that licked and groomed their rats the most wound up with offspring that grew up to be adults that were less stressed out when they were put into mildly stressful situations. The mothers that licked and groomed their baby rats less wound up with offspring that were more stressed out. In order to determine if this was an effect of experience, the researchers cross fostered the baby rats, so the ones born to the high licking and grooming mothers were raised by the low licking and grooming mothers. What they found was that it was the perinatal experience that made all the difference. It didn’t matter who you were born to—if you were raised by a low licking and grooming mother, you would grow up to be a more stressed out adult rat.

So the question was, how can it be that these kinds of early experiences can have these long-term effects later on in adulthood? Meaney and Szyf traced the effect to epigenetics. Specifically, they discovered that in certain brain cells of baby rats, there are certain genes that get turned on when the babies are licked and groomed. Then, the turning on of those genes leads cells to build proteins that help moderate stress responses into adulthood, because the genes stay turned on. Meaney and Szyf’s work shows how it is that an experience can influence what an animal’s genes are doing, in a way that can have a long-term effect.

EN: Can you describe how epigenetic research relates to humans?

DM: We don’t know as much about this, because we really can’t do tightly controlled experiments with human beings for ethical reasons. As a result, we don’t have a particularly concrete understanding about how this all works in people. But the reason I wrote my new book, The Developing Genome , is because we have enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that things are happening in humans much as they’re happening in Meaney and Szyf’s rat pups.

There are really two ways in which we can get insight into what’s going on in people. One is by looking at experiments that have been done on our primate relatives, the monkeys. There are a variety of studies on monkeys that show effects like those discovered in rats, where experiences influence the epigenetic states of certain genes in certain cells in monkeys’ bodies. The second way we can get insight into epigenetic phenomena in people is by doing correlational studies. In this way, even though we’re not doing experiments, we can see if certain kinds of experiences early in life are correlated with later epigenetic states in actual people. So far, these kinds of studies have revealed that this is indeed the case.

It’s not true that genes do things independently of their contexts…genes do what they do because of the contexts that they’re in.

Scientists have also discovered epigenetic effects of experiences that are less related to psychology. For instance, when they’ve looked at certain cells in the muscles, they’ve seen epigenetic effects of exercise. And when they’ve looked at other cells in the body, they’ve seen epigenetic effects of diet.

EN: Can you describe from an epigenetics perspective what is known about how an experience like poverty might impact an individual’s biological processes and their outcome?

DM: Yes and no. Again, I need to start off with a caveat. There is very little that we know for sure at this point, because it’s not like scientists can do experimental studies in which they randomly assign people to grow up in poverty, so it’s hard to know for sure what’s going on. Having said that, there is an increasing amount of data that suggests that growing up poor has long-term effects on people. Let’s say we’re studying a person who grew up in an impoverished environment, but as he got older, the person was successful and reached a higher socioeconomic status. If scientists compare such a person’s epigenome to the epigenome of someone born into the higher socioeconomic status, and who has managed to stay at this level, they’ll find that the person who was poor in childhood has a different epigenetic state than the person who was born into greater wealth, even if both people are now equally wealthy. So, poverty seems to have consequences that produce effects that can be detected in the body decades later.

EN: In your book, you describe the pitfalls of genetic determinism and you caution against people creating an epigenetic determinism. For instance, because a person was born into poverty they will be X or because they’ve had this experience they will be Y. Can you describe the potential hazards of this type of thinking?

DM: I don’t think people know enough about epigenetics yet to be epigenetic determinists, but I foresee that as a problem. As soon as people start hearing about these kinds of data that suggest that your early experiences can have long-term effects, there’s a natural assumption we all make that those experiences are determinative. That is, we tend to assume that if you have this experience in poverty, you are going to be permanently scarred by it.

The data seem to suggest that it may work that way, but it also seems to be the case that the experiences we have later in life also have epigenetic effects. And there’s every reason to think that those later experiences can ameliorate some of the effects that happened early on. So, I don’t think we need to be overly concerned that the things that happen to us early in life necessarily fate us to certain kinds of outcomes.

EN: How does epigenetics make us rethink the idea of genetic inheritance?

DM: To me, there’s been a surprising amount of hype related to epigenetic inheritance. That’s because there is some evidence that the experiences we have in the course of our lives can change our epigenetic states and those epigenetic states can then be transmitted to the next generation. This has caused a bit of an uproar among some biologists. They are unsure about what to do with this new finding, because it calls to mind a pre-Darwinian biologist named Lamarck who argued that evolution occurs when the experiences we have change our bodies and we pass those bodily changes on to our offspring.

Asking which is more important, genes or environments, is kind of like asking which is more important in making an ordinary automobile run, spark plugs or gasoline. You need both. They’re both absolutely essential. Asking the question “which one is more important?” really doesn’t make any sense.

Lamarck’s idea was abandoned in the 19th century after Darwin’s theory rose to the fore. The truth is, Darwin was actually a Lamarckist and he wasn’t opposed to this idea, but a lot of the neo-Darwinians—the people who picked up Darwin’s theory in the early 20th century and ran with it—they were very opposed to Lamarck’s idea. The presence now of some data that suggest that our experiences can produce biological effects that can then be transmitted to the next generation has alarmed biologists who were trained to believe that Lamarckian inheritance is impossible.

I think it’s now clear that this kind of transgenerational transmission is possible, although it might be rare. We still don’t know for sure yet. One thing to keep in mind when thinking about epigenetic inheritance is that it’s potentially scary, because imagine if you’re exposed to a pesticide, for example, or some other environmental toxin. If that exposure has some sort of epigenetic effect on you, the prospect that your great-great grandchildren might be influenced by your experience is somewhat worrisome. But these kinds of swords typically cut both ways, so there’s also the possibility that people can have experiences that might somehow improve the lives of their descendants. This is all still poorly understood, but it makes it an exciting time to be doing research in this area.

EN: Given the revolutionary nature of some of these findings, how has your thinking changed as a result of the rise of epigenetics?

DM: I became interested in these kinds of questions long before epigenetics became popular. When I was a naïve graduate student, one of my hopes was that I might be able to tease apart nature and nurture by working with babies. But it became clear to me very early in my career that it was not going to be possible to do that, because by the time they’re born, babies have already had 9 months of experiences inside of their mothers, and many of those experiences are influential. Thinking seriously about development made it clear to me that nature and nurture can never be teased apart, because influential experiences are an important part of natural, normal development, starting immediately after conception.

