SLUniverse Forums

Aimee Weber

Nature vs. Nurture vs. Force of Will

What makes us who we are and behave as we do? While there may be other forces in play, I think most people break it down to various weighted combinations of these three elements:

Nature - Genetics. How much of our behavior are we born with? Some core behaviors are practically the definition of being human such as our sentience and our predisposition towards language. It has also been shown that some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction and addictive behavior. How about anger and poor impulse control? Can you breed people to be violent, passive, or good-natured just as we breed dogs?

Nurture - The environment. This includes the way your parents raised you, the neighborhood where you grew up, your role models, the kind of entertainment, reading, & games you were exposed to, all the abuse you got, and all the encouragement you got. What percentage of people raised in the projects become software engineers or lawyers and what percentage of people raised in happy suburbs join gangs?

Force of Will - This is a certain special something that can't be measured. The idea is that if you take genetically identical twins, and raise them in identical environments, they are not destined to exhibit the same behaviors. Instead, if one twin just tries hard enough, they can overcome any limitations of their nature & nurture to do anything they want/need in ways that their identical twin may simply not choose to do. So how different CAN these twins turn out if indeed their genetics and environment were identical?


So here is the question to ponder, which of these three factors have the most and least effect on our behavior?

Here are a few examples (from my point of view):

Profiler's Answer:
Nature=30% Nurture=55% Will=15%

Like Clarice in the Silence of the Lambs, FBI profilers look for patterns of behavior to help catch criminals. They look at who was murdered, how it was done, what weapon was used, how the body was left, etc. From this info they can determine (with striking accuracy) the probable race, age, gender, socioeconomic background, family background, and employment history of the perp. It's not psychic work, it's simply playing the odds given that people from similar backgrounds commit similar crimes in similar ways.


Religious Answer:
Nature=5% Nurture=5% Will=90%

If you're a spiritual person and believe that God is testing us, you have to believe that Will supersedes all. Otherwise your path to/away from salvation will have already been determined by your parents and your birthplace. This would make the great test irrelevant. Whether you were raised by loving family in a religious community, or locked in a closet and beaten until you were 18, the choices you make will always be a matter of will overcoming adversity.


So there are two examples. How would you break it down?

Briana Dawson

Nature=30% Nurture=50% Will=20%

Polymorphous

I think most people most of the time are probably around the profilers percentages.

Nature=30% Nurture=55% Will=15%


But I wonder if these are really all that static. Perhaps people can alter their percentages. The idea behind "enlightenment" could be conceptualized as an awareness of the influences of Nature and Nurture and the increase of concious choice (Will).

__________________
-Polymorphous Projects in SL

Jessica Robertson

I don't believe the problem is able to be formulated as
Nature + Nurture + Willpower = 1

I believe that Nature + Nurture define a potential pattern for an individual.

That potential pattern can be changed or modified or suppressed by willpower.

Willpower can be due to social, religious, political, parental, environmental, etc... factors.

Which means 'willpower' is actually part of Nurture.

In other words, the desire to modify or change a behavior comes from Nurture.

So, we are back to: Nature + Nurture = 1

Jessica

Aimee Weber

I don't think this is a problem with my rating system, you are just assigning Will a value = 0% (which is valid!) In other words, what others perceive as will ... perhaps a soul or some intangible influence that occasionally or often overcomes nature & nurture, you see as simply a function of nature & nurture itself (and the people keen on "will" are fooling themselves.)

So Will = 0% and you can divide the rest between nature and nurture.



ADDED: I think the litmus test for a 0% will would be this. Take two genetically identical twins/clones. Raise them in FLAWLESSLY identical circumstances (assuming it can be done, this is a hypothetical.) If you believe they will grow up to make identical decisions (given identical nature & nurture) then Will = 0% would be the right answer.

Jessica Robertson

That works too!

I guess it should be, for me:

Nature: 40
Nurture: 60
Willpower: 0

Hey! This was my 100th post!

Jessica

Michael Bigwig

Nature: 30%
Nurture: 50%
Will: 20%

__________________
~Michael Bigwig
___________________Lead Designer, Glowbox Designs

Stankleberry Sullivan

Nature: 50%
Nurture: 50%
Willpower: 0%

Will is an illusion.

Jessyanne

Nature: 10%
Nurture: 40%
Willpower: 50%

__________________
Me

Picasa Albums

Cindy Claveau

I go with Jessica here. I think "willpower" is highly overrated in determining our reaction to situations and our growth as individuals. I would accept something closer to

Nature = 60%
Nurture = 40%
Willpower = 0%

We are the products of our environment and upbringing. Even those who claim to have broken out of the mold of their upbringing cannot deny the influence of their own genetics in shaping their personality.

I don't believe in predestiny either, and I think that's all "Willpower" is, but dressed in fancier semantical clothing.

