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Building causal knowledge in behavior genetics without racial/ethnic diversity will result in weak causal knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2023

Moin Syed Open the ORCID record for Moin Syed [Opens in a new window]
Moin Syed*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA moin@umn.edu https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/moin
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Abstract

Behavior genetics often emphasizes methods over the underlying quality of the psychological information to which the methods are applied. A core aspect of this quality is the demographic diversity of the samples. Building causal genetic models based only on European-ancestry samples compromises their generalizability. Behavior genetics researchers must spend additional time and resources diversifying their samples before emphasizing causation.

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Open Peer Commentary
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Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 46 , 2023 , e202
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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