EN: How are other scientists reacting to epigenetic research? Are people optimistic? Is there a rift?

DM: I think everybody is optimistic and excited. I think everybody knows that there are a lot of really interesting and important things to be learned from doing this kind of work. Of course, there are also differences in perspective.

Whether you talk to biologists or psychologists, if you ask them outright, they will almost invariably tell you that genes and environments always interact to produce our characteristics. But my experience has been that if you press them a little bit, you will find that their interactionism is actually rather shallow. For instance, it can often be revealing to ask someone about a characteristic like Phenylketonuria—widely considered to be a genetic disease—or about a characteristic like eye color. When you ask most people if characteristics like these are more influenced by genetic factors than by environmental factors, they will typically say “yes.” So even though everybody says “I understand that genes and environments interact,” they are still under the mistaken impression that one of these kinds of factors can be more important than the other. But that’s just not right. Given how genes and environments interact, each kind of factor is always just as important as the other in influencing the final form of a trait.

We are on the threshold of a whole new way of thinking about human development.

There’s an analogy I like to use to illustrate this point. Asking which is more important, genes or environments, is kind of like asking which is more important in making an ordinary automobile run, spark plugs or gasoline. You need both. They’re both absolutely essential, and it’s the same for genes and environments. Asking the question “which one is more important?” really doesn’t make any sense. Yet in spite of the fact that most people will tell you that genes and environments interact, they’ll also tell you that some characteristics are more genetic than others, even though this can’t be right. Research on epigenetics has really driven this point home. So, I think as we learn more about epigenetics, there will need to be some change in theoretical perspective among some scientists.

EN: Is there anything else you would like to add?

DM: I have seen a number of books coming out about epigenetics that contain a lot of unsubstantiated claims. It’s [been] picked up by some writers who use it to suggest that simply by changing our attitudes, we can potentially use epigenetics to heal ourselves in certain ways. And while it’s possible that that’s true, there really isn’t any good data to that effect yet, so we just don’t know.

The bottom line is that we are still very much in the early stages of understanding this aspect of molecular biology, and it’s a bit too early for anyone to either sound alarm bells or to argue that we’ve discovered a magic bullet that’s ultimately going to solve our health problems. There’s a lot more work that still needs to be done before we understand all of this, but it certainly looks like we are on the threshold of a whole new way of thinking about human development, and it’s very exciting.

Evan Nesterak

Evan Nesterak is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Behavioral Scientist .

Further Reading & Resources

• Moore, D. S. (2015). The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Moore, D. S. (2003). The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of "Nature Vs. Nurture". New York, NY: Macmillan.
• Borghol, N., Suderman, M., McArdle, W., Racine, A., Hallett, M., Pembrey, M., . . . Szyf, M. (2012). Associations with early-life socio-economic position in adult DNA methylation.  International Journal of Epidemiology, 41 , 62–74.
• Provençal, N., Suderman, M. J., Guillemin, C., Massart, R., Ruggiero, A., Wang, D., . . . Szyf, M. (2012). The signature of maternal rearing in the methylome in rhesus macaque prefrontal cortex and T cells. Journal of Neuroscience, 32 , 15626–15642.
• Weaver, I. C. G., Cervoni, N., Champagne, F. A., D’Alessio, A. C., Sharma, S., Seckl, J. R., . . . Meaney, M. J. (2004). Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 7 , 847–854 .
• Moore, D. S. (2013). Behavioral genetics, genetics, & epigenetics. In P. D. Zelazo (Ed.), Oxford handbook of developmental psychology (pp. 91 – 128). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Moore, D. S. (2013). Current thinking about nature and nurture. In K. Kampourakis (Ed.), The philosophy of biology: A companion for educators (pp. 629 – 652).  New York, NY: Springer.
• Learn Epigenetics.  Genetic Science Learning Center, University of Utah.
• Cloud, J. (2010, January 6). Why your DNA isn't Your Destiny,  Time.
• The Third Way: Evolution in the Era of Genomics and Epigenomics.
• epigenetics
• the psych report

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Nature Vs. Nurture Debate

By Motherly Editors February 26, 2024

The nature versus nurture debate is a long-standing psychological discussion that focuses on the influence of genetics (nature) and upbringing or environment (nurture) on human behavior and development. Supporters of the nature argument believe that traits, abilities, and characteristics are largely determined by genetic factors. Those supporting the nurture side argue that human behavior and development are primarily shaped by environmental factors such as upbringing, societal norms, and experiences.

Key Takeaways

• The Nature vs. Nurture debate is an ongoing discussion focusing on whether inherited genetic traits (nature) or environmental factors (nurture) are more influential in determining an individual’s development, including personality, behavior, and intelligence.
• Proponents of the nature argument emphasize the significance of genetics in determining individual traits, whereas supporters of the nurture argument emphasize the importance of external factors such as upbringing, experiences, and social interactions.
• Most contemporary scholars recognize that both nature and nurture play essential roles in human development, with their relative contribution varying depending on the specific trait or behavior in question. It is now widely accepted that the two factors interact with each other to shape an individual’s characteristics, rather than one factor being solely responsible.

The nature versus nurture debate is a crucial aspect of understanding human development, as it deals with the influence of genetics (nature) and environmental factors (nurture) on shaping human behavior, personality, and cognitive abilities.

This debate is important as it provides insights into how much of a role heredity and environment play in determining an individual’s traits, allowing parents, educators, and policymakers to make informed decisions about child-rearing practices, education, and social policy.

By understanding the complex interplay between nature and nurture, we can better appreciate the significance of both innate predispositions and external experiences in shaping the individuals we become, helping to promote holistic approaches to personal development and well-being.

Explanation

The Nature Vs. Nurture Debate serves as an essential framework for understanding the interplay between genetic predispositions and environmental influences in human development.

This ongoing debate is centered on determining the extent to which an individual’s abilities, personality, and behavioral traits are determined by nature (innate factors, such as genetics) or nurture (acquired factors, such as upbringing, cultural, and social factors). By examining the relationship between nature and nurture, researchers, educators, and parents can better appreciate the various factors that contribute to a child’s development and make informed decisions regarding their parenting approach, educational strategies, and social and environmental exposure. The primary purpose of the Nature Vs.

Nurture Debate is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence child development and the effectiveness of certain parenting or educational interventions. Over the years, numerous studies have explored this topic, leading to increased knowledge about the impact of genetics and environmental factors on various aspects of human growth, such as intelligence, personality, and mental health.

