Overview
- The Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium published a Nature paper on Wednesday that reports roughly 1,260 common genetic variants associated with one or more of the Big Five traits.
- The finding comes from a meta-analysis that pooled 46 cohorts with between about 611,000 and 1.14 million participants depending on the trait.
- Common variants collectively explain a modest share of differences in personality, with trait-specific estimates ranging roughly from about 5% to 16%, and within-family comparisons show the associations are not driven by shared family environment.
- Genetic scores from the study predict very little about any one person (under about 4% in held-out tests) but are useful at the population level for linking personality predispositions to outcomes such as smoking, COVID-19 infection risk, daily activity patterns, and residential and career patterns; agreeableness showed inconsistent patterns across cohorts, likely reflecting measurement or cultural differences.
- The results confirm long-standing twin-study evidence that genetics matters while underscoring that most variation is non-genetic; the large dataset will enable follow-up work on biology, measurement differences, and responsible use but cannot be used to read an individual’s character from their DNA.