20117 이준우 Second Draft

Nurture makes your characteristic

Most of your physical features can be identified as identical to that of your parents, like your eyes from your father, and the hair color from your mother. It means that nature is influenced to your physical features. However, your personality and talents may have come not from your father or mother. The environment where you grew up may have a lasting effect or influence on that way you talk, behave and respond to the things around you(Sarah Mae Sincero (Sep 16, 2012). Nature and Nurture Debate.
https://explorable.com/nature-vs-nurture-debate). Many psychologists have debated a matter of which one is more influenced between nature and nurture in shaping human behavior for a long time. About this matter they debated for a long time. However, I think that Nurture plays more important role in shaping human behavior and characteristic.

Nature is defined that human development is predisposed in his DNA. The coding of genes in each cell in us humans determine the different traits that we have, more dominantly on the physical attributes like eye color, hair color, ear size, height, and other traits. However, it is still not known whether the more abstract attributes like personality, intelligence, sexual orientation(Sarah Mae Sincero (Sep 16, 2012). Nature and Nurture Debate. https://explorable.com/nature-vs-nurture-debate).

The nurture theory holds that genetic influence over abstract traits may exist; however, the environmental factors are the real origins of our behavior. This includes the use of conditioning in order to induce a new behavior to a child, or alter an unlikely behavior being shown by the child. According to John Watson, one of the strongest psychologists who propose environmental learning as a dominating side in the nature vs nurture debate, once said that he can be able to train a baby randomly chosen in a group of 12 infants, to become any type of specialist Watson wants. He stated that he could train him to be such regardless of the child's potentialities, talents and race. Although it is true that fraternal twins raised apart have remarkable similarities in most respects, still the intervention of the environment have caused several differences in the way they behave (Sarah Mae Sincero (Sep 16, 2012). Nature and Nurture Debate. https://explorable.com/nature-vs-nurture-debate).

Personality is a frequently cited example of a heritable trait that has been studied in twins and adoptions. Identical twins reared apart are far more similar in personality than randomly selected pairs of people. Likewise, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins. Also, biological siblings are more similar in personality than adoptive siblings. Each observation suggests that personality is heritable to a certain extent. However, these same study designs allow for the examination of environment as well as genes. Adoption studies also directly measure the strength of shared family effects. Adopted siblings share only family environment. Unexpectedly, some adoption studies indicate that by adulthood the personalities of adopted siblings are no more similar than random pairs of strangers. This would mean that shared family effects on personality wane off by adulthood. As is the case with personality, non-shared environmental effects are often found to out-weigh shared environmental effects. That is, environmental effects that are typically thought to be life-shaping (such as family life) may have less of an impact than non-shared effects, which are harder to identify.

In social learning theory Albert Bandura (1977) states behavior is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning. Unlike Skinner, Bandura (1977) believes that humans are active information processors and think about the relationship between their behavior and its consequences. Observational learning could not occur unless cognitive processes were at work. Children observe the people around them behaving in various ways. This is illustrated during the famous bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1961). Individuals that are observed are called models. In society children are surrounded by many influential models, such as parents within the family, characters on children’s TV, friends within their peer group and teachers at school. Theses models provide examples of behavior to observe and imitate, e.g. masculine and feminine, pro and anti-social etc. Children pay attention to some of these people (models) and encode their behavior. At a later time they may imitate (i.e. copy) the behavior they have observed. They may do this regardless of whether the behavior is ‘gender appropriate’ or not but there are a number of processes that make it more likely that a child will reproduce the behavior that its society deems appropriate for its sex. First, the child is more likely to attend to and imitate those people it perceives as similar to itself. Consequently, it is more likely to imitate behavior modeled by people of the same sex. Second, the people around the child will respond to the behavior it imitates with either reinforcement or punishment.  If a child imitates a model’s behavior and the consequences are rewarding, the child is likely to continue performing the behavior.  If parent sees a little girl consoling her teddy bear and says “what a kind girl you are”, this is rewarding for the child and makes it more likely that she will repeat the behavior.  Her behavior has been reinforced (i.e. strengthened). Reinforcement can be external or internal and can be positive or negative.  If a child wants approval from parents or peers, this approval is an external reinforcement, but feeling happy about being approved of is an internal reinforcement.  A child will behave in a way which it believes will earn approval because it desires approval. Positive (or negative) reinforcement will have little impact if the reinforcement offered externally does not match with an individual's needs.  Reinforcement can be positive or negative, but the important factor is that it will usually lead to a change in a person's behavior. Third, the child will also take into account of what happens to other people when deciding whether or not to copy someone’s actions.  This is known as vicarious reinforcement. This relates to attachment to specific models that possess qualities seen as rewarding. Children will have a number of models with whom they identify. These may be people in their immediate world, such as parents or elder siblings, or could be fantasy characters or people in the media. The motivation to identify with a particular model is that they have a quality which the individual would like to possess. Identification occurs with another person (the model) and involves taking on (or adopting) observed behaviors, values, beliefs and attitudes of the person with whom you are identifying.

