The nature versus nurture debate is about the relative influence of an individual’s innate attributes as opposed to the experiences from the environment one is brought up in, in determining individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. The philosophy that humans acquire all or most of their behavioral traits from “nurture” is known as tabula rasa (“blank slate”).
In recent years, both types of factors have come to be recognized as playing interacting roles in development. So several modern psychologists consider the question naive and representing an outdated state of knowledge. The famous psychologist Donald Hebb is said to have once answered a journalist’s question of “which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?” by asking in response, “which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?”.
Comparison chart
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Nature |
Nurture |
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| What is it? | In the “nature vs nurture” debate, nature refers to an individual’s innate qualities (nativism). | In the “nature vs nurture” debate, nurture refers to personal experiences (i.e. empiricism or behaviorism). |
| Example | Nature is your genes. The physical and personality traits determined by your genes stay the same irrespective of where you were born and raised. | Nurture refers to your childhood, or how you were brought up. Someone could be born with genes to give them a normal height, but be malnourished in childhood, resulting in stunted growth and a failure to develop as expected. |
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Factors
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Biological and family factors | Social and environmental factors |
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