These are comprehensive notes for Chapter 2 of the prescribed book (Social Psychology: South Africa (1st Edition)) for SLK 220. They are very detailed and well-organised and contain diagrams. I've also used colour to make them more visually appealing to study from
Nature, Nurture and Social Behaviour
➢ We refer to nurture as the guiding principles that guide the way an individual lives his or her life.
➢ An individual’s nurturing is based on many factors, including religion, culture, geographic location, race, gender
and family upbringing, parenting styles, sibling interaction and schooling
o Many researchers and psychologists argue that the way we are nurtured is even more influential than
the individual’s innate nature, although this has been widely debated and contested
Explaining the psyche
• One approach to understanding how people think, feel and act is to try to understand what the human psyche is
designed for.
• The psyche is a broad term for mind, including emotions, desires, perceptions and indeed all psychological
processes.
• If the psyche was designed to do something in particular, then nature and culture designed it for that purpose. If
we can learn what the purpose is, then we can understand people much better.
• The nature explanations say that people are born a certain way: their genes, hormones, brain structure and other
processes dictate how they will choose and act.
• The cultural explanations focus on what people learn from their parents, from society and from their own
experiences.
• In recent years, some researchers have stressed that both nature and culture have real influences. However, the
most common resolution tends to favour nature as more important, because nature is indispensable
• Frans de Waal proposed that the argument should be waged between whether a particular behaviour is the direct
result of nature or comes from a combination of nature and culture
• Your body has to perceive what is happening, your brain has to understand events, and your body has to carry out
your decisions – and brain and body are both created by nature ▪ nature comes first, and culture builds on what
nature has provided
• This book, however, favours the view that nature and culture have shaped each other. In particular, nature has
prepared human beings specifically for culture
• The characteristics that set humans apart from other animals include language, a flexible self that can hold
multiple roles, and an advanced ability to understand each other’s mental states. These characteristics are mainly
there to enable people to create and sustain culture. This interaction between nature and culture is the key to
understanding how people think, act and feel.
Nature defined
• Nature is the physical world around us, including its laws and processes. It includes the entire world that would be
there even if no human beings existed
• Those who explain human behaviour using nature invoke the sorts of processes that natural sciences have shown.
▪ Neuroscientists look for explanations in terms of what happens inside the brain (chemical reactions,
electrical activity).
▪ Behaviour geneticists seek to understand behaviour as the result of genes and show that people are born
with tendencies to feel and act in certain ways
▪ Advocates of nature in psychology turn to evolutionary theory to understand behaviour patterns
Evolution, and doing what’s natural
• Over the past two decades, many social psychologists have begun looking to the theory of evolution to help
explain social behaviour.
• The theory of evolution, proposed by the British biologist Charles Darwin in the 1800s, focuses on how change
occurs in nature.
, ▪ Over thousands of years, a plant or animal may evolve into a somewhat different kind of creature.
▪ Human beings and the great apes evolved as part of the same family tree.
▪ Human beings may be different from all other animals, but we are animals nonetheless.
- As such, we have many of the same wants, needs and problems that most other animals have
(food and water on a regular basis, preferably a couple of times every day, sleep, warmth,
shelter,air, ways to recover from injury and illness)
- Our interactions with others are sometimes characterised by sexual desire, competition, aggressive
impulses, family ties or friendly companionship.
• An important feature of most living things, including animals and thus humans, is the drive to prolong life. There
are two ways to do this.
▪ Obviously, one way is to go on living. - Death has always been a disturbing threat, and beliefs that death is
not the end but merely a transition into a different kind of life, whether as a ghost, a spirit in heaven, or a
reincarnated person, have been found all over the earth since prehistoric times.
▪ The other important feature is reproduction: life makes new life. - In fact, you might say that nature was
unable to create an immortal being and therefore settled on reproduction as the only possible strategy to
enable any form of life to continue into the future.
• Change is another common trait of living things.
▪ Each living thing changes as it grows older, but more important forms of change occur from one generation
to the next: children are different from their parents.
▪ Nature produces changes that are essentially random.
▪ Complicated processes that mixes the genes of two parents to produce a unique set of genes in the baby
sometimes produce novel outcomes in the form of new traits.
▪ As a result, some random changes will disappear, whereas others will endure.
▪ The process of natural selection decides which traits will disappear and which will continue.
• Natural selection has two criteria: survival and reproduction.
▪ A trait that improves survival or reproduction will tend to last for many generations and become more
common.
▪ A trait that reduces one’s chances for survival or reproduction will probably not become common.
▪ Survival means living longer.
- Darwin’s contemporary, Herbert Spencer, created the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe
natural selection.
- Animals compete against each other to survive.
- Survival depends in part on the circumstances in your environment. - Survival is important mainly
as a means to achieve reproduction.
▪ Reproduction means producing babies, though the babies also have to survive long enough to reproduce.
- Reproductive success consists of creating many offspring who will in turn create many offspring.
- Nature judges you by how many grandchildren you produce.
- Mutation: that is, a new gene or combination of genes
• Much of the recent work in evolutionary theory has focused on gender differences
▪ evolution would likely select men to want more sex partners than women want. A woman can only have
about one baby a year no matter how many men she has sex with, but a man can father dozens of children
each year if he has sex with many women.
▪ Current research suggests that this pattern is found all over the world, in many different cultures: men
desire more sex partners than women.
• Biological evolution produces changes through causal processes depending entirely on random changes to physical
elements, such as genes.
▪ The person (or other creature) is programmed to respond a certain way. Crucially, nothing has to be
thought, understood, or said in order for these changes to occur.
▪ That is, meaning has nothing to do with it.
▪ Molecules, chemicals, electrical impulses in the body and other physical mechanisms produce the results.
• Behaviour changes because the physical makeup of the new-born individual is different. ▪ This is quite different
from how culture works.
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