01 Section A, Key question 2 - The nature and nurture debate (part 2)

Nature, nurture and socialisation

The nature and nurture debate concerns how biological influences and experience contribute to human behaviour.

Nature refers to biological influences, including inherited genetic characteristics and the capacities of the developing body and brain. A nature explanation might ask whether inherited differences contribute to differences in temperament, such as a tendency to respond cautiously to unfamiliar situations. It does not automatically mean that every action is present at birth or cannot change.

Nurture refers to environmental influences, including upbringing, education, relationships and cultural experience. It includes much more than a parent's deliberate teaching. Friends' reactions, repeated media messages and the opportunities a person encounters can all affect what they learn.

A norm is an expectation about appropriate behaviour; a value is a belief about what is desirable or important. Socialisation helps connect an expectation to everyday action: a child observes what others do, receives approval or correction, and gradually learns what counts as acceptable. Learning does not stop in childhood. Joining a workplace or a new friendship group may involve learning new expectations.

Consider this original teaching example: a child becomes hungry and asks for food using a phrase adults have taught them. Hunger involves the body; the particular language and polite phrase depend on social experience. Saying that the whole event is either biological or learned would miss part of the explanation.

Biological determinism treats behaviour as fixed by biological characteristics, leaving little or no meaningful role for social experience. An equally absolute nurture account would treat biological capacities and differences as irrelevant. A careful explanation asks what each influence contributes, and how they work together. This is an account of interaction between biology and experience, rather than a decision that all behaviour must belong to one side.

Biological capacity and cultural expression

Having the capacity to perform an action does not specify the cultural form that action takes.

A biological capacity is an ability made possible by bodily and mental processes. A cultural expression is the particular socially learned way that an ability is used or given meaning. For example, physical movement makes a greeting possible, but the circumstances in which a bow, wave or handshake is appropriate depend on learned expectations. These examples illustrate possibilities; they do not imply that everyone in a country uses the same greeting.

Marcel Mauss developed this distinction through his account of techniques of the body: socially transmitted ways of using the body. In a lecture delivered in 1934 and published in 1936, he drew on observations and comparisons of bodily practices. He described changes in how swimming and diving were taught within his own lifetime, as well as differences between groups. His argument was that even activities that appear simply physical involve acquired techniques. Mauss, Les techniques du corps.

The sociological reasoning is that a change in teaching can produce a change in bodily practice without requiring a new biological capacity. Instruction, imitation and repeated practice are mechanisms through which a cultural pattern becomes a familiar habit. What later feels automatic can therefore have a history of learning.

Mauss's observations are useful examples, but they are not a controlled experiment or a representative survey of every society. His comparisons do not establish that every difference in movement is cultural. Bodies, environments, equipment and opportunities can also differ. The defensible conclusion is that bodily behaviour can be socially learned, not that biology contributes nothing.

Here is an original worked example. Two equally able students join different drama groups. One group teaches performers to greet an audience with a bow; the other teaches a raised-hand greeting. Their ability to move allows both actions. Demonstration and correction explain why each student comes to use one action in that setting. The same ability can support different learned practices.

Language, learning and social interaction

Language illustrates how learning capacities operate through social contact rather than in isolation.

A language is a shared system for communicating meaning. It can be signed as well as spoken: sign languages are languages, not merely gestures accompanying speech. A person's capacity to learn language is different from knowing a particular community's vocabulary and ways of combining expressions. Socialisation provides contact with other language users, while learners also contribute to what a community develops.

Senghas, Kita and Özyürek's 2004 study examined the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language after deaf children were brought together in schools from the late 1970s. Researchers compared 30 deaf signers in three groups according to when they first encountered the language, and 10 hearing Spanish speakers' gestures. Participants watched a cartoon and retold it to a peer; researchers recorded and analysed descriptions of movement. Later groups of signers more often separated the manner of movement, such as rolling, from its path, such as moving downwards, and combined these elements in sequences. Senghas, Kita and Özyürek, original study.

This supports the importance of a communicating community: the language developed through continued use and transmission. Yet children also reorganised expressions rather than only reproducing the surrounding gestures. The authors argued that learning capacities help create linguistic structure. The study therefore challenges both the idea that a full community language simply appears without social contact and the idea that learners only passively copy everything they encounter.

