ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences2022
Challenging the utility of polygenic scores for social science: Environmental confounding, downward causation, and unknown biology.
Article in The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perceptions of Polygenic Scores for Medical and Social Traits Among Biobank Participants and the Public.Biopreservation and biobanking · 2026Article
- Ancestry-Calibrated Polygenic Risk Scores Predict PTSD Trajectories in Recent Trauma Survivors and Interact with Neighborhood Resources.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Ethical Priorities Among Commercial Genomics Professionals : Survey Evidence Highlighting Diversity, Fragmented Privacy Law, and Human Rights Risks as Central Participant Concerns.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2026Article
- Genetic Burden andJournal of personalized medicine · 2026Article
- Predictors of Environmental Sensitivity in Syrian refugee children.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Social and Behavioral Genomics: On the Ethics of the Research and Its Downstream Applications.Annual review of genomics and human genetics · 2025Review
- The Genetics of Intelligence.Deutsches Arzteblatt international · 2025Review
- Race, intelligence and genetics: colonialism in the era of neurotechnology.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- The Geneticization of Education and Its Bioethical Implications.Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees · 2024Article
- The role of environmental sensitivity in the mental health of Syrian refugee children: a multi-level analysis.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
- Polygenic Indices (a.k.a. Polygenic Scores) in Social Science: A Guide for Interpretation and Evaluation.Sociological methodology · 2024Article
- Infrastructuring Educational Genomics: Associations, Architectures, and Apparatuses.Postdigital science and education · 2024Article
- All that glisters is not gold: Genetics and social science.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2023Article
- Vertical pleiotropy explains the heritability of social science traits.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2023Article
- Scanning the Horizon of Sociogenomics: an Assessment of the Development and Growth of Polygenic Indices for Social and Behavioral Traits.AJOB empirical bioethicsReview
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
The sociogenomics revolution is upon us, we are told. Whether revolutionary or not, sociogenomics is poised to flourish given the ease of incorporating polygenic scores (or PGSs) as "genetic propensities" for complex traits into social science research. Pointing to evidence of ubiquitous heritability and the accessibility of genetic data, scholars have argued that social scientists not only have an opportunity but a duty to add PGSs to social science research. Social science research that ignores genetics is, some proponents argue, at best partial and likely scientifically flawed, misleading, and wasteful. Here, I challenge arguments about the value of genetics for social science and with it the claimed necessity of incorporating PGSs into social science models as measures of genetic influences. In so doing, I discuss the impracticability of distinguishing genetic influences from environmental influences because of non-causal gene-environment correlations, especially population stratification, familial confounding, and downward causation. I explain how environmental effects masquerade as genetic influences in PGSs, which undermines their raison d'être as measures of genetic propensity, especially for complex socially contingent behaviors that are the subject of sociogenomics. Additionally, I draw attention to the partial, unknown biology, while highlighting the persistence of an implicit, unavoidable reductionist genes versus environments approach. Leaving sociopolitical and ethical concerns aside, I argue that the potential scientific rewards of adding PGSs to social science are few and greatly overstated and the scientific costs, which include obscuring structural disadvantages and cultural influences, outweigh these meager benefits for most social science applications.
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