Gordon Allport's Adoption Study

Personality, in layman’s term usually involves useful judgments such as social attractiveness of a person. People sometimes used this lay definitions of personality to highlight the features of an individual’s physical appearance and maybe several comments on their way of interactions with others. These definitions are normally associated with our implicit personality theories and elements of folklore within a certain culture are often included. Hence, using these definitions, personality seems to be judged based on social context. However, in psychological term personality is defined as the characteristics, or the distinct qualities in an individual. As defined by Gordon Allport, it is the ‘Dynamic organization, inside the person’s characteristic

Therefore from these studies, childrearing are perceived to have a subtle effect on personality development. McCrae et al. (2000) revealed that from the results that were obtained from the adoption studies, the adopted individuals tend to have minimal resemblance to either of their foster parents or their foster siblings. In its place, the adopted individual appeared to have more similarity towards their biological parents and/or siblings. This is because every human being inherits and shares about 50 per cent of their genes with each of their parents and their siblings respectively. On top of that, in the view of personality, the correlation value of the foster “brothers” and/or “sisters” (genetically uncorrelated children adopted into the same foster family) is rather close to zero, and this number basically suggest that shared environment is not fundamental and that the effects of environmental, which are consider significant for personality, are of the non-shared variety (Plomin & Colledge, 2001). Carey and DiLalla (1994) also stated that the heritability estimates, along with the estimates of shared and novel nature impacts on identity concur well with those from twin studies in proposing that the prevailing explanation behind familial similarity in identity could be followed to hereditary elements, with basic environment having just a little impact. Henceforth, it shows that neither parenting habits nor parental role modeling would have much influence on the personality traits of all individuals in the family (McCrae et al.,