Like father, like son? The complex factors that shape a parent’s influence on their child

Al Pacino and Marlon Brando‘s father-son relationship in The Godfather was complicated, to say the least. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

The eternal mystery of how much we are shaped by our parents – or how much we shape our children – was stirred again last week with the publication of a study that suggests that we are less like our parents than we had previously thought.

Led by René Mõttus of Edinburgh University’s department of psychology, the study looked at more than 1,000 pairs of relatives to establish how likely children are to inherit what psychologists call the “big five” or “Ocean” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.