Via Reddit, I came across an article about a new study by Eric Turkheimer that suggests that nurture may be more important than nature, at least relative to numbers suggested by previous studies. The newer studies are careful to include identical twins where one grew up broken homes, which has a very negative impact. So extremely bad development can have an impact on intelligence. This raises the estimations of the nurture impact, but only for
In the same article RIchard Nisbett, a psychologist who wrote the very excellent The Geography of Thought, shows how people will skew the results.
A lot of parents really want to believe that nurture is really important, so they are very quick to jump to conclusions so "not raising kids in a poor, broken home is important but once you are richer nurture differences matter less" gets turned into the parenting fallacy of "this study supports nurture, and therefore you are right to do everything that common sense tells us is good for children."
In the same article RIchard Nisbett, a psychologist who wrote the very excellent The Geography of Thought, shows how people will skew the results.
The findings will undoubtedly please those parents who already send their children to good schools, drive them to violin lessons in the afternoon, and then drag them around museums at the weekend. "So you haven't wasted your time, money and patience on your children after all," Nisbett says.
A lot of parents really want to believe that nurture is really important, so they are very quick to jump to conclusions so "not raising kids in a poor, broken home is important but once you are richer nurture differences matter less" gets turned into the parenting fallacy of "this study supports nurture, and therefore you are right to do everything that common sense tells us is good for children."