Twin Studies

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be a twin? Would your personality or behavior be any different or would genetics determine your development? In recent years, twin studies have been more relevant because of the fascination of nature (environment) versus nurture (genes). Scientists and psychologists are well aware of the nature versus nurture effect but with technological advances, it is taken to a whole new level. Researchers are able to look more deeply into what the differences are in twins’ genes by decoding their genes hands-on with different services that are offered. These services make it easier to distinguish differences considering that identical twins’ genes are the same and fraternal twins’ genes are about half the same. Instead of …show more content…
This is evident in twin studies. For example, if one twin from an identical pair suffers from a disorder such as schizophrenia, then the chance of the other twin getting that same disorder is about 50%, but with fraternal twins, it would be approximately 17% (Guo, 2005). Therefore, when analyzing genetic influences, it is obvious that heredity plays a big part in the development of certain disorders, traits, and behaviors. Likewise, the text says that if a behavioral trait is more dominant in a set of identical twins than fraternal twins, then researchers can conclude that the trait is genetic (Santrock, 2015, p. 45). I am a fraternal twin myself and I can vouch that genetics is definitely more prominent than environmental factors. Personally, my sister and I look very much alike, but our personalities are very different most likely because of our genes only being partly similar. Nevertheless, many studies cannot tell us about the specific effects that genes have in our daily lives, but they can tell us how much of our genes actually contribute to our development (Guo, 2005). Despite this setback, genetics still proves to be very