Genetics Help Shape Personality And Life Path, Major Study Finds

THURSDAY, Sept. 3, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Genetics help shape your personality, and those same genes reverberate throughout your life, a new study has found.

More than 1,200 different genetic variants are linked to the Big Five personality traits, researchers reported Sept. 2 in the journal Nature.

What’s more, those personality genetics are linked to dozens of different paths taken throughout a person’s life, including health, education, career and parenthood, researchers found.

“Personality seems to be relevant nearly everywhere you look. We hope this study will encourage many other scientists to incorporate personality traits into their fields of study,” lead researcher Ted Schwaba said in a news release.

“For example, genetic variants associated with neuroticism predict more time spent in the hospital, which is relevant to physicians and health researchers, and variants associated with openness to experience are linked to income and switching jobs, which is relevant to vocational researchers,” Schwaba said. He is an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University.

For the study, researchers reviewed data across 46 different groups participating in genetic research, with sizes ranging from 611,000 to as many as 1.1 million people.

The participants also completed a questionnaire that measured the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These traits are relatively stable differences in how people think, feel and act, researchers said.

The research team then linked differences in people’s personality traits to specific variations in their genetic makeup.

“There is no single ‘personality gene,’ ” Schwaba said. “Personality traits are associated with many genetic variants, but even the largest effects of individual genetic variants are still very small.

“However, even though any individual genetic variant makes very little difference in personality, the effects of many variants together can be more sizeable,” he said.

Results showed that certain variants could be used to predict personality. For example, genes linked to extraversion in a young adult in the Netherlands also predicted extraversion in an older adult retiree in the United States, researchers said.

Further, they found that the genetic variants that predict personality also partially predict a person’s mental or physical health, longevity, education, career path and decision to become a parent, among other things.

For example, genes linked to conscientiousness also were associated with being more active during the day, while night owls were more likely to carry variants linked to openness to experience and extraversion.

Likewise, genetic variants linked to openness to experience predicted that a person would be more likely to move to a more cosmopolitan neighborhood.

However, the team also noted that environment still plays a major role in personality. Moving to a cosmopolitan neighborhood might reinforce and further shape that openness to experience, researchers said.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on the Big Five personality traits.

SOURCES: Michigan State University, news release, Sept. 2, 2026; Nature, Sept. 2, 2026