The nature vs nurture debate is never-ending. Nature includes the hereditary factors which influence who exactly we are, the characteristics of our personality and our physical appearance. On the other hand, nurture refers to variables available in our environment. It may include our childhood experiences, our social relationships, our culture or in short you can say that everything that we are learning from our environment. These can be both good and bad things. Good things such as the virtue of kindness or doing daily chores etc. Bad things may include taking an interest in inappropriate activities such as theft and violence etc.

  • Examples of Nature vs Nurture:
  1. Homosexuality- This example of nature vs nurture debate is related to homosexuality because the proponents of nature believe that homosexuality is considered to be genetic and a person can’t control it whereas the nurture proponents believe that such sort of behaviour is actually influenced by the environmental factors.
  2. Occupation- If we talk about careers, then a child who decides to follow the footsteps of his parents should be labelled as naturally inclined towards a skill. While others can hold the viewpoint that the credit goes to the nurturing given to the child by the parents.
  3. Personality- Everybody wants to know how the personalities of their children are developed. It has been noted that whether the child is having the influence of his mother or is it just because the child has grown up under the supervision of his mother and it’s just the learnt personality.
  • Nature vs Nurture Personality:
  • Nature and Personality:

Those who follow the nature debate are called nativists. Such individuals believe that all the hereditary factors are responsible for shaping the personality. Popular nativist Chomsky personally believes that language can only be learnt through a device specifically used for language acquisition. There is also another nativist and psychotherapist who believe that there are only two motives to explain the behaviour and they are aggression and sex.

There is also evidence available that proves that the genetic inheritance is responsible for shaping the behaviour. You may have seen many people who are behaving just like their mother or father. If the father is short-tempered, so is his son and if the mother is shy, so is her daughter. But we can’t put all the pressure on genes as the environment also plays an important role in shaping up an individual’s behaviour.

  • Nurture and Personality:

People following the nurture debate are known as empiricists who believe that mind is a blank state “tabula rasa”, and it can be filled with two things known as learning and experiences. Alburt Bandura’s “Social Learning Theory” stated that the personality traits, most specifically aggression, can be learnt through imitation, and he proved this point through an experiment of Bobo Doll. In that experiment, the preschool children were shown a movie in which an actor was kicking a doll very badly. When the children finished watching that movie, they repeated those actions and kicked the doll in the same way.