Nature, nurture and nonshared environment in cognitive development
Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: One of the most important findings from behavioural genetic research is that nature, not nurture, makes children in a family similar in personality and psychopathology. The same research provides the strongest available evidence for the importance of environmental influence controlling for genetics, but it shows that environmental influences are not due to nurture; they are not shared by family members. Cognitive traits such as cognitive abilities and educational achievement are thought to be an exception, with half of the environmental variance attributed to shared environmental influences. However, most of this cognitive research has involved children. A developmental perspective indicates that shared environmental influence on cognitive abilities and educational achievement declines from accounting for 20-30% of the variance in childhood to 10-20% in adolescence and to 0% by early adulthood. Educational attainment (years of schooling) is the exception with lasting shared environmental influence (30%) driven by decisions made in adolescence to go to university, which shows the greatest shared environmental influence (47%). We conclude that environmental influences on individual differences in cognitive development are, in the long run, nonshared. We discuss the far-reaching scientific and societal implications of these findings for understanding the nonshared environmental causes of individual differences in cognitive abilities in adulthood.
Authors: Robert Plomin, Kaito Kawakami
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4390699602