ESRecent research suggests that biological inheritance also influences social factors such as socioeconomic status, posing new challenges for the design of behavioral interventions.
Have you ever heard someone say, “You’re such a math whiz, just like your mother,” or something like, “You have such a strong personality, just like your grandmother”? Socially, we have accepted that our talents and personalities are carbon copies of our family members. Like father, like son, right? While these statements have empirical support, the facts behind them are not entirely clear. Does our behavior depend on genetics or on what we learn from our family? For years, many professionals have opted for one explanation or the other, but the truth is that no one is right. Or everyone is, depending on how you look at it. Because the reality is that we are both genetics and context.
At BeWay, this is the approach that guides our work in designing behavioral interventions. This term—behavioral interventions—may sound very technical, but it is nothing more than working with companies to understand what is going well for them, what is not going so well, and helping them get where they want to be by improving human behavior. In other words, we act on how they operate (hence the term intervention) by tinkering with the individual behavior of employees and the overall behavior of organizations (hence the term behavioral).
Now, the concept may seem very simplistic, but it is anything but simple. Understanding human behavior is very complex. This is where we return to the idea that we are genetics and context. A person’s aptitudes and attitudes cannot be understood solely through a genetic or contextual variable. In fact, we would like to take a look at a paper published in Nature Human Behavior that highlights what we are saying, using people’s socioeconomic status as an example.
Socioeconomic status is typically described—according to the authors—by four variables: income, education, occupation, and wealth. The higher you score on all of these, the higher your socioeconomic status will be, and vice versa. A priori, genetics would have no place in these variables, right? Well, research has concluded quite the opposite.
Genetics and Status
According to the authors themselves, “genomic research is revealing previously hidden genetic consequences of the way society is organized, offering insights that must be approached with caution in the quest for a just and functional society.”
How can this be? Let’s take a look at the great game of “building” life.
At birth, we inherit a unique set of genetic variants from our parents, as if they were giving us a box of pieces with which to start building our lives. Some of these variants are associated with greater ease in logical reasoning, others with a tendency toward perseverance, sociability, or emotional sensitivity. There are thousands of tiny instructions distributed throughout the genome that influence, without entirely determining, our personality, our abilities, and how we respond to our surroundings. You can think of it like Lego pieces: each person receives a different set with which to build their own tower, their own biography. Genes do not impose a destiny, but they do offer a repertoire with which to improvise.
However, no one builds their tower in a vacuum. Everything happens within a context: the neighborhood where you grow up, the quality of the air you breathe, the school you attend, the emotions that circulate at home, the opportunities or threats that surround you. These environmental factors are not secondary: they interact with your genes at every stage of development. A favorable environment, rich in stimuli, affection, and resources, can enhance certain genetic abilities, just as fertilizer enhances a seed. A hostile environment, on the other hand, can stifle even the most promising talents.
And this is where society comes into play, as the broad framework that shapes the context. Public policies, wealth distribution, the history of a country or community—all of these factors shape the terrain in which individuals grow up. And that terrain, in turn, selects, orders, and groups the players in the game. Those who share certain genetic advantages, such as a predisposition for academic success or robust health, tend to gather in similar environments. It is no coincidence that affluent neighborhoods concentrate both resources and certain genetic profiles: society facilitates this grouping.
A ‘Vicious’ Circle
This has long-term consequences. Not only do we choose partners within the social group to which we belong, which means we also share certain genetic traits, but over time, this dynamic reinforces the transmission of certain genetic combinations within certain environments. It’s a circle: your genes help you find your place, but your place also determines which genes are mixed and which are passed on to the next generation.
Genetics and environment are not separate forces. They are two sides of the same story, deeply intertwined. We cannot understand one without the other, because together they write, with blocks and landscapes, the complex architecture of who we are. This finding not only shakes up the social sciences, it directly challenges those of us who work on designing behavioral change. Today, many companies apply experimental methods, such as the famous A/B tests, to evaluate the effectiveness of different strategies on customer decisions: which message encourages saving the most, which design increases the use of a feature, which channel improves conversion. But often, these experiments are based on an overly simplistic premise: the idea that individuals are comparable except for the stimulus presented to them.
What the research reveals is that this homogeneity is illusory. Socioeconomic status not only segments people according to income or educational level, but also condenses deeper differences: access to resources, quality of life, exposure to stress, and biological predispositions that affect how we respond to incentives. This is not essentialism, but rather a recognition that biology and environment are constantly and dynamically intertwined. Genetics influence how we adapt to our context, and context, in turn, can activate or silence genetic predispositions.
Experimental Design
This has crucial implications for experimental design in applied Behavioral Science. For example, if one of the alternatives shows better results in an experiment, can we say that it is “better” in absolute terms? Or are we observing a differential effectiveness that depends on how variables such as socioeconomic status are distributed among the groups? If we do not control for these covariates, we not only risk losing accuracy, but we also run the risk of drawing unfair or ineffective conclusions.
At BeWay, we have faced these dilemmas over and over again. That is why we strongly advocate the use of multivariable models: they refine statistical accuracy while allowing us to see what is essential.
Human behavior does not arise in a vacuum. It is the product of genetic chance, family history, the neighborhood where you grow up, the school you attend, and the small and large biographies inscribed in the body and context. We know that, in many cases, incorporating covariates requires additional effort on the part of our clients, because it requires locating data, refining it, and integrating it carefully. But that effort has a very high return. It allows experiments to be technically more robust, fairer, more representative, and more useful. A model that ignores context may be easier to build, but it is less capable of understanding.
Designing without taking this complexity into account is like navigating without charts or a compass. Recognizing that we are the result of this constant interaction between biology and environment does not mean surrendering to determinism. Rather, it means that if we want to change behaviors, we must begin by understanding them in their entirety. Anything else is dangerous simplification.
We are genetics and context. And any experiment that does not take this into account will, ultimately, be poorly calibrated.
Team
