Blog Post #2

This week in sociology we discussed the nature vs. nurture debate, which has always fascinated me. It is crazy to me that I could be who I am because that is just the way I was born, or I can be the way I am due to the way I was raised and what I was surrounded with in my early stages of life. An article on Very Well Mindwas written last November, discussing how this is one of the toughest arguments for psychologists to depict. They referenced Descartes saying “Genetic traits handed down from parents influence the individual differences that make each person unique” which I agree with more than other references saying that when we are born we are each a “blank slate.” 

I believe that everything we go through makes up so much of who we are and would strongly affect how we choose to go about certain situations that life could throw at us later in life, but things such as race, ethnicity, or even just the way we look could strongly sway us to one side of a situation rather than another. An example in this article is whether somebody with tons of academic success is smart because they are just born genetically smart or because they work for it. What about if a violent person is just born with violent tendencies, or did they grow up in an abusive household and that is all they know? Honestly these are very tough to decide. This could go either way and that is why psychologists have such a tough time deciding which outweighs the other. You never truly know what somebody grew up around, or if what they saw when they were 5 was truly what was going on. 

Psychologists that study these two different viewpoints are broken up into two separate categories. On one side, you have the biopsychologists who focus on our brain and the way neurotransmitters will affect our behavior, and how much they impact the way we look at situations. The other side of this debate is the social psychologists, who look at how what happens in your past, specifically when you are forming your social skills as a young child, or in today’s world of social media, and all other forms of pressure one would feel, that influences them one way or another into becoming who they are. 

This article does not say whether nature or nurture is the correct answer, in fact there may be no “correct” answer, as these both contribute to making us who we are. We are all unique, individual beings, who are all shaped so differently that we may never know what exactly it is that makes us who we are.