What is it that makes us who we really are? Our life experiences or our DNA? Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were born and raised in New York City. Both women were adopted as infants and raised by loving families. They met for the first time when they were 35 years old and found they were “identical strangers”: they had been separated as infants as part of a secret research study of identical twins designed to examine the question of nature verses nurture. “When the families adopted these children, they were told that their child was already part of an ongoing child study. But of course, they neglected to tell them the key element of the study, which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes,” Bernstein said. The results of the study, that ended in 1980, have been sealed until 2066 and given to an archive at Yale University. Of the 13 children involved in the study, three sets of twins and one set of triplets have discovered one another. The other four subjects of the study still do not know they have identical twins.
2 thoughts on ““Identical Strangers’ Explore Nature vs. Nurture””
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For twin studies to yield estimates of the impact of “nature” versus “nurture,” the twins need not only be raised in “separate” environments, but in uncorrelated or randomly distributed environments. Given the nature of adoption, this is an highly unlikely outcome. Hence, at least some of the resemblance in twins’ outcomes attributed to genetic similarity is likely due to the “separate” environments in which the twins were raised being similar.
As Michael says, this study may not yield much information on nature vs. nurture. But it does say much about social attitudes to twinship in the 20th century.
The ethics of withholding this information from the study’s subjects, who will be dead by 2066, seems questionable. Who consented for them? Not their adoptive parents.
Separating twins in adoption was not uncommon because being a twin was considered psychologically unhealthy, and twins were thought to be at risk of not developing their individual identities. This was a kind of prejudice, not based on research. As a parent of twins, I feel fortunate that Madison schools have had flexible policies with regard to placement of twins in classes. Research does not show a benefit to separating twins routinely in school, but it has been the norm in many school systems, even when parents did not want it and twins were adversely affected by it. Some twins do better in class together and some thrive in separate classes.
One of the best math classes any of my children has had was taught at Hamilton Middle School by Ms. Unmacht and Ms. Pliner. They are twins who share a single teaching position. Not only were they great math teachers, I thought they were a great example of adults who have enjoyed and made the most of their unique twin relationship.