Your genes may determine how "pro-social" you are, including your sense of civic duty, job commitment and concern for the welfare for others.
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PARIS: Who's been naughty and who's been nice? The answer lie in our genes, as a study of nearly 1,000 twins found that selflessness and civic-mindedness can be inherited, especially if you are a woman.
Niceness, in other words, may be in your genes. The study, published in Biology Letters, adds to a growing body of research suggesting that the drivers of human behaviour are found, more often than previously suspected, in 'Nature' rather than 'Nurture'.
Environmental influences such as parenting and schooling remain strong, the scientists agree. But our genetic endowment – along with the way genes are activated or expressed – is increasingly seen as shaping who we are and what we do.
How "pro-social are you?
Seeking to tease apart these factors, University of Edinburgh scientists Gary Lewis and Timothy Bates looked at self-assessments of nearly 1,000 pairs of twins in the United States to see how "pro-social" they were.
Some of the twins were identical and the others were fraternal. "Having identical and non-identical twins allows you to understand whether there is a genetic factor at play," Lewis explained by phone.
"Identical twins, which share 100% of their genes, are more similar than non-identical twins, who share only 50%. You can infer genetic influence because of that biological fact."
Civic duty, job commitment and concern for others
Previous research, notably with infants too young to have been fully socialised, already suggested humans have an inbuilt capacity for empathy.
In their twins study, Lewis and Bates broke down that impulse in adults into three "pro-social" areas: a sense of civic duty, job commitment and concern for the welfare for others.
On the last of these, for example, the twins were asked, on a scale of one to 10, how much compulsion they felt to pay more so that everyone, including the poor, could have access to medical care.
Those who felt the greatest impulse for generosity were identical female twins. "This suggests that genetic effects are influential with regards to pro-social behaviour," Lewis said.
