Pathways between a polygenic index for education and years of completed schooling: the presentation of self and assessment of others

ABSTRACT

Polygenic scores (PGS) are broadly misconstrued as reflecting direct causal genetic effects on their respective phenotypes. While this assumption might be accurate for some anthropometric traits like height, more complex traits such as educational attainment show very large indirect effects that stem from many sources. One unexplored source of confounding is the possibility of evocative gene-environment correlation (rGE). Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we examine the relationship between interviewer assessments of respondent appearance as a function of education PGS. We show a bivariate association between educational PGS and 1) perceived grooming, 2) physical attractiveness, and 3) personality. We then regress years of education on the educational PGS and show that very little of the association (~1–2%) is mediated by attractiveness or personality but 7.5% of the baseline association is confounded with how others may perceive grooming. These results highlight the importance of social-behavioral mechanisms that may link specific genotypes to successful transitions through high school and college and continue to bridge research from the social and biological sciences.

Acknowledgments

This research uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH, CUPC, or the University of Colorado. This specific project received additional support from NICHD (R01 HD073342; R01 HD060726).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the infrastructural support provided by the University of Colorado Population Center (CUPC) supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development center grant [P2C HD06613].