Genes linked to sexlessness overlap with genes associated with:
- Higher education & IQ
- Less substance use
- Higher autism & anorexia risk
- Lower ADHD, anxiety, depression & PTSD risk

"Our understanding of the stability in attachment during the first two decades of life is limited...I found little support for an early-formed prototype being responsible for stability. In sum, there was little continuity in attachment from childhood to adolescence"
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

"To assume that children are fashioned in such a way that their adult behavior is contingent on their experiences with their parents in the first few years of life is not just to underrate them but to underrate evolution itself."

"Contrary to popular and long-standing accounts of the causes and consequences of attachment styles, we find no evidence that attachment and ideology are jointly grounded in early familial experiences."

"As the work of Hugo Mercier and others shows, it’s really hard to change people’s minds . . . With respect to colleges and universities . . . empirical research consistently finds that students’ typically change very little over the course of their college education."

Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The modern nature-nurture debate has been boiled down to a sterile empirical question about whether "genes" or "environment" are more important for the explanation of human differences. For almost any trait that people care about, that question has no interesting answer."

Our paper on indirect assortative mating is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! In it, we provide refined definitions of terms used to explain partner similarity, develop statistical models, and find evidence of surprisingly high social homogamy for education.

Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Probably the most important paper in personality psych this decade just dropped. 👀 Interesting genetic correlations between other traits (the #1 reason for GWASs on social traits IMO), and evidence of weak but non-zero assortative mating on personality.

"John [...] thought awakening people to [the social dynamics created by our coalitional psychology] might help us—humanity—avoid some of the terrible suffering our coalitional instincts cause. Unfortunately, he ran out of time."

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Does anyone know of useful literature on "adjusting for confounds" in statistical models? I put it in scare quotes because I am often unconvinced that the methods commonly used actually achieve that...

🚨 Big question, big paper! Why does educational inequality run in families?
The parent-child education link (r = .31) is often seen as purely environmental.
From 569k kids, we decomposed it:
🧬 68% genetic
🏡 12% parental environment
👴 20% extended-family environment
👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
🧵

«…if such an [cross-sectional mediation] analysis is the centerpiece of an article and the authors do nothing to credibly address confounding, they are trying to sell elaborate causal storytelling based on three correlations in a trench coat.»

www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words!

If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.

www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

"Since AI reduces the cost of generating misinformation to nearly zero, analysts who look at misinformation as a supply problem are very concerned. But analyzing the demand for misinformation can clarify how misinformation spreads and what interventions are likely to help."

🧪 How are risk factors like parental mental illness and low education distributed across families? This cool new paper explores how couples resemble each other — both before and (even more so) after meeting. A highly recommended read for those interested in intergenerational mobility + genetics.

I'm thrilled to share this work from my time at @ox.ac.uk (Department of Psychiatry), in which we investigate temporal and contemporaneous within-person associations between adolescent mental health difficulties and various aspects of the family environment 🧵

osf.io/preprints/ps...

"We observed vast cross-trait assortment for mental health conditions, indicating that individuals match on overall mental health, rather than on specific health conditions. The link with education might indicate trade-offs for overall attractiveness."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yesterday I gave a talk at @imprs-life.bsky.social in Berlin on how siblings shape our personalities. It was a lot of fun to talk about my substantive work for a change!
Slides, in case you're curious: osf.io/xepmk

I’m looking for psychology papers that use a rigorous causal inference approach with observational data. I’d like to find some great examples to showcase in my teaching.

Any recommendations?

#stats
@rmcelreath.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci

A large scale effort to replicate evidence that infants prefer prosocial agents suggests that infants don't consistently prefer prosocial agents. This is progress. Science is hard.

New paper: in what we think is one of the largest meta-analyses of animal behaviour, we find no evidence for inequity aversion in nonhumans (in accept/reject paradigms) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter

New preprint 📈📉

🧠👶🏻 We explored the link between parenthood and mental health in over 2M Norwegians using primary health care records. We found that parents generally experienced fewer mental disorders, even after accounting for factors like education and marital status.

🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2024...