A Brazilian twin study published in Personality and Individual Differences suggests that people’s beliefs about their own artistic and practical creativity are modestly influenced by genetics. The researchers say that while inherited factors matter, most differences arise from unique life experiences. The study used 196 participants forming 98 twin pairs — 79 identical and 19 fraternal — recruited in Brazil. Data collection occurred in two phases, with 74 twin pairs attending a laboratory session before the pandemic and a further 24 completing the study online later.
Creativity is defined as the ability to generate original and useful ideas in response to environmental demands or social challenges, and is commonly broken down into two domains: artistic creativity, including visual arts, music and performance, and practical or everyday creativity, such as improvising a fix for a broken item or navigating a social situation.
Rather than objective tests of creative performance, the study focused on creative self-beliefs — how people perceive their own creative capacities. Such beliefs are a psychological trait that can shape whether individuals seek out creative opportunities or persist when faced with difficulties.
To estimate heritability, researchers rely on twin designs: identical twins share all their DNA, while fraternal twins share around half; environmental influences are partitioned into shared environments (things like the home) and non-shared environments (unique experiences such as personal friendships or mentors).
The research team, led by João Vitor Rodrigues Costa and Marco Antonio Corrêa Varella at the University of São Paulo, sought to provide initial estimates of genetic and environmental influences on creative self-beliefs in a South American context.
Participants answered a brief questionnaire measuring self-perceived creativity and curiosity, rating their own artistic and practical creativity on an 11-point scale from zero to ten. They also answered a single question about general curiosity using the same scale.
The researchers found that genetic factors accounted for about 22 percent of the variation in artistic creative self-beliefs and 21 percent in practical creativity. When the two measures were combined into a general factor of creative self-belief, the genetic influence rose to about 24 percent.
The remaining variation was largely explained by non-shared environmental factors, with about 78 percent for artistic creativity and 79 percent for practical creativity. Shared environmental factors, such as being raised in the same household, had no statistically significant effect. The model for the curiosity question did not fit well enough to interpret those results.
“How one considers oneself as creative varies among people, and we found that in a small and unrepresentative sample of Brazil, about a quarter and a fifth of this interpersonal variation is due to genetic factors,” Varella explained. “The majority of this individual variation is due to each one’s unique individual environment (the one not shared with our siblings or no one else).”
As with all research, there are caveats. The study relied on a relatively small number of participants, particularly in the group of fraternal twins, which means the exact statistical estimates have wide margins of error and should be viewed as preliminary. Recruitment difficulties also meant identical twins generally participate at higher rates because they are more intrigued by their similarity.
The researchers noted the use of single-item questions to measure creativity and curiosity. While practical for keeping surveys brief, these measures do not capture the full complexity of human creativity, and the results reflect how participants view their own abilities rather than how they would perform on objective tests.
“Heritability is not about how much of my or your creativity is due to my genes, but instead it is a measure of the genetic contribution to the individual differences in traits in a given population,” Varella explained. “The more one knows about modern genetics and behavioural genetics, the less one is afraid of genes as being the destiny or immutable fatality. Heritability or genes can never really be used as excuses because the most important factor that affects individual differences across traits and population is the unique environment; what we do with our life and all the random factors that we face.”
Future research could combine self-reported beliefs with actual performance tasks and involve larger, more diverse groups of twins across Latin America to explore how cultural and educational opportunities interact with genetic predispositions.
“We hope our humble study serves a bigger purpose of inspiring more researchers in Latin America to study behavioural genetics and other biological perspectives to psychology and behaviour, so that we get to a more integrated and richer notion of humans,” Varella concluded.
The study, “Heritability of self-reported artistic and practical/everyday creative self-beliefs in Brazilian twins,” was authored by João Vitor Rodrigues Costa, Yago Lukševičius de Moraes, and Marco Antonio Corrêa Varella.