By continuously studying the intricate interplay of genes and experiences, experts can better design interventions that take into account the unique combination of nature and nurture that shapes an individual. This can ultimately lead to more effective and personalized strategies in education, healthcare, and mental health services, allowing both parents and professionals to support children in reaching their full potential.

Examples of Nature Vs. Nurture Debate

The nature vs. nurture debate revolves around the role of genetics (nature) and the experiences or environment (nurture) that shape an individual’s behavior, intelligence, personality, and other traits.

Twin studies: One of the most compelling examples of the nature vs. nurture debate is the study of identical twins raised apart. An example of this is the famous Minnesota Twin Study, which observed twins reunited after being raised in different environments. The study found that the twins often shared similar traits, such as intelligence and personality, even though they were raised in different environments, implying that genetics had a significant role in shaping these traits. However, differences in things like beliefs, values, and specific habits also indicated the influence of their unique environments.

Language acquisition: The ability to learn languages is another key example of the nature vs. nurture debate. It is widely accepted that humans are born with an innate capacity to learn languages (nature); for example, infants can recognize speech sounds from any language. However, the specific language(s) they learn and how proficient they become depends on the environment they are raised in (nurture). A child raised in a bilingual environment, for instance, will likely become fluent in both languages, while a child raised in a monolingual environment will likely only become fluent in the language spoken at home and in their community.

The case of Genie Wiley: This case study provides a tragic example of extreme deprivation and its effects on development. Genie, a girl who was isolated and abused from the age of 20 months until she was discovered at age 13, had not been given the opportunity to learn a language or develop basic social skills. Despite intensive intervention, she never acquired full language abilities or complete social functioning, suggesting that there is a critical period for nurture to have an effect on certain developmental milestones. While Genie’s genetics may have played a role in her overall cognitive potential, the lack of nurture during her early years had a detrimental impact on her development.

Nature Vs. Nurture Debate: Frequently Asked Questions

1. what is the nature vs. nurture debate.

The nature vs. nurture debate is an ongoing discussion surrounding the extent to which genetic (nature) and environmental factors (nurture) influence the development of a person’s physical, cognitive, and behavioral traits.

2. How does the nature vs. nurture debate apply to parenting?

In the context of parenting, the nature vs. nurture debate involves considerations of how much a child’s development and behavior are shaped by innate qualities they are born with (nature) and how much they are influenced by their experiences and upbringing (nurture).

3. Which is more important, nature, or nurture?

Both nature and nurture are important in shaping a person’s development. Research has shown that various traits are influenced by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, with varying degrees of importance placed on each depending on the specific trait in question.

4. How can parents use the nature vs. nurture debate to inform their parenting decisions?

Parents can use the nature vs. nurture debate to understand the importance of providing a supportive, nurturing environment for their children, while also recognizing the role that genetics may play in certain aspects of their child’s development. Educating themselves on both aspects can help parents make informed decisions about their child’s upbringing so that they can best support their child’s growth and development.

5. Can a nurturing environment overcome genetic predispositions?

A nurturing environment can be crucial in helping children reach their full potential, but it may not entirely override genetic predispositions. However, certain environmental factors can significantly influence gene expression, allowing children to thrive despite genetic challenges. It’s essential for parents to provide a positive, supportive, and enriching environment for their children regardless of genetic predispositions.

Related Parenting Terms

• Genetic Influences
• Environmental Factors
• Childhood Development
• Behavioral Traits
• EPIGENETICS

Sources for More Information

• Psychology Today
• National Center for Biotechnology Information
• Verywell Mind
• ScienceDirect

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By Robin Marantz Henig

• Sept. 29, 2020

UNIQUE The New Science of Human Individuality By David J. Linden

In the longstanding debate over whether “nature” or “nurture” determines how we turn out, the old saw goes like this: When your first baby is born, you are sure that what matters is nurture. When your second baby is born, you’re a firm believer in nature.

This adage is confirmed, somewhat, in how people answered a survey that David J. Linden cites in “Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.” In the book Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, sets out to look at everything that makes us distinctly ourselves: our height and weight, food preferences, personality styles, gender identity, racial identity, sexual orientation and intelligence. Are these qualities carried in our genes, or does the life we live — every experience, from the viruses we encounter to the books we read to what month we were born — play a bigger role in making us who we are?

Turns out we can be bad at guessing to what degree our traits are genetic — or what scientists call “heritable” — and to what degree they’re affected by environment. In an online survey from 2019, Linden tells us, Americans were generally good at intuiting the source of certain traits; they knew that height is strongly heritable, political beliefs are not heritable at all and musical talent is somewhere in between. But they also had some revealing blind spots. They assumed that the heritability of body mass index was 40 percent, for instance, when the consensus from the scientific literature is that it’s really more like 65 to 75 percent. “I imagine that many people want to believe that food consumption is more a matter of personal willpower than it really is,” Linden writes; they want to believe “that they (and others) have a greater degree of autonomy and personal agency than they really do.”

And the survey respondents who were most accurate? College-educated mothers of more than one child. In other words, the ones whose “it’s all nurture” attitude was likely attenuated by the birth of a second child with a different “nature.”

This is not to say that Linden is out to prove that genes define us; far from it. The main takeaway from “Unique” is that while there might be a genetic tendency to develop in a particular way, there’s a wide range of influences, beginning in fetal life, that help determine how and whether our genes are expressed. Some examples of the gene-environment interplay are well known, such as the single gene that causes a cognitive impairment known as PKU, which never reveals itself if a child eats the right diet. But most of the scientific understanding is still evolving as to just how experience interacts with and changes gene expression.

I feel the need to pause here to point out that Linden hates the phrase I’ve been using: “nature versus nurture.” He says it oversimplifies the question of how genetics and the environment influence each other over the course of development.

In ordinary English, “nurture” means how your parents raise you, he writes. “But, of course, that’s only one small part of the nonhereditary determination of traits.” He much prefers the word “experience,” which encompasses a broad range of factors, beginning in the womb and carrying through every memory, every meal, every scent, every romantic encounter, every illness from before birth to the moment of death. He admits that the phrase he prefers to “nature versus nurture” doesn’t roll as “trippingly off the tongue,” but he offers it as a better summary of how our individuality really emerges: through “heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development.”

