This one seems hard to believe but I am sure it will elicit several comments from those gnxp’ers:
Genes may account for more than 40% of such charitable behavior as the massive outpouring of donations following the recent South Asian tsunamis.
A study comparing the social responsibility of identical and non-identical twins showed that genes account for 42% of individual differences in attitudes while common environment accounts for 23% and other factors account for the remainder.
Conducted by Canadian researcher J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, the study also found that genes have a stronger influence on males than females (50% to 40%) while home upbringing has a stronger influence on females (40% to 0%), suggesting that parents may more closely watch the behavior of daughters than of sons.
I’ve always mentioned to folks that it’s not just Desi movie plotlines that have benefitted from “twins separated at birth.” Science has actually done a LOT of research on the few thousand or so pairs they’ve been able to track down & it’s been a fascinating window into the classic nature vs. nurture debate.
In addition to generosity, other stuff that’s correlated more with their biological twin rather than their adopted families included
and so on. GC might be able to say a lot more than I about how tight the correlations were… Downside – parents seem to matter less than we’d like to think. Upshot – we aren’t entirely slaves to biological destiny either….