No, I am not about to tell you about the baseball team. That story is much too sad to be told. What I am going to talk about, though, is a study performed at the University of Minnesota researching twins who had been reared apart, both fraternal and identical, and these twins who participated in the study are referred to in the psychology world as the "Minnesota Twins."
Before the study conducted, many scientists believed that there would be almost no resemblance in sets of twins raised apart. Turns out that the skeptics were wrong. The study found that many personality traits of reared apart twins were just as highly correlated as personality traits of twins who were reared together. Out of the 130 sets of twins studied, this article looks at some striking similarities between a pair of reared apart twins. Each person in this pair, James Arthur Springer and James Edward Lewis, divorced a woman named Linda and remarried another woman named Betty. They also both had similar drinking and smoking habits. The video (posted below) of reared apart twins, who were not part of the Minnesota study, shows that the twins have similar tastes, including the exact same favorite movie. These two examples describe identical twins. The Minnesota study found that personality traits of identical twins are more correlated than those of fraternal twins. This provides much evidence to the idea personality traits have genetic influences.
Being that I have a twin brother (a fraternal twin bother), I find studies of twins to be rather interesting. I have sometimes wondered how similar we would be if we were raised by different families. What the Minnesota study showed is that, at least in terms of personality traits, it would not have mattered if we had been raised apart, our personalities would have the same likelihood to be similar.
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