The Role of Nature and Nurture in Violent and Anti-Social Behavior

However, in recent years, the nature-nurture discourse has taken a different course and now focus on the gene-environment interaction. The view that human behavior is either controlled by the inherited genes or the environmental factors is considered old-fashioned. Modern developmental psychologists assert that both genes and environment have a significant contribution to human development and behavior. Sociologists maintain that the interaction between a person’s genotype and environment determines the phenotypic characteristics of that person. Nurture plays a critical role in the violent and antisocial behavior among the youths. Aggressive and antisocial behaviors are more likely to be learned based on the environment in which one is brought up than passed down from parents to their offspring. Environment shapes the phenotypic characteristics of a person and the resulting personality regardless of the genes inherited from the parents.

From this perspective, social learning plays a critical role in personality a person develops later in life. Arguably, the role of social learning in a child’s personality development was first advanced by a psychologist Albert Bandura who carried out an interesting study known as Bobo Doll Experiment on aggression in children. The study sought to assert that learning behaviors occur through observation and interaction with other people. This view demonstrates that it is the way parents bring up their children that determines their behaviors. Precisely, it is the environment the parents provide to their children at home that influence how their personality development as well as behavior. Admissibly, behaviors such as aggression and violence develop in children because parents fail to take up their primary responsibility of taking part in child development.

The genes passed down from parents to their children play an insignificant role in what the child becomes. In a home dominated by violence and abuse, children are likely to grow up knowing that it is normal to be violent to fellow children. But the attitudes and perceptions of mistrust have developed over the time through experience and learning. The man has been conditioned to believe that snakes are dangerous and every time he has an encounter with it, he finds ways of killing it lest it releases its venom to him. The propensity to harm animals which are thought to be dangerous like the snake is a learned experience which makes man elicit violent behaviors every time he encounters such animals. In this sense, both reasonable and irrational behaviors are learned from the environment in which a person is exposed to.

In “The Man, the Snake, and the Stone,” both creatures have learned not to trust each other. This behavior may not be exhibited in families with relative tranquility. As explained by Zaky, aggression may be an innate drive, but its manifestation is significantly influenced by the environment in which a child is brought up. In the recent times, violent behavior has been exhaustively examined in criminology with the focus on what elicits it in violent people. Evidence points out that human beings behave based on where they come from and the nature of environment in which they are brought up. The sociologists disregards the biologists’ view that human behavior is undergirded by his instincts. Experiments such as Bandura’s Bobo Doll on aggression in children back the claim that attributes such as violent and antisocial behaviors are acquired through learning.

The children who are more exposed to violent environments (violent doll) exhibited more violent behaviors while those who were subjected to the less violent environment were less violent when they were left alone. It is evident that nurture determines who a person develops to be. Generally, there are overwhelming evidence affirming the claim that an environment in which an individual is brought up shapes their personality. Works Cited Bandura, Albert, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Shah, Idries. “Two Islamic Tales. ” The Little Brown Reader. Edited by Marcia Stubbs and Sylvan Barnet, Fifth Edition, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1989, pp. Zaky, Eman Ahmed.