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in “Unique,” including findings from decades’ worth of twin studies that gave scientists some of their first insights into how much of personality and behavior might be inherited and how much acquired. There are some great descriptions of investigations into genetics including, for instance, a Russian geneticist’s attempt, starting in the 1950s, to domesticate silver foxes by breeding them for tameness. Or we might find ourselves in the middle of a cool psych experiment, like one conducted at Berkeley in 2006 that ended up with a bunch of blindfolded college kids crawling through a grassy field trying to smell a trail of chocolate.

More notably, Linden marches into territory where too many other scientists fear to tread: the genetics of gender identity, sexual orientation and race. He manages, by and large, to avoid the worst land mines, acknowledging certain genetic differences among some populations but emphasizing that they don’t necessarily align with the social binaries of male/female, gay/straight, cis/trans or Black/white. Occasionally I did find myself cringing at some of the language, as in the chapter on gender, where I wish he had followed his own good advice — offered in a footnote in which he referred readers to the advocacy group InterACT — and steered clear of medicalized language to describe intersex people. But such missteps were rare.

I also wish he had worked harder to explain some of the complicated biological processes at the heart of his argument, especially epigenetics and neurogenetics. Too often he resorts to the crutch of apologizing in advance for prose riddled with “alphabet soup,” or for “bombarding you with a bunch of names for biomolecules,” before launching into a tangle of jargon. But apologizing in advance shouldn’t get him off the hook. It’s possible to convey even complicated biology in crisp, clear language without sacrificing accuracy. It’s just hard — especially for a scientist like Linden who clearly knows his subject inside out — and Lord knows it’s time-consuming. But it’s worth the effort.

Still, when it matters, Linden neither falters nor apologizes. At the end of his chapter on the genetics of race, he could not be clearer. “I can’t say this loudly enough,” he writes, making liberal use of italics: “ There is no evidence for significant average differences in intelligence-related genes between ‘races.’ Not between self-identified whites and Blacks in the United States, nor between any pair of self-defined racial groups. Not only that, there is no evidence for racial group differences in genes that have been linked to any behavioral or cognitive trait. Not aggression. Not A.D.H.D. Not extroversion. Not depression. Nada, niente , nichts , bupkis.”

That’s the kind of clarity we need more of in popular science books like this, especially ones that investigate both what makes us human and what makes us distinctly, immutably ourselves.

Robin Marantz Henig is a science writer and author of nine books, including “Pandora’s Baby” and “The Monk in the Garden.”

UNIQUE The New Science of Human Individuality By David J. Linden 336 pp. Basic Books. $30.

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The big idea: is it time to stop talking about ‘nature versus nurture’?

The latest science shows that genes and environment are ​too deeply entwined to pit them against one another

W hen you hear people conversing in an unfamiliar language, why is it that you can’t even tell where one word ends and the next begins? If you are a native English speaker, why is it so challenging to get your mouth around a French or Hebrew “r”, which originates lower in the throat, or the “r” in Spanish or Italian, which is trilled on the tip of the tongue? Your ability to hear and make sounds, and to understand their meaning as language, is wired into your brain. How you acquire that wiring illuminates an age-old debate about human nature.

In the first few months of your life, your infant brain is bathed in all kinds of information from the world around you, through your senses. This sense data causes changes in your brain as your neurons fire in various patterns. Some collections of neurons fire together frequently, strengthening or tuning their connections and aiding learning. Others are used less and are pruned away, making room for more useful ones to form. This process of tuning and pruning is called plasticity, and it happens throughout your life, but enormously in the first few years.

One of the biggest sources of sense data for an infant brain is other people. As a consequence, your infant brain was tuned and pruned to detect fine differences in human speech, including a large inventory of consonant and vowel sounds, becoming expert in distinguishing one from another. But here’s the thing ​– ​babies tend to spend time with caregivers who speak the same language, so you probably missed out on many sounds found only in other languages. That’s one reason you may find it hard to produce or even discern these unfamiliar sounds today.

This brings us to the age-old debate I mentioned: are your deepest characteristics and abilities present at birth, or are they formed by your experiences in the world? In other words, is nature or nurture the prime mover? We know that part of who you are comes from genes, which contain instructions to build your body and wire your brain. We also know that the culture you grow up in can shape your brain and body in fundamental ways.

Few scientists today would say that 100% of your attributes are inborn or are learned; the debate tends to be about where to draw the dividing line. Newer evidence, however, suggests that the dividing line doesn’t really exist. Your environment, it turns out, causes certain genes to turn on and off, a process called epigenetics. You also have genes that regulate how much the environment affects you. Genes and environment are ​so deeply entwined, like lovers in a fiery tango, that it’s fundamentally unhelpful to call them separate names like “nature” and “nurture”.

Take the idea of sleeping on a piece of furniture called a bed, by yourself or with a partner, in a designated room called a “bedroom”, for a long chunk of time like eight hours. Such ideas are actually wired into your brain by experience and guide your expectations and actions. You can tell because it feels somehow “wrong” to change the habit. If you and your whole family all slept on straw mats in one room every night, and you had to wake up every two hours to tend the fire, it would feel unnatural to you, despite the fact that other cultures live this way.

Even emotions such as joy, sadness and fear, which feel inborn and automatic, are in fact a product of culture. Suppose you see someone make a wide-eyed, gasping face. If you grew up in a western society, you are likely to perceive fear in that face, but if you grew up in Melanesia, you’re more likely to perceive threat and aggression.

Culture allows one generation to pass information on to the next without it having to be carried by genes. Your childhood caregivers curated your physical and social world, and your brain wired itself to that world. You perpetuate that world and eventually pass your culture on to the following generation through your words and actions, wiring their brains in turn. This cultural inheritance is an efficient, flexible partner to genetic inheritance, and means that the process of evolution doesn’t require all our wiring instructions to be in genes. The way your brain becomes tuned to the languages you hear as a baby is just one example. Similarly, if you’re exposed to adversity in early life, it may activate certain genes and suppress others, wiring your brain to deal with adversity that may arise in the future. Unfortunately, this wiring also makes you more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, heart disease and diabetes in adulthood. If you have children, you might pass some of these characteristics on to them through epigenetic changes .

Cultural practices even shape the genetic evolution of our entire species, by influencing who is available to reproduce with whom, and which children are more likely to live to reproductive age. Wealth, social class, laws, war and other human inventions empower one group over another, changing the odds on whether certain people will have children together, or at all. Political and religious polarisation ensures that people with different beliefs will scarcely speak to one another, let alone date or mate. Parents who vaccinate their children against deadly diseases, or choose not to, likewise make waves in the gene pool. This is how humans, by virtue of the cultures we create, nudge the evolutionary trajectory of our species.

