ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!
I’ll be honest that when I first encountered the concept of personality change, all those years ago, one reason I was skeptical about it was that I thought personality was genetic, and you can’t change something that’s genetic.
One of the biggest things I wanted to change about myself was to lower my level of neuroticism—my tendency toward anxiety and depression. But both my parents are very neurotic, and I’ve been neurotic since I was a kid. This wasn’t some learned thing I picked up at some point in adulthood; this was inborn. (To name just one example, my dad is so anxious that he once declined to buy a car manufactured near Hiroshima, Japan, because he worried that a particle of the residual radiation from the atomic bomb dropped there in 1945 might somehow have nestled into the glove compartment, and, upon the car’s arrival at Pat Lobb Toyota in Texas, would jump out and give him instantaneous, fatal cancer.) And well, you can’t change your genetics, right?
It turns out that’s only partly right. First of all, genes only determine about half of your personality, and the genes you do inherit from your parents can make you surprisingly different from them in unexpected ways. And it turns out you can change some things that are genetic. To understand the relationship between genes, personality, and behavior, I recently sat down with University of Texas psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden. We talked about her forthcoming book Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness, a fascinating exploration of the genetic influences behind supposedly “sinful” (or societally maligned) behavior, and what that says about how we should think about other peoples’ bad behavior—and our own.
Some excerpts from our conversation are below, and you can listen to the full version above, or on Spotify.
Olga: I wanted to start off by asking this question that has underpinned a lot of my research on personality, which is, how much are you doomed or blessed, depending on how you look at it, to be like your parents?
Paige: Most of the time when people think about genetics, they think about genes as something that can make you similar to your parents. And that’s true, but your genes can also make you different from your parents. So you only got 50% of your genes from each parent. Personality is this really interesting thing where it’s both highly tied toward genetics and we might be very different from our parents in terms of our personality.
If we’re thinking about traits, like let’s say like Huntington’s disease. So Huntington’s disease is a disease that’s caused by one gene and you only need one copy of it from one parent and then you’re definitely gonna get this disease, right? So in that way, it’s a gene that makes you a lot like your parent in having this particular disease because there’s only one factor that causes it.
Most complex human behavior and personality is influenced by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of genetic variants, and their effects seem to both depend on each other and depend on the environment, such that just by reshuffling your parents genome, which is what happened when each of this was conceived, could lead to a very, very different product.
I’ve produced three children and they’re all different from me and they’re also all different from each other and their fathers
So what you find is that identical twins who have the exact same genome, so they inherited all of the same ingredients, tend to be very similar for their personality. But as soon as you step down to even just fraternal twins or full siblings, you start to see that they’re not that similar at all, and they’re not that similar to their parents. And that’s because those genes are operating in interaction, and they’re operating in interaction with the environment. And so … I inherited this bit of DNA from my mom to am I similarly irritable if I haven’t had enough sleep? Not necessarily. You don’t necessarily get that same connection because personality is influenced by so many things that can interact in different combinations.
Olga: You include in your book one of my favorite quotes from Andrew Solomon, which is: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production.” Once you have a kid it really hits home that, “wow I did not reproduce myself. I created a whole new person with all of his own opinions.”
Paige: I have three [kids] and I have them with two different partners. So my two oldest are with my first husband and then I have a three year old with my second husband. I’ve produced three children and they’re all different from me and they’re also all different from each other and their fathers. And when you have one, you’re like, this is what happens if me and my partner combine. And then you have another one and you’re like, this is a random draw from the same potential pool of genetic material, but these people are nothing alike.
Olga: One thing that you mentioned early in your book is one of your studies where you created this genetic score for, it sounds like bad behavior, and you found that less than 20% of people with a low score on this bad behavior genetics were ever arrested for a crime compared to nearly 40% of people with a high score. So tell me a little bit about what that score is and what that’s actually showing.
Paige: What we did in this paper, which we published in 2021, is we looked at a variety of behaviors ranging from things that are considered disorders, so like an alcohol use disorder or ADHD in childhood to things that are not disorders at all that are just normal range human behaviors, but are things that are stigmatized or are moralized or things that maybe someone who has very conservative values might think is a wrong behavior. Things like having sex at a younger age or having sex with more sexual partners. And what all of these things have in common is that people persist in doing them despite negative consequences. So early frequent sexual behavior is stigmatized in the United States. Alcohol use disorder has negative consequences. Children with ADHD do things in school that get them in trouble. And so what we’re looking for is genes that are associated not just with one of these things, but with all of these things. So they don’t just affect how your body metabolizes alcohol, they are associated with an increased risk of drinking and smoking and having sex at an earlier age and having ADHD in childhood.
