“Nature and Nurture”

People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviour are formed. However, it is not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another is _________.

Social scientists are of course_________interested in these types of questions. They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviour. There are no clear answers yet, but two_________schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might expect, the two approaches are very different from each other, and there is a great deal of debate between_________of each theory. The controversy(争论) is often conveniently referred to as “nature and nurture”.

Those who_________the “nature” side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behaviour patterns are_________determined by biological factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics and behaviour is_________to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory states that our behaviour is predetermined to such a great degree that we are almost completely governed by our_________.

Supporters of the “nurture” theory, or, as they are often called, _________, claim that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. A behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, sees humans as beings whose behaviour is almost completely__________by their surroundings. The behaviorists’ view of the human being is quite mechanistic. They state that, like machines, humans respond to __________stimuli(刺激) as the basis of their behaviour.

Socially and politically, the consequences of these two theories are __________. In the US, for example, blacks often score below whites on standardized intelligence tests. This leads some “nature” supporters to conclude that blacks are genetically lower in status than whites are. Behaviorists, __________, say that the differences in scores are due to the fact that blacks are often robbed of many of the educational and other environmental advantages that whites enjoy, and that, as a result, they do not develop the same__________that whites do.

Neither of these theories can yet fully explain human behaviour. As a matter of fact, it is quite__________that the key to our behaviour lies somewhere between these two extremes and that the controversy will continue for a long time is certain.