Culture is not a mere moderator of our biology, then, but a fully fledged cause. I’m not saying that your culture determines your destiny, but then neither do your genes. Together, your genes and the world you live in make you who you are (for better or for worse). We are therefore all partly responsible for wiring each other’s brains, and the brains of the next generation, through our words and actions. That’s the lesson of the latest science: there need be no “versus” in the equation. We simply have the kind of nature that requires nurture, and they are utterly intertwined.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University , Boston, and the author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain .

Further reading

Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J Richerson and Robert Boyd (Chicago, £27)

Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour by Gillian R Brown and Kevin N Laland (Oxford, £34.49)

The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin (Harvard, £24.95)

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Nature vs. nurture? It’s both

Recently I was going through some old photos of my dad, Kurt Katch . He was an actor who escaped the Nazis and immigrated to the U.S. in 1937 with my mom (and two suitcases). Neither spoke English (but they did speak five other languages!) and once they left their families they never saw them again. All of their relatives perished in the Holocaust.

The author and his father, Kurt Katch. (Image courtesy of Vic Katch.)

My mother always told me that I got all my genes from my dad. We both had brown hair ( oh how I wish I still had that hair ), dark skin, smiley faces, broad shoulders, etc. In contrast, my twin sister and older brother displayed my mother’s genes: fair skin, blondish/red hair, and a more linear stature. Apparently, I had inherited my dad’s personality and demeanor, as well as other social traits, while my sister and brother had inherited those of my mother.

Or so I was told.

My dad died at age 65 when I was just 12 years old, so I never knew him when I (and he) got older. But a gander at these old photos are telling. Indeed, the physical resemblance is unmistakable. We are about the same age, 45, in this photo. I always have wondered if the dramatically different turns our respective lives took had an effect on our personalities, social intelligence, IQ, and other traits that made us who we are (and were).

I was always told these traits were genetically determined, for the most part. But what about environmental and behavior influences?

Nature versus nurture

From a scientific perspective, “nature” refers to the biological/genetic predispositions that impact one’s human traits — physical, emotional, and intellectual. “Nurture,” in contrast, describes the influence of learning and other “environmental” factors on these traits. The debate over whether peoples’ strengths and weaknesses are the results of nature or nurture has risen to the surface lately due to exciting research in the areas of genetics, bioinformatics (the application of computation and analysis tools to the capture and interpretation of biological data), and epigenetics (the study of how cells control gene activity without changing the DNA sequence). This debate illuminates significant social implications, particularly concerning what is thought to determine one’s intellectual ability, capacity to avoid disease, health optimization, and successful aging.

A little history

Studying twins is one of the best ways to explore the nature/nurture debate, Katch says. (Image: stock photo.)

While scientists have studied physical, behavioral, and intellectual inheritance throughout human history, the systematic investigation of the inheritance for most human traits formally began with Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, in the 1869 book Hereditary Genius and in other writings.

During the late 19th century, developmental psychologists began to study methods for testing the intelligence of French children to determine their readiness for school. These scientists believed they could predict intelligence based on inherited “learning abilities.” Essentially, they were interested in studying the impact of genes and biology versus environmental and social influences on intellectual development. At that time, heredity was deemed more important in predicting intelligence, health, performance, and even civility. Heredity often was used to justify the superiority of the “ruling elite.”

In contrast, earlier philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke independently theorized that people were born as blank slates (i.e., “tabula rasa” ). They proposed that the eventual differences in individual intelligence developed solely due to environmental influences. Twentieth-century behavioral psychologists shared a similar perspective, believing that events that take place during early childhood have far more influence on what kind of adults we become, compared to the effect of our genetic makeup.

Studying nature and nurture

Devising research to study the nature/nurture issue is complicated. It requires innovative approaches and new technological methods that can isolate and distinguish the cause-and-effect of human traits due to genetic or environmental influences. The two major approaches involve studying twins that have been raised together or who were separated at birth (or during early childhood). The second approach involves identifying how different genes correlate to specific traits, or how environmental influences (effects of circumstances of life and experience) affect how genes express. As noted above, this field of study is termed epigenetics.

Twin studies

The history of specific twins affords the ability to study the influence and effects of genetic transference at birth versus influences imposed by life’s circumstances during the aging process. The identical twin Wolverines featured in the lead image, above, are brothers, comedians, and rabid sports fans Randy and Jason Sklar.

Darwin’s cousin Galton was the first scientist to systematically study twins to examine and distinguish between nature and nurture. Based on his studies, Galton concluded nature had a larger imprint than nurture on humans in all developmental areas. Galton’s resolute belief in the importance of heredity led him in 1883 to invent the term eugenics — a set of beliefs and practices aimed at increasing “desirable” human traits while decreasing “undesirable” ones. Perhaps well-intentioned, the science lacked rigor and people distorted the philosophy to propagate concepts of racial and class superiority.

While Galton’s conclusions have mostly been disproven, newer well-controlled twin research has proven essential in understanding the nature/nurture debate.

Researchers worldwide have established twin registries where scientists systematically identify twin births and follow their development and life circumstances until death. The Swedish Twin Registry , founded in 1959 at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, contains information on 194,000 twins born since 1886. This largest twin registry in the world has made important strides regarding cardiovascular disease, cancer, and aging. The Twins UK Registry , which launched a database for studying arthritis, includes more than 14,000 twins, aged 16-100 years, throughout the United Kingdom.

These types of retrospective, observational twin studies compare the two different types of twins: identical and fraternal. Identical twins possess the same set of genes entirely, while fraternal twins share about half of the same genes, on average — similar to siblings who didn’t share a womb. This difference enables scientists to explore how heredity contributes to illness and behavior. For example, if identical twins are both more likely to suffer from high or low cholesterol levels than fraternal twins, researchers can conclude that genes play an important role in the development of that trait. From there, they can search for any associated genes.

Twins separated during infancy

The Swedish Twin Registry at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm contains information on 194,000 twins born since 1886. Here, the author is pictured as a baby with his twin sister, Judy, and their dad. (Image courtesy of Vic Katch.)

By studying twins separated in infancy and raised apart, scientists can answer the question: To what extent do cognitive and psychological differences between people result from nature and/or nurture?

