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Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

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Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#31

Post by whimsicalism »

mjburgess wrote: post #19

For those who arent aware, this entire field is largely pseudoscience; though this paper goes out of its way to be fairly sincere in its modelling, it's still just nonesense methodologically. The correlation coefficient is not a measure of correlation, but of co-linearity, and coefficients the entire system of computing correlation coefficients is bunk if the data is nonlinear. Almost all interesting phenomena outsid…

You're clearly arguing from the conclusions you want to be true.

Nobody who is in the know and actually is skeptical of this branch of work (ie. people like Sasha Gusev) thinks it is as useless as you are making it out to be.

Adoption studies produce causality and even the GWAS (genome-wide association studies) stuff, while not necessarily causal, is pretty interesting.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#32

Post by blackhawkC17 »

I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer.

Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand.

Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped.

One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doesn’t have to be rich…anyone with a stable middle-class life to imitate is enough, compared to questionable characters some imitate (gun-toting rappers for one).

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#33

Post by Aeolun »

firewolf34 wrote: post #10
onemoresoop wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and children do a lot of mimetic Do you mean they learn by osmosis from their parents? That's a known thing already and it's very obvious.

Something nobody seems to mention that could be a convoluting factor... I wonder if this operates bidirectionally - if parents learn traits from their offspring, maybe to a lesser extent. If you have a group of people that constantly spend time around each other, they all seem to average out their social tendencies over time, to some degree. As children get older and develop more defined characteristics, it's possibl…

To some extend, but at 36 I’m already pretty set in my ways. While my son might occassionally affect me, I think the reverse is a constant.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#34

Post by darig »

throwaway924385 wrote: post #30
whimsicalism wrote: post #17

It seems that this is a taboo topic to discuss oftentimes (especially academically), despite the fact that most people I meet seem to have an intuitive understanding that kids are often like parents. It also provides compelling alternate explanations for things like 'children of abusive parents are more likely to abuse' that you also are not really allowed to discuss nowadays.

Why aren't you allowed to discuss it?

[dead]

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#35

Post by lazide »

phkahler wrote: post #28
lazide wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the taboo the poster was referring to was more along the lines of discussion of actual free will, level of control of self, etc. My take is that free will is, 90% of the time, a necessary lie. Because if we didn’t believe it, everything would get far far worse.

>> My take is that free will is, 90% of the time, a necessary lie. Because if we didn’t believe it, everything would get far far worse. Why? Would people choose to do bad things because they don't have a choice?

If people can argue they should not be held accountable for doing something bad, because they defacto had no choice (due to nature/nurture) - and people will take that seriously - then exactly the worse kind of people will never be held accountable.

And folks on the fence will hop over it onto that side.

Because consequences do matter for preventing most behavior (weighed by the rational and non-rational part of the mind), but punishing someone for something they can’t control seems cruel - and that will stop many people from applying them. Resulting in more damage and more bad behavior.

So regardless of if it’s true or not, treating it as true is fundamental for a functioning society.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#36

Post by ryanjshaw »

whimsicalism wrote: post #17

It seems that this is a taboo topic to discuss oftentimes (especially academically), despite the fact that most people I meet seem to have an intuitive understanding that kids are often like parents. It also provides compelling alternate explanations for things like 'children of abusive parents are more likely to abuse' that you also are not really allowed to discuss nowadays.

Just look at the people who are convinced they have to beat up their kids to discipline them because "I turned out fine".

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#37

Post by Aeolun »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #29

Some of the comments here are quite baffling for me to read. Of course I'm like my parents. I'm completely made up of their genetic material and for my formative years I spent almost all of my time with them. I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting?

I think maybe they’re talking about kids that hated every minute of their life while living with their parents, only to do the same thing after.

Even if you’ve lived like that all the time, if you hated it, you’d expect someone to do the opposite.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#38

Post by whimsicalism »

throwaway924385 wrote: post #30
whimsicalism wrote: post #17

It seems that this is a taboo topic to discuss oftentimes (especially academically), despite the fact that most people I meet seem to have an intuitive understanding that kids are often like parents. It also provides compelling alternate explanations for things like 'children of abusive parents are more likely to abuse' that you also are not really allowed to discuss nowadays.

Why aren't you allowed to discuss it?

The suggestion that personality or really any sort of brain function is linked to genetics at all seems to fly in the face of mind-body dualism and Hollywood-movie-ethics ("anyone can do anything if they work hard enough") both of which are things most people seem to hold very dearly.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#39

Post by em-bee »

lazide wrote: post #13
actionfromafar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it nature vs nurture? If, so, how does your anecdote untangle that?

I think the taboo the poster was referring to was more along the lines of discussion of actual free will, level of control of self, etc. My take is that free will is, 90% of the time, a necessary lie. Because if we didn’t believe it, everything would get far far worse.

the issue with free will is that even with 100% free will, life is an optimization problem. we can not possibly make a conscious decision for everything we do. we'd stop breathing. therefore we must rely on doing things by habit. and where do we learn habits? from our parents.

i fall on strongly on the nurture side of the nature vs nurture question, but the issue is that with the amount of habits and behavior patterns that we acquire, we simply don't have the capacity to change all of them without effort. we can change a few at a time, and each can take considerable effort to change. not to mention many that we are not even aware of.

in short, there is no need to fall back to nature as a reason for why certain behaviors don't change. moreover, even if a certain behavior is nature, i believe willpower can allow us to change that too.

what bothers me is that nature or lack of free will are abused to excuse certain behaviors as unchangeable. everything can be changed, because humans are very adaptable. we just need to carefully consider which things we actually want to change.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#40

Post by giantg2 »

blackhawkC17 wrote: post #32

I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer. Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand. Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped. One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doe…

I generally agree. However, some kids of rich people turn out spoiled or lazy.
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