Luke Ford

In her 2010 paper on diverging family structure, Amy Wax names the traits and stops. Discount rate, executive function, self-control, future orientation, conscientiousness, cognitive ability. She correlates them with education, occupation, and demographic group. She observes that they determine who thrives under normative deregulation. Then she declines to say where they come from. She knows what the next question is. Everyone reading the paper knows what the next question is. She writes that the source of the observed differences, whether grounded in culture or individual characteristics, warrants further investigation, and leaves the sentence to do the work of a chapter.

Prudence explains part of it. A working paper for an Elgar volume on family law cannot carry a full treatment of behavior genetics and survive as a paper about family law. Any paper that takes on the heritability of self-regulation across populations becomes a paper about that, and the local-versus-global model gets read as a vehicle rather than as a claim. Wax had already written enough to guarantee hostility. Adding the origins question would have guaranteed that nothing else in the paper got discussed.

Legal scholarship has no procedure for adjudicating this kind of empirical dispute. A law review cannot referee a quarrel among statistical geneticists. What it can do is cite, and citation in a contested field is taken as endorsement. Wax’s choices were to cite the hereditarian literature and be read as endorsing it, cite the environmentalist literature and be read as endorsing that, or cite neither. She cited neither, with two exceptions buried in footnotes: a 1981 Sandra Scarr volume on race, social class, and individual differences in IQ, and a reference to average racial and ethnic differences in personality profiles on employment screening tests.

Her argument runs: a latent distribution of self-regulatory capacity existed before 1960; strong norms masked it; deregulation revealed it; the revealed differential now compounds across generations. A theory that explains how a latent difference becomes manifest after a regime change is incomplete without a theory of where the latent difference came from. Without one, the framework risks circularity. Populations differ in outcomes because they differ in decision style; we infer the decision style from the outcomes.

Start with what the three literatures say.

The first literature, on within-population heritability of cognitive ability and personality, is about as settled as anything in social science. Twin, adoption, and sibling designs across many Western samples converge on adult heritability estimates for measured cognitive ability in the range of fifty to eighty percent, with the estimate rising through childhood and adolescence and stabilizing in adulthood. Personality traits, including conscientiousness, run lower, in the range of forty to fifty percent. These are variance-partitioning results within the populations sampled, and they do not say what any individual’s score is caused by. They are also not seriously contested by anyone who works with the data. Robert Plomin (b. 1948) has spent a career establishing them and Eric Turkheimer, who dislikes almost every use to which they are put, does not dispute them.

The second literature, on between-population differences, is where the confidence collapses. The classic point from Richard Lewontin (1929-2021) holds: within-group heritability licenses no inference about between-group causes. Two batches of seed with identical genetic variance, grown in different soils, produce mean differences that are entirely environmental while heritability within each batch stays high.

The obvious response is that molecular genetics should settle what quantitative genetics cannot. It has not. Polygenic scores for cognitive ability and educational attainment, built from genome-wide association studies conducted almost entirely in European-ancestry samples, lose most of their predictive power when applied to other ancestry groups. The loss comes from differences in linkage disequilibrium patterns, differences in allele frequencies, and confounding by population structure that within-sample controls do not remove. Comparing mean polygenic scores across ancestry groups, which several authors have attempted, is a procedure that statistical geneticists reject on the grounds that the tools currently cannot do the job.

Against the persistence of measured gaps stands the Flynn effect. James Flynn (1934-2020) documented gains in measured cognitive ability across the twentieth century of roughly three points per decade in many countries, which is to say that the environmental headroom on population means exceeds the size of the differences under dispute. Whatever produced those gains was not genetic change. Some portion of the American Black-White gap has narrowed over the same period, by amounts that vary by test and cohort. Transracial adoption studies exist on both sides of the question and all of them are small, old, and confounded.

The between-population question is open, the confidence expressed on both sides exceeds what the data support, and anyone who tells you it is settled is telling you about his coalition.

The behavior-genetic literature does contain a finding that wounds Wax’s argument. Wax’s fallback, and the fallback her sympathetic readers reach for, is the developmental loop. Family structures produce the developmental environments of children; those children acquire the traits; the traits reproduce the family structures. She writes that restraint, moderation, emotional control, trustworthiness, persistence, and sobriety develop best when children live with both biological parents in stable marital homes. The loop generates path-dependent equilibria without invoking any heritable substrate difference, which is exactly why it appeals.

The trouble is that the loop specifies a shared-environment effect, and shared environment is the component that behavior genetics has had the hardest time finding. In standard designs, the shared environment contribution to adult cognitive ability in Western samples shrinks toward zero. For personality traits including conscientiousness it is near zero at most ages. Siblings raised in the same home resemble each other on these traits at about the rate predicted by their genetic relatedness and little more. Adoptive siblings, who share the home and not the genes, correlate near zero as adults. If growing up with a married father transmitted self-command through the home environment, the designs that measure home environment should find it. They mostly do not.

