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Using genetics for social science

Abstract

Social science genetics is concerned with understanding whether, how and why genetic differences between human beings are linked to differences in behaviours and socioeconomic outcomes. Our review discusses the goals, methods, challenges and implications of this research endeavour. We survey how the recent developments in genetics are beginning to provide social scientists with a powerful new toolbox they can use to better understand environmental effects, and we illustrate this with several substantive examples. Furthermore, we examine how medical research can benefit from genetic insights into social-scientific outcomes and vice versa. Finally, we discuss the ethical challenges of this work and clarify several common misunderstandings and misinterpretations of genetic research on individual differences.

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Fig. 1: Genetic correlations of educational attainment with traits across the entire lifespan.
Fig. 2: The influence of GWAS sample size on the accuracy of polygenic scores for two genetically complex traits with assumed SNP heritability of 20% and 40%.
Fig. 3: The relationship between a polygenic score for educational attainment and actual years of schooling in the Health and Retirement Study.
Fig. 4: How medical science can benefit from social science genetics.

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Data availability

The genetic correlations reported in Fig. 1 are based on publicly available GWAS summary statistics on LDHub (http://ldsc.broadinstitute.org/ldhub/). The Health and Retirement Study data in Fig. 3 can be accessed via dbGaP and the University of Michigan.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Burik for preparing Fig. 1 and the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (https://www.thessgac.org/) for Fig. 3. P.D.K. was financially supported by an ERC consolidator grant (647648 EdGe). K.P.H. was supported by the Jacobs Foundation, the Templeton Foundation and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grants R01-HD083613 and 5-R24-HD042849 (to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin). The funders had no role in the conceptualization, preparation or decision to publish this work.

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Harden, K.P., Koellinger, P.D. Using genetics for social science. Nat Hum Behav 4, 567–576 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0862-5

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