Hoorcollege 1 History of nature vs nurture
Nature: genetic influences, programmed by our DNA, all that is inherited from our parents (short
term)/ancestors (long term)
Nurture: environmental influences, varying from parents and family, to education, to living in urban-
non urban place, to accidents/illnesses, to life events, to peers, to therapeutics, even to prenatal
circumstances, summarized as environmental influences
John Locke (1632-1704)
• Individuals are born without built in mental content, they are ‘tabula rasa’
• All knowledge comes from experience
• All behavioral traits are formed by nurture
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Gifted man…: Geographer, statistician (founder of correlation, standard deviation), meteorologist
(first weather map), tropical explorer, contributor to criminology (classifying fingerprints as
identifier) and geneticist!
(Uncle is Charles Darwin)
‘Hereditary Genius’ (1869)
Galton became interested in human abilities, were they inherited?
• Method: He studied relatives of ‘eminent men’, arguing that when human ability was heritable,
there should be more eminent men among the relatives than among the general population.
• Result: Indeed, this was the case. Family of the eminent men were more often eminent themselves,
compared to the relatives of a random group of individuals. Additionally, the numbers of eminent
men dropped off as a function of the degree of relatedness.
• Conclusion: human (cognitive) abilities are heritable
Conditioning: Pavlov Response
•Animal research (dogs, pigeons, rats, monkeys)
1890: ‘Pavlov response’ by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
Behavior can be conditioned: reward positive behavior, punish negative behavior
1. Stimulus: food Response dog: saliva
2. Stimulus: food + sound Response dog: saliva
3. Stimulus: sound Response dog: saliva
Behaviorism
• Psychological concept introduced by
Watson (1878-1958) and Skinner (1904-1990)
‘The Behaviorism Manifest’(1913)
Nature: genetic influences, programmed by our DNA, all that is inherited from our parents (short
term)/ancestors (long term)
Nurture: environmental influences, varying from parents and family, to education, to living in urban-
non urban place, to accidents/illnesses, to life events, to peers, to therapeutics, even to prenatal
circumstances, summarized as environmental influences
John Locke (1632-1704)
• Individuals are born without built in mental content, they are ‘tabula rasa’
• All knowledge comes from experience
• All behavioral traits are formed by nurture
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Gifted man…: Geographer, statistician (founder of correlation, standard deviation), meteorologist
(first weather map), tropical explorer, contributor to criminology (classifying fingerprints as
identifier) and geneticist!
(Uncle is Charles Darwin)
‘Hereditary Genius’ (1869)
Galton became interested in human abilities, were they inherited?
• Method: He studied relatives of ‘eminent men’, arguing that when human ability was heritable,
there should be more eminent men among the relatives than among the general population.
• Result: Indeed, this was the case. Family of the eminent men were more often eminent themselves,
compared to the relatives of a random group of individuals. Additionally, the numbers of eminent
men dropped off as a function of the degree of relatedness.
• Conclusion: human (cognitive) abilities are heritable
Conditioning: Pavlov Response
•Animal research (dogs, pigeons, rats, monkeys)
1890: ‘Pavlov response’ by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
Behavior can be conditioned: reward positive behavior, punish negative behavior
1. Stimulus: food Response dog: saliva
2. Stimulus: food + sound Response dog: saliva
3. Stimulus: sound Response dog: saliva
Behaviorism
• Psychological concept introduced by
Watson (1878-1958) and Skinner (1904-1990)
‘The Behaviorism Manifest’(1913)