The dissolution is available. Judith Rich Harris (1938-2018), in The Nurture Assumption, argued that the near-zero shared environment finding does not mean environment fails to socialize children. It means the socializing environment is the peer group. Children calibrate conduct to the group they expect to live among, and the calibration happens outside the family. From the standpoint of a twin design conducted within neighborhoods, peer influence loads onto the non-shared component, or vanishes into the residual, because siblings in the same home often occupy different peer positions and because the design cannot see variance that a whole community shares.

Harris’s account fits Wax’s framework better than Wax’s own account does. A normative regime operates at the level of a community. The pre-1960s architecture Wax describes worked because everyone in the neighborhood was following the same rule, which is what made following it cheap. That is a community-level variance component, and a twin study conducted inside a single normative environment measures nothing about it. Ask a twin design what fraction of variance in age at first intercourse is attributable to shared environment in Utah, and the answer tells you about differences among Utah families.

Shared environment estimates differ sharply by outcome. For measured intelligence and for personality traits, shared environment washes out. For behaviors like religiosity, political attitudes, smoking initiation, age at first intercourse, and fertility timing, shared environment persists into adulthood at levels that are not trivial. This is the structure Wax’s theory requires. Norms govern conduct, and conduct is the thing on which community-level environment continues to register.

Trait distribution may be substantially heritable, and the question of its cross-population structure may remain open, and neither fact touches the claim that a normative regime converts a given trait distribution into a given behavioral distribution. Wax’s argument is about a conversion. The origins question determines the ceiling on what environmental intervention might achieve.

Behavior geneticists have a name for what a strong normative regime does. Michael Shanahan and Scott Hofer call it social control, one of four types in the typology they set out in “Social Context in Gene-Environment Interactions: Retrospect and Prospect,” alongside triggering, compensation, and enhancement. Norms canalize genetically diverse people, they write, and as norms grow more effective and choices narrow, genetic differences carry less consequence. When a rule pushes everyone toward the same conduct regardless of disposition, dispositional variance stops appearing in behavior and the heritability of the outcome falls. Remove the rule and the outcome tracks the disposition. The same logic runs through the Scarr-Rowe finding, where heritability of cognitive ability comes out lower in low-socioeconomic-status American samples and shows up less consistently in European samples with stronger institutional floors.

The demographer J. Richard Udry (1928-2012) reached the same position from the other direction in “Biosocial Models of Low-Fertility Societies,” fourteen years before Wax wrote. The more freedom individuals hold over reproductive behavior, he argued, the more the variation in that behavior reflects biological differences between them.
Wax cites neither Udry nor Shanahan and Hofer. Her account of normative architecture arrives at a claim that demographers and behavior geneticists had already stated in their own idiom, and the two literatures have never met.

Where the origins question bites is on policy. If the trait distribution responds to environment, environmental intervention can compress it, and the pessimism about the post-deregulation equilibrium is overstated. If the distribution has a substantial heritable component that intervention cannot reach, the only arrangement that compensates for the differential is one that restores external rules, and the argument for restoration is arithmetic.

A paper that names the traits, correlates them with racial groups, and refuses to say where they come from leaves the reader to supply the missing term. Readers tend to supply the one that is convenient. The hostile reader concludes she means heredity and is hiding it. The friendly reader concludes she means heredity and is being brave about it. Both conclusions are inferences from a gap, and both are unfalsifiable, since she wrote nothing to check them against. Silence in a combustible field transfers authorship of the missing paragraph to whoever wants to write it.

The alternative she had available was to state the disjunction and show that her argument survives both branches. That paragraph runs about two hundred words. It says the origins of the trait distribution are contested. It says molecular methods have not settled the contest and may not for some time. It says the descriptive claim holds under either resolution, and that the policy implications diverge, with the environmental branch supporting intervention and the heritable branch supporting institutional restoration. Writing it would have cost her the accusation of hiding something and gained her the accusation of raising it. Whether that trade made sense in 2010 is a judgment about the field she was writing in rather than about the evidence, and the field has moved enough since that the calculation might come out differently now.

Nobody knows the cross-population structure of the traits Wax describes. The tools that could answer the question do not work across ancestry groups yet, and the inferential shortcut from within-group heritability is invalid. The within-population heritability of the traits is high and not in dispute. The shared-environment finding rules out the simplest family-transmission story and leaves community-level normative transmission standing, which is the story Wax needs and the one she should have told.

Her framework, stripped of the origins question, makes a prediction about cohort heritability. The reasoning is ordinary behavior genetics. When a rule carries everyone to the same conduct regardless of temperament, temperament stops appearing in the outcome. A man with a high discount rate and a man with a low one both marry at twenty-three, both stay, and both have their children inside the marriage, because the alternatives carry costs neither will pay. The dispositional variance sits there with nowhere to express. Heritability of the outcome runs low, and the community rule the siblings grew up under does the work. Remove the rule and the same two men diverge, because the outcome now tracks the disposition and nothing else is steering. Heritability rises.

The prediction has a literature, and it runs older than Wax’s paper.

