Myth: Personalities come from the genes

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Myth

Personalities are determined by genes. We are born with an unchangeable set of characteristics. If you are dealt a bad hand, tough luck. Some people belong to a worse sort and will never change

Fact

All books in psychology will tell you that we are shaped by our genes to a large degree (at least fifty-fifty). They go as far as to tell you that if your mom was an alcoholic, you are quite doomed unless you take it seriously from the young age.

In reality, it is the environment that makes a world of difference, and few healthy alleles produce effects that can break through environmental influences. Those that make a difference, usually make a difference for the worse, and are likely to be recessive.

A good way to understand the link between genes and environment is to study identical twins separated at birth into polar opposite environments. Such studies show that there is a substantial correlation between genes and personality. However, they do not tell the whole story. Genes that are entirely unrelated to personality can heave a strong impact on personality by interaction with the environment.

A striking example is the whole array of genes contributing to attractiveness. We all know that lives of attractive people are easier. They will likely generate a different constellation of personality characteristics and can lead to a false conclusion that genes that make you attractive also determine your personality.

In a similar fashion, a skin color can determine the personality of an individual born in environments affected by racial inequality. Thus a set of genes associated with race may seem to determine the personality or even intelligence. In addition, those personalities will also be linked to skin color leading to numerous myths used in racial discrimination. A good study would not only require identical twins, but also eliminating factors that feed forward from genes onto the personality. This is obviously impossible because we never know in advance which factors these are. To prove my point however, we might study the correlation between race and personality in environments differing by the level of discrimination. For example, we might take a yardstick Nigerian gene set and compare that in twins separated into (1) discriminatory environments (e.g. neglected black neighborhood in Detroit), and (2) non discriminatory environments (e.g. prosperous village in Nigeria). It is easy to see that similar research is quite unlikely to happen for logistic and ethical reasons. So we will need to stay with a thought experiment.

In research, it is far more productive and educational to show how personality characteristics can be re-programmed via environmental influences or training. It is important to see if such reprogramming is bound by preset limits. This is exactly what my job is about, and this is also why I am sure that personalities are largely the effect of nurture. If you take a healthy kid, you can invariably arrive at a great individual if the kid grows up in conducive environments. This largely means a warm loving family and rich access to educational opportunities. My claim is monumentally important because one of the main destroyers of personality is school. I say that compulsory schooling must end. You may further that goal using human rights perspective by saying that coercion is immoral. However, for me, the fact that we expose a billion children to environments that are harmful for the development of their brain is overwhelming!

Abusive families and coercive schooling are prime destroyers of human personality

If you are skeptical, consider the negative impact of school on how we behave in adult life. If you read 100 bad habits learned at school you will find out how school conditioning makes us introverted, disagreeable, cautious, harmfully self-disciplined, and neurotic. I intentionally picked those characteristics from the Big Five list. In all cases, school changes children for the worse. It is the uninjured state that is the brains default. Our understanding of human psychology is ruined by the school system. We are born with potentially fantastic brains, and yet the word genius is reserved only to a fraction of the population.

For an exemplary analysis of the fluidity of psychological concepts associated with personality, see: Are extroverts more creative?

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