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Aaaah, evidence for 'every stereotype' being 98% true, please? The field of psychology would heartily disagree with you and I don't need to look up a study to know that. People apply stereotypes as a judgemental heuristic, which is a mental shortcut. We do it because it is easy and doesn't require controlled thinking, not because it is accurate all the time. It isn't. Heuristics often cause minor to serious judgemental errors. We make judgements based upon several principles, the stereotype falling into the representative heuristic. This means we have a tendancy to want to categorize things in ways that make sense to us.

An example: you see a book on the shelf of a bookstore that has the title "Stalking the Night." Your past experiences will probably tell you something about these words that will make you place this book in the category of 'horror.' You pull out the book and find it is actually a book about panthers. It's the same with stereotypes. You see someone dressed in all black and place them in the category 'goth.' Then you actually bother to get to know them and find out they wear black because they're a theater techie.

That's not to say that shortcuts based on the representative heuristic are always wrong. They're not often completely right, though.

A note on genetics: it is not correct to say most of personality is created by nurture. That question is not yet answered, but the things I have read have pointed to a much stronger genetic influence than most people are confortable thinking about. I've read in psych textbooks for example, that intelligence is around 70% genetically determined. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that personality fits at around that number as well.

Er. I would believe that that theory is at least partially true. Get this:

I'm the third in a family with four kids. I have an older brother, and older sister, and a younger brother. Yes, that means I'm the odd one out. There's the girl, the youngest, and the oldest. My parents swear it isn't true, but they didn't pay quite as much attention to me as they did to the others. I ended up doing better than any of the others academically, mostly because I developed an interest in reading at a young age (probably due to the fact that it drew my attention away from the real world). I probably wouldn't have developed an interest in reading like I did if I had more preferential treatment.

An interesting point to be added to this is that due to my obsessive reading of books, my role models were often characters I admired in books. My personality is very very different from those of my siblings. So, while your parents are a major factor in your personality development, I believe there are many other factors. Role models, social status at school, a billion things go into personality development. So, while I wouldn't say that bad parents = bad children, I would say that abusive parents are a major factor that can lead to the development of criminals and thugs. Just not always the determining one.

Well that goes into a whole other argument about the difference between "smart" and "intelligent" or "aquired knowledge" vs. being "predisposed to understand."

How you turn out, we've all managed to state, is determined by a lot of different factors, and just how much each factor effects the outcome is A: unknown and B: probably varies from person to person.

In addition to that sum-up, I'd like to add that for some children of "bad" parents, they're own personal drive to not end up like their parents is a factor in itself, possibly even replacing the idea of a role model if one isn't avaiable. The desire not to be like someone else is a very strong force.

I know a girl who grew up in a very poor abusive family, and she has risen to be a A student, graduated with $32 thousand in scholarships, and is now at a great university studying a career in politics. She had very few people to lean on, but she persevered because she knew that she wanted better for herself than what her parents had.