Eli5: are some personality traits gained from birth or all they all learned from the people around you as a kid?
In: Biology
There is a genetic component to personality, but it’s mostly learned behavior. Not only the people you interact with, but also the rest of the world. Rural kids might have more interaction with nature or animals while city kids might have more interaction with crowds or waiting in queue.
Yeah welcome to a fundamental question plaguing society for centuries; nature vs nurture is unknowable at this point. Consensus seems it’s both but you can’t really tell to what degree
You are born with a temperament. If you are sanguine it’s in your genes. How we handle our temperaments and being aware of how we are challenges many.
From MedLine, it looks like when you study twins that 20-60% of personality is genetic. The rest is environmental. So neither are we blank slates on which anything can be written, nor are we robots controlled by our genes.
Traits such as neuroticism can be tested for at six months old.
I know you’re not asking about physical features but weight is around 70% genetic.
Twin studies – where you examine twins that were adopted by different families find that the twins wind up more similar to each other in both personality and life outcomes than to the families that raised them.
The rest of the differences can be explained by the environment but environment is defined as all random experiences that happen to the child not as the parenting you do. I live in Brooklyn and find it funny how parents contort their lives by getting their kid a chess tutor at 5 years old or having a resume for their 2 year old when in reality the kid will wind up how they’re going to wind up anyways.
Mostly genetic and after that comes from your environment.
I mean look at twins, at 8 months old you can already see a difference in personality.
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