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Is your personality nature or nurture?  Studies consistently show 45 to 50 percent is nature.  The surprise though is that the other 50 percent is not nurture.  It’s not your birth order.  It’s not whether you were in day care.  Most surprisingly, 0 percent of the remaining 50 to 55 percent is  determined by how your parents raised you.  Don’t worry, you can still blame your parents for lots of specific aspects of your behavior, but you can’t blame them for your personality.  What is it then that really shapes your personality?  Your peers and chance.  This is nature’s strategy for helping you win.  In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about the research and conclusions in the roles of nature and nurture in shaping your personality.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• 45 to 50 percent of your personality is nature.
• The other 50 to 55 percent is your peers and chance.
• Find your natural advantage, then seek out unoccupied niches.
• Specialization is nature’s strategy for winning.
• It’s a reminder to be YOUR best.
• Who you spend your time with matters.
• Your younger years shape your older years from a personality standpoint.
• Your parents shape your behaviors, not your personality.
• Birth order does not determine your personality.

I’ll admit some of the ideas here create cognitive dissidence for me, but that’s a good thing.  It’s those little surprises in knowledge throughout our lifetime that can really shift paradigms to more effective techniques.  Bloodletting used to be accepted practice until better knowledge came along.  The real trick though isn’t what you know, it’s what you do with the information.  I’m going to ponder this a bit since some of the information really did surprise me.  I suspect I’ll have some more “ah has” as I start to connect more dots.

50 Percent of Your Personality is Nature
50 percent of your personality is what you got from Mom and Dad.  Buckingham writes:

… we can now finally lay to rest the age-old question about which has more influence on who you are: nature or nurture.  In every study of its kind, the results are always the same: 45 to 50 percent of your personality is nature.  That is to say 45 to 50 percent of your personality is nature.  That is to say 45 to 50 percent of your personality is due to the genes that you inherited from your mother and your father.  I realize that this sounds impossibly precise, but if you gather enough personality-test results from identical twins raised together, and results from those raised apart; and a similarly large number of results from fraternal twins and non-twin siblings raised together and apart; and the personality test results from the parents of all these children – getting all these results is the hard part – then the work of calculating how much of each child’s personality is inherited is, mathematically speaking, quite straightforward.

The Remaining 50 Percent is Not Nurture
The other 50 percent is not nurture.  We used to think it is, but the research says otherwise.  Buckingham writes:

And what of the remaining 50 to 55 percent?  Well, we used to think that this remainder was due to nurture – how you were weaned, potty trained, disciplined, praised, whether you were in day care or not, where you were in the birth order of your siblings, and so on.  We know this isn’t true.  How you were raised has absolutely no impact on your personality at all.  Just to be clear, 0 percent of the remaining 50 to 55 percent is determined by how your parents raised you.  (Judith Rich Harris’s book No Two Alike provides an incisive description of these studies and their challenging implications.) 

Your Parents Affect Many Specific Aspects of You and Your Behavior
Your parents play an important role.  They may not shape your personality, but they do shape many specific aspects of your behavior.  Buckingham writes:

This doesn’t mean that your parents behavior and your relationships with them are unimportant.  On the contrary, not only do they surround us with the unconditional love for which we all yearn (that is, if they are effective parents), they also affect many specific aspects of you and your behavior, such as your religious beliefs, your manners, your support of the Arizona State Sun Devils, your fascination with Chris Martin of the band Coldplay, your love of soccer, and your appetite for Granny’s special shepherd’s pie dinner.  

How Your Parents Raised You Does Not Affect Your Personality
You can’t blame your parents for your personality.  Buckingham writes:

But as long as their behavior falls within the bounds of normal parenting (if there was abuse or repeated trauma in your childhood, these obviously leave their scars), how your parents weaned you or disciplined you or praised you does not affect your personality at all.  And by personality, I mean it will not affect how competitive you are, or how timid, or how patient, or how outgoing, or how self-assured, or how willful, or how creative, or how focused, or how responsible, or how calm, or how positive, or any other train that might apply to you.  Again, to be clear, this doesn’t imply that parents don’t matter.  It simply means that which family you were brought up in has no measurable impact on your personality.