Hans-Peter Kohler, Joseph Rodgers, and Kaare Christensen asked in “Is Fertility Behavior in Our Genes? Findings from a Danish Twin Study” whether genetic influence on fertility shifts across demographic regimes, and found it high for Danish women born around 1880, low through the middle of the century, and high again after 1955. They followed it with “Between Nurture and Nature,” and by 2003 Kohler and Rodgers were stating the argument outright: reduced social constraint and greater egalitarianism raise the relevance of genetically mediated differences. Felix Tropf and colleagues found the same pattern in British female twins born between 1919 and 1968, naming war and economic crisis as constraints that suppress genetic expression and “normative freedom” as what releases it.

The American version exists too. Daniel Briley, Paige Harden, and Elliot Tucker-Drob ran it on 933 twin pairs from the Midlife in the United States study, framed by the second demographic transition, in “Genotype by Cohort Interaction on Completed Fertility and Age at First Birth.” Genetic influence on both outcomes was trivial for the 1920 to 1935 cohort and rose substantially for 1936 to 1955. That is the prediction, confirmed on American data, published five years after Wax wrote.

The third cohort is where the result stops being a confirmation and starts being an instrument. For twins born between 1956 and 1970, genetic influence on completed fertility persists, and genetic influence on age at first birth falls back, with shared environment returning. The model behind this is a diffusion curve rather than a release curve. Briley and colleagues cite Rogers on the diffusion of innovations in their first footnote, and the logic follows: when a new behavior becomes available, people differ in willingness to adopt it, those differences are partly heritable, and so genetic influence peaks during the transition and falls once the new behavior settles into a norm of its own. Old norm, low dispositional expression. Norm breaking, maximum differentiation. New norm, convergence.

A hump has consequences for anyone reading the number. Any given value of the additive component is consistent with two positions on the curve, early or late, and reading it requires knowing where the cohort sits in the transition. Deregulation does not raise heritability indefinitely. It raises it while the rule is contested and lowers it once a replacement rule is in place, which means a low estimate is evidence of a settled regime without telling you which regime.

Smoking supplies the same curve from a second direction. Jason Boardman, Casey Blalock, and Fred Pampel used the same MIDUS twins in “Trends in the Genetic Influences on Smoking,” estimating heritability of regular smoking year by year from 1922 to 1968. It runs high for those born in the early 1930s, collapses to zero for those born around 1942, climbs to a maximum for those born in 1954, and falls to zero again for those born in the mid-1960s. The 1942 minimum belongs to the cohort that was in its early twenties when the Surgeon General reported in 1964. The final decline belongs to the cohorts who came of age under clean-indoor-air laws. Boardman and colleagues distinguish three accounts of what moves the number, and only two of them are causal. Social control suppresses expression. Social trigger permits it. Social push, borrowed from Adrian Raine, changes how visible genetic differences are to the observer without changing how they operate, and they assign the entire 1935 to 1954 stretch to it. The estimate rose because social smokers quit after the Surgeon General and left the physiologically dependent behind, which is a change in who is being measured.

There is a further complication, and it is arithmetic. Heritability is a ratio. Constraint that closes the behavioral margin cuts the numerator. Constraint that homogenizes circumstances cuts the denominator, and the ratio rises. Gülüm Kosova, Mark Abney, and Carole Ober built a study on exactly that in “Heritability of Reproductive Fitness Traits in a Human Population,” choosing the Hutterites because communal life assures uniform and equal access to resources, and recovering significant heritabilities for reproductive traits in both sexes. A norm that dictates family size can suppress genetically influenced variation in desired family size. A norm that forbids contraception can expose genetically influenced variation in fecundity. Both are norms, and they move the estimate in opposite directions. Constraint compresses heritability only when it closes the margin through which the dispositional variance would otherwise reach the outcome.

None of which leaves the structural rivals where a first reading places them. It looks as though Wilson should predict stable heritability or rising shared environment, since wages and sex ratios fall on neighborhoods and families and siblings share both. That does not follow. A shock reaching both twins in a pair need not register as shared environment. Reliable contraception hands individuals control over reproduction, and if people differ heritably in discount rates, sexuality, conscientiousness, or desired family size, the technology raises the additive component for the same reason a moral collapse does. Udry’s model depends on that possibility. Kohler and Rodgers give female labor-force entry as another case. The decomposition registers that a constraint fell. It does not name the constraint.

Timing, geography, and race do separate the accounts. Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz put the break between 1965 and 1973 and predict a common break everywhere, because the technology arrived everywhere at once. Wilson puts it in deindustrialization, a decade later, concentrated in the labor markets that lost manufacturing and in the populations living in them. Those come apart on a date and a map. Geronimus comes apart the same way, since weathering ties early childbearing to local mortality and health schedules. Wax and Akerlof do not come apart at all here, since a moral collapse and a contraceptive revolution ran on the same clock and reached the same people.

One comparison does separate them. Populations that kept their own norm-producing institutions while the surrounding society shed its own hold the technology and the economy roughly constant and vary the norm. Boardman’s own sources show the pattern in another domain, with Judith Koopmans and colleagues and David Timberlake and colleagues finding genetic influence on tobacco muted or absent among people raised under strict religious prohibition. Any registry carrying religious affiliation can run the family-formation version, and that comparison, rather than the raw cohort trend, is what would discriminate a normative account from a technological one.

