Born That Way

by William Wright

  The reporter worked for a wire service and a few days later a small article based on the Jim twins’ similarities and Bouchard’s comment appeared in a number of newspapers, including the New York Times. Suddenly Bouchard’s phone began ringing with requests for interviews with him and his Jims, and for television and radio appearances. Then a call came from The Tonight Show asking Bouchard if Springer and Lewis could appear with Johnny Carson. The Jims, who saw all the hoopla as a prolonged celebration of their reunion, happily agreed to everything, and Bouchard phoned their acceptance, but not without apprehension. He knew the jealousies and snobberies that permeated the academic community, and he knew the threat to scientific respectability posed by an appearance on the popular Tonight Show, which leaned more toward juggling acts and cleavage than serious science. But he also knew the price of an ad in major newspapers, and he saw a chance to gain a cost-free nationwide appeal for more twins.

  Before the Jim twins arrived at the University of Minnesota, Bouchard sat down with two of his graduate students, Margaret Keyes and Susan Resnick, and put together an assessment battery. To avoid being accused later of tailoring tests to hoped-for results, he selected several well-established tests of personality. For the comprehensive series of tests envisioned, he needed the help of other specialists—psychiatrists, medical doctors—so he solicited university friends for assistance. When he approached a professor of psychiatry, Len Heston, to run a psychiatric evaluation on the twins, Heston told Bouchard he felt the undertaking a complete waste of time.

  “Len,” said Bouchard, “humor me.”

  Heston went along and later admitted that of all the experts Bouchard recruited into his project, none felt that examining the twins would turn up anything useful. But after a week of examining the two Jims, all were astounded at the degree of sameness and became infected with Bouchard’s enthusiasm for studying reared-apart twins.

  During the week the Jims spent at the University of Minnesota, Bouchard subjected them to the battery of tests he and his colleagues had devised. In one series designed to measure personality—such traits as conformity, leadership, sociability, tolerance—the two Jims’ scores were as close as when one person takes the same test twice. On tests that measured I.Q. and interests, their scores were also very close. Their heart rate and brain-wave measures were almost identical.

  Both Jims were cooperative and seemed to relish the attention. This limelight factor would later be pounced upon by critics of the Minnesota study as a possible skewing element. The reasoning would be that twins reveling in the lionization their twinness brought them would emphasize, even exaggerate, their sameness. Astute as the argument is, it is refuted by the separation of the twins during tests and by the types of tests Bouchard administered. They were not only an array of physiological tests but personality questionnaires so complex that there would be no way to falsify or exaggerate. Beyond this, all who were present at the two Jims’ first meeting with each other scoffed at the suggestion the two men worked at being similar. Before they had time to collaborate on a “twin routine,” and before either had any idea their relationship would interest people beyond their immediate families, the two discovered a list of similarities that astounded them even more than they astounded the others present.

  A naturally cordial and accommodating man, Bouchard treated his first set of twins like two extremely rare albino greyhounds that had been placed in his care. (Seventy twin sets later, he would still show the same paternal protectiveness to each pair.) Everything the Jims did fascinated him, and he was constantly vigilant for new astonishments.

  Sitting with them at lunch during their week together, he noticed Jim Lewis place his finger in his mouth and bite his nail. Bouchard was intrigued and wondered if by some miracle the brother might have a similar habit. A few minutes later, he watched in amazement as Jim Springer’s hand went to his mouth and he began biting his nails. It is unlikely that an undesirable personal habit ever gave anyone as much pleasure as this did Bouchard. Jumping in, he learned that both Jims had been intense nail-biters all their lives.

  Bouchard’s excitement at watching two adult males stick their fingers in their mouths is understandable. In the behaviorist orthodoxy from which Bouchard came, few things were considered a more classic example of an environmentally induced neurotic symptom. Throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties, millions of nail-biting children were subjected to a bouquet of theories about their habit, ranging from hostility toward parents to castration fears. In the welter of facile and fanciful explanations, no one ever suggested that nail-biting might be an inherited trait. And while the Jims’ chewed nails did not prove it was, the phenomenon threw open a long-locked door to the possibility.

  Another occurrence struck Bouchard with comparable force. A group of examiners was sitting with Jim Springer playing back a tape-recorded interview and was trying to determine which Jim was speaking. Springer listened for a few moments then said without doubt, “That’s me.” As it turned out, it was his brother.

  While there might be a tendency to lump male speaking voices into general categories like high, medium, and Henry Kissinger, the speed with which an acquaintance’s voice is recognized on the phone suggests how distinctive each voice is. That commercial banks and other institutions now trust electronic voice measures as valid identification would suggest that speaking voices are as individual as fingerprints.

  An experienced psychologist, Bouchard knew too well how easily most of his colleagues in the field would explain twins raised in the same house having identical speaking voices—the constant togetherness, the subconscious mimicry, and so forth. That these two men had never met until they were thirty-eight yet still spoke exactly the same—the same intonation, the same inflections, similar choice of words—struck Bouchard as highly significant. “Anyone’s speaking voice is important behavior,” Bouchard would later say. “It’s part of your personality.”

