TEXT F People have wondered for a
long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed. It’s not easy to
explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is
cooperative and another is competitive. Social scientists are,
of course, extremely interested in these types of questions. 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 one another, and there is a great deal of debate between
proponents of each theory. The controversy is often conveniently referred to as
"nature/nurture". Those who support the "nature" side of the
conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are largely
determined by biological and genetic factors. 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 almost completely governed by
our instincts. Proponents of the "nurture" theory, or, as they
are often called, behaviorists, 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 al- most
completely shaped by their surroundings. The behaviorists’ view of the human
being is quite mechanistic; they maintain that, like machines, humans respond to
environmental stimuli as the basis of their behavior. The social
and political implications of these two theories are profound. In the United
States, for example, blacks often score below whites on standardized
intelligence tests. This leads some "nature" proponents to conclude that blacks
are genetically inferior to whites. Behaviorists, in contrast, say that the
differences in scores are due to the fact that blacks are often deprived of many
of the educational and other environmental advantages that whites enjoy, and
that, as a result, they do not develop the same responses that whites
do. Neither of these theories can yet fully explain human
behavior. In fact, it is quite likely that the key to our behavior lies
somewhere between these two extremes. That the controversy will continue for a
long time is certain. In the United States, blacks score below whites on standardized intelligence tests. We think it probable that______.
A．blacks are genetically inferior to whites B．blacks don’t have the same opportunity for education as whites do C．blacks and whites develop different responses D．none of the above statements gives a satisfactory answer