Experience:

Robert Plomin:

"Experience is not just something that happens to us. With all our genetically rich differences in personality, we differ in our propensity to experience life events and social support, to watch television and to get divorced."

"The point is that life experiences are not just events that happen haplessly to us as passive bystanders. With all our genetically rich psychological differences, we differ in our propensities to experience life events and social support. The nature of nurture suggests a new model of experience in which we actively perceive, interpret, select, modify and create experiences correlated with our genetic propensities."

"In summary, parents matter, schools matter and life experiences matter, but they don't make a difference in shaping who we are. DNA is the only thing that makes a substantial systematic difference, accounting for 50 per cent of the variance in psychological traits. The rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects."