Contents
What is more important – genes or upbringing? Is it true that men and women think differently? Is it possible to create ideal conditions for the development of a child’s talents? These questions were answered by psychophysiologist Ilya Zakharov
The guys from the Trends team discussed this material in the release of the Flying Podcast. You can listen on any convenient platform: in the player above, in Apple Podcasts, CastBox, Yandex.Music, Google Podcasts and wherever there are podcasts.
What does psychogenetics study?
Psychogenetics, or behavioral genetics, is one of the first interdisciplinary areas of scientific knowledge. On the one hand, psychogeneticists study things that are related to psychology, such as memory. On the other hand, they are trying to understand the work of genetic mechanisms.
Classical psychogenetics considered the nature of individual differences. Scientists tried to understand in what proportion an individual is influenced by hereditary biological and social factors – upbringing at school or parental attitudes. Over 100 years of the development of psychogenetics, researchers have realized that nature and society affect the development of the individual in approximately the same way. Now scientists have more difficult questions on the agenda. For example, where do individual differences in a population come from, how the ratio of biological and social changes depending on the conditions in which the individual developed.
Sometimes the results of psychogenetic studies contradict conclusions that seem quite logical. If you ask students at a lecture the question: “What factors do you think most influence the intelligence of children born in a family with a high socioeconomic status?”, Most will answer that the environment plays a decisive role. But practice shows that this is not the case. The contribution of genetic factors to the development of intelligence in such children is about four times greater.
How twin studies work
The main method of psychogenetics is twin studies. Their essence lies in comparing the features of a related pair.
Because twins are born with almost the same set of genes, differences in behavior, intelligence, or orientation can be found in social factors. And although it seems that the twins growing up in the same family are under the influence of exactly the same social factors, in fact this is not entirely true. Some elements of the environment were still different, as was the reaction to these factors.
To understand where individual differences come from in a pair of twins, scientists have to build mathematical models that take into account the most insignificant parameters, such as differences in weight or heart rate. On this basis, conclusions are drawn about the ratio of the contribution of genetic and social factors to the development of the trait under study.
Why psychogenetics is needed
It may seem that the purpose of psychogenetic research is not obvious. After all, there is molecular genetics, which explains how heredity works and how recessive and dominant genes appear. But explaining why the colors of peas are different is easier than understanding how exactly the features of human behavior are formed, which can be influenced by thousands of genes at the same time.
There are characteristics that cannot be directly studied with the help of DNA decoding. A person does not have “genes for alcoholism” or “crime”, but there is an innate degree of propensity for aggression. How it manifests itself over time depends largely on the impact of the environment – this is what psychogenetics studies.
How to apply psychogenetics in practice
Perhaps in the future, knowing about the innate tendencies of a particular person or an entire group, we will be able to model environmental conditions in such a way as to develop innate talents. For example, parents, knowing about the innate superpower of their children for music or the exact sciences, will be able to build a suitable educational trajectory from an early age.
Is it true that psychogenetics breaks gender stereotypes
Partly it is. Psychogenetic studies show that although there is a difference between men and women, there are still no significant differences. That is, if we take 10 thousand women and men, we will almost always find some quality in which women will differ from men. But such differences almost always turn out to be much smaller than just the difference between two randomly selected people. That is, two randomly taken men will differ from each other more than men on average from women on average.