Nature and nurture are significant contributors to personality development of individuals. Research is yet to establish the exact proportion of the contribution of the two aspects or sources of personality. However, what remains evident is that both elements hold a strong controversy over each other.
Nature refers to an individual’s inborn genetic characteristics especially those that are passed over from parents to their offspring. Nature starts impacting on an individual (shaping individuality and personality) as early as during the prenatal stages of life. By the time an individual is born, nature has already impacted on his or her behavior, personality, individuality and other aspects of his or her being ( Rothe, 2017). An illustration of nature is when an individual is born a genius that is inherent and evident among the parents.
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On the other hand, nurture refers to the role that an individual’s environment has on their personality (Kandler & Zapko-Willmes, 2017). Kandler and Zapko-Willmes add that a person is born without any percentage of nature contribution in their personality because nurture is entirely a product of environmental influence. An example of nurture influence is when an individual is brought up in an environment that deprives him or her opportunity to attend school and learn, hence missing an opportunity to practice learning and use of cognition. In this case, nurture (or environment) is said to have impacted negatively upon ones personality, thus reversing the initial natural state of an individual who was born a genius and had the potential to perform optimally in academics.
However, if an individual is born a genius and finds an academically supportive environment in which he or she grows, such an individual is certain of succeeding in future academic work. Therefore, nurture can have a positive or a negative impact on personality, regardless of whether an individual is born with particular traits or not.
To sum up, both nature (inheritance) and nurture (environment) contributes in giving us our personality. Because sometimes it is difficult to modify nature (Walker & Vetter, 2016), it is important that parents and caregivers work on making nurture better and supportive for the development of desirable personality traits.
References
Kandler, C., & Zapko-Willmes, A. (2017). Theoretical perspectives on the interplay of nature and nurture in personality development. In Personality development across the lifespan (pp. 101-115).
Rothe, J. P. (2017). The scientific analysis of personality . Routledge.
Walker, M., & Vetter, T. (2016). Personality Processes and Individual Differences: Changing the personality of a face: Perceived Big Two and Big Five personality factors modeled in real photographs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 110 (4), 609-624.
