News and Social Media

On Friday 14th October, we were very fortunate to take part in the workshop led by graduate student, Miss Lee, based on the ‘Nature vs Nurture’ debate. We started off by defining the key concepts of nature, consisting of innate characteristics determined by genetics, and nurture, as the environment that shapes the people’s identity.

We then went on to learn about the evidence to support the two extreme ends of the spectrum of the debate.

For example, for the ‘Nature’ side of the debate, we discussed Charles Darwin’s idea that all our abilities are determined by biology and are not a product of learning, as well as the experiments carried out with pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic twins. These experiments show that, even when adopted into completely different families, identical twins developed the same genetically heritable disorders, such as schizophrenia.

For ‘Nurture’, we learnt about multiple social experiments that showed how heavily individuals were influenced even by the experiences created artificially, such as the Bobo doll experiment in which children quickly picked up and replicated adults’ behaviour they had observed. The one that captured my attention the most was the Zimbardo’s prison experiment that had to be interrupted because of the extent to which the behaviour of ordinary students had been influenced by the roles assigned to them (some of the ‘prisoners’ developed mental health issues after being treated badly by the ‘guards’).

In the final stage of the masterclass, we discussed whether serial killers have this disorder from when they are born. Using the information from the first half of the session and our own knowledge, we had a thought-provoking debate in our groups which we started by establishing the definition of ‘serial killer’.

At first we agreed that a serial killer does not simply commit multiple murders but also finds pleasure in doing so, and it seemed as if this mental disorder can be caused by biological characteristics only, such as hormones generating incorrect responses, and that a correct environment can only suppress ‘nature’ in this case. However, later we challenged the idea of psychopathy being entirely dependent on genetics. Some of us argued that (in a completely hypothetical situation) if a person had been indoctrinated with a completely different vision of the world and had been watching people finding true joy and satisfaction in hurting others for his or her whole life, nurture could play a fundamental role in defining this individual’s identity regardless of their neurological characteristics.

Miss Lee concluded the workshop by letting us take a glance at the concept of epigenetics – a new branch of science which investigates how the surroundings affect the expression of genes.

Overall, it was a fascinating debate in which we not only looked at the influences of nature and nurture on people’s identity separately, but also considered how, in some cases, they are not just involved (in one combination or another) in shaping personalities. We considered how in fact they may also intertwine with and change each other, such as, for example, nurture enhancing or overriding nature.

Ekaterina, SFC1 (Year 12)