Children are less like their parents than often thought.
Children do not always share the same characteristics as their parents
A new study has revealed that kids inherit surprisingly few of their parents' personality traits, to the extent that parents and their children are only just more likely to be similar in temperament than a pair of strangers.
The experts compared the character traits of parents and their adult children, including how neurotic, extrovert and agreeable they were.
Participants completed a personality test and were told that they were in either the bottom, middle, or top third of the population for specific traits - but shock analysis revealed that only 39 per cent of the children would be grouped in the same third as their parents.
Meanwhile, the data revealed that pairs of unrelated individuals had a 33 per cent chance of being grouped alongside each other.
Rene Mottus, who led the study for Edinburgh University, said: "More than 60 per cent of children are in a different (category) from their parents for any given personality trait.
"In other words, children and parents are a little more likely to be similar than random people, but not sufficiently so to allow us to accurately predict children's traits from their parents."