How Does Nature And Nurture Affect Human Development, Behavior And Personality?

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The debate on whether nature vs nurture impacts human development, behavior, and personality is ongoing. There has been an abundance of contributions to the debate throughout the years. This debate is based on two standpoints. The first standpoint is that human development, behavior, and personality is inherited through a person’s genes. The second standpoint is based on the belief that human development, behavior, and personality is learned through your environmental experiences. It’s often easy to determine where an individual gets their physical features from. You can generally look at their family and see similarities between the individual and their parents. Physical characteristic as well as certain diseases such as eye color, skin pigmentation, …show more content…

(Sigelman and Rider 2014) Individuals who support the nature theory believe that the genes passed on from the parents to the child dictates the path in which they will grow and learn. On the nurture side of the debate are those who emphasize change in response to environment. All the external physical and social conditions, stimuli, and events that can affect us. (Sigelman and Rider 2014) Individuals who support the nurture theory argue that an individual’s experiences shape their development, behavior, and …show more content…

If genes matter identical twins should be more similar because they have 100% of their genes in common. (Sigelman and Rider 2014) Scientist conducted a study on a set of identical twins. This study differed from other twin studies because it followed the pair that had been separated from birth to adulthood. Scientist could compare their similarities as well as their differences. The argument was that twins that are raised in the same environment may be alike due to their identical genetics or their identical environment Whereas twins who are raised apart differences between them must be attributed to differences in their environment, while similarities are mainly due to their identical heredity. (Gruber 1981) Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein had been part of a secret research project in the 1960s and '70s that separated identical twins as infants and followed their development in a one-of-a-kind experiment to assess the influence of nature vs. nurture in child development. (Richman 2007) The birth parents and children did not know the real subject of the study. The twins were separated at birth, and were not reunited until 35 years later. “Since meeting Elyse, it is undeniable that genetics play a huge role, probably more than 50 percent," Bernstein says. “It’s not just our taste in music or books; it goes beyond

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