Nature Vs. Nurture in personality

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The Nature Vs. Nurture debate goes on in nearly every field of psychology. It is the study of whether the heritable genes that we get or the factors in the environment that we live in have a larger effect on a person. The study psychological studying of personality is no exception to this debate.
On the one hand, kids witness their surroundings and things that happen to them and this alters a child's personality. For example a child might watch adults working and giving to charity and then later emulate this behavior; thus the environment in which the child was in (witnessing the charitable giving) later effected the behavior of the child (the child also gave to charity). This is an example of "nurture" affecting personality.
On the other hand, a person might be depressed due to an imbalance of certain neurotransmitters in the brain. One of the potential causes of this imbalance would be genes that encode certain proteins for the brain are genetically predisposed to create this imbalances. This is an example of "nature".
But the problem is, in both of these cases it is difficult to nail down a definitive outcome for certain inputs. The child witnessing charity might be having a bad day and associate negatively with giving to charity. A person with an imbalance of chemicals could instead become manic or have other personality shifts or potentially none at all. Both of these examples at first seem as though they would have a clear cause and effect. But when applying most things about nature and nurture to personality, it is nearly impossible to truly evaluate and cause and effect relationships without some other factors affecting it. Because of this not only is it clear that both nature and nurture affect a personality, it calls into question whether the Nature vs. Nurture debate is truly as relevant to personality as it is to the rest of psychology.

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This page contains a single entry by joh09648 published on November 20, 2011 11:49 PM.

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