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How where you grow up affects your personality Would you be a different person if you had grown up somewhere else? A growing body of research is helping to answer this age-old nature verses nurture question and what it means for your identity. It was a hot afternoon in the little village near Kolkata, India, and the adults were asleep. My cousin and I were sitting on the floor munching on puffed rice with mustard oil when she turned to me and asked: "Is it true that people in Sweden eat cows and pigs?" I, just about 10 years old at the time, felt ashamed as I nodded. "So do they eat dogs and cats too?" she probed. It was a perfectly logical question. If you can eat one four-legged mammal, why not another? Having grown up in Sweden, albeit with an Indian mother, it wasn't something I had thought about before – vegetarianism was rare at the time, especially in Europe, and Swedish kids were accustomed to seeing cows as a source of food. My cousin, on the other hand, was a passionate animal lover with a habit of rescuing creatures she perceived to be in danger. She didn't eat meat. My visits to India were full of such moments, which made me realise just how much culture shapes the way we think, feel and behave. If I had grown up in India, would I have had a different set of morals? A different sense of humour? Different dreams, hobbies and aspirations? Would I still have been me? These are questions that scientists and philosophers have been grappling with for centuries, and now a new field of study – cross-cultural psychology – is beginning to investigate possible answers. Nature vs nurture In one sense, every human being's DNA is unique and its fundamental structure (in big-picture terms) does not change depending on where we go. But DNA alone does not make us who we are, says Ziada Ayorech, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of Oslo in Norway. Born in Uganda, Ayorech moved to Canada when she was three, spent most of her life in the UK, and then moved to Norway a couple of years ago. "When I think about all the places I've lived and all the ways they have influenced my perspective, I intuitively imagine there's no way that that couldn't have made a difference," says Ayorech. To explore this, scientists typically use studies comparing identical twins, who share almost identical DNA, to non-identical twins, who share, on average, half of their genome. This way, if identical twins are more or less likely to share a trait than non-identical twins, it suggests that that trait is more governed by genetics than environment. The brain you have right now would be very different if you were born and had grown up in Taiwan, even if you have the same DNA – Ching-Yu Huang In one large 2015 analysis of nearly 50 years of studies about 17,000 different traits in 14 million twins all over the world – exploring education and political beliefs to psychiatric conditions – scientists concluded that genetics accounts for, on average, just 50% of differences. "It's that combination of nature and nurture that makes us who we are and contributes to our beliefs and our cultures," says Ayorech. "And so we couldn't have that same combination in another place." The environment shapes some traits more than others, of course. Research shows that IQ is on average over 50% heritable, with the caveat that genetics plays a larger role later in life than it does in childhood. While personality traits are roughly 40% heritable and therefore more influenced by the environment. (This doesn't mean 40% of one person's extroversion is down to their genes, but rather that 40% of the differences in extroversion among a population as a whole can be explained by genetics.) Although Ayorech is quite extroverted, she says Norway caters less to the types of outgoing expressions she is familiar with. For instance, one is less likely to break into a spontaneous conversation with a stranger on the streets of Oslo. This has changed her, she says. "If you compare the version of me living here in Norway to the version of me that was living in the UK, it would be fair to say I'm less extroverted now," says Ayorech. But given her genetic makeup, she's unlikely to ever completely lose her outgoingness. She continues to subconsciously gravitate towards activities that encourage more spontaneous interactions, Ayorech says. "We tend to seek out environments that are in line with our genetic traits." In turn, this combination shapes our brains over time, allowing us to grow into ourselves. Neural pathways form and solidify as we integrate experiences, according to Ching-Yu Huang, a cross-cultural psychologist at National Taiwan University. She argues that culture is an "absolutely crucial part" of who we become. "You would have been a different person if you'd grown up in Taiwan," she tells me, confidently. "The brain you have right now would be very different if you were born and had grown up in Taiwan, even if you have the same DNA." 'When in Rome': Cross-cultural psychology Vivian Vignoles, a cross-cultural psychologist at the University of Sussex, agrees. "I think people tend to get overexcited about the genetic side of it," he says. "Whatever genes you've got, you need a certain environment to bring them out." While the basic idea that culture shapes how people see themselves is now well supported in psychology, it did come as a surprise to some psychologists in the mid-20th Century, Vignoles says. Scientists had long assumed that human psychology was universal and that study results about human behaviour conducted in the US and Europe would hold true across the world. But by studying and comparing psychology from elsewhere, Vignoles and others have found that this isn't the case. For instance, experiments suggest that people in the West tend to be more individualistic and see themselves more in terms of their personal traits, such as being funny, smart or kind, compared to people in Japan, who tend to be more collectivistic and likely to define themselves in terms of their social roles, such as being a father or a student.

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