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Personality plays into how people think, feel, behave and interact with their environment.Credit: PeopleImages\/Getty<\/p>\n
A study of more than one million people has uncovered around 1,200 genetic variants that are associated with personality traits, and is by far the largest effort of its kind.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that common genetic variants account for a small percentage of variation in the \u2018Big Five\u2019 personality traits \u2014 extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience \u2014 within a population.<\/p>\n
Although the genetic links to personality are small, the study found that they are more robust to confounding factors such as family background than are gene associations with education level, income and some other socio-behavioural traits. Using these genetic correlations, the researchers connected personality traits to a slew of health and lifestyle factors, including whether a person is likely to take up smoking (linked to how conscientious they are), COVID-19 infection risk (linked to extroversion) and even participation in research studies (linked to a person\u2019s agreeableness and openness to experience).<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonality is super central to all kinds of human outcomes,\u201d says Michel Nivard, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who co-led the study, which was published on 2 September in Nature1<\/a>. It is not yet clear whether personality underlies such differences, however. \u201cWe just want to show that the genome can be used to start to study those,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n \u201cResearchers in the field have been waiting for a sufficiently large genome-wide association study, or GWAS, of personality,\u201d says Aysu Okbay, a behavioural geneticist at Amsterdam University Medical Centre. \u201cGenetic studies of personality have lagged behind those of many other important behavioural traits.\u201d<\/p>\n Big personality data<\/p>\n Like all human characteristics, personality is influenced by the interplay between a person\u2019s genetic make-up and environmental influences. But efforts to identify reproducible gene variants linked to personality have been hampered by the absence of reliable measurements of personality in many of the large population genomic databases.<\/p>\n To overcome this, an international effort called the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium pooled data from 46 cohorts representing between 611,000 and 1.14 million people, depending on the trait.<\/p>\n All the participants had completed questionnaires (such as this one from PersonalityLab.org<\/a>) that psychologists use to measure the Big Five traits and the individual characteristics that comprise each one. The researchers note in an accompanying FAQ document<\/a> that the tests are not the only way to measure personality, and scientists continue to debate how effective they are at capturing it. But they remain widely used in psychological research.<\/p>\n
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