Research from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research (The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart) includes more than 137 pairs of separated identical and fraternal twins and triplets who participated in a battery of medical and psychological tests. Over the years, identical twins reared apart developed personalities and interests that showed about the same degree of resemblance as identical twins raised together.

With robust twin-registry databases, researchers have published hundreds of papers on blood pressure and heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, the gut microbiome, fatigue, rheumatic disease, aging, cancer, and periodontal disease — to name just few.

One study used twins to learn whether adolescent marijuana use causes IQ to decrease, or are adolescents prone to smoking marijuana also pre-disposed to seeing their IQs drop, regardless. The researchers looked at twins where one twin used marijuana and the other did not. The researchers found that when IQ dropped in the marijuana-using twin, it also dropped in the twin who didn’t use marijuana. Thus, the IQ drop was the result of a vulnerability that was present before any exposure to the effects of using marijuana.

Epigenetics

Epigenetics means “in addition to changes in genetic sequence.” The term has evolved to include any process that alters gene activity without changing the DNA sequence, and leads to modifications that can be transmitted to daughter cells. Essentially, epigenetics studies how behavior and environment can cause changes that affect the way genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible (maybe) and do not necessarily change DNA sequences. But they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence. While genetic changes can alter which protein is made, epigenetic changes affect gene expression, i.e., to turn genes “on” and “off.” Since different environments and behaviors, such as diet and exercise, can result in epigenetic changes, it is easy to make the connection between genes, behaviors, and environment.

How epigenetics work

When the information stored in DNA converts into instructions for making proteins or other molecules, it is called gene expression and represents a tightly regulated process that allows a cell to respond to its changing environment. (Image: stock photo.)

Gene expression is the process by which the instructions in DNA are converted into a functional product, such as a protein. When the information stored in DNA converts into instructions for making proteins or other molecules, it is called gene expression and represents a tightly regulated process that allows a cell to respond to its changing environment. It acts as both an on/off switch to control when proteins are made, and also a volume control that increases/decreases the number of proteins made.

Two key steps involved in making a protein include transcription and translation. Transcription is when the DNA in a gene copies to produce an RNA transcript called messenger RNA (mRNA). Translation occurs after the messenger RNA carries the transcribed “message” from the DNA to protein-making factories in the cell.

Epigenetic changes that affect gene expression include different biologic and physiologic effects regarding how “to read” a gene, resulting in change. Epigenetic changes begin before birth. While all cells have the same genes, they look and act differently. With growth and development, epigenetics helps determine which function a cell will have (for example, whether it will become a heart cell, nerve cell, or skin cell). Epigenetics allows a muscle cell to “turn on” genes to make certain proteins important for muscle function and “turn off” genes important for some other function. Meanwhile, epigenetics change throughout the lifespan. Our epigenetics at birth is not the same as our epigenetics during childhood or adulthood.

Fortunately, not all epigenetic changes are permanent. Some epigenetic changes can be added or removed in response to changes in behavior or environment. In fact, epigenetic changes often occur in smokers vs. non-smokers. After quitting smoking, former smokers can begin to have increased DNA activity in certain genes. Eventually, they can reach levels similar to those of non-smokers.

Other research demonstrates that epigenetic changes can affect health in different ways. Germs can actually change how epigenetics weaken the immune system to help the germ survive — or die.

After quitting smoking, former smokers can begin to have increased DNA activity in certain genes. Eventually, they can reach levels similar to those of non-smokers. (Image: stock photo.)

Epigenetic changes also may involve a pregnant woman’s environment and behavior. A pregnant woman eating healthy food (or not) and engaging in physical activity (or not) can change the baby’s epigenetics. Some of these changes can remain for decades and might make the child more likely to get certain diseases (or not).

Lastly, some studies suggest the possibility of epigenetic inheritance – that a life’s experiences can possibly change our epigenetic states and those epigenetic states can then be transmitted to the next generation. That is a lot to comprehend: Just imagine the inherited generational trauma and other emotional traits carried through time.

Nature and nurture: Together forever

The nature-nurture debate has been cast as a contest between the idea that some characteristics are caused primarily by genetic factors and other characteristics are caused primarily by experiential factors. This premise is outdated and is not supported by current research. We now know that genes do not act independently of their contexts. Instead, genes do what they do because of their contexts.

( Lead image from Sports Illustrated. Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar are identical twins who happen to be Wolverines and rabid sports fans. This is a great video interview by then-student journalist Eric Cutter in which the twins share memories of seeing real-time game action by the legendary Fab Five, Desmond Howard, and more.)

• Galton, F., Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. (Macmillan, London, 1869).
• Galton, F., “ The history of twins , as a criterion of the relative powers of nature and nurture.” Fraser’s Magazine; 1875(12):566.
• Guo, G., and Stearns, E. “The social influences on the realization of genetic potential for intellectual development.” Social Forces 2002;80:881.
• Guo, S.W., “Does higher concordance in monozygotic twins than in dizygotic twins suggest a genetic component?” Hum Hered 2001;51:121.
• Heijmans, B., et al., “Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans.” Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2008;105:17046.
• Holden, C., “Identical twins reared apart.” Science 1980;207:1323-5, 1327-8.
• Hopper, J.L., et al., “Australian twin registry: 30 years of progress.” Twin Res Hum Genet 2013;16:34.
• Liew, S.H., et al., “The first ‘classical’ twin study? Analysis of refractive error using monozygotic and dizygotic twins published in 1922.” Twin Res Hum Genet 2005;8:198.
• Lynch, T, et al., “A primer on infectious disease bacterial genomics” Clin Microbiol Rev. 2016 Oct;29(4):881.
• McCartney, D., et al., “Epigenetic signatures of starting and stopping smoking.” EBioMedicine. 2018;37:214.
• Moore, D.S., The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics. (Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Newman, Horatio, et al., Twins, a study of heredity and environment . (The University of Chicago Press, 1937).
• Norwegian twin registry .
• Roseboom, T., “Epidemiological evidence for the developmental origins of health and disease: Effects of prenatal undernutrition in humans.” J Endocrinol 2019.242:T135-T144.
• Skytthe, A, et al., “The Danish twin registry in the new millennium.” Twin Res Hum Genet 2006;9:763.
• Sumathipala, A., et al., “The Sri Lankan twin registry: 2012 update.” Twin Res Hum Genet 2013;16:307.
• Tobi, E,. et al., “DNA methylation differences after exposure to prenatal famine are common and timing, and sex-specific.” Hum Mol Genet 2009;18:4046.

