Twin Studies

Twins are important for studies of nature vs. nurture theories in psychology because they are one of the few ways to study and see results due to their shared genetics. There are studies that have been done on this topic, however not that many since it is a long term experiment and in some cases it was done without even the twins or their parents and families knowing about it happening. There are multiple existing coincidental examples and planned studies that were done in which it is shown that twins were influenced in both genetic and environmental ways. It is however hard to completely choose one side based on these studies because it seems that the answer is that both aspects are necessary and make us who we are, which is also what most scientists and psychologists agree on.
The study of twins is still a relatively knew thing that started in 1870s by Francis Galton. He wrote and believed that nature has a bigger influence on a person rather than nurture and based his belief in cases of twins. He also guessed that identical twins must come from one single fertilized egg while non-identical must be from two separate ones. His guess was confirmed with further studies in 1883 but Galton himself had no evidence to support his idea. Twins are one of the only ways to study such notion as nature vs. nurture because they naturally become a control group. Many have argued that while it is one of the best ways to study this phenomenon it might be unethical to twins who participate since it could be considered an invasion of privacy of both individual. While nature vs. nurture is a big study that twins can relate to, there are also other aspects and questions that scientists and psychologists are interested to know about twins. Some of the questions people are interested to know about twins are how and what causes the egg to split, how are identical twins different from non-identical, and how are twins different when they grow up or if they are separated, which again