Gene-Environment Interplay in the Social Sciences

Pereira, Rita Marisa Ribes; Biroli, Pietro; Hinke, Stephanie von; Kippersluis, Hans van; Galama, T. J.; Rietveld, Niels; Thom, Kevin

doi:10.31219/osf.io/d96z3

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 149 publications

(188 reference statements)

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“…Two prior review papers in general-interest economics journals (Beauchamp et al, 2011a;Benjamin et al, 2012) were published before the first large-scale GWAS of a social-science phenotype (Rietveld et al, 2013). A third (Dias Pereira et al, 2022) provides an accessible, succinct and non-technical introduction to a subset of the topics we discuss here. More recent reviews have been published in sociology (Freese, 2018;Braudt, 2018;Martschenko, Trejo and Domingue, 2019;Conley, 2016) and psychology (Plomin et al, 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

Social-Science Genomics: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Benjamin,

Cesarini,

Turley

et al. 2024

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Rapid progress has been made in identifying links between human genetic variation and social and behavioral phenotypes. Applications in mainstream economics are beginning to emerge. This review aims to provide the background needed to bring the interested economist to the frontier of social-science genomics. Our review is structured around a theoretical framework that nests many of the key methods, concepts and tools found in the literature. We clarify key assumptions and appropriate interpretations. After reviewing several significant applications, we conclude by outlining future advances in genetics that will expand the scope of potential applications, and we discuss the ethical and communication challenges that arise in this area of research.

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confidence: 99%

Social-Science Genomics: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Benjamin,

Cesarini,

Turley

et al. 2024

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Class background reverses the effect of a polygenic index of cognitive performance on economic ideology

Ahlskog

2022

Preprint

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Variation in political preferences is increasingly understood to stem from both environmental influences and genetics. Research has argued that a possible pathway for genetic effects on ideology is via cognitive performance, showing a genetic overlap between the traits. Yet, an unambiguous link between cognitive performance and economic policy preferences remains elusive, with results ranging from negative to positive effects on economic conservatism. In this study, I argue that this heterogeneity reflects an underlying gene-by-environment interaction. I depart from the assumption that cognitive performance, rather than being directly connected to a set of policy preferences, influences the capacity to correctly optimize those preferences. Combined with insights from standard models in political economics, this leads to the proposal that genetics associated with cognitive performance should cause more left-wing economic preferences if you grow up in relative poverty, but more right-wing preferences if you grow up in relative affluence. Utilizing variation in a polygenic index of cognitive performance within dizygotic twin pairs, coupled with unique register data on economic conditions for both the twins, their parents, and their childhood neighborhood, I show that the effect of the PGI on a fine-grained measure of economic conservatism is zero on average, but indeed sizable and sign-discordant by class background. To my knowledge, this represents the first sign-discordant GxE finding for a socially relevant outcome, which has implications for future social science research using PGIs.

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Gene-Environment Interplay in the Social Sciences

Cited by 2 publications

References 149 publications

Social-Science Genomics: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Social-Science Genomics: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Class background reverses the effect of a polygenic index of cognitive performance on economic ideology

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