So then we took those genetic variants and we applied those results to new groups of people including this longitudinal study of American adolescents who are no longer adolescents, they’re my age, but they’ve been followed since they were in high school. And saw, what other things are these genetic variants associated with? And they were associated with what you would think. So they were associated with sexual behavior, with drinking, with smoking, but also with aggression, pulling a knife or a gun on someone, ever becoming arrested.
Someone says I shouldn’t be doing this and I’m doing it anyway. And am I doing it anyway because I can’t stop myself or because I don’t care that you think it’s wrong or because the reward I think I’m going to get out of this is more valuable to me than any negative consequences that I’ll see. One way to think about this in basic terms is just sort of punishment sensitivity, right? And so that’s the genetic index that we’re trying to capture here.
It’s not deterministic, right? If you’re born with these genes, you’re not destined to become someone who’s committing some sort of criminalized behavior. But it is predisposing you towards doing things that might violate rules or that might have negative consequences and sort of being indifferent to those negative consequences.
Olga: So it’s impulsivity plus not being very sensitive to punishment?
Paige: Theoretically people talk about it as a combination of disinhibition and antagonism. So disinhibition is I’m doing things that are impulsive without regards to their future consequences to myself, right? So I’m having condomless sex at 15 without regards to the fact that this might, you know, risk pregnancy or disease. And antagonism is doing things without regard to the negative consequences for other people.
Olga: So you say that it’s not deterministic and I’m wondering, is there something you can do if you have that constellation of genes or have that predisposition? Is there an Ozempic for this disinhibited renegade behavior?
Paige: Our current best evidence for things that prevent really harmful forms of disinhibition among children who are high at this genetic risk come from adoption studies. And it seems to be a combination of things that are actually going to be really familiar to anyone who’s ever read a parenting book, which is not being really harsh and reactive in your own discipline and also being warm. So warmth, positive reinforcement and praise for self-control or for pro-social behavior for all children I think is more effective than harsh punishment for unwanted behavior but that seems to be especially true for children who have this kind of genetic liability towards disinhibition.
But … there is not a medication that a psychiatrist could prescribe that child. There’s ADHD meds and there’s anti-anxiety meds and there’s depression meds, but there’s no pharmacological treatments for conduct disorder, which would be psychiatry’s label for this. And I think the really tragic case of Rob Reiner’s family exemplifies this. All the reporting suggests that Nick Reiner struggled with not just substance use problems, but also aggressive impulses and sort of this impulsive aggression from the time he was a child and a teenager. And this is a family that had a lot of resources and tried a lot of treatment strategies. And that still didn’t prevent this really horrible outcome in which he has been arrested for murdering his parents. And I think that speaks to how few resources there are, maybe relative to some other disorders that onset in childhood for treating children who then become adolescents who then turn into grown-ups who really struggle with this persistent not just disinhibition but also antagonism.
Olga: You also write that genes influence religion and religious adherence. And I wanted to talk more about that because I also grew up in the South like you did. And I know a lot of people and knew a lot of people who grew up very religious. And then it was funny because they would grow up and then maybe stop being Christian, but then they would get really into yoga or really into Buddhism and be like this is actually the thing. And I’m kind of like, “you’re just doing it again except with a different idea.”
Paige: Yeah, I think that some people are extraverted joiners and then they replace, you know, kickball leagues with the church or vice versa. They have a “religiously musical mind” is one of the quotes that I have in the book.
I was raised evangelical Christian and then as many people in our generation have, left the church of my youth in my 20s. My dissertation was on differences in religiosity between twins. And what you see is that in early life when your parents are dragging you to church, it’s the shared environment that predominates.
Olga: So what you’re saying is people start out very similarly religious to their family of origin, but then it kind of branches off based on the influences that you encounter throughout your life?
Paige: Yeah, it looks, a lot like personality. What we see for religiousness, which is that people are very similar, regardless of their genetic relationship to their siblings in childhood, and they become less similar in adolescence. And then as they move through young adulthood, especially in some religious traditions, like the one I was raised in, there’s so much emphasis on individual belief. And I think that can be hard to manufacture if you don’t have the disposition for it. And so people start to drift into their own kind of idiosyncratic spaces, which might be a reflection of their own personalities and not their family upbringing as they move into adulthood.
Olga: You also write, genes make a difference, but genes are not usually destiny. Can you elaborate on that?
