Like father Like Son? Think again! Research shows that people inherit surprisingly little of their personality from their parents

Expressions such as ‘like father, like son’ suggest that it is not just appearance that is passed down from generation to generation.

In fact, we are often led to believe that personality traits are inherited from our mother or father.

But a new study claims there may be little truth to this.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh say we are only slightly more likely to share personality traits with our parents than with a random stranger.

They report that it is “impossible to accurately predict a child’s personality traits from those of his mother or father.”

“In almost every language there is some form of the English proverb ‘like father, like son’,” lead author Dr René Mottus from the University of Edinburgh told MailOnline.

‘Many people believe this and sometimes judge people based on their parents.

‘But it turns out that this proverb isn’t very accurate when it comes to personality traits – our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

“There’s only a small chance that people are more like their parents than any random stranger.”

In collaboration with experts from the University of Tartu in Estonia, Dr. Mottus and colleagues selected more than 1,000 relatives from the Estonian Biobank, a large collection of health information from volunteers in the country.

Participants reported their own levels of the ‘big five’ traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, as well as life satisfaction.

The ‘big five’ personality traits are the most widely accepted and widely used personality model in academic psychology.

Everyone rated their own personality traits, but for more accurate results, the researchers got a second opinion from an ‘informant’ – usually their partner.

‘Self-assessments alone are not very reliable, but if two people agree on someone’s traits, they must be on to something,’ said Dr Mottus.

The results estimate the heritability of personality traits and life satisfaction at approximately 40 percent.

While this is higher than the 25 percent common in self-report studies, it is not high enough to suggest that we are more likely to share personality traits with parents than with a random stranger.

The experts further explain their findings with a hypothetical scenario.

Suppose a group of parents and their adult offspring took a personality test and were placed in the bottom, middle, or top third of the population based on their results.

In this scenario, only 39 percent of offspring would receive the same feedback as their parents for a given trait – compared to 33 percent in the case of random strangers.

In other words, more than 60 percent of children are in a different group than their parents on some personality trait.

Dr. Mottus emphasizes that the findings “do not say that personality traits are not heritable at all” – but that this heritability is not significant.

Moreover, they are most likely inherited through genes (‘nature’) and not through upbringing (‘nurture’).

‘According to the most accurate estimates, around two-thirds of the reasons people have different personality traits have something to do with their genes,’ he told MailOnline.

‘But this is not enough to make parents and children much more alike than strangers.

‘Furthermore, there is no evidence that the experiences associated with sharing a family make people more similar.

“For example, there is no evidence that adoption into a family makes people’s personality traits comparable to those of their foster parents or other children in the family.”

Where exactly our personalities come from has long been a source of fascination for psychologists.

The theory that they are passed on from our parents – via genes or external factors – is officially known as ‘familial transmission’.

Any similarities between a parent and a child may be responsible for reinforcing the idea that familial transmission actually exists, along with proverbs such as ‘like father, like son’ or ‘like mother like daughter’.

“Similar proverbs also exist in many other languages, presumably because they are based on simple and abundant observations from the real world,” the team says.

“And yet these proverbs may exaggerate the extent of familial transmission, because current data suggest that, on average, parents and children differ only slightly less than strangers.”

The study has been released as a pre-print on the PsyArXiv server, meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed.