Nature Vs. Nurture

In both of my Master’s degrees (Psychology and Criminology) there was a common essay question; was behavior – in Criminology, offending - a result of nature or nurture? With crime in general, there really can be no direct linkage, as what is defined as a crime, is something that is socially constructed, and subject to change e.g., at one time crystal meth was legal in the US, and recently cannabis in many states has been decriminalized etc. However, if we get more specific, and ask a question about a particular behavior, such as aggression, that leads to violent offending, then we have a relevant discussion point i.e., are people born with a certain level of aggression that is “hard-wired”, or do they develop their level(s) of aggression based on their experiences, and interactions with the environment? Although, Criminology rarely touches upon an idea of “morality”, the same question could be re-phrased to ask, “are some people just born bad?” Though, it is far beyond the scope of a blog article to fully answer such questions, I want to present the arguments of two opposing schools of thought (Ethology and Behaviorism) concerning this question of aggression/violence being the result of nature or nurture, in order to better understand the roots of such behaviors.

               An Ethologist such as Konrad Lorenz, who in 1973 was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in “Physiology or Medicine” (along with two other prominent ethologists Niko Tinberg and Karl von Frisch), makes the argument, that human behavior is inherent e.g., a stimulus elicits an inbuilt response; a fixed action pattern (FAP), that is sometimes referred to as an “instinctive movement”. Lorenz and Tinberg believed that these FAPs gave animals, including humans an evolutionary advantage, as they were born already knowing how to respond to a threat or danger, without having to learn by trial and error e.g., a rat is born already knowing that the scent/smell of a cat signals danger – a 2001 experiment saw lab rats when exposed to a cat odor, spend 87% of their time in a “hide box” (a place of safety) during a 20-minute exposure, compared to 20% with a neutral odor. From an ethological perspective the fixed action pattern of a rat would be to hide, when exposed to the scent of a cat.

Behavioral Psychology (started by John Watson at the start of the 20^th Century) would make a different argument, stating that all behaviors are learned from the environment, and that there is no distinction between animal and human behaviors e.g., human behaviors could be inferred from animal ones; if a rat responds to a stimulus in a certain way, such as being exposed to a predator, then a human would have the same response. Behaviorism gave us the idea of “tabula rasa”, the idea that we are born with a “blank slate” that our behaviors are written on, as we learn them from our interactions with the environments, such as copying and imitating the actions of others when we see them respond in a certain way to certain stimuli e.g., we see someone recoil away from a snake, and so we learn that the snake is dangerous etc. Another big difference between these two schools (Behaviorism and Ethology), is the importance of context. Ethologists believe that the only way you can study behavior is in the environment where it is experienced e.g., a rat in a laboratory setting may behave differently to a rat in its natural environment. For Behaviorists, such as Watson, context was not so important.

As with most things both schools of thoughts got some things right and some things wrong. Monkeys and Apes have to learn how to look after their young, they are not born with the innate ability to do so. This is one of the reasons why there are so many parenting books, and why so many new parents buy them i.e., they understand that they don’t actually know what to do. It’s also the reason why the parents of new parents offer to help; there is an understanding that parenting is not a natural thing. This is also seen in the wild; monkeys and apes, with siblings that have had young, make better parents of their own babies because they have already seen how to be a parent. However, we don’t learn things at the same speed. We learn to be afraid of snakes at a far quicker rate than we might learn to be afraid of a puppy, and if at some point in our lives we are scared by puppies, we are much more likely to lose that fear (fear extinction), than we would our fear of snakes. It would seem that we have a degree of “prepared learning”, when it comes to creatures such as snakes and spiders etc. We aren’t instinctively scared of them, but their shapes, colors, patterns/markings, and movement make us more wary of them than other creatures. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. If we had a hard-wired fear of snakes, and snakes evolved to somehow be different, then our fear would no longer be applicable, however the threat/danger would still remain. By having this prepared learning, we could adapt to “new” snake, as its evolutionary changes would be small enough that we could still identify it as a potential threat/danger.

Rather than try to make nature versus nurture a binary argument, it is better to look at how the two interact together to produce behavioral responses to stimuli. There is certainly evidence that nature has an effect e.g., certain dog breeds are bred for aggression etc. However, at the same time “aggressive” dog breeds don’t always produce aggressive dogs – only a very small number of pitbulls, ever develop the levels of aggression for dogfighting, and their aggression can be unlearnt when rehabilitated. Not every child who grows up in a violent household or neighborhood, will become a violent offender, and equally there are those who grow up in middle class, loving and stable environments, with every advantage who go on to commit the most heinous crimes. We are certainly not blank slates, but neither are we hard-wired automatons.