Your DNA says less about your personality than a short online quiz

Representative image. A global team of researchers analysed data from up to 1.14 million participants across 46 study cohorts. | Photo Credit: Minator Yang/Unsplash Decades of psychology have categorised human personality into five broad buckets: openness to experience (curiosity and imagination), conscientiousness (organisation and responsibility), extraversion (sociability), agreeableness (compassion), and neuroticism (a tendency towards anxiety and volatility).In new findings published in Nature, scientists have completed one of the largest-ever genetic analyses of these ‘big five’ traits, offering a more detailed picture of the genetic architecture of personality.“The finding that genetic signals were broadly consistent across different contexts … supports the view that personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism have a biological basis,” Veena Kumari, professor of Experimental Psychology at Brunel University London, said. “However, like most psychological constructs, personality is a complex phenotype.” She noted that human behaviour remains deeply tethered to its environment and “may not be similarly expressed, or even measured with the same precision” across different walks of life. Published - October 28, 2026 07:30 am IST