Drew Burney

Here's the thing, though, in behavioral genetics especially,

heritability has a very specific definition.

It doesn't mean determined, okay?

This is something that I think our industry, and we've probably even perpetuated this to some degree too.

When you hear the word heritability, that's what you think.

I inherited this and there's nothing I can do about it.

So what those studies did show though, is that somewhere between 40 and 60% of personality traits, the big five that we've been talking about, are heritable, okay?

But heritability is a population level trait.

measure, okay?

It can't really predict any individual differences necessarily.

What it's really doing is it's telling you the degree to which your personality traits in that environment at that time with those specific people, that specific population, how much of that can be attributed to genes.

It does not mean that these genes determine that.

Actually, if you change the environment,

the heritability measure will change too.

Okay.

If that makes, that probably doesn't make sense, but that's the point.

It's not that the genes are causing that necessarily.

It's not that they're determining that.

It's just how much of it is due to the genes versus the environment.

And it depends on how much variation is within both of those types of things.