essay on assessing to what extent social and cognitive psychology consider human behaviour to be determined by nurture (8 marks), including 3 PEEL paragraphs and a balanced conclusion discussing both sides of the debate for top band marks.
this is for exam preparation and provides a structure to p...
To what extent do social psychology and cognitive psychology
consider human behaviour to be determined by nurture? (12)
Social and cognitive psychology may consider human behaviour to be
largely determined by nurture. This refers to the external influences within
one’s own environment that are beyond the individual’s control. They include
upbringing, social pressure and education. Social impact theory explains how
people are passive receivers of others’ behaviour towards themselves and do
whatever social pressure makes them do. Milgram’s variation #17 showed
that participants were less obedient when other 2 rebel peer confederates
rebelled against the experimenter, thus demonstrating that the participants
behave according to what they experience in their environment. Similarly,
reconstructive memory proposes that retrieval of stored memories is an active
process of reconstruction based on one’s cultural expectations and previous
experiences. Bartlett’s serial reproduction of the war of the ghosts conveyed
that participants recalled some details of the story differently due to their
previous expectations. For example, they recalled fishing in the story instead
of hunting seals, thus showing that modern cultural norms which are present
in the environment, had an effect on their memory. This means that both
cognitive and social psychology may explain behaviour in terms of nurture.
On the other hand, the working memory model which proposes that short
term memory is subdivided into 4 components, demonstrates that everyone
has these components of short term memory. For example, case studies
about patients with brain damage show that different areas of the brain are
affected based on different types of information that the patients were able
to recall. This suggests that most people have these STM elements because
they are implied to be located in different brain areas which are shared by all
humans. This provides evidence for the role of nature in memory.
Social and cognitive psychology may not consider behaviour to be
completely determined by nurture as there is also some effect from nature.
Nature refers to biological factors which are internal to each individual that
may drive certain behaviour. For example, replications of Milgram’s (1963)
experiment across countries conveys that obedience levels across cultures
are similar, suggesting that obedience may be an innate part of human
behaviour as it has not been shown to be affected by culture or gender
which are environmental factors. Similarly, the multi store model which
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