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The Claim

In an 8-year-old child, inherited genetic liability to externalizing or conduct problems increases the probability of repeated rule-breaking behavior (including theft), but the magnitude of the genetic contribution to that individual child's stealing cannot be calculated from family history or population heritability estimates.

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The Short Version

The evidence strongly supports the claim. Genetic liability is associated with a higher probability of childhood externalizing and conduct problems, including recurrent rule-breaking behaviors. But neither family history nor population heritability estimates can calculate how much of one specific child’s stealing is genetically caused, because those measures describe group-level risk and variance, not individual causal fractions.

Caveats

  • Genetic liability indicates increased probability, not inevitability; environment, parenting, peers, and context remain highly important.
  • The evidence is strongest for broad externalizing or conduct problems, not for predicting a specific theft by a specific child.
  • Family history and polygenic scores can indicate risk only probabilistically; they do not yield an individual-level percentage of genetic causation.

The Receipts

  1. Examining intergenerational risk factors for conduct problems using polygenic scores in the ALSPAC cohort

    Nature

  2. Familial Transmission and Heritability of Childhood Disruptive Disorders

    National Institutes of Health (PMC)

  3. Heritability

    Wikipedia

  4. BEHAVIORAL GENETICS: THE SCIENCE OF ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

    NIH/National Library of Medicine (PMC)

  5. Associations Between a Genetic Liability Toward Externalizing and Developmental Trajectories of Externalizing Behavior

    PubMed

  6. The power of parenting: mitigating conduct problems among adolescents carrying genetic risk

    PubMed

  7. Heritability - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

    ScienceDirect

  8. What is heritability?

    MedlinePlus Genetics

  9. Genetic Influences on Conduct Disorder

    PubMed Central (NIH)

  10. On the importance of parenting in externalizing disorders: an evaluation of indirect genetic effects in families

    PubMed

+ 33 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

Conduct ProblemsExternalizing BehaviorFamily HistoryHeritabilityTheft