Final answer:
The psychiatrist who emphasized the environment over biology in a child's intellectual development was Lev Vygotsky, with his sociocultural theory of development.
Step-by-step explanation:
Understanding Child Development Theorists
The psychiatrist who believed that the environment was more important to a child's intellectual development than biology was Lev Vygotsky. Unlike B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Sigmund Freud, Vygotsky proposed a sociocultural theory of development, suggesting that human development is deeply embedded and influenced by one's culture and social environment. He emphasized the significance of social interactions and cultural tools like language in shaping cognitive development, indicating a strong interdependence between a child's development and their environmental context.
Cognitive growth, according to Vygotsky, is a collective process that results from social interaction. This contrasts with the views of someone like B. F. Skinner, who focused on behaviorism and the role of external stimuli in shaping behavior, and Jean Piaget, who focused more on stages of individual cognitive development. Piaget's perspective, while acknowledging the role of the environment, still placed a lot of emphasis on biology and innate stages of development.