Enviromental Effects on Behavior

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Recommended: Effects of the environment on human behavior

The level of genetic influences on a person’s behavior is called the heritability of the behavior. Based on previous research intelligence as measured by IQ scores is thought to be attributed mostly to genetic influences. However it has been suggested by several researchers that genetic influences are moderated by the environment a person grows up in. There have been several studies that have explored the effects of environmental effects on heritability. However these studies have been methodologically limited because they did not have a large enough sample size or they did not measure the zygosity of the twins they use. Other studies measured change in heritability across different birth cohorts. However these studies might have been influenced by the different circumstances that might have been present during the different time periods these people lived in.

Some general reasons why there is a lack of evidence for the moderating effects of the environment is that the studies conducted so far did not use measures environmental variables to detect differences in the environm...

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