Russell Lyons - 1983

“centuries later” should, of course, be “centuries earlier”.

Deborah Holdship

Thanks, Russell.

Abby Rosenthal - 1972 SPH

The epigenetics/twin article was fascinating. I am already on the mailing list. Thanks, Abby

Jeff Lipshaw - 1975

Vic, I always enjoy your father as Colonel Haki in The Mask of Dimitrios – whenever it shows up on TCM!

Victor Katch

Thanks Jeff. You should check him out in Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Cheers, Vic

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Epigenetics and Child Development: How Children’s Experiences Affect Their Genes

For more information about epigenetics, please scroll down below the infographic .

New scientific research shows that environmental influences can actually affect whether and how genes are expressed. In fact, scientists have discovered that early experiences can determine how genes are turned on and off and even whether some are expressed at all. Thus, the old ideas that genes are “set in stone” or that they alone determine development have been disproven. Nature vs. Nurture is no longer a debate—it’s nearly always both!

More Information on Epigenetics Deep Dive: Gene-Environment Interaction Learn more about the physical and chemical processes that take place as part of the creation of the epigenome. Working Paper 10: Early Experiences Can Alter Gene Expression and Affect Long-Term Development This in-depth working paper explains how genes and the environment interact, and gives recommendations for ways that caregivers and policymakers can effectively respond to the science.

During development, the DNA that makes up our genes accumulates chemical marks that determine how much or little of the genes is expressed. This collection of chemical marks is known as the “ epigenome .” The different experiences children have rearrange those chemical marks. This explains why genetically identical twins can exhibit different behaviors, skills, health, and achievement.

Correcting Popular Misrepresentations of Science

Until recently, the influences of genes were thought to be set, and the effects of children’s experiences and environments on brain architecture and long-term physical and mental health outcomes remained a mystery. That lack of understanding led to several misleading conclusions about the degree to which negative and positive environmental factors and experiences can affect the developing fetus and young child. The following misconceptions are particularly important to set straight.

• Contrary to popular belief, the genes inherited from one’s parents do not set a child’s future development in stone. Variations in DNA sequences between individuals certainly influence the way in which genes are expressed and how the proteins encoded by those genes will function. But that is only part of the story—the environment in which one develops , before and soon after birth, provides powerful experiences that chemically modify certain genes which, in turn, define how much and when they are expressed. Thus, while genetic factors exert potent influences, environmental factors have the ability to alter the genes that were inherited.
• Although frequently misunderstood, adverse fetal and early childhood experiences can—and do—lead to physical and chemical changes in the brain that can last a lifetime. Injurious experiences , such as malnutrition, exposure to chemical toxins or drugs, and toxic stress before birth or in early childhood are not “forgotten,” but rather are built into the architecture of the developing brain through the epigenome. The “biological memories” associated with these epigenetic changes can affect multiple organ systems and increase the risk not only for poor physical and mental health outcomes but also for impairments in future learning capacity and behavior.
• Despite some marketing claims to the contrary, the ability of so-called enrichment programs to enhance otherwise healthy brain development is not known. While parents and policymakers might hope that playing Mozart recordings to newborns will produce epigenetic changes that enhance cognitive development, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that such exposure will shape the epigenome or enhance brain function. What research has shown is that specific epigenetic modifications do occur in brain cells as cognitive skills like learning and memory develop, and that repeated activation of brain circuits dedicated to learning and memory through interaction with the environment, such as reciprocal “ serve and return ” interaction with adults, facilitates these positive epigenetic modifications. We also know that sound maternal and fetal nutrition , combined with positive social-emotional support of children through their family and community environments, will reduce the likelihood of negative epigenetic modifications that increase the risk of later physical and mental health impairments.

The epigenome can be affected by positive experiences, such as supportive relationships and opportunities for learning, or negative influences, such as environmental toxins or stressful life circumstances, which leave a unique epigenetic “signature” on the genes. These signatures can be temporary or permanent and both types affect how easily the genes are switched on or off. Recent research demonstrates that there may be ways to reverse certain negative changes and restore healthy functioning, but that takes a lot more effort, may not be successful at changing all aspects of the signatures, and is costly. Thus, the very best strategy is to support responsive relationships and reduce stress to build strong brains from the beginning, helping children grow up to be healthy, productive members of society.

For more information:   Early Experiences Can Alter Gene Expression and Affect Long-Term Development: Working Paper No. 10 .

Full Text of the Graphic

“Epigenetics” is an emerging area of scientific research that shows how environmental influences—children’s experiences—actually affect the expression of their genes.

This means the old idea that genes are “set in stone” has been disproven. Nature vs. Nurture is no longer a debate. It’s nearly always both!

During development, the DNA that makes up our genes accumulates chemical marks that determine how much or little of the genes is expressed. This collection of chemical marks is known as the “epigenome.” The different experiences children have rearrange those chemical marks. This explains why genetically identical twins can exhibit different behaviors, skills, health, and achievement.

Epigenetics explains how early experiences can have lifelong impacts.

The genes children inherit from their biological parents provide information that guides their development. For example, how tall they could eventually become or the kind of temperament they could have.

When experiences during development rearrange the epigenetic marks that govern gene expression, they can change whether and how genes release the information they carry.

Thus, the epigenome can be affected by positive experiences, such as supportive relationships and opportunities for learning, or negative influences, such as environmental toxins or stressful life circumstances, which leave a unique epigenetic “signature” on the genes. These signatures can be temporary or permanent and both types affect how easily the genes are switched on or off. Recent research demonstrates that there may be ways to reverse certain negative changes and restore healthy functioning. But the very best strategy is to support responsive relationships and reduce stress to build strong brains from the beginning.

Young brains are particularly sensitive to epigenetic changes.

Experiences very early in life, when the brain is developing most rapidly, cause epigenetic adaptations that influence whether, when, and how genes release their instructions for building future capacity for health, skills, and resilience. That’s why it’s crucial to provide supportive and nurturing experiences for young children in the earliest years.

Services such as high-quality health care for all pregnant women, infants, and toddlers, as well as support for new parents and caregivers can—quite literally— affect the chemistry around children’s genes. Supportive relationships and rich learning experiences generate positive epigenetic signatures that activate genetic potential.

Related Topics: brain architecture , lifelong health , mental health

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Cross-Cultural Psychology

Nature and nurture: how culture shapes us, insights from cultural psychology..

