Lumifer comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 04 May 2015 12:06AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 04 May 2015 06:18:27AM 4 points [-]

Here is a different study which says:

The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations—mainly genetic confounding—of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.

Comment author: gwern 04 May 2015 02:41:48PM 3 points [-]

Indeed. One could also look at Sariaslan's population registry studies.

Sadly, most of these sorts of studies can be written off with a single sentence: "includes no family design, therefore is useless and merely shows that heritable traits gonna inherit."