The Influence Of Environment On Human Development

A major concern of Psychologists is whether our development is influenced by human genetics, the environment were born into, or interactions between our genetics (nature) and environment (nurture), or to put simply learning vs instinct. To find a possible answer, we must look at how we start to grow in our childhood.
Before the times that we knew about genes, it was widely accepted our development was based on our environment, or the nurture element of the debate. In 1928, John B. Watson wrote Psychological Care of Infant and Child which is considered to be the ground works of behaviorism. His book focused on how children were raised with emphasis being placed growth of emotional habits, day and night care, and sex education. The nurture aspect

Most of his teaching we can observe every day in how parents bring up their children. If you are at the grocery store, it wouldn’t be an unlikely thing to see a child be prompted by a parent to give the cashier money as a means to show them how buy something.
In more recent years however, new evidence suggest that both nature of our genetics and nurture of our upbringing both play an equal role in our development from infant to adult. We can see how both of these factors play a part in our intelligence. In their article, Genetics and intelligence: What's new? Intelligence (written in 1997), Robert Plomin & Stephen A. Petrill give some new insight on the involvement of genetics intelligence level. Research of environmental genetics, a shared family environment, accounted the IQ levels of members of the family going through their childhood. The results showed that genetics of the human children stopped playing a major role once they hit adolescence. Interestingly however, the authors note that “the genetic factors contribute to measures of the environment and to the correlation between measures of the environment and IQ.”( Plomin, R., and Petrill, S.A. (1997). This new research gives a new insight of how genetics play into cognitive abilities in early childhood and

Burt, Brooke L. Slawinski, and Kelly L. Klump. They analyzed the anti-social behaviors of boys and girls with a hypothesis stating that antisocial behavior would be prevalent in boys rather than girls. Early report support this hypothesis, showing that girls having stronger genetic influences in females while males have a stronger environmental influences. However, both sexes have an equal chance of showing anti-social behavior, but they were not tested in subpopulations or in different situations. So a twin study was done at the Michigan State University Twin Registry on 1,030 child twin pairs. Half of the sampled twins had some sort of disadvantage, which would give the researcher more meaningful evaluation. It would allow them to observe if these disadvantage would have an effect the etiology of advantaged verses disadvantage between the two sexes. They also analyzed whether the etiology of teacher figures versus maternal figures. The results were that there was no etiological difference when place advantage verse disadvantage situation. However, when the placed with a teaching environment, there was a slight difference. It showed the girls would be more influenced by their genetics and boys would be more influenced by their environment when it came to anti-social behaviors. So while there might be any difference in etiology when in a public place between boys and girls,