How where you grow up affects your personality

Would you be a different person if you had grown up somewhere else? A growing body of research is helping to answer this age-old nature verses nurture question and what it means for your identity.

It was a hot afternoon in the little village near Kolkata, India, and the adults were asleep. My cousin and I were sitting on the floor eating puffed rice with mustard oil when she turned to me and asked: “Is it true that people in Sweden eat cows and pigs?” I, just about 10 at the time, felt ashamed as I nodded. “So do they eat dogs and cats too?” she probed.

It was a perfectly logical question. If you can eat one four-legged mammal, why not another?

Having grown up in Sweden, albeit with an Indian mother, it wasn’t something I had thought about before – vegetarianism was rare at the time, especially in Europe, and Swedish children were accustomed to seeing cows as a source of food. My cousin, on the other hand, was a passionate animal lover with a habit of rescuing creatures she perceived to be in danger.

She didn’t eat meat.

My visits to India were full of such moments, which made me realise just how much culture shapes the way we think, feel and behave. If I had grown up in India, would I have had a different set of morals? A different sense of humour? Different dreams, hobbies and aspirations? Would I still have been me?

These are questions that scientists and philosophers have been grappling with for centuries, and now a new field of study – cross-cultural psychology – is beginning to investigate possible answers.

NATURE VS NURTURE

In one sense, every human being’s DNA is unique and its fundamental structure (in big-picture terms) does not change depending on where we go.

But DNA alone does not make us who we are, says Ziada Ayorech, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of Oslo in Norway. Born in Uganda, Ayorech moved to Canada when she was three, spent most of her life in the United Kingdom, and then moved to Norway a couple of years ago.

“When I think about all the places I’ve lived and all the ways they have influenced my perspective, I intuitively imagine there’s no way that that couldn’t have made a difference,” says Ayorech.

To explore this, scientists typically use studies comparing identical twins, who share almost identical DNA, to non-identical twins, who share, on average, half of their genome. This way, if identical twins are more or less likely to share a trait than non-identical twins, it suggests that that trait is more governed by genetics than environment.

In one large 2015 analysis of nearly 50 years of studies about 17 000 different traits in 14 million twins all over the world – exploring education and political beliefs to psychiatric conditions – scientists concluded that genetics accounts for, on average, just 50% of differences. – BBC Africa

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