  The twin-recruitment strategy worked. After the Tonight Show appearance, a number of twins responded, and within a few weeks Bouchard had five sets and the funds to bring them to Minneapolis for a week. Within another few weeks, five more sets had turned up and expressed a willingness to fly to Minneapolis for a week of tests. The Minnesota Twin Study was born. It would be the first separated-twins study in America in forty-two years. It also went far beyond the earlier studies in terms of extent of testing, the numbers of twins, and the integrity of their separateness. So superior was the Minnesota study to previous studies that various journals, including the New York Times, in announcing its launching referred to it as the first such study.

  Eighteen years later Bouchard’s elaborate project was still in progress and had by then examined 120 sets of reared-apart twins, seventy of them identical, fifty fraternal. He and his associates in the twins project, who would total eighteen scientists, had published over forty papers and articles summarizing the results of their investigations in such preeminent professional journals as Science, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and the British Journal of Psychiatry. In the view of many interested and impartial observers, their remarkable findings were the empirical culmination, the clincher, to a mounting pile of evidence of a significant genetic component to human personality and behavior.

  In addition, the numerous specific similarities between twins who first met as adults, anecdotal and untabulated as such evidence was (the Minnesota study made no systematic attempt to seek out such particular similarities between twins), strongly suggests manifestations of genetic expression in behavior of a pinpoint exactitude that had never before been so much as conjectured. Despite the oddity and logic-defying nature of many of these parallels—which will be discussed later—the examples are too numerous to ignore and, in many cases, too precise to dismiss as coincidence. If they proved nothing else, the odd similarities would serve to open minds to the possibility of a far broader range of genetic influence over our personalities than had been suspected by even the most bullish geneticists.
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  But more than the bizarre similarities, it was the array of across-the-board similarities found in a majority of the reared-apart twins that surprised the Minnesota researchers. They had expected to find a degree of concordance in domains like I.Q. and fundamentals of temperament like timidity or gregariousness. They had not been prepared, however, for the identical or highly similar speech patterns, body carriage, sense of humor, temperament, matrimonial histories, professional careers, tastes in clothes, choice of hobbies, and on and on into the labyrinth of personality. Because they were in totally unanticipated areas, many of these similarities turned up accidentally. No questionnaires or tests had been devised to ferret them out and measure them, so hurried efforts were made to include the often repeated categories in the tests. Bouchard had expected a stream of genetically evocative data; instead he was getting a river.

  To show how far his original findings were from prevailing psychological thought, Bouchard, in an overview essay on his twin study, quoted a sentence from one of the day’s most widely used psychology textbooks, the 1981 Introduction to Personality by W. Mischel. After discussing the power of the environment to mold personality, the author writes: “Imagine the enormous differences that would be found in personalities of twins with identical genetic endowments if they were raised in two different families.”

  THREE

  DESPERATELY SEEKING TWINS

  AT THE TIME he began the Minnesota Twin Study, Bouchard felt reasonably certain that he would find a high heritability to I.Q., as the earlier studies had. He also foresaw finding a degree of heritability to a number of personality traits, probably the traits that vary least throughout a lifetime, such as timidity, optimism, aggressiveness. While a principal objective was to put to rest the notion that genes play zero role in personality and behavior, Bouchard denies having been on a single-minded quest for genetic influences but rather hoped to bring his profession to a more balanced genes-and-environment view.

  “We really intended to look for differences between the twins,” he told me in an early conversation. “Whatever differences we found, we knew they had to be environmental. For a psychologist, environmental effects are the most interesting.” With the amazing similarities they found in Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, however, they knew that they were onto something quite different, that the genetic effects would be the big news.

  Regardless of whether Bouchard felt the objections to the earlier studies had merit—and some he considered downright silly—he made a strenuous effort to address each of them and struggled as well to anticipate unforeseen ones. Twins were tested separately, and well-established tests were used to avoid accusations of customizing the questions, tilting them toward hoped-for results. To forestall charges of examiner bias, outside examiners were brought in to administer I.Q. tests. Although Bouchard told twins the study’s purpose, he did not belabor it or go into much detail. (The first set of twins I interviewed after undertaking this book, two young men from a coalmining town in Pennsylvania, had no idea why they were tested in Minnesota, were mildly interested when I told them, but spoke more of the fun they had had in Minneapolis.) The fear was that twins, knowing what the Minnesota researchers were seeking, would try, consciously or unconsciously, to accommodate them. Most of the twins had little idea whether the Minnesota people were interested in similarities, differences, or neither.