__________________
"Treble is for pussies." - Saints Row 2 DJ

Aimee Weber

I'm honored it happened in my thread!!

Aimee Weber

One other thought that occurred to me was that these % will change as you get older. A newborn baby's behavior will likely be dictated entirely by her genetics rather than her 10 minutes of experience in her environment. When she becomes 18, she will have years of experience that will override her genetics to some degree or another.

I think after the formative years are over, the shift from nature to nurture slows drastically such that the shift from age 0-18 could be in the 20-70% range while ages 19-60 will only see a slight shift of 1-5%.

So when putting your ideas down, for the sake of standardizing, maybe we should just consider somebody about the age of 20-30 years old.

Cocoanut Koala

I figure with identical twin/clones in flawlessly identical circumstances, you will get identical decisions - at first. Ultimately, there will be divergence.

I don't think of this in terms of free will, though, but more in terms of random goings off-center. For example, you can set up two identical this and thats - like maybe two identical metronomes, and yet there will eventually be variation and they won't be striking the same beat anymore.

And why? Possibly because nothing in the universe can ever BE identical. I mean, is anything? How tiny have we gotten in study? Could anything at all ever - theoretically, much less for any pragmatic purposes - be identical? A number is identical. But can a piece of biology, star matter, or anything not purely a mental construct be identical?

Then, too, I don't think "free will" can be subjected to manipulation as a variable in a study, as nature and nuture can.

In any case, perhaps because "free will' can't be analyzed as easily as circumstances of nature or nurture, the issue of free will was never a part of the equation when I was studying nature vs nurture, or even mentioned. (Is it now? Cause I'm not up on it any more, but I would be surprised if it is part of the academic issue at all.)

Anyway, when I was young, and studying psychology and child development, I was certain nurture was the overwhelmingly hugely important factor.

This was exciting, because I figured given any baby or any child, I could overcome practically anything through nurture. Cause I'd be such a good mom! Just raise the kid right, and you will get such and such a kid at the end! Well, you get the idea. (Not that I had expected to be "given" any baby at this time; I assumed I would have them myself. I meant, given any baby I might have had.)

But by the time we were applying for adoption, I had already spent a lot of time with lots of kids not my own. And I decided that nature was probably a lot more defining (and in many ways, limiting) than I had previously believed.

Around about that time, too, studies had come out, observing different temperaments in newborns, and all of that type of thing.

Anyway, one of the questions the social worker asked us was, "Do you believe more in nature or nurture?"

Well, I said, I used to believe it was mostly ALL nurture, but I have come to consider nature as playing a much stronger role than I previously believed. I think children have temperaments and traits that define them, to an extent; but you can still bring out the best of them and their own individual potential through nuture.

Who knows what would have been the "right" answer for the social worker? I still don't know.

Seems to me like it was kind of a trick question! That you (if you were talking to a social worker, trying to adopt) had better believe pretty strongly in nuture, or you might be the type who might say, "Oh, the kid is just a bad seed." On the OTHER hand, if you didn't accept the role nature plays, then you might be constantly trying to cram your adopted child into some sort of expectations he really isn't biologically/mentally cut out for.

Must have been an okay answer, though, cause we got the kids.

coco

__________________

ARABIAN NIGHTS by Shagz Anubis

Cocoanut Koala

P.S. Don't say it, Joshua!

Asher Bertrand

Hm. I don't think it's that simple. The percentages will be different according to the task or attribute at hand.

For example: Schizophrenia. This is a disease with a strong genetic component, but that also appears to be triggered. In other words, not everyone with the predisposition will get it. And according to some accounts, will power plays a role in the course of the disease. So that might be 50 percent nature, 30 percent nurture, 20 percent will power.

Now consider someone who knows many languages but struggled to learn them. Whatever natural gift for language there might exist wasn't there, but they had willpower in spades. That breakdown might be 10 percent nature, 30 percent nurture, 60 percent will.

As an aside, I thought on the first several readings of the topic that it said Nature vs. Nurture vs. Force of Wii

Jellin Pico

I agree that all 3 play a role in makin gus who we are, but I believe the percentages are different for everyone.

Here's a few devils advocate questions to ilustrate my point. A few may use exagerated circumstances to just get the idea across succinctly, forgive me.

The feral child. Abandoned at birth, raised by wolves. Certainly Nature, that is instinct, will have a huge impact on this person's life. So will Nurture, but which would be stronger? Nuture by canines? Sure, that can be fun at times I guess, but we're not wired for that, we're wired for human Nurture. Will? Who can say?

The deeply autistic child. The kind that has little contact with the outside world. Well, Nurture may have little to do with this person, since they are unable to connect normally. Nature? Because they have mental incapacities, they aren't acting in a completely natural way. Will? It can be argued that anything they do is simply acting out of Will.

