Social Mechanisms of Genetic Effects on Education

The purpose of this project is to analyze how genetic effects on children’s educational performance depend on the social environment. Research shows that children’s educational performance is affected both by genetics and the social environment provided by parents, daycare, and school. However, we are just starting to understand that educational performance results from the interplay between genetics and the social environment. The SOCGEN project contributes to this emergent research by asking (1) Does the social environment provided by parents, daycare, and school mediate and moderate the effect of children’s genotype on their educational performance? (2) Do these social mechanisms of genetic effects differ across socioeconomic status?

In answering these research questions, the SOCGEN project furthers our understanding of the interplay between social and biological forces shaping human behavior, thereby improving our basic understanding of humans. During the past century, research has attempted to understand how much of human behavior is explained either by genes or the environment, thereby separating the two and, at times, fueling a deterministic understanding of genetics. In the past decade, advances in molecular genetics have led to a new research agenda asking how genetic effects depend on the social environment. Aligned with this research agenda, SOCGEN challenges a deterministic understanding of genetics by analyzing how genetic effects depend on something quite malleable, namely the social environment.

SOCGEN uses large-scale quantitative datasets with information on genotype, parenting, childcare, and educational records and leverages the natural experiment of conception to identify the effect of child genotype on educational performance. Thereby, SOCGEN delivers a theoretical development of the social mechanisms linking genetics to educational performance.