Two design constraints govern anyone who runs it. Family structure is not one phenotype. Matt McGue and David Lykken established genetic influence on divorce risk in 1992, Victor Jockin and colleagues traced part of it to heritable personality, and Beth Jerskey and colleagues then found in Vietnam-era twins that the genetic influences on marrying and the genetic influences on divorcing are largely distinct. Marriage timing, completed fertility, nonmarital birth, and dissolution need separate decompositions, and a result on one carries nothing to another. Hans Fredrik Sunde and Philipp Dierker have since argued from 353,210 Norwegian marriages that divorce is a couple-level outcome and that conventional twin models inflate what they attribute to individuals.

The shared environment component also behaves less obligingly than the framework suggests. A national norm experienced by every twin pair does not become shared environment because everyone shares it. If it holds constant within a cohort it contributes no variance at all. It shifts the mean, or suppresses the additive component, or interacts with it. Briley and colleagues report raw variance components rather than standardized proportions for this reason, and warn that the components need not sum to one.

Which leaves the gap that matters most. Every study named here runs on white, Nordic, or British samples. Briley is MIDUS. Boardman is MIDUS. Kohler is Danish, Tropf is British, Kosova is Hutterite, Jerskey is Vietnam-era veterans. The American argument among Wax, Wilson, Akerlof, Yellen, Katz, and Geronimus is centrally about a divergence between Black and white family structure, and a heritability estimate is a within-population number that says nothing about differences between groups in either direction. Minnesota, Virginia, Denmark, Sweden, and Australia cannot answer an American question about two populations. The sibling samples in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth can, across two cohorts, which is the structure Roland Fryer used for the wage decomposition. The precedent for the population half exists: a 2009 study of cohort differences in educational attainment among African American twins read Jim Crow as an external ceiling suppressing individual differences and predicted that removing the ceiling would show up as declining similarity within pairs. Nobody has run the family-formation version.

The Minnesota, Virginia, Swedish, Danish, and Australian registries hold cohorts on both sides of the break with marital and fertility histories attached, and they will answer the European version of the question. The American version requires the sibling samples, split by race, on marriage timing and nonmarital first birth rather than on completed fertility.

Udry and Shanahan and Hofer built the theory. Kohler and Briley and Tropf calibrated it on fertility, Boardman calibrated it on smoking, Kosova established what the ratio does when the environment is homogenized, and four decades of results show what the instrument can and cannot see. It has never been pointed at the outcomes the American argument turns on, in the populations that argument is about. The experiment does not need to be invented. It needs to be imported, and the importing is the harder half.

Notes

On Wax’s own record. The paper under discussion is Amy L. Wax, “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424. The two footnote citations described above appear at notes 76 and 99 of that draft. The earlier statement of the demographic argument is “Engines of Inequality: Class, Race, and Family Structure,” 41 Family Law Quarterly 567 (2007). Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2009) is the book where she walks through the exogenous explanations for the test score gap and declines the hereditarian step, at https://archive.org/details/racewrongsremedi0000waxa. The paper that shows the agnosticism doing positive work is “The Poverty of the Neuroscience of Poverty: Policy Payoff or False Promise?“, 57 Jurimetrics 239 (2017), at https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1711/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2888600. Her argument there turns on the point that imaging research cannot separate innate from environmental causes of brain characteristics, which she uses against interventionist optimism while asserting nothing about origins. “Educating the Disadvantaged,” National Affairs (Summer 2017), sits at https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/educating-the-disadvantaged. Her faculty listing, which still carries rational choice and family structure among works in progress, is at https://www.law.upenn.edu/faculty/awax/.

On the within-population findings. Eric Turkheimer, “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean,” 9 Current Directions in Psychological Science 160 (2000), states the two propositions the essay leans on: traits are heritable, and the effect of being raised in the same family runs smaller than the effect of genes. Journal version at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8721.00084, author copy at https://uva.theopenscholar.com/files/eric-turkheimer/files/three_laws_of_behavior_8.pdf. Turkheimer’s own reading of the laws differs sharply from the use hereditarian writers make of them, and his Substack is the place to see him say so. Christopher Chabris and colleagues added a fourth law in 2015, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721415580430. For the heritability estimates and their rise with age, Robert Plomin and Ian Deary, “Genetics and Intelligence Differences: Five Special Findings,” Molecular Psychiatry (2014), at https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105, and Thomas Bouchard’s account of the age gradient at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/wilson-effect-the-increase-in-heritability-of-iq-with-age/FF406CC4CF286D78AF72C9E7EF9B5E3F.

On the shared-environment problem and its resolution. Judith Rich Harris, “Where Is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development,” 102 Psychological Review 458 (1995), and The Nurture Assumption (Free Press, 1998), carry the argument that the socializing environment is the peer group. Harris is the least-cited figure in this dispute relative to her usefulness, largely because both camps read her as conceding to the other. On the interaction between socioeconomic position and heritability, see the Scarr-Rowe literature and the failure to replicate it outside the United States: Ken Hanscombe and colleagues, “Socioeconomic Status and Children’s Intelligence,” PLoS ONE (2012), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270016/. The Dickens and Flynn model of environmental multipliers, which explains how high heritability coexists with large environmental movement in population means, sits here.

