Not all like their father: scientists have found that children do not inherit character from their parents.

Conscientiousness and openness cannot be passed on by inheritance.

When assessing the character of a person, you can often hear a reference to his family and parents as a factor determining personality traits. However, scientific research shows that this intuitive impulse is likely to be wrong. Unlike external signs, character is passed on to a lesser extent from parents to children.

In a new study conducted by scientists from the University of Edinburgh, the authors concluded that children are little more similar to their parents' personalities than they are to the personality traits of random strangers. The assessment was carried out according to several parameters: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to new things, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

The experiment involved not only those directly studied and their immediate relatives, but also “second-order” relatives, including grandparents, half-brothers and sisters. The basis is a genetic bank, which contains information about more than a thousand pairs of relatives.

The researchers tried to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors. Previous work on this topic involved experiment participants’ own assessment of certain character traits. But this does not seem to be a reliable approach, because the conventional understanding of openness to something new differs from person to person.

To avoid such uncertainty, the authors of the work asked the experiment participants to name a close person who could also evaluate his character traits. And then he was interviewed. The assessments were combined to form a personal portrait of the person.

Participants were then categorized according to each criterion assessed into first, second, or third categories based on the severity of traits, such as extraversion. It turned out that the agreement with the parents did not exceed 39 percent. And for strangers, the agreement was usually about 33 percent, that is, not much less.

More than 60 percent of children differ from their parents in some personal qualities. In other words, children and parents are likely to be a little more similar to each other than random strangers. But not so much that we can accurately predict the character traits children inherit from their parents.

Rene Mottus is the lead author of the study.

Are you similar to your parents in character?