Birth Order Has No Impact on Your Personality
You can’t blame your birth order for your personality.  Buckingham writes:

And neither, contrary to recent books on the subject, does birth order.  Parents think it does because they are very familiar with their children’s behavior inside the home and consequently witness many examples of how elder siblings react to the younger ones, and how each child is subtly different from the others.  Because parents are also acutely aware of the birth order of their children, they then draw conclusions that link a child’s behavior to his birth order.

Your Peers and Chance Determine the Remaining 50 Percent
You can blame your peers and chance for the remaining part of your personality.  Buckingham writes:

So if it’s not parenting, and it’s not birth order, what does affect the remaining 50 to 55 percent of your personality?  An overwhelming body of research suggest that two forces are at play (again, I’ll refer you to Judith Rich Harris’s book if you want to dive into the data itself).

Chance
Lady luck or a series of unfortunate events can play a role in your personality.  Buckingham writes the following:

Chance, which can mean pretty much anything, from your bad luck in suffering repeated ear infections as  a child, to the random variations in your genes as you grow.  (These small variations explain why we sometimes see one identical twin with a cleft palate, while the other, although genetically identical, does not have one, or why it’s possible for one to be a schizophrenic, and not the other.)

Peers
It’s not about peer pressure.  That’s only temporary.  Instead, your peers are the most reliable information about you.  Buckingham writes:

Not peers in the clichéd sense of peer pressure.  You may well have felt some peer pressure going up, but if you did, this will have affected only your behavior and your values, and probably only temporary.  Peer pressure of this kind will not affect your underlying personality.  I mean peers in the sense that your peers are the most reliable source of information about you, and in particular, about what your true strengths are in the world outside your home.  Your peers will tell you accurately (far more accurately than your family will) if and who you can dominate, if you’re funny, if and when you’re a good ally, if your ideas are interesting, if your ideas are practical, if you are trustworthy, and so on.

You’re Wired to Seek Out Your Peer Group for Feedback
You’re wired to use your peers to find your strengths.  Buckingham writes:

This is tremendously valuable information for you as a child, since it helps you learn where you have the best chance to compete successfully as an adult.  So from birth through early adolescence, you are wired, as are all humans in all cultures, to seek out feedback from your peer group as to where your relative strengths lie.

This System Continues to Do Its Work Throughout Your Childhood and Early Adolescence
Buckingham writes:

While you are picking up on these clues about your strengths, a second system kicks in.  This system pushes you to seek out situations where you can play to these strengths, and these repeated behaviors cause material changes in your brain development, which in turn cause you to play to your strengths still more.  This system continues to do its work throughout your childhood and early adolescence.  Then, once you reach your mid teens, it locks these changes in.

The Instructions Written into Your Biological Design Specs
Nature has a formula for how your peers shape your personality towards your strengths.  Buckingham writes:

These, then, were the instructions written into your biological design specs when you were born, which we can state as follows:
1.    Pay very close attention to what your childhood peers think of you.
2.    Identify where you have some preexisting strengths in relation to these peers.
3.    Build on these strengths, and then
4.    Permanently skew your personality toward these strengths while you are still a young teenager.

Nature Wants You to Seek Out Your Strengths and Strengthen These Strengths
Nature wants you to be your best.  It wants you to find your strengths and grow your strengths.  Buckingham writes:

Nature makes sure you are born different, and then, not content with this, it has designed a complex feedback and personality-molding system to ensure that you become even more different.  It wants you both to seek out your strengths and then to strengthen these strengths.

Specializing is Nature’s Strategy for Winning
It’s natures way of helping you out.  Buckingham writes:

Why did nature design you this way?  The same reason it gave you an adaptive immune system and opposable thumbs.  Because you’re more competitive this way.  Find your natural advantages, then seek out unoccupied niches where you can capitalize on these advantages, and you are more likely to thrive, whether in a group of hunter-gatherers or a team of co-workers.  Specialization: It’s nature’s strategy for winning.

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