Personality psychologists were doing behavior genetics way before it was cool. In this episode, Rafael and Aysu sit down with Eivind Ystrøm, personality psychologist at the University of Oslo, to talk about what personality actually is, how heritable it turns out to be, and why the field was so far ahead of the rest of the social sciences in taking genetics seriously.

They also dig into one of the most provocative findings in the field: the so-called "gloomy prospect" — the idea that a large chunk of what makes you you may come down to essentially random, non-systematic events that even siblings growing up in the same household don't share. What does this mean for the search for specific environmental causes of personality? And more importantly — what is the mysterious mutation that Eivind thinks he may have?

What do we mean when we talk about "non-cognitive skills," and what does genetics tell us about them? In this episode, our hosts visited Perline Demange to talk about the genetic architecture of cognitive and non-cognitive skills — how they relate to educational attainment, where they overlap with personality and psychopathology, and what that could tell us about the genetics of doing well in school. And also - what on earth do Christmas Elves have to do with it?

Perline also mentions work by: Vaishnavi Madhavan https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaishnavi-madhavan-8ba3641ab/ Sverre Ofstad https://www.linkedin.com/in/sverre-ofstad-a6207b279/ Rosa Cheesman https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-cheesman-6586ba93/

Why did you pick your partner? Just right place at the right time, or deliberate process? Whatever the case, it turns out that your partner is likely to be more genetically similar to you than we would expect by random chance. Also turns out that this has a bunch of weird consequences for genetic research! In this episode, our hosts went to Oslo and had a chat with Hans Fredrik Sunde about all things assortative mating. What is it, why is it interesting, and how do we study it? And more importantly - what is the one weird item that Hans Fredrik has amassed a huge collection of?