People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are for med.It is 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 clearanswers yet， but two distinct schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might ex-pect， the two approaches are very different from one another， and there is a great deal of debatebetween proponents of each theory. The controversy is often referred to as "nature/nurture".
Two who support the "nature" side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behaviorpatterns 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 degree that we are almost completely governed by our instincts.
Proponents of the "nurture" theory， or as they are often called， behaviorists， claimed 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 almost complete-ly 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.
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 willcontinue for a long time is certain.
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