Journal Article

Using genetics for social science

Koellinger, Philipp D., Harden, K. Paige

2020

Overview

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. Harden and Koellinger discuss the goals, methods and challenges of social science genetics, which aims to unravel the genetic underpinnings of individual differences in social, behavioural and health outcomes.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: 4014/159 / 4014/4012 / 4014/477 / 4014/523 / 631/208 / Behavioral Sciences / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Environmental aspects / Ethical dilemmas / Ethics / Experimental Psychology / Genetics / Genome-Wide Association Study / Health behavior / Health status / Human Genetics - methods / Humans / Individual differences / Life Sciences / Medical research / Microeconomics / Multifactorial Inheritance / Neurosciences / Personality and Social Psychology / Psychology, Social / Review Article / Social Mobility / Social sciences / Social Sciences - methods / Social scientists