How Personalities and Behaviors are Formed？ 1. People have wondered for a long time h

How Personalities and Behaviors are Formed？

1. People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and .behaviors are formeD．It is not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another is competitive.

2. 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 each other. The controversy is often conveniently referred to as "nature vs. nurture".

3. Those who support the nature side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior. patterns are largely determined by biological (生理学的) 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 pre- determined to such a great degree that we are almost completely governed by our instincts.

4. Those who support the "nurture" theory, that is, they advocate education, are often called behaviorists. They 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 almost completely shaped by their surroundings. The behaviorists maintain that, like machines, humans respond to environmental stimuli (刺激) as the basis of their behavior.

5. Let us examine the different explanations about one human characteristic, intelligence, offered by the two theories. Supporters of the "nature" theory insist that we are born with a certain capacity for learning that is biologically determineD．Needless to say, they don't believe that factors in the environment have much influence on what is basically a predetermined characteristiC．On the other hand, behaviorists argue that our intelligence levels ate the product of our experience. Behaviorists suggest that the child who is raised in an environment where there are many stimuli which develop his or her capacity for appropriate responses experience greater intellectual development.

第 23 题 Paragraph 1__________

A．Environment is important

B．Two approaches are different from each other

C．How personalities and behaviors are formed

D．Our personalities and behavior. patterns are largely determined by biological factors

E．We want to explain the behaviors

F．The "nature" theory is better than the "nurture" theory