Heritability estimates are slippery animals, but this recent PNAS paper is a great illustration of how they can be used to discipline theories of social network formation. The authors start by showing that three building blocks of social networks are heritable, namely the number of friends you have, the number of people who name you […]

It is good news that the social scientists are finally starting to think seriously about genetic variation and social behavior. This latest Science paper by UCSD political scientists James Fowler and Darren Schreiber is a case in point. A key argument they make in the paper is that political scientists cannot ignore behavior genetics because […]

Here is a nice follow-up to the Herbert and Coates study on London floor traders where they study the profitability of traders and testosterone levels. In this new paper, “Testosterone and Financial Risk Preferences”, available on the website on one of the authors, a Harvard-led team of researchers report that men with higher T make […]