I was just wondering about this whole nature vs. nurture debate. I mean, it seems to me like there aren't really many developmental psychologists (or just people in general) who think that human behavior is due to only one of the two extremes. Most would probably say it's a mixture of the two... I realize that "nature vs nurture" is a rather large, nonspecific topic, which can one could relate to many of the other topics we've discussed in class so far.
But I guess specifically, I recently got to thinking about how developmental psychologists study certain traits, and then make a reasoned determination as to whether they are more genetically heritable, more socially conditioned, or both. Like Steven Pinker, for example, can classify several personality traits as being in either camp: "concrete behavioral traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture—which language one speaks, which religion one practices, which political party one supports—are not heritable at all. But traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments—how proficient with language a person is, how religious, how liberal or conservative—are partially heritable."
What puzzles me is how a researcher would define a personality trait. And how they would then accurately rate a person according to that trait. It seems inaccurate to lump all of the possible positions on the vast spectrum of human emotion or temperment into a few representative categories. It makes me wonder how a person would ever rate a thing like intelligence. How can you classify something as either genetically heritable or socially conditioned when the definition of the trait varies from person to person? Wouldn't the researcher's unique perspective inherently bias their interpretation?
Anyway, that's just something I was wondering about.
