I read The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature a while ago and your numbers are pretty close to what Pinker says.
About 50% of personality from genetics, 50% from environment, and approximately 0% from parental influence.
About 50% of personality from genetics, 50% from environment, and approximately 0% from parental influence.
One of the telling trait of serial killers are harsh parenting/tough childhood in general btw.
But even before we even get to overt trauma, simple resentment is pretty powerful in my opinion as well. Resentment can build in lots of ways. Parents perceived to not treat children equally or to restrict child from persuing a particular interest including love interests.
If parents don’t respect a child it has consequences.
Edit: to add that resentment is normally a reciprocation. Meaning, parent resents child and therefore behaves in a manner that causes child to resent parent. Snowball that for a few years / decades = not good.
[0]- https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_...
It was almost scary that those cats didn't recognise us. I had to hold the "what have you done to my cat!" down more than a few times.
I often wonder if people are similar. That there's really only 1000 different humans or so, and the rest are copies that recognise different people and places. Because for cats, that's definitely the case.
I wonder if people who are more adept at creating and selective recall of memories tend to be happier individuals.
This is why kids like to pretend to play kitchen or use a broom. They see you do it.
Anecdotally, I have seen children who have ‘bad attitudes’ do a 180 when the parents make an effort to model calmness and positivity. Anxious, stressed out or negative emotions in parents affect the kids.
In most settings, mood is contagious and is set by the leader. The catch is you have to keep it up.
Both in terms of how the kid reacts to situations around and what the kid likes, dislikes or value (consider good vs bad behavior).
I don't think there is scientific a consensus on this yet. I strongly doubt that there is reasonable study that would make the split 50%, 50%, 0%. It is too round, too nice to be true.
GP provides sources in a sibling thread where the discussion is further elaborated.
Unless you want to go psychodynamic on things but you'll have to start making excuses for Freud then!
This is what Watson would have said (in a roundabout way) [0]. Perhaps it's not related but he's not considered to have been a very nice guy. [1] [2]
Skinner was a lot more fun.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#Behaviorism
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#"Little_Albert"...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson#Advertising
What's the source of this? Given that siblings are often so different between each other, and from their parents, it could be that most of personality traits come from the environment, but we're still born with it (i.e. it could be influence in early development of the fetus, from the environment (womb, food mother eats and her hormones, sounds and movement from outside, ...) not from genes).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-nat...
As a parent, that seems about right. We may lay a foundation for helping them make good choices. But, a child’s identity ultimately seems to be formed by their predisposition and the types of peers that they seek out and befriend at around 12 years and onwards.
There's almost no fact checking and they usually mangle the science. http://www.danielbor.com/lehrerandsciencewriting/
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
I figured a ‘pop sci’ reference could at least help guide the way. My bad.
Pop-sci often adopts sensationalism at the expense of rigour in order to shift volumes.
At least personal, lived experience can be taken at face value, if accepted in good faith as a truthful account, and can be cross-examined.
If you have an observer giving a truthful account that conflicts with an established fact then surely something must account for that discrepancy.
See for instance radio-waves vs Kirchoffs law. It's not that Kirchoff was wrong, it's just that he didn't account for frequency as a variable, which was solved by Maxwell.
Now, that's for established facts. If you're talking about commercially adulterated science then you have an even higher burden to bear.
We need to be beyond a level of discourse where "because science" or "a study said" is considered a fait acompli. Science often contradicts herself and studies are often debunked.
Just because "some guy wrote it", doesn't make it so.
I don't disagree. But I don't think personal anecdote is a sufficient answer. You could criticize the quality of the research (in more specific terms than "pop-sci") or present contradictory evidence and I'd have no problem with it. Simply attacking a guy in a casual discussion that is not particularly rigorous for posting a citation you deem insufficiently rigorous without further explanation I do not think is fair.
Initially, I merely proposed that in the modern world we need to be more rigorous in our evaluation of scientific propositions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083635
That's where you joined in.
I'd go so far as you're just trying to hurtful.
If parenting is a part of the environment, then that's not 0%.
The conclusion purposely mangles the numbers for the sake of sensationalism, and that is the kind of thing that gets picked up on and becomes myth.
Nonetheless, I don't think it's fair to jump straight to "sensationalism" to explain why he has different findings than yours. Perhaps your sense of influencing your children is more illusory than you think. It wouldn't be the first time a widely-acknowledged phenomenon with children turned out to be in the imagination of parents (consider "sugar high," for instance, which does not really exist).
The influence of parents is very much a factor in development. Just other factors influence a lot more than other people might expect.
You're making assumptions I'm some sort of uneducated whimsical pixie-head and that's your failure. Not mine.
I actually do think this counts for a lot. Certainly there are genetic and epigenetic factors, but scant attention is paid to gestative influence (an area it seems few know much about).
It does seem there is an eagerness to label all personality traits from the date-of-birth as "genetic".
The author proposes three laws of behavioral genetics which summarize results across a wide range of behaviors:
All human behavioral traits are heritable. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
But most identical twins are not so different from each other. Read up on twin studies, where twins were separated at birth. They tend to have very similar personalities and outlooks on life, despite never having had contact until the study was conducted.
This probably doesn't happen very often. (TBH I don't know if it's even possible.)
Sure it would, if you study enough of them.
Thus, even if raised separately, the 'environment' to which each identical twin is exposed will be more similar than the 'environments' of two non-identical people.
Simple example....
Adam and Bob are raised separately. Yet, both develop to be confident and strong leaders. Is this leadership quality 'genetic'? Or, is it because Adam and Bob are each 6'5" and handsome?
It would be very difficult indeed to statistically tease out these things.
That is incorrect.
The number of identical twins that have been raised separately (and studied) is tiny.
With a sample size that small, it is difficult to get statistically significant results. Obviously. I was just pointing out that one of the issues with which a researcher must grapple is the fact that not only is one shaped by one's environment, but one's environment is shaped -- to some degree -- by one's appearance... a tricky issue when dealing with two subjects who are identical in every outward respect.
Yes, I wonder about this too.
> Given that siblings are often so different between each other, and from their parents, it could be that most of personality traits come from the environment, but we're still born with it.
In terms of genetics, the reason there's variation between siblings and parents, even though it is true that as children we inherit 50% of our genes from our father and 50% from our mother, is due to randomness in terms of which parts get inherited. Our siblings are inherits different combinations of genetics, but we all inherit 50%/50%.
This doesn't answer the question of how much of our personality is inherited vs environmental, but that siblings/parents are so different from each other doesn't argue against heritability.