The Nature-Nurture Debates
Bridging the Gap

Dale Goldhaber reframes the nature-nurture debates, providing fresh insight into old and persistent questions of human behavior and development.

Dale Goldhaber (Author)

9780521148795, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 9 July 2012

188 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.32 kg

"...this book provides a useful review of the history of thought about the different influences on human development that might well provide the basis for an interesting undergraduate course..."
--Dr. Susan E. F. Chipman, PsycCRITIQUES

How is it possible that in more than one hundred years, the nature-nurture debate has not come to a satisfactory resolution? The problem, Dale Goldhaber argues, lies not with the proposed answers, but with the question itself. In The Nature-Nurture Debate, Goldhaber reviews the four major perspectives on the issue - behavior genetics, environment, evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory - and shows that the classic, reductionist strategies (behavior genetics and environmental approaches) are incapable of resolving the issue because they each offer a false perspective on the process of human development. It is only through a synthesis of the two holistic perspectives of evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory that we will be able to understand the nature of human behavior.

1. Issues and questions
2. A brief history lesson
3. The proxy debate: a primer on methodology and analysis
4. A classic debate
5. A new debate
6. So what?
7. Now what?

Subject Areas: Philosophy & theory of education [JNA], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Child & developmental psychology [JMC], Philosophy of mind [HPM]