What does the high heritability of psychological traits mean for psychologists and educators?

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• Prof Michael Thomas, Birkbeck, University of London
• Friday 28 November 2025, 16:30-18:00
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.

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Behavioural genetics has a hundred-year history of pointing to the high heritability of psychological traits relevant to people’s everyday lives, and outcomes such as educational attainment linked to wellbeing and professional success. Recently, the availability of polygenic indices, derived from large-scale genomic studies, has brought behavioural genetics to the individual level, generating individualised predictions of genetic potential. This advance brings into focus the relevance of genomic information for both personal and policy decisions. The drawbacks of behavioural genetics are twofold: it tells us only about current population outcomes, not how they could be different under different circumstances; and it is relatively silent on the developmental mechanisms that deliver heritable outcomes. In this talk, I will use a computational framework to focus on developmental mechanisms. I will show how simulations of interventions to alter developmental outcomes for whole populations, which have been designed to show differing levels of trait heritability, can produce surprising results. These results point to the policy relevance of the notion of heritability itself.

Host: Prof Dénes Szücs (ds377@cam.ac.uk)

This talk will be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.

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