On why the cross-population question stays open. The logical point is Richard Lewontin’s, most accessibly in his 1970 reply to Arthur Jensen in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For the technical reason molecular methods cannot currently answer it, see Alicia Martin and colleagues, “Clinical Use of Current Polygenic Risk Scores May Exacerbate Health Disparities,” Nature Genetics (2019), at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-019-0379-x, with the open preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/441261v3, and the companion survey of the field’s ancestry composition at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11112-0. More recent work shows prediction accuracy falling continuously along the ancestry continuum rather than in discrete population steps, at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06079-4, which further undercuts any procedure that compares group mean scores. A recent review of the open problems in portability is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68565-3. For the skeptical case stated at full strength, Jonathan Kaplan and colleagues, “Genes, Heritability, ‘Race’, and Intelligence,” Genes (2022), at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/13/2/346.

On the theory of normative constraint and genetic expression. Michael J. Shanahan and Scott M. Hofer, “Social Context in Gene-Environment Interactions: Retrospect and Prospect,” 60 Journals of Gerontology: Series B 65 (2005), at https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/60/Special_Issue_1/65/2965138, sets out the four ideal types, of which social control is the one Wax needs. J. Richard Udry, “Biosocial Models of Low-Fertility Societies,” 22 Population and Development Review 325 (1996), at https://doi.org/10.2307/2808017, states the demographic version and is the ancestor of everything in this literature that followed.

On the cohort-heritability test, which requires the most care. Hans-Peter Kohler, Joseph Lee Rodgers, and Kaare Christensen, “Is Fertility Behavior in Our Genes? Findings from a Danish Twin Study,” 25 Population and Development Review 253 (1999), and the same authors’ “Between Nurture and Nature: The Shifting Determinants of Female Fertility in Danish Twin Cohorts, 1870-1968,” 49 Social Biology 218 (2002), at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14652919/, report that genetic influence on female fertility runs high in cohorts born around 1880, falls through the middle of the twentieth century, and rises again for cohorts born after 1955. They tie the movement to changing socioeconomic and normative conditions rather than to normative deregulation as such. Daniel Briley and colleagues, “Genotype by Cohort Interaction on Completed Fertility and Age at First Birth,” Behavior Genetics (2015), at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-014-9693-3, is the American version and the source of the diffusion model that turns the prediction into a hump. Felix Tropf and colleagues, “Genetic Influence on Age at First Birth of Female Twins Born in the UK, 1919-68,” 69 Population Studies 129 (2015), at https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2015.1056823, names normative freedom as the moderator. The Danish twin fertility design is at https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/38/1/29/170416/Behavior-genetic-modeling-of-human-fertility, and a two-registry treatment of completed fertility at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-016-9805-3.

On the analogy and its warnings. Jason D. Boardman, Casey L. Blalock, and Fred C. Pampel, “Trends in the Genetic Influences on Smoking,” 51 Journal of Health and Social Behavior 108 (2010), at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3158572/, is free in full and is the methodological template for anything anyone runs on family structure. Their social push category, borrowed from Adrian Raine, is the one that should worry anyone reading a heritability trend as evidence of normative change, since it describes an estimate moving because the composition of the measured population moved. Their religious-upbringing sources are Judith Koopmans and colleagues at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10857244/ and David Timberlake and colleagues at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16497606/. For the arithmetic point about the ratio, Gülüm Kosova, Mark Abney, and Carole Ober, “Heritability of Reproductive Fitness Traits in a Human Population,” 107 PNAS Suppl. 1, 1772 (2010), at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0906196106, which uses Hutterite uniformity as an instrument for detecting genetic variance rather than as a constraint suppressing it.

On family structure as several phenotypes. Matt McGue and David T. Lykken, “Genetic Influence on Risk of Divorce,” 3 Psychological Science 368 (1992); Victor Jockin, Matt McGue, and David T. Lykken, “Personality and Divorce: A Genetic Analysis,” 71 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 288 (1996); Beth A. Jerskey and colleagues, “Marriage and Divorce: A Genetic Perspective,” 49 Personality and Individual Differences 473 (2010), which finds the genetic influences on marrying and on divorcing largely distinct. Hans Fredrik Sunde and Philipp Dierker, “Are Spouses Similar in Divorce? Investigating Spousal Similarity in Couple-Shared Outcomes,” Twin Research and Human Genetics (2026), argues that couple-level outcomes and assortative mating inflate what conventional twin models attribute to individuals.

