I used to think this was a false binary, the kind of question people ask at dinner parties to sound like they’ve read enough philosophy to have opinions. Now I think it’s a real question with an answer I don’t love.
Experience does most of the shaping. Not all of it. But most.
Starting close to home, my sister and I had the same parents, the same house, the same rules; we came out different people. If who we are were the dominant force, siblings raised in near identical conditions would converge more than we do. We didn’t. Something did work beyond temperament, and that something is the specific, granular texture of what happened to each of us and when, not the shared conditions we’re supposed to point to as the explanation.
In the 1960s, a child psychiatrist named Peter Neubauer, working through the Louise Wise adoption agency in New York, tracked at least eight sets of twins and one set of triplets separated at birth. The point was to settle nature versus nurture for good, so the agency placed the infants with families of deliberately different socioeconomic status, and nobody told the adoptive parents any of it was happening, or that their child had siblings. Identical genes, different households, tracked from infancy.
Three of the boys found each other by accident at nineteen, which became a documentary. What’s less cited is what the reunion actually showed: the triplets looked alike and shared surface habits, but their personalities had diverged significantly depending on which home raised them. One of them, Eddy Galland, died by suicide in 1995, in a household reporting later described as harsher than his brothers’. Same DNA. Different math.
A Psychology Today piece did push back on the documentary’s framing, arguing Neubauer didn’t choose the separation himself, since the agency had already placed the triplets before his study began. I’m citing the study for what it shows about outcomes, not endorsing the tidy villain narrative built around it.
Still: identical starting material, divergent people, same as my sister and me minus the genetics being quite that identical. Whatever “who we are” means, it’s not nothing though. It’s the lens the experience gets read through, not the picture itself.
If I’m being precise: temperament sets the range, experience picks the point inside it. My sister and I prove the range isn’t as narrow as shared parents would suggest. The triplets prove it isn’t destiny either.
by subiksha 
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