Suzanne is 16, her younger sister Ellen is 13, and the two girls are as different as night and day. Suzanne is impulsive, short-tempered, and generally hard to get along with, at least from her parents' point of view, although she is very popular with adolescents of her own age. Ellen is typically quiet and pensive, much more interested in school studies than in her peers and generally reserved
around other people. (a) How do the girls rate on the introversion/extraversion scale? (b) In terms of genetics, how might the girls be so different? (c) In terms of environment, how might the girls be so different?
What will be an ideal response?
(a) Suzanne is on the extravert end of the continuum; Ellen is introverted. (b) The girls have only 50 percent of their genes in common (i.e., a .50 kinship quotient). The particular genetic combinations in each girl are also different, noting that a given pair of parents is capable of producing perhaps 64 trillion different children. Finally, personality is polygenic, which means that different combinations of genes could have markedly different expressions. (c) The first-born child is typically reared somewhat differently and may also dominate the younger sibling. Such differences yield markedly different environments within the same home. The girls would also experience different classrooms in school, different friends, and a host of other nonshared characteristics.
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Four-year-old Jasmine is African-American. Jasmine prefers to play with dolls that are white. Also, she is more likely to say that black children are naughtier than white children. Jasmine’s preference for majority values or people suggests that she may be experiencing
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