Describe the nature vs. nurture controversy.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann, a popular newspaper columnist, criticized the Army Alpha and Beta tests as having a great potential for abusing the psychological testing process—a process that could be of great benefit to the Army.
• Like others, Lippmann questioned whether intelligence tests such as the Army Alpha and Beta tests actually measured “intelligence” and whether intelligence was determined by heredity (or innate) or through life experiences (or learned).
• The heredity or experience question is what we refer to as the nature-versus-nurture controversy.
• Seventeenth-century philosophers such as René Descartes may have supported that intelligence occurs naturally and is influenced little by the environment.
• Philosophers such as John Locke likely would have supported that we are born with a “blank slate,” or tabula rasa, and our environment shapes our intelligence.