Developmental psychologists study how we change from the cradle to the grave.
When psychology was a new science, there was a great debate. This is called the
nature vs nurture debate. Some psychologists believe that we were born a blank
slate, or the Latin term â€œtable rasa.â€  This means that our environment
completely dictates who we are. Environment is everything with nurture. And
then some psychologists believe that it's nature. Or as they like to say, the
world within the skin. So, on the nature side, it's everything that we're born
with, like our genetics that determine who we are. However, today we know that
who we are is a function of both nature and nurture. It's a really complex
interplay of these two things, and we can rarely separate the two when trying
to explain different aspects of development.