This story confirm my argument through the real example. This saying refers to the legend that Mencius's mother moved house three times before finding a location that she felt was suitable for the child's upbringing. As an expression, the idiom refers to the importance of finding the proper environment for raising children. Mencius's father died when he was very young. His mother raised her son alone. They were very poor. At first they lived by a cemetery, where the mother found her son imitating the paid mourners in funeral processions. Therefore the mother decided to move. The next house was near a market in the town. There the boy began to imitate the cries of merchants (merchants were despised in early China). So the mother moved to a house next to a school. Inspired by the scholars and students, Mencius began to study. His mother decided to remain, and Mencius became a scholar. This story means that nurture is more influenced than the nature(http://terms.naver.com/entry.nhn?docId=1168439&cid=40942&categoryId=32972).

A word of criminal also confirm my argument. Shinchangwon(신창원) is a criminal who is killed 7 people. He said, " Nation use a lot of money and armies to catch me, but, there is a way not to make me like this. When I studied in elementary school, My class teacher said that you don't have to study, if you don't have enough money, shut up and go away. Since my teacher said like that, in my mind, the evils started to appear. If the teacher gives me the love, I won't be here." It means that nurture changes him. 
Through these supports, It is proved that Nurture plays more important role in shaping human behavior and characteristic(http://blog.naver.com/ddoo97/90102343712).

Counterpoising genetics and environmental influences is somewhat misleading, despite the partisan claims of people on each side. Many human traits and behaviors result from both genetic and environmental factors. Moreover, genetic and environmental influences on a trait are not simply additive. Genes “interact” with the environment. That is, genes provide the potential for a trait, but environmental conditions determine whether that potential will be realized. The same genetic codes may be expressed at different levels in different environments. Compare, for example, Asian immigrants in the United States to U.S.–born Asian Americans. U.S.–born Asians are twice as likely as immigrants to suffer from prostate cancer, and Asian-American adolescents born in the United States are more than twice as likely to be obese as Asian-American adolescents who recently immigrated to the United States. U.S.–born Asians and immigrant Asians are likely to have similar genetic predispositions for prostate cancer and obesity. The differences between the two groups in the prevalence of these disorders are, therefore, likely to be caused by environmental conditions such as lifestyle and diet. To understand gene-by environment
interactions, we must evaluate the estimated heritability of traits in particular environments. The term heritability is often misunderstood. The traditional twin study design generally produces a single heritability estimate. Heritability, however, is not a fixed property of a trait; it could vary from one population to another. For example, under different social circumstances, the heritability for cognitive development may differ. We could make one estimate of heritability based on a U.S. middle-class population and another based on a low-caste population in India. We would expect the former to be significantly larger than the latter. In a modern liberal democracy, individuals enjoy more access to educational opportunities than in a traditional aristocratic society. As a result, the differences in cognitive achievement in a modern democracy should be due more to genetic differences than in a traditional society. An egalitarian, democratic society can be thought of as a “normal” environment for estimating the heritability of cognitive development, where the “genetic potential” for cognitive development can be realized. We can compare heritability in a traditional or more hierarchical society against this potential.

Perhaps one of the challenges to discussing this topic is how to prove that the nurture plays more important role in shaping human behavior and characteristic. There is a related theory that proves my argument. Bandura's (1977) social learning theory states that aggression is a learnt from the environment through observation and imitation. This is seen in his famous bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1961). This saying refers to the legend that Mencius's mother moved house three times before finding a location that she felt was suitable for the child's upbringing. As an expression, the idiom refers to the importance of finding the proper environment for raising children. Shinchangwon(신창원) is a criminal who is killed 7 people. He said, " Nation use a lot of money and armies to catch me, but, there is a way not to make me like this. When I studied in elementary school, My class teacher said that you don't have to study, if you don't have enough money, shut up and go away. Since my teacher said like that, in my mind, the evils started to appear. If the teacher gives me the love, I won't be here." It means that nurture changes him. Through this supports, I think that nurture plays more important role in shaping human behavior and characteristic.

Bibliography

• http://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html
• http://terms.naver.com/entry.nhn?docId=1168439&cid=40942&categoryId=32972
• http://blog.naver.com/ddoo97/90102343712
• http://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html
• https://explorable.com/nature-vs-nurture-debate
• http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html