Is Personality Genetic?

“Psychologists have spent decades searching for personality traits that exist independently of circumstance, but what if personality can’t be separated from context?” Beginning with President Kennedy’s initiative to screen applicants for the Peace Corps, scientists have searched for a way to estimate someone’s personality. Failure after failure suggests that broad categories do not hold true and that how a person reacts to a given set of circumstances depends largely on—the circumstances. “Just look at Hamlet. … He’s brooding and melancholy in one scene, and then violent and impulsive in the next. But this doesn’t seem strange to the audience. Instead, the inconsistency of Hamlet seems all too human.”