Abstract
While there are many investigations concerning the inheritance of intelligence, we have only a few studies on the heredity of character. Because at first there was no objective method of investigating, and measuring character traits, the correlation method could not be applied to them, but now the development of chararcter study has opened the way to study character quantitatively, and also to use the correlation method.
Awaji and Okabe's extraversion-introversion test was assigned to seventythree students of awomen's college, who introspected themselves and also observed the character of their parents and brothers and sisters (older than ten years of age).
The correlation of the version quotient between a father and his daughter (the observer)is .207 and the correlation between a mother and her daughter is. 304 These values are very low, compared to those of the inheritance of intelligence.
While some parents resemble each other, other parents have different characters, therefore we calculated the correlation coefficient separately for each of those two groups. But the difference between the correlations in the two groups is not so large as we expected. And further correlations between parents and their children (non-observers), who were observed by the same other-observation method, are also very low.
Parents resenlbling Unlike _??_
Besides this correlation method, we tried other methods of checking these negative results, but the result was the same.
These results make it necessary to modify the common sense view that children take after their parents in their character.