Anyone running the test might want to read Michael Rutter’s skeptical chapter in Offspring: Human Fertility Behavior in Biodemographic Perspective (National Academies Press, 2003), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/, which argues that secular trends in heritability estimates have proved inconsistent across traits and countries and that the interpretive temptation runs ahead of the evidence. His example is the rise in heritability of educational attainment in Norway for males and not females over a period when opportunity widened for both. That objection applies to the argument advanced here with full force. Note also that the existing work covers fertility outcomes rather than marriage timing, marital dissolution, and childbearing outside marriage, and covers Denmark, Britain, and a largely white American sample rather than the two populations whose divergence the American argument is about. For the precedent on the population half, see “Education in Time: Cohort Differences in Educational Attainment in African-American Twins” (2009), at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2765648/, which runs the same design on Jim Crow.

Further reading. On the older quantitative-genetic critique, David Layzer, “Heritability Analyses of IQ Scores: Science or Numerology?“, Science (1974), at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.183.4131.1259, states the case against inference from heritability estimates in a form that most later criticism restates. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege (2023), carry the descriptive picture forward from where Wax leaves it. Orlando Patterson’s writing on culture and agency, and William Julius Wilson’s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report in the opening chapter of The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), supply the disciplinary context for the omission this essay examines.

The phrase “moral economy” comes from two authors. E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) used it in 1971 for the customary expectations that governed what an eighteenth-century English crowd would tolerate from a grain market. A merchant could hold a legal right to charge what the market would bear and still violate the moral economy, because the offense lay in breaching an unwritten understanding about what people owed one another. Lorraine Daston (b. 1951) carried the term into the history of science in 1995, defining a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values that regulates practice from the inside. Such economies are historically specific, arising and dissolving with the disciplines they govern. And they live in the practitioner, who experiences them as the sense that a finding smells wrong.

Robert Merton (1910-2003) described the scientific ethos in terms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Those are rules for evaluating claims once claims are on the table. A moral economy operates earlier. It is a schedule of prices attached to hypotheses. Two explanations can carry comparable empirical support and impose sharply different costs on the scholar who advances them.

Merton’s norms were never the whole sociology of science. Ian Mitroff’s study of the Apollo moon scientists found working counter-norms running alongside them: particularism beside universalism, interestedness beside disinterestedness, emotional commitment beside neutrality, organized dogmatism beside organized skepticism. Scientists carry both codes and do not choose permanently between them. The question is which propositions activate the counter-code.

Contemporary social science has such an economy, and Amy Wax’s 2010 paper on family structure violates it. What produced the hostility was the sense that the paper was doing something illegitimate with the materials.

The central rule it broke was that responsibility flows uphill while causation flows downhill.

When certain people had bad outcomes, explanations that locate the cause in institutions, markets, discrimination, history, neighborhoods, schools, employers, or policy carry a presumption of legitimacy. Explanations that locate any part of the causal chain in genetics, behavior, norms, preferences, family organization, self-command, or cognition face a surcharge. The first class directs attention toward actors with power. The second appears to blame the victim.

The surcharge shows up as a difference in the price of evidence, and Wax’s own review of her field displays it. The marriageable-men hypothesis of William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) attributes the collapse of Black marriage to the disappearance of stable working-class employment. By the estimates of demographers across the methodological spectrum, male earning power and sex-ratio imbalance account for somewhere between five and twenty-five percent of the racial gap, with several estimates far lower. The hypothesis explains a fifth of the phenomenon at its best, and it remains the default account on syllabi. Arline Geronimus’s argument that early nonmarital childbearing constitutes an adaptive response to compressed life expectancy rests on a restricted counterfactual, comparing early nonmarital births to later nonmarital births while never comparing nonmarital to marital, on a sample unrepresentative of the population it describes. It circulated for two decades. Neither survives a week at that standard of fit if the conclusion runs the other way.

The price of evidence has been measured under controlled conditions. Henning Finseraas, Arnfinn Midtbøen, and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud gave Norwegian social scientists a description of an identical research design on contact between refugees and native-born citizens, randomizing only the reported result. When contact supposedly made attitudes toward immigration more liberal, respondents judged the design better and the research more important than when the same design supposedly made attitudes less liberal. No comparable effect appeared on a nonpoliticized control study about robots. Nothing about the evidence had changed except its implication. The price had.

Scientific racism, eugenics, and theories of inherited inferiority gave behavioral and genetic explanation a bad reputation after the Nazis. Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students displaced that anthropology by claiming culture as the explanatory unit. Boas produced evidence, including an immigrant anthropometry study covering tens of thousands of measurements whose cranial-plasticity conclusions have been contested. What the moral and political commitments of that circle shaped was the speed of the displacement and the questions the discipline pursued afterward.

The decisive American episode arrived in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) and his report on the Black family. William Ryan (1923-2002) supplied the phrase “blaming the victim” that outgrew the controversy that produced it. To describe a behavior that contributed to disadvantage was shifting responsibility from the society that produced the conditions to the people living under them. Wilson wrote later that the controversy made liberal social scientists reluctant to describe behavior that might be regarded as stigmatizing, and that fear of the accusation discouraged investigation of the genetic, cultural and behavioral dimensions of urban poverty.

In 2010, the same year Wax circulated her paper, Mario Luis Small, David Harding, and Michèle Lamont announced in the Annals that culture was back on the poverty agenda. The new cultural sociology analyzed frames, repertoires, identities, perceptions, and meaning-making, in interaction with structural circumstances.

