Your personality may be more genetic than scientists realized — SkimNews
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- The Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium identified more than 1,200 genetic variants associated with the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), drawing on DNA and questionnaire data from 46 research cohorts worldwide.
- Ted Schwaba, lead author and MSU Department of Psychology faculty, emphasized that 'there is no single personality gene' — individual variant effects are tiny, but cumulative effects across many variants are more substantial.
- The genetic associations held across very different populations: variants predicting extraversion in a young adult in the Netherlands also predicted extraversion in an older retired adult in the United States, and family-comparison methods ruled out shared upbringing as the explanation.
- Personality-linked variants overlapped with genetic patterns tied to mental and physical health, longevity, education, career choices, and income — including everyday habits like conscientiousness variants linking to daytime activity and openness/extraversion variants linking to night-owl tendencies.
- Schwaba noted that neuroticism variants predict more time spent in the hospital and openness variants track with income and job-switching, suggesting the findings could inform medicine, vocational research, and workplace studies.
- Funding came from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Aging, with the study published in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10992-9).
Why it matters: The study gives researchers a large enough genetic dataset to move personality science from scattered clues to cross-disciplinary application — Schwaba directly tied neuroticism variants to hospital time and openness variants to income and job-switching. Using 46 cohorts across countries and age groups, the team showed these patterns hold broadly while still leaving room for environment, meaning fields from medicine to vocational counseling now have a concrete genetic map to build on.
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