Updated October 10, 2023 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

• Our cultures are engrained in our minds and brains, affecting our psychology.
• There are various explanations for the differences between cultures, including aspects of ecology.
• Emotion, cognition, and construal of the self are all impacted by our cultures.

A well-known analogy developed by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in the 1970s imagines culture as an iceberg. What typically grabs the attention – the way people talk, dress, and behave in any given culture – is merely the visible tip. The vast majority of it – values, attitudes, perceptions – remains under the surface, hidden from view.

There is a lot to discover about the deeper parts of the iceberg, including how culture is engrained in our minds and brains.

“Nature is nurtured,” says cultural psychologist Cristina Salvador. “That means that repeated engagement in our cultural environments can shape not only our psychology, but also our physiology, neural responses, the structural volume of our brains, and even our genes .”

Here are various ways that our cultures shape us, according to the latest research in cultural psychology.

1. Cultural values and agriculture. The crops that were traditionally grown in different communities may have given rise to large-scale differences in cultural values. For example, growing labor-intensive rice fostered collectivism because it required cooperation among populations. Conversely, lands that were more suitable for low-labor crops like wheat, and where people therefore didn’t need to depend on each other as much, nurtured individualism. Our environments can affect us in more ways than we imagine. In fact, 20 percent of the differences between cultures have been attributed to various aspects of our ecology.

2. The church says no. Another surprising link between our psychology and the environment comes from the ban on incest that the Roman Catholic Church initiated during the Middle Ages in Europe. While protecting family assets, cousin marriages fostered “ conformity , nepotism, tradition and obedience to authority.” Researchers believe that by shifting the focus away from kin-based institutions, Western societies began moving toward individualistic values and traits, including “independence, creativity , and willingness to trust strangers.” Apparently, the “Speak now or forever hold your peace” part of modern-day wedding ceremonies has its origins in sixth-century C.E. Back then, the inquiry for any last-minute objections to the marriage by church officials probably included the question, “Is anyone here aware whether these two are cousins?”

3. Tight and loose cultures. Societies that historically endured higher levels of threat – from natural disasters to wars – have stricter social norms, are considered more tight than loose , and are more likely to punish citizens for going against social norms. Since infectious diseases spread easily from person to person, research shows that certain norms, particularly a country’s tendency to be open to strangers and freely choose friendships ( relational mobility) predicted a faster spread of COVID-19 .

Our inner lives

1. Daily emotions. “The relative prominence of what emotions you experience might be shaped by your culture,” says Salvador. People in interdependent cultures have a tendency toward expressing socially engaging emotions. Whether positive ( friendliness ) or negative ( shame ), these emotions foster social connectedness with others. Recent research points to interesting variations in these tendencies among different interdependent cultures . For example, Latin Americans tend to express more positive engaging emotions, while the Japanese are more expressive of negative engaging emotions. In contrast, European Americans express more socially disengaging emotions that promote personal autonomy. “You can display pride because you did something great, or frustration because something didn’t work out. But they don’t really help you with your connections,” says Salvador.

2. Flavors of happiness . Most of us value happiness. Yet, we might define, conceptualize, and express happiness differently depending on where we are from. “In some cultures, happiness is understood as more dialectical , almost contradictory – the good comes with the bad,” says Salvador. Even our preferences for the flavor of happiness can vary depending on our cultures. For example, research on ideal affect has shown that people from some cultures (e.g. Hong Kong) ideally prefer to experience low arousal positive emotions like calm , while others (e.g. European Americans) want to feel more high arousal positive emotions like excitement . These preferences can shape various aspects of daily life – from health to social judgments.

3. Explaining others' behavior. The analytical vs. holistic distinction of cognitive styles can impact how we explain others’ behavior. “When someone cuts you off on the road, you could think of it in two different ways,” says Salvador. “You might automatically ascribe a trait to them ( What a jerk! ). Or you could think about the situational factors that prompted them to act in that way ( Maybe they’re having an emergency and need to rush to the hospital .).” In the first way of thinking ( analytical ), you are focusing on people’s internal traits by making quick judgments about their dispositions ( dispositional attributions ). In the second case, you are giving more weight to external, contextual factors ( situational attributions ). The dispositional bias is weaker in interdependent cultures .

Independent self vs. interdependence

1. Different goals . What impacts your self-esteem more, success or failure? Depending on our cultural contexts, our tendencies for self-enhancement or self-improvement can shape how we construct our sense of self. In a recent study , Salvador and her colleagues explored the neural measures of classical findings on the differences between self-enhancement and self-criticism across cultures. “Americans showed an increase in alpha-wave brain responses when they encountered successes rather than failures. Not only were they more impacted by their successes, but they also spontaneously incorporated their successes into self-knowledge.” The Taiwanese participants in their study showed the opposite pattern and were impacted by failures more than successes. According to Salvador, the differences in our cultural goals regarding the self – how important it is for our self-worth to maximize positive feelings and internal attributes – can affect how we maintain our self-esteem.

2. Stress and coping strategies. Stress is a ubiquitous companion of daily existence. Yet, culture can play a key role in how people interpret stress, as well as what strategies they use to cope with it. For example, a recent study showed that European Canadians relied more on primary rather than secondary control strategies to cope with stress. Primary control orientation allows individuals to exert direct influence on the external environment in order to make it less stressful for them, as opposed to merely accommodating the demands of the situation (secondary contro l ). The study further showed that the Japanese had more flexibility in the way they coped with daily stressors, using both primary and secondary control strategies. Culture can also influence how people make meaning of stressful experiences, in turn affecting their coping style (for example, by using acceptance or positive reframing).

3. Self-compassion. Self-compassion refers to the way we relate to ourselves when we are suffering. According to Kristin Neff, a pioneering psychologist in self-compassion research, self-compassion consists of three main elements : “how people emotionally respond to suffering (with kindness or judgment), how they cognitively understand their predicament (as part of the human experience or as isolating), and how they pay attention to suffering (in a mindful or overly identified manner)” (Neff, 2023). Over the past two decades, thousands of studies have established a robust link between self-compassion and various facets of well-being – from reducing psychopathology to improving physical and mental health. While culture can influence the way people relate to themselves (for example, research points to differences in self-compassion scores across cultures), interventions that promote self-compassion appear to yield similar benefits. Being kind to ourselves is good for all of us.

Many thanks to Cristina Salvador for her time and insights. Dr. Salvador is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University where she heads the Duke Culture Lab.

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Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D. , is a lecturer in Cultural Psychology and a consultant specialising in cross-cultural transitions.

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