Culture was readmitted under conditions. It could influence how people perceived their options. It could supply repertoires that made some actions easier to imagine. It could mediate responses to structural disadvantage. What stayed hard to say was that some norms and habits produce worse outcomes than others at securing ends that nearly everyone in the population wants.

Wax published into that environment and crossed the line in four places at once. She puts characteristics of actors inside the causal model. She entertains average differences among sociodemographic populations. She describes recurring patterns of conduct as self-defeating even when the people engaged in them are poor. And she argues that traditional moral norms performed useful work because they restricted individual choice.

The fourth is the one that stings. Wax describes pre-1960s sexual mores as heuristics. Clear rules about marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and divorce reduced the foresight and self-command required to produce a stable family. Their removal transferred the burden of regulation from institutions to individuals. People who could supply their own discipline adapted. People who leaned on the external script did not.

That makes the paper more disruptive than a conventional appeal to personal responsibility. Wax asks what arrangements let ordinary people avoid solving the optimization problem at all. Her account of norms runs parallel to behavioral economics. A default enrollment rule gets people to save without requiring them to compute an optimal savings path every payday. A marriage norm does similar work. It sustains a long-term cooperative strategy.

The two paternalisms sit in different places in the moral economy. Automatic retirement enrollment gets called choice architecture and sounds technocratic. Marital fidelity gets called a social norm and sounds moralistic. Steering people away from sugar is public health. Attaching shame to abandoning one’s children is judgment. The behavioral logic is the same in each pair. Only the vocabulary and the price differ. Contemporary social science is full of paternalism. What it will not tolerate is paternalism that speaks in moral language.

A second asymmetry runs through the treatment of individual traits. Dispositional explanations of high-status outcomes are welcome, marketable, and honored. A large body of work on grit, growth mindset, and delay of gratification explains professional and academic success by traits located inside the successful, and it sells to the parents of the successful and gets taught in their schools. Angela Duckworth (b. 1970) and Carol Dweck (b. 1946) built careers on it. The marshmallow paradigm of Walter Mischel (1930-2018) circulated for four decades as a story about what self-command does for a child’s future.

Hold the variable and the measurement constant and point them at the bottom of the distribution, and the reception inverts. Self-command explaining why the children of professors do well is a finding. Self-command explaining part of a group gap is a provocation requiring extraordinary evidence. The methodological critiques of the marshmallow work that arrived after 2018 raised real questions about socioeconomic confounding, and I do not dispute their substance. What tracked the variable’s migration from one use to the other was the energy behind them.

A standard that depends on the status of the population explained rather than on the evidence is a standard of manners. And the manners run in a direction: agency is a compliment paid to people already doing well, and its withdrawal is the courtesy extended to people who are not.

Lee Ross (1942-2021) named the fundamental attribution error in 1977. Observers over-attribute conduct to disposition and under-attribute it to situation, reliably, and worse for people they do not know.

This protects subjects. Findings about populations get used, and the use is rarely gentle. Publish that a group’s members exhibit shorter time horizons and you have produced a sentence that will appear, stripped of qualifications, in the mouth of someone who wants to deny that group a loan.

And it buys access. Ethnography runs on entrée. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed a hundred and sixty-two single mothers in Philadelphia and produced a book whose empirical value survives its interpretive frame. They could not have done that work while publishing that the central obstacle was the conduct of the men these women chose. The interviews record the women saying so, at length, about infidelity, violence, drug use, and desertion. The book attributes the conduct to bad schools and absent opportunity. The gap between what the subjects said and what the authors concluded is the price of admission, paid in explanatory currency, and every fieldworker knows the exchange rate without having seen it posted.

Mancur Olson (1932-1998) argued that enforcement of a norm is a public good. The benefit diffuses across a population that includes almost nobody the enforcer knows. The cost concentrates on him, in the room, at the time: the awkwardness of judging a colleague’s divorce, the risk of saying in a seminar that children do better with a father at home, the demotion that attaches to anyone who moralizes about sex. Every individual therefore has reason to withhold enforcement while hoping others supply it, and provision settles below what even the enforcers privately believe correct. The same arithmetic governs the scholarly version. Each researcher who declines to publish the uncomfortable finding gains a private benefit and imposes a small diffuse cost on the field’s stock of knowledge. Nobody defects from the economy because defecting is expensive and the returns go to strangers.

Joanna Kempner, Jon Merz, and Charles Bosk (1948-2020) documented how the enforcement runs. They interviewed forty-one academic researchers about knowledge considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce, and found that the constraints were largely informal and self-imposed rather than codified. What marked the boundaries were the narrative legacies of past controversies, which working scientists used to locate the lines. Researchers learned where the edges were when their own work or a colleague’s drew rebuke.

Those interviews now have a quantitative successor. Cory Clark and twelve coauthors surveyed 470 American psychology professors about conclusions regarded as taboo within the discipline. The scholars who judged those conclusions more likely to be true reported more self-censorship, not less. Almost all anticipated some social cost from stating their empirical beliefs openly, and tenure did little to remove the fear. Most respondents also opposed suppressing scholarship or punishing scholars merely because conclusions might cause harm.

