Essential Questions

[mikaelacoop]

Week 1:

1.When are we not responsible for our own beliefs or behaviors?

The point at which we are not responsible for our own beliefs is when we are uninformed of the consequences that inevitably come with them. Another case of this is when we are misinformed of certain details of a situation. Just like in the situation of the criminals in the book, misinformation can cause unintended circumstances and actions.

2. Which is more important to a person's development: nature or nurture?

I would argue that nurture is more crucial to a person's development.  Nurture is most commonly based on the type of environment in which a person is raised. A person's environment can greatly influence many aspects of their life as adults. For example, someone who has been raised in a broken home, there are studies that show that a person will have trouble forming relationships in their adult life, a result from the conditions experienced in their childhood environment. Perry Smith, a criminal in the book, grew up in an environment that was very unhealthy for a child. Some psychologists would say that the type of environment that Perry grew up in led him to the life of crime he leads in the present.

3. To what extent are we "products of our environment"?

We are all like our parents in one way or another, mirroring their accents and methods of handling problems, thus reflecting the way our parents acted around us in our household environment. We all tend to act like our parents, only because we spent so much time with them in our key years of development (our childhood). In this aspect we are very much products of our environment. An aspect that would say otherwise would be a situation such as Truman Capote's. Like Perry Smith, he too grew up in an unhealthy home environment, but he did not result to the ways he experienced growing up , he made a better life for himself. This contradicts the idea that we are all completely products of our environment, although Smith and Capote do form a strange relationship, supporting the idea that people from similar backgrounds can somewhat relate to each other. This shows that the environment that the two grew up in did have some affect on them as adults, drawing them together.

[Cheyenne Lee]

I agree but I also think that age is a factor. Our parents would teach us their beliefs and we didn't have a say in what to believe. As toddlers I don't think we were responsible for our behaviors because it was considered ok to act that way because of our age. But as we've gotten older I think we're more responsible because we know right from wrong and have a say in our beliefs.

[aliviasteffen]

I agree too, that nurture is more important that nature, as I said in my response, parents play a crucial role in the development of their children. But I also believe in the fact that sometimes, when a child grows up in a poisonous environment, it can't lead them to want to better themselves and not be like how people in their family are. As you see with Truman Capote, Capote grew up with a life full of neglection and loneliness and ended up a successful man around other famous authors such as Harper Lee.

[displayname]

Nurture refers to the environment's effect on our psyche. The environment composes your parents and you among other things. All actions you and your parents make are at least in some way directly related to the environment. The environment had dominion of these things even before you or your parents were born. Therefore, nature is a subset of nurture, and the question of nature vs. nurture is irrelevant.

For a more concrete example, fetal alcohol syndrome has psychological effects on how are brains are when we're born, yet fetal alcohol syndrome is clearly nurture.

As we approach an era where we will have dominion over nature, question will shift from "nature vs nurture?" to "is it moral for us to rewire this brain?"