Psychology

# Great Debates

## Nature vs. Nurture

The question at the heart of this debate is whether **nature**, meaning heritage and genetical disposition determines such things as personality and character traits of a person or **nurture**, understood as education and environment.

Walter Mischel, the creator of the famous  Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is one of advocates of the now common theory of the interplay between nature and nurture in determining a person's character and personality. As he says: “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation. The two influences are completely interrelated.”

# Studies and Experiments

## The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

In this now famous experiment the experimenter sits a child in a room and gives it either a tray of sweets or simply a marshmallow, hence the name of the experiment. He then tells the kid that it can either eat the marshmallow now or wait for a few minutes until he comes back and then have two. Footage of experiments like in this video show the different mechanisms children find to resists the temptation. Some look away, others touch it and yet others stare at it longingly. The experiment aims at testing the need for immediate gratification in the children. However, after initially only testing for the different coping strategies, experimenter Walter Mischel, creator of the experiment then went further on using the results to deduce the likely future development of these children.

The article Don't - the secret of self-control gives an overview of the development of the experiment and its results and highlight some of the main findings: "Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds." In that sense the experiment tests self-control itself and the way in which it affects intelligence and aptitudes.

Walter Mischel himself is an advocate of the "if-then" pattern, relating behavior to context. **If** certain circumstances prevail, **then** a certain behavior follows. "One of Mischel’s favorite metaphors for this model of personality, known as interactionism, concerns a car making a screeching noise. How does a mechanic solve the problem? He begins by trying to identify the specific conditions that trigger the noise. Is there a screech when the car is accelerating, or when it’s shifting gears, or turning at slow speeds? Unless the mechanic can give the screech a context, he’ll never find the broken part. Mischel wanted psychologists to think like mechanics, and look at people’s responses under particular conditions."

# Typical Problems and Fallacies

## Reliance on Self-Reports

In self-reports, as the name itself suggests, the experimenter is entirely dependent on the willingness of the person giving the self-report to disclose details giving the experimenter insight into that person's life and thus renders results to the experiment. Hence, self-reports can be affected by a series of biases all relating to the fact that there is a considerable distortion when people give accounts of themselves, apart from biases resulting from the formulation of the respective questions and similar biases in the set-up of the experiment.

# References

1. ↑  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/18/dont-2
2. ↑  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/18/dont-2