PSY311H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Heritability, Heredity
Document Summary
Comparison of adopted children to biological and adoptive parents: children completely unrelated to adoptive parents, but similar environmentally with their adoptive parents. Biological parents cannot always participate in research and often adoptive parents are selected because the environment they provide is similar to that of the biological parents. Biological parents might want to just leave their past behind and not see the child again so it"s problematic to research with them. The adoptive parents most likely from the same race/ culture/religion so they actually might be similar to the adoptive parents genetically as well than adoptive parents from a different race/culture/religion. Strong evidence for heritability for intelligence; weak and inconclusive evidence for personality traits. For personality traits the results are not very consistent across studies, but they are for intelligence. First child born into the family don"t need to share the parents and has them to him/herself.