Thomas Bouchard's Twin Experiments

Thomas Bouchard, a former American psychologist of the University of Minnesota, is considered to be one of the most influential researchers of the century due to his numerous experiments involving identical twins separated at birth, as well as his striking discoveries regarding adoptees and biological parents. Some of his surprising discoveries have sparked debate and controversy among a number of different psychologists, but, nonetheless, have proven the personality traits among twins to be strikingly similar. After reading the studies and discoveries of the Jim Lewis and Jim Springer twin experiment, Bouchard was inspired to design an experiment of his own testing reared-apart identical twins (Dewey, 2007). Seeking to find individual differences …show more content…
For example, a specific pair of test subjects, known as Oskar and Jack, had been separated shortly after birth and were raised in highly contrasting cultures. However, as the two arrived and finally met at the airport, a large number of similarities could already be noticed. Both wore wire-rimmed glasses and had mustaches, as well as two-pocket shirts along with epaulets. The pair also shared a wide range of individual characteristics, such as their tendencies to be absentminded and reading magazines from back to front, to name a few (Dewey, …show more content…
These surprising and “wild” results still leave many questions unanswered, such as why the percentage of intelligence due to heritability is so high, as well as leaves many psychologists skeptical. “In social science, it's rare that we can explain even 10 percent of the variance of a trait,” explained Dr. Robert Plamin, a psychologist at the Pennsylvania State University whose own findings from a similar experiment conducted by himself provided completely different results from that of Bouchard’s (Kolata, 1990). “No one study is definitive,” added Dr. Feldman, professor of psychology at Yale University (Kolata,