I wonder how many traits there are that, for most people, are acquired responses to their environment, but for a minority are essential qualities of their nature.
Considering the poor track-record of the nurture assumption when it comes to psychological traits, I would surmise that the answer might be: almost none[1]. Even perfectionism has at least moderate genetic influences[2].
Yeah, generally when people say “someone has a trait X because that’s how his parents brought him up” it makes sense to ask “okay, but why did his parents bring him up to do X” and a likely hypothesis is that the parents themselves were X. In which case, we should consider the possibility that X was simply inherited.
The thing the parents can teach are the coping strategies they use.
Wow that was a fascinating read, thank you for linking that. Most interesting to me was the separation of self-perfectionism from social perfectionism as a clinical concern. I’ve never felt social perfectionism, and ironically almost all of the trouble I got myself into as a child was from actively rebelling against social expectations. I’m glad to hear that this is also considered different in the literature.
Considering the poor track-record of the nurture assumption when it comes to psychological traits, I would surmise that the answer might be: almost none[1]. Even perfectionism has at least moderate genetic influences[2].
Excluding traits that have close to no influence on one’s life.
And I would argue that the study underestimates the heritability due to measurement error, which can be a non-trivial issue when measuring personality.
Yeah, generally when people say “someone has a trait X because that’s how his parents brought him up” it makes sense to ask “okay, but why did his parents bring him up to do X” and a likely hypothesis is that the parents themselves were X. In which case, we should consider the possibility that X was simply inherited.
The thing the parents can teach are the coping strategies they use.
Wow that was a fascinating read, thank you for linking that. Most interesting to me was the separation of self-perfectionism from social perfectionism as a clinical concern. I’ve never felt social perfectionism, and ironically almost all of the trouble I got myself into as a child was from actively rebelling against social expectations. I’m glad to hear that this is also considered different in the literature.