The deep woods hill billy raised by a violent drunk in a huge family. Nature and Nurture would be scewed here certainly, but which would be the stronger?

The orphan raised in the institution. Again, where do the percentages lie here? Not nearly what most of us would call nurture here where in such a large institution even attention would be hard to come by.



For me, it's too complex a question and depends entirely on the individual

__________________
Dolphins ... The Smug Bastards of the Sea

Aimee Weber

I am going to put my numbers in.

Nature = 40%
Nurture = 60%
Will = 0%

Naturally it's a complex question involving many variables ... which is why we are dealing with percentages here.

Figuring out how a dice will land is an insurmountable mathematical challenge involving the properties of the materials used in the dice and the rolling surface, the exact initial position, rotation, initial velocity, and likely other extremely minute details such as air pressure, humidity, and vibrations from local sounds, etc. It may simply be impossible to calculate it ...

But %16. 666 of the time you are gonna role a 6.

Tyche Shepherd

Rock = 28%
Paper = 61%
Scissors = 11%

__________________

Ramonna Villota

Nature = 55%
Nurture = 10%
Will = 35%

__________________
Ramonna
Þú ert með andlit sem aðeins móðir getur elskað, Tík elskhugi kyssast minn munnur


http://www.flickr.com/photos/25968648@N08/

Aimee Weber

That's a combo I didn't expect. While I do think some folks would downplay the importance of Nurture, I figured most would do it in favor of Will rather than Nature.

So you think genetics plays the dominant role in determining who we are?

How about the good/evil twin thing?

Cocoanut Koala

We're suffering here from a lack of clear definition of "force of will." Some have thought of it purely in terms of making a choice; others think of it in terms of will power.

I don't think of it as a third branch of one organism, as it were, sharing limited sustenance - in other words, as things that must share a percentage, in any given instance.

Rather, I would think of each of the three as being on its own sliding scale, and can come into play independently, regardless of how much the other two are concurrently coming into play.

Thus, you could sometimes be functioning on a 30-30-40 basis, and at other times on a 30-10-40 basis, or a 28-99-67 basis.

***

I think of each of us as being a combination of nature and nurture, with the various combinations of each displaying in various percentages in different situations, each with different requirements. Free will is also a constant, and, interestingly, is itself often a product of both nature and nurture.

Definitions

Nature: Biology; genetic predispositions and tendencies; genetic determinations of the physical body; environment of the brain. Is there, period. (Barring surgical, pharmaceutical, or other physiological intervention.) Changes with age and maturity in predicable directions.

Nurture: The affect of upbringing and environment. Is also there, period; but is ever changing, with much less predictable (in our current scientific state, and for practical purposes, probably always) directions.

Free will: The ability to make a choice, when choices are seen. Is something which every human has at all times, unless the brain ceases to function. One exercises will power at every point of one's existance (unless, of course, one has no brain function), to the degree that one can. As an infant, one can decide to turn one's head. As a hunting adult, one can decide to pursue the prey along one path or the other.

Where need is not paramount, the brain is free to indulge in free choice play. And does, constantly; indeed, all creatures do.

Thus I don't consider the three things to ever amount to percentages of anything besides specific situations with specific requirements. And each is still on its own scale, with one perhaps being simply outdistanced by another in a given situation, which is running on its own scale.

Examples

Nature: Will the baby cry for food when it is hungry? Unless damaged beyond that capacity, the answer is predictably yes, due to nature alone. Even if given electric shocks and other extreme deterrents, creatures will attempt to fulfill vital requirements, due to nature alone.

Nurture: Will a toddler stomp his feet for a toy, or tug on a hem for it? Here, nurture could provide a much stronger, even obvious explanation, though nature - in the form of the toddler's innate temperament - can also play a huge role.

Free will: When the physiological necessities are satisfied, the brain is free to exercise much more whimsy - and whimsy could be a synonym for free will. But the CAPACITY for whimsy - for choice - is constantly available, unless overridden by need.

Argument

I have the free will to get up from this computer and do something else. You could TRY to maintain that the reason I'm sitting here was predetermined by a long, infinite, multitudinous series of minute changes in environment combined with my basic physiology that caused me to sit here now, at this moment.

But that would assume that a major capacity of the brain doesn't exist at all. It would, in fact, deny the brain's capacity to choose, even to choose arbitrarily. The fact is the brain does have that power, and MUST have that power. And on many (if not most) occasions, once all physical needs are met (which is most of the time), the brain weighs potentialities and chooses among them. This is the very definition of sentience.

***

Back up to your original post, Aimee, I don't know what on earth would make you think that religious people (or even whatever few religious people you have in mind) would conclude that, because they may believe in free will, nature and nurture (biology and environment) are irrelevant in human nature to the point of nonexistence. (For one thing, the three hardly pose either-or choices.)

Where do you get these ideas?

coco

Briana Dawson