Self-Attributed Innateness Beliefs Moderate the Heritability of Psychological Traits
Abstract
People vary in how strongly they believe their psychological traits are innate. Using a twin/sibling design (N = 5,844; 1,043 MZ and 2,607 DZ families), I tested whether such beliefs moderate the heritability of 11 traits spanning sexuality, personality, attitudes, and health behavior. Innateness beliefs significantly moderated heritability for all traits: individuals who considered a trait more innate showed higher heritability for that trait. The effect was more trait-specific than indicative of a general essentialist tendency and largely driven by the individual's own belief rather than shared familial or genetic factors (religiosity and risk-taking were partial exceptions). A stringent sensitivity analysis reduced the number of significant traits from 11 to 6, indicating that for some traits the moderation may at least partly reflect a confound between extreme trait scores and innateness beliefs. The low heritability of innateness beliefs is consistent with largely non-genetic beliefs gatekeeping the expression of genetic variation.
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BibTeX
@misc{jern2026selfattributed,
title = {{Self-Attributed Innateness Beliefs Moderate the Heritability of Psychological Traits}},
author = {Patrick Jern},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/q6ths_v2},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/q6ths_v2/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Self-Attributed Innateness Beliefs Moderate the Heritability of Psychological Traits
AU - Patrick Jern
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/19
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/q6ths_v2
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/q6ths_v2/
AB - People vary in how strongly they believe their psychological traits are innate. Using a twin/sibling design (N = 5,844; 1,043 MZ and 2,607 DZ families), I tested whether such beliefs moderate the heritability of 11 traits spanning sexuality, personality, attitudes, and health behavior. Innateness beliefs significantly moderated heritability for all traits: individuals who considered a trait more innate showed higher heritability for that trait. The effect was more trait-specific than indicative of a general essentialist tendency and largely driven by the individual's own belief rather than shared familial or genetic factors (religiosity and risk-taking were partial exceptions). A stringent sensitivity analysis reduced the number of significant traits from 11 to 6, indicating that for some traits the moderation may at least partly reflect a confound between extreme trait scores and innateness beliefs. The low heritability of innateness beliefs is consistent with largely non-genetic beliefs gatekeeping the expression of genetic variation.
ER -