Nature And Nurture In Lord Of The Flies By William Golding

There has always been a debate about nature and nurture. Which one has the most influence on how one reacts to a situation that someone is in? There are a lot of studies from a lot of different scholars and universities of different subdivisions of this subject. What I am focusing on is what is to blame for humans to react the way they do when they are in a survival situation. I am using is the novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The story starts out like this: there are a group of boys that are on this island in the middle of nowhere. It gives off the vibe that they were in a plane crash. They are completely stranded by themselves. At first, they vote who is the leader of the group and who does the building, who tends to the fire,
My point is the members have an effect on each other. The members give hints to the other members. For example, giving hints to wearing nicer clothing when you are around them or talking a certain way. This is called social cues. A social cue “can either be a verbal or non-verbal hint, which can be positive or negative. These cues guide conversation and other social interactions.” This obviously doesn’t just happen within the group but with strangers as well. For example, in the book Opening Skinner’s Box, there is a chapter outlining the details of social cues. Slater, the author, told a story about her sister who worked at a bar as a bartender. What her sister would do is she would put bigger bills in her tip jar. You may be thinking, why would she do that? What’s the point? Here’s the point: the reaction she acquired from it was that she would get more and higher value of tips. Slater explains this to be “driven by imitation (105).” What Slater believe it to be is that if people see the larger amount of bills in the jar, then they feel like they should give the bartender, her sister, larger tips as well. Why? Two words: Social cues. What happened with the boys was that the social cues that were learned from home was brought to the island along with them a.k.a. the voting of
We want to live peacefully because the human race usually doesn’t like confrontation. The reason why we want to follow moral standards is because we want the feeling like we are on this earth for a reason, like we have a mission that we need to get done to feel purposeful. Those seem like they go hand-in-hand but sometimes, blending this two things in certain situations can get a little out of hand and things can get a little messy. During the Lord of the Flies, they started out living peacefully, which then fulfills one of our human impulses. But when the boys start getting rebellious, that’s when their moral standards go out the window. They start killing each