Nature vs nurture

Child Development, January/February 2010, Volume 81, Number 1, Pages 6–22

A Unified Theory of Development: A Dialectic Integration of Nature and Nurture
Arnold Sameroff
University of Michigan

The understanding of nature and nurture within developmental science has evolved with alternating ascendance of one or the other as primary explanations for individual differences in life coursetrajectories of success or failure. A dialectical perspective emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual and context is suggested to interpret the evolution of developmental science in similar terms to those necessary to explain the development of individual children. A unified theory of development is proposed to integrate personal change, context, regulation, and representational models ofdevelopment.

The attention of philosophers and then scientists to human development has always begun with a concern that children should grow up to be good citizens who would contribute to society through diligent labor, moral family life, civil obedience, and, more recently, to be happy while making these contributions. The motivation for these concerns was that there were many adults who were not.Although attention was paid to the socialization and education of children, it was ultimately in the service of improving adult performance. The societal concern has always had a life-span perspective. Without healthy, productive adults no culture could continue to be successful. This concern continues to be a major motivator for society to support child development research. Although theintellectual interests of contemporary developmental researchers range widely in cognitive and social–emotional domains, the political justification for supporting such studies is that they will lead to the understanding and ultimate prevention of behavioral problems that are costly to society. With these motivations and supports there have been major advances in our understanding of the intellectual,emotional, and social behavior of children, adolescents, and adults. Moreover these understandings have increasingly involved multilevel processes cutting across disciplinary boundaries in the social and natural sciences. This progress has forced conceptual reorientations as earlier unidirectional views that biological or social
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to ArnoldSameroff, Center for Human Growth and Development, University of Michigan, 300 N. Ingalls Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0406. Electronic mail may be sent to sameroff@umich.edu.

circumstance controlled individual behavior are becoming multidirectional perspectives where individual behavior reciprocally changes both biological and social circumstance. The models we use to understand how individualschange over time have increased in complexity from linear to interactive to transactive to multilevel dynamic systems. Was this progression in complexity an expression of empirical advances in our developmental research or is it related to more general progressions in the history of science as a whole? Several years ago during a discussion of a need for a critical social history of developmentalpsychology by a number of distinguished scientists (Bronfenbrenner, Kessel, Kessen, & White, 1986), Sheldon White argued that it is necessary to engage and deconstruct the history of the field in parallel with efforts to understand the child. He continued by pointing out that the study of development needs a self-concept, just as each child requires ‘‘the building of some kind of selfreferential,self-regulating, self-knowing set of structures.’’ If there is a more sophisticated understanding of the development of humans, is there a more sophisticated understanding of the development of our science? The models we use to understand the history of our field from child psychology to developmental science should increase in complexity. Understanding developmental science requires developmental...