Genetics, Environment, and Personality

Most clinicians still underestimate the degree to which genetic factors shape personality traits and personality development. This is not controversial within behavioral genetics, but it remains surprisingly controversial in everyday clinical thinking.

Twin and adoption studies converge on a striking conclusion. Roughly half or more of the variance in most personality traits is attributable to genetic factors (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). When combined with non-shared environmental influences, that figure exceeds 90%. What is notably absent is a large role for the shared environment, including broad features of upbringing that many psychotherapeutic models implicitly treat as decisive (Krueger et al., 2008).

This evidence has led me to revise my own thinking over the past few years. Like many clinicians trained in the psychoanalytic tradition, I once assumed that early relational experience held explanatory primacy for adult personality. I now believe that view substantially overstates what

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