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People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed. It is not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another petitive.
Social scientists are, of course, extremely interested in these types of questions. (61) They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviors. There are no clear answers yet, but two distinct schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might expect, the two approaches are very different from each other. The controversy is often conveniently referred to as nature vs. nurture.
(62) Those who support the nature side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are largely determined by biological factors. (63) That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics and behavior is central to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory maintains that our behavior is predetermined to such a great degree that we are pletely governed by our instincts.
Those who support the nurture theory, that is, they advocate education, are often called behaviorists. They claim that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. A behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, sees humans as beings whose behavior is pletely s