A recent study of Brazilian twins suggests that people’s beliefs about their own artistic and practical creativity are modestly influenced by their genetics. The research, published in Personality and Individual Differences, indicates that while inherited factors play a role, unique life experiences account for the vast majority of differences in how creative individuals think they are. The findings provide behavioral genetics data from a South American population, expanding a field that traditionally relies on North American and European samples.
Creativity is generally understood as the ability to generate original and useful ideas in response to environmental demands or social challenges. The concept is often broken down into specific domains. Artistic creativity involves expressive and aesthetic pursuits like visual arts, music, and performance. Practical or everyday creativity involves finding functional solutions to daily problems, such as improvising a fix for a broken household item or navigating a complex social situation.
Instead of measuring objective creative performance, the current research focuses on creative self-beliefs. This term refers to how people perceive their own creative capacities. A person’s belief in their own creativity is a psychological trait that influences whether they seek out creative opportunities or persist when faced with complicated challenges.
To understand how much of a trait is inherited, scientists often rely on twin studies. By comparing identical twins, who share all of their DNA, with fraternal twins, who share about half of their DNA, researchers can estimate the relative contributions of genetics and the environment. Environmental influences are further divided into shared environments, like growing up in the same household, and non-shared environments, which include unique personal experiences such as individual friendships, specific mentors, or personal hobbies.
Most of what scientists know about the genetics of creativity comes from populations in industrialized Western nations. However, a 2024 review pointed out a regional blind spot, noting that Brazilian twins have been largely missing from global genetic research. The research team, led by João Vitor Rodrigues Costa and Marco Antonio Corrêa Varella at the University of São Paulo, set out to provide initial estimates of genetic and environmental influences on creative self-beliefs in a South American context.
Varella, a biologist and research fellow at the Institute for Research on Sociocultural Variations who also authored an open access book about the ecological and evolutionary bases of human behavior, was drawn to the topic through his interest in evolutionary psychology. “From the evolutionary perspective, the only way to empirically be confident that something morphological or psychological evolved is to reunite a converging line of evidence stemming from different areas and fields,” Varella told PsyPost. “One of these sources of evidence is indeed twin studies, which tell us how much genetic variation lies underneath individual variation in psychological and bodily traits.”
To conduct the new study, the researchers recruited 196 participants, making up 98 twin pairs. The sample included 79 pairs of identical twins and 19 pairs of fraternal twins. The participants were predominantly female, mostly young adults, and primarily from middle-class backgrounds in Brazil. Data collection occurred in two phases, with 74 twin pairs visiting a laboratory for an extensive session of psychological and physical assessments prior to the pandemic, and an additional 24 twin pairs completing the study through an online survey at a later date.
The participants answered a brief questionnaire designed to measure their self-perceived creativity and curiosity. They rated their own artistic creativity and practical creativity on an 11-point scale ranging from zero to ten. They also answered a single question about their general curiosity using the same scale. The researchers then used statistical models to compare the scores of identical and fraternal twins, allowing them to calculate the percentage of variance explained by genetics, shared family environments, and unique individual experiences.
The researchers found that genetic factors accounted for about 22 percent of the variation in artistic creative self-beliefs. For practical creativity, genetic factors accounted for a nearly identical 21 percent of the variation. This means that roughly one-fifth of the differences in how creative these individuals believed themselves to be can be traced back to their genetic makeup. When the researchers combined both measures into a single general factor of creative self-belief, the genetic influence was estimated at 24 percent.
The remaining variation in creative self-beliefs was almost entirely explained by non-shared environmental factors. Unique life experiences accounted for about 78 percent of the variance in artistic creativity and 79 percent in practical creativity. Shared environmental factors, such as being raised in the same household or having the same parents, had no statistically significant effect on the twins’ creative self-beliefs. The statistical models for the curiosity question did not fit the data well, so the researchers did not interpret those specific 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 a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on a relatively small number of participants, particularly in the group of fraternal twins. This small sample size means that the exact statistical estimates have wide margins of error and should be viewed as preliminary approximations. A larger sample of fraternal twins would help to provide more precise calculations of genetic and environmental influences in this population.
Varella noted the difficulty in recruiting a sample of twins, “particularly because they are less than two percent of the population and because the USP Twin Panel is still in its initial phase, so the size of the twin register and the proportion of twins who want to be part of research is still small, unfortunately.” He added that identical twins generally participate at higher rates because they “are more intrigued by their similarity.”
The study also used single-item questions to measure creativity and curiosity. “Because we had little access to twins and little time with them, we had to compromise and use only a single item question about creativity self-belief,” Varella said. While these brief measures are useful for keeping surveys short, they do not capture the full complexity of human creativity.
The results reflect how participants view their own abilities, which is not necessarily the same as how they would perform on objective tests of creative thinking or problem solving. People’s self-ratings can be influenced by cultural norms regarding modesty, self-esteem, and what a specific society considers creative.
“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 behavioral 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 build on these findings by combining self-reported beliefs with actual performance tasks, such as generating alternative uses for everyday objects or having independent judges evaluate creative products. Exploring these traits in larger and more diverse groups of twins across Latin America could also help clarify how cultural and educational opportunities interact with genetic predispositions to shape the creative mind.
“We hope our humble study serves a bigger purpose of inspiring more researchers in Latin America to study behavioral genetics and other biological perspectives to psychology and behavior, 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.
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