Personality Traits
Personality is a frequently cited example of a heritable trait that has been studied in twins and adoptions. The most famous categorical organization of heritable personality traits were created by Goldberg (1990) in which he had college students rate their personalities on 1400 dimensions to begin, and then narrowed these down into "The Big Five" factors of personality--Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The close genetic relationship between positive personality traits and, for example, our happiness traits are the mirror images of comorbidity in psychopathology(Kendler et al., 2006, 2007). These personality factors were consistent across cultures, and many experiments have also tested the heritability of these traits. Identical twins reared apart are far more similar in personality than randomly selected pairs of people. Likewise, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins. Also, biological siblings are more similar in personality than adoptive siblings. Each observation suggests that personality is heritable to a certain extent. A supporting article had focused on the heritability of personality (which is estimated to be around 50% for subjective well-being) in which an experiment was conducted using a representative sample of 973 twin pairs to test the heritable differences in subjective well-being which were found to be fully accounted for by the genetic model of the Five-Factor Model’s personality domains (Weiss, Bates, & Luciano, 2007). However, these same study designs allow for the examination of environment as well as genes. Adoption studies also directly measure the strength of shared family effects. Adopted siblings share only family environment. Most adoption studies indicate that by adulthood the personalities of adopted siblings are little or no more similar than random pairs of strangers. This would mean that shared family effects on personality are zero by adulthood. As is the case with personality, non-shared environmental effects are often found to out-weigh shared environmental effects. That is, environmental effects that are typically thought to be life-shaping (such as family life) may have less of an impact than non-shared effects, which are harder to identify. One possible source of non-shared effects is the environment of pre-natal development. Random variations in the genetic program of development may be a substantial source of non-shared environment. These results suggest that "nurture" may not be the predominant factor in "environment". Environment and our situations, do in fact impact our lives, but not the way in which we would typically react to these environmental factors. We are preset with personality traits that are the basis for how we would react to situations. An example would be how extraverted prisoners become less happy than introverted prisoners and would react to their incarceration more negatively due to their preset extraverted personality (Kette,1991).
Read more about this topic: Nature Versus Nurture
Famous quotes containing the words personality and/or traits:
“Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.”
—Quentin Tarantino, U.S. screenwriter and director, and Roger Avary. Jules (Samuel Jackson)
“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)