The comparison did not randomly allocate children to different histories of language exposure or measure particular genes. It cannot calculate a precise biological contribution to language, nor establish that this community represents all language learning. Its value is to reveal how social interaction and children's learning processes can combine.

For sociological explanation, follow the connection: opportunities to communicate allow a shared practice to develop; learners acquire and modify it; later learners encounter the changed practice. Socialisation can reproduce culture while also contributing to cultural change.

Genetic evidence without determinism

Evidence for biological influence must be interpreted without turning it into a claim that culture or change is impossible.

Identical twins originate from the same fertilised egg and have very similar genetic material. Comparing twins raised in different homes can help researchers investigate biological influences while reducing the influence of growing up in the same household.

In the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, Bouchard and colleagues reported in 1990 on a continuing project that assessed more than 100 sets of separated twins or triplets. Participants completed intensive psychological and physiological assessments. On several measures, including personality and temperament, identical twins raised apart were about as similar as identical twins raised together. The authors interpreted the pattern as evidence that genetic differences contribute to differences between people. Bouchard and colleagues, original abstract.

However, different households are not necessarily wholly different environments. Twins can share wider cultural conditions and prenatal experiences; some also had contact before assessment. Recruitment was not a random sample of all people. These issues matter when judging how confidently similarities can be attributed to genes or generalised. The researchers considered environmental similarity and contact, so a criticism must engage with the design rather than merely assert that no controls existed. Study design and discussion, original article.

Heritability concerns how much variation in a measured trait within a population is associated with genetic variation. It does not divide an individual's behaviour into a genetic percentage and an environmental percentage. Its estimate depends on the population and environmental conditions, and it does not show that a trait cannot change. National Library of Medicine, heritability explanation.

The distinction is important for socialisation. A tendency to be sociable is different from knowing the rules of conversation in a particular group. In an original example, someone keen to interact still learns when to speak in a meeting and how to address unfamiliar people. Even if biological influences help explain a disposition, they do not supply every norm through which it is expressed.

This also prevents a faulty argument about groups: evidence about individual variation within a studied population does not, by itself, explain a difference between social groups. A separate explanation and relevant evidence are needed.

Judging evidence and research ethics

A sound judgement about nature and nurture connects a claim to what the evidence can establish and how it was obtained.

Start by identifying the behaviour to be explained. A claim about the capacity for communication differs from a claim about a particular greeting convention. Then identify the proposed mechanism: inherited dispositions, imitation, instruction or reactions from other people. Finally, examine whether the evidence distinguishes this mechanism from plausible alternatives.

For example, an original scenario describes a child adopting a new conversational style after joining a club. The change is consistent with learning through peers. Interviews about when and how it was learned, combined with observations of the group, could strengthen that account. The change alone is not conclusive: the child might also have encountered that style at home or online. An association is a relationship between observations; it does not by itself establish causation, meaning that one influence produced the other. Asking about competing explanations improves the argument.

Claims based on children raised with very limited social contact need particular caution. Such circumstances may involve deprivation, trauma or illness as well as limited opportunities to learn. Researchers cannot assume that a difficulty has a single cause, and a rare case cannot establish how every child develops. Creating harmful isolation to separate nature from nurture would be ethically unacceptable.

Research ethics concerns responsibilities towards those involved in or affected by research. The British Sociological Association's 2017 guidance emphasises protection from harm, informed consent and privacy; research with children requires particular care, including seeking the child's consent as well as the parent's. Consent means understanding what participation involves and having a genuine choice. Consent alone does not justify a harmful design. BSA ethical guidance.

Ethical evidence can be gathered through voluntary interviews and observation of ordinary learning, with appropriate permission, confidentiality and the ability to refuse participation. Confidentiality means protecting information entrusted to the researcher. Researchers should report cultural variation accurately and avoid treating a whole community as if all its members behave alike. This is both an ethical responsibility and a way to avoid overstating the evidence.

The resulting judgement should specify the contribution being supported: biological capacities make some behaviour possible; socialisation helps explain its shared cultural form; learners can actively interpret and change that form. Evidence may strengthen one part of this account without providing a complete explanation of every behaviour.