Courtesy of the Economist’s View blog, I came across this important piece of research. You can tell it’s important because it isn’t in a finance or management journal but in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research finds that genetic data may eventually be “moderately predictive of economic and political preferences”. People who are genetically similar do, to some small extent, share similar attitudes.
But individual genes explain very little. “Given what is currently known, the molecular genetic data has essentially no predictive power for the 10 traits studied”. This overturns the findings of earlier research based on much smaller numbers of people.
Note that the title of the press release is both badly written and manages to give the opposite impression to what the researchers actually found.
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