Nature vs. Nurture

Nature and nurture: Working Together to Form the Person I want to take a look at a subject that has been at the (unspoken) heart of many topics, nature versus nurture. How we became who we are today and what made us that way. Nature versus nurture, the age-old battle. What truly shapes us into the beings that we become in our adult lives? Is it the constant care and looking after by parents and loved ones? Or does it come from the chromosomes that our forbearers have passed down to us? Or is it a combination of both working in unison to create our inward attitudes, beliefs, actions, and thoughts? The consensus based on a survey of many psychological studies on the matter appear to conclude that we are shaped mainly by nature, or our biology. The religious world (including the LDS church) appears to lean towards nurture, or how and where we are raised and what we are taught. I, on the contrary, believe that we are molded by a perfect combination of both. We have certain inborn traits that cannot be denied, but we also have to learn how to act and how to think and how to mold those traits to be productive citizens in a social world

Nature refers to the biological basis of traits and the scientific explanation of these traits. One recent study found that “Temperaments are often regarded as biologically based psychological tendencies with intrinsic paths of development….” < Journal of Personality and Social Psychology > In other words the basic personality of an individual is ascribed by that person’s biology and its develop is deterministic.“Evidence for the endogenous nature of traits is summarized from studies of behavior genetics, parent-child relations, personality structure, animal personality, and the longitudinal stability of individual differences. New evidence for intrinsic maturation is offered from analyses of NEO Five-Factor Inventory scores for men and women”. < Journal of Personality and Social Psychology >. The NEO Five Factor