  Despite his great caution and the rigorous amount of testing he planned, Bouchard had no illusions of avoiding a hostile reception from the usual quarters if he turned up persuasive evidence of genetic influence—which he felt quite sure would happen if he found enough pairs of separated twins. Bouchard took heart, however, in the intellectual climate’s gradual shift then taking place toward an evolutionary perspective on human nature. Four years earlier, it had made a giant move in that direction with the publication of Sociobiology—A New Synthesis, by Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson. This major work primarily addressed animal behavior but concluded with a controversial bang: a chapter that advanced the notion that in humans too, behavioral traits had evolved along with physical traits. Almost rudely the book said, “By the way, these animals we’ve been talking about? You’re one too.”

  For this impertinence the book was brutally attacked by the custodians of environmentalism, but it still had a sizable impact with others less threatened and won many converts to the biological perspective. Still, Bouchard knew that there were cadres of environmentalists—now called “radical environmentalists,” as the evidence against their extreme position mounted—who would reject his findings no matter how sound his methods. “We knew,” Bouchard later said with philosophical resignation, “that no matter what we did, we would still get jumped on.”

  Bouchard threw himself into setting up his twin study with the added gusto of one who knew he was onto something truly important. He worked long days and nights, reading every scrap of information on the subject and brainstorming with colleagues ever more ingenious strategies for prying cosmic secrets from identical twins. Throughout the planning stage, he was constantly alert for any deviation from methodological impeccability.

  The project took on the ambition and scope of a new business venture, and Bouchard brought to it the same drive and resourcefulness of an entrepreneur who has staked all his savings, but in this case his intellectual conviction added a different sort of passion and intensity. When the study reached its eventual scope and magnitude, Auke Tellegen, who now knew the formidable logistical and methodological problems that he and Bouchard had not foreseen when they were fantasizing about a study, paid a simple tribute: “Only Tom Bouchard could have brought this twin study into existence.”

  BARBARA PARKER, an attractive woman of thirty-six, returned to her Los Angeles home one day in 1983 to be intercepted on her front walk by her next-door neighbor. “Do you remember telling me you were an adopted child and thought you might have an identical twin?” the neighbor asked.

  The woman nodded yes.

  “Well, brace yourself,” the neighbor went on. “She’s sitting in my living room.”

  This was typical of the jarring scenes and intense emotions that typified twin reunions. Some of the twins, to be sure, knew of their twin’s existence, as had the two Jims, but had never had the inclination to initiate a search. Others had heard hints from adoptive parents who had learned of the sibling from the adoption agency, but these new parents had either forgotten the information or had decided against telling their adopted child for fear of negative repercussions. Other times an adopted child simply had a strong belief in a lost twin based on no conscious knowledge. Fantasy siblings are common with children, but in the case of Bouchard’s reunited twins, the missing-half stories are told with impressive frequency and a high degree of conviction.

  A number of the reunion stories hinged on one twin’s being mistaken for the other by a stranger, as with the Jim twins. If this sort of chance run-in happened to an adoptee who suspected or knew of a twin’s existence, he or she could usually elicit from the stranger enough information to find the other twin. (“This guy who looks like me; do you know where he lives?”) This sort of chance encounter has better prospects of success than plunging into court records and other bureaucratic thickets. Documents are often lost and families disperse into untraceability over the years. Even without such mischance, adoption agencies traditionally have had strict policies against releasing information about biological parents.

  In recent years, however, this stand seems to be softening, perhaps as a result of a growing awareness of the importance of biological inheritance. In the case of twins, the agencies have heard twin sense-of-loss stories and have come to realize how misguided, even cruel, their earlier policy had been of separating twins—on the hard-nosed assumption that one infant is easier to place than two—and have all but stopped separating twins. As a result, a study like Bouchard’s will not be possible in the future.

  TO TAKE PART in the Minnesota Twin Study, twins had to volunteer, which meant they wer
e a self-selected sample. This is a category in psychological experiment that raises concerns, in that self-selection may not be as pure as, for example, picking a group of people at random from the phone book or, as in other twin studies abroad, locating experiment subjects through national twin registries.

  One of the criticisms later leveled at Bouchard’s twin study was that because he solicited his twins through talk shows and news articles, he only lured twins into the study who craved publicity and would thus bias his sample. Instead of getting a cross section of American adults, he would get an atypical collection of self-delighted show-offs, who felt themselves on a remarkable level of sameness; dissimilar twins would choose not to compete in what might appear to be a national similarity play-off.

  As a group, psychologists have become masterful at ferreting out potential flaws in studies of humans, especially any aspect of the recruitment process that might produce an atypical sample. This is appropriate, since bias in selection methods can creep in inadvertently and must constantly be guarded against. A legendary example of a tainted sample was a major study on criminal intelligence that examined a large number of prison inmates. The costly study went well, with evidence building toward a highly significant result: that criminals were on average of lower I.Q. than the general population. Eventually, some spoilsport pointed out that if the prison criminals measured poorly, it was probably because the smart criminals did not get caught. The results of this particular study did nothing to prove that criminals were dumb, only that prisoners were.