Paige: Yeah, so there are genetic differences, rare variants of large effect or big chromosomal abnormalities. Like Trisomy 18 or Down syndrome, where if that happens, it’s going to overwhelmingly affect your life.
I think whenever people are tempted to think about genes as destiny, they should think about Chance and Second Chance and how well that worked out.
Most genes though, most of their genetic variants, are not like that. Most of what we’re talking about is common genetic variation that changes the probability of something, but in combination with other things. So I give this example in my book where I talk about this Texas couple who had a beloved bull named Chance. And it was like this gentle, docile bull. And then it died and they cloned it, right? So you have a clone of this animal with the exact same genotype, but different mother, different epigenetics, different other things. And then they named it Second Chance, the cloned bull. And it gored its owners twice.
They just kept being like, well, we had a docile bull and we’d cloned it! And that’s a cow, right? Like that is a cow that we can rear under exact rearing circumstances with the exact same clone genotype. And you end up with a different level of aggression.
And think how much more complicated people are in terms of their socialization and rearing. So, you know, I think whenever people are tempted to think about genes as destiny, they should think about Chance and Second Chance and how well that worked out.
Olga: It’s like that movie Multiplicity where each successive copy, he gets weirder and weirder. You had one description about gene-environment interaction that I really liked, which was, “Children genetically predisposed toward faster development in toddlerhood elicit more cognitive stimulation from their parents, which in turn predicts faster language development by kindergarten, a gene➞development➞environment ➞development feedback loop.” It’s like our genes kind of elicit ways of people treating us that then influence us even more.
Paige: Yeah. So my, would say my most extroverted child genetically is my third one. And we took her to Italy with us when she was like a year old. And we would be sitting on the subway and she would just like find someone to look at and just smile at them. And so everywhere we went the whole week was like Italian grannies, also teenagers, but also like Milanese businessman just being like, you’re so beautiful. And I just thought, “she’s having an experience of the world in which everyone is smiley and she’s smiley and people are such a source of reward for her.”
This is this is the gene-environment feedback loop that builds personality in real time. I’m watching it happen in real time that you have this tendency towards positive affect and it elicits something from the world. Like if I got on the subway I would not be like everyone is beautiful, life is beautiful … that would not be my experience of the world, but I wouldn’t be putting out that energy that like gets that experience either.
It’s amazing how evolution has equipped us to build each other and to build ourselves in community. We have this initial program and then it’s scaffolded by living in society, living with other people. And it snowballs in these interesting ways.
Olga: I also don’t have that energy, and in fact, when I’m in public people often ask me what’s wrong. But good for your daughter, she’s gonna be the captain of the cheerleading squad. At the very end, you ask this very poignant question which is, a lot of times when we talk about how much our genes influence our lives or our behavior, the real question is, can I change? And I think that was ultimately the question I was wondering about: My parents are both super neurotic and I’m neurotic, can I change? If something is genetic, can it be changed?
Paige: It’s a very common association that genetic means unchangeable and environmental means changeable. And if we stop and think about that for five seconds, we know it’s not true, right? Like we know that there are people who’ve had very severe childhood trauma, and that’s environmental, but it’s really hard to recover from. And we don’t have an obvious solutions to make them feel better. And people might have a genetic set point for being higher weight, and we give them a pharmaceutical.
So the relationship between genetic versus environmental and changeable versus not changeable is not nearly as straightforward as is commonly assumed. Why do we have that assumption? My speculation in the book, one of the things I invite readers to consider is that it’s very Christian of us to think that way. Even if we weren’t raised Christian, this idea that our flesh, our genes, are the things that are weighing us down and holding us back and are insurmountable without divine salvation is an extremely Augustinian way of viewing the flesh and of viewing the self. And I think that even if we aren’t personally steeped in that tradition, we are intellectually all steeped in that tradition.
And so what would it be like to think of our bodies as also a source of virtue and not just vice, also a source of change and not just stagnation. I think it would require us to revise some really deep seated cultural narratives about the relationship between our identities and our bodies.
It’s very American of us to think about “how can I change myself” versus “how can we collectively change the way that we’re operating such that myself fits better within this system,” right? Like do we want to change the ADHD child or do we want to change the way that classroom demands are set up so that more people can flourish within them. So I think it’s the combination of our Christianity and our individualism, and I’m saying that culturally, our cultural individualism and our cultural Christianity that really keeps like dragging people down to this, “because it’s genetic, I can’t change it. And if I can’t change myself, I’m doomed.”