The combination is the finding. A moral economy does not require a room full of people eager to censor one another. It can be sustained by pluralistic ignorance, with researchers who personally favor open inquiry anticipating sanctions from colleagues who may privately be making the same calculation. Timur Kuran (b. 1954) supplies the name. Preference falsification preserves a public equilibrium that few participants privately endorse, and it holds precisely because each participant reads the silence of the others as evidence of a consensus he alone doubts.

This is how a moral economy should operate. Graduate students observe which questions make advisers uneasy. Scholars learn which formulations require three paragraphs of disclaimer. Referees demand alternative structural accounts with more insistence when the conclusion is uncomfortable. Investigators anticipate the reaction and redesign the project before anyone has to object.

The evidence that the process begins well before peer review arrived in 2026. George Borjas and Nate Breznau examined a many-analyst experiment in which seventy-one teams containing 158 researchers received the same data and the same question about immigration and support for welfare programs, and produced 1,253 regression models. The researchers’ prior views on immigration predicted the direction of their estimates. The route ran through specification. Five ordinary research-design decisions accounted for roughly two-thirds of the difference between the pro- and anti-immigration teams. No fabrication, no falsified analysis, no gatekeeper. Research design had become endogenous to prior belief.

Two features of that result discipline the argument here. Both ideological directions showed the effect, and moderate teams drew better blind-review scores than either extreme. The claim is not that one side is uniquely capable of motivated science. It is that a politically homogeneous field converts ordinary motivated reasoning into a systematic tilt, because the specifications that feel natural to most of the room are the ones that get run.

The costs.

A class of true propositions becomes unpublishable, and a field that cannot publish a proposition cannot test or correct it. Suppression does not produce silence on a question. It produces relocation. The question migrates to writers with no data, no training, no review, and no stake in the population’s welfare, who answer it badly and loudly to an audience that has noticed the professionals declining to speak. Wilson said as much about the years after Moynihan.

Theories with poor fit survive on moral standing. A field that keeps the marriageable-men hypothesis at the center of its account while a fifth of the variance supports it has stopped optimizing for fit, and has lost the ability to tell whether it is making progress.

The economy patronizes. Powerful people get treated as agents. Disadvantaged people get treated as respondents to conditions. The employer discriminates, the landlord excludes, the school fails, the market dislocates, the neighborhood constrains, and the disadvantaged individual adapts. Sometimes that is what happened. When the grammar becomes a default theory of causation, agency itself becomes stratified: people at the top hold enough of it to cause social outcomes, and people at the bottom hold enough to experience outcomes without helping to cause them. Orlando Patterson (b. 1940) has pressed this from a position that makes it hard to wave off, arguing that the refusal to discuss culture and conduct among Black Americans amounts to a denial that they are agents in their own lives.

And morally congenial explanations have victims. Suppose a destructive behavior responds strongly to norms and weakly to the economic variable researchers prefer. A generation spent improving the economic variable while declining to investigate the normative one does not protect the affected population. It withholds a useful explanation from them. Compassion attached to the wrong causal model is not compassionate in its consequences.

The strong version of this argument does not survive every test, and the failures are worth stating. An adversarial collaboration led by Diego Reinero examined 194 psychology studies that later faced replication attempts and found that liberal versus conservative slant predicted neither replication success nor citation frequency nor effect size. What showed modest association with poorer replicability was ideological extremity in either direction. Morally congenial research is not generally false, and the claim here has never needed it to be. The economy changes which questions get asked, how much scrutiny competing explanations receive, and which conclusions impose reputational costs on the person reporting them. Those are effects on the composition of a literature rather than on the truth of any paper in it.

Where the moral economy causes the most damage is in the conflation of explanation with exculpation. Discrimination contributing to an outcome leaves open whether every person experiencing it acted wisely. Behavior contributing to an outcome leaves open whether discrimination is present. A norm proving socially useful leaves open whether those who violate it are wicked. A population differing on average in some trait leaves open where the difference came from, whether it is mutable, and what anyone owes anyone else about it. None of these propositions entails the moral conclusion habitually attached to it.

Wax’s empirical case for population differences in local and global decision-making runs far weaker than her theoretical model. She concedes that the time-discounting literature is messy, that the measurements are inconsistent, and that the evidence linking psychological traits to intimate conduct is thin. That is where to attack the argument. Are the traits measured well? Do the group differences survive controls? Which way does causation run? How much variance do they carry? Can the model outperform its rivals out of sample? Does the normative environment change conduct through the route she specifies?

Those are scientific objections. That hypothesis blames the victim is a statement about the hypothesis’s position in a moral economy.

Researchers choose subjects because some outcomes weigh more with them than others. Societies regulate experiments because knowledge is not worth every price. What a science can demand is that the ledgers stay separate.

The causal ledger asks what produces the outcome. It lets institutions, incentives, history, culture, norms, cognition, personality, choice, inheritance, developmental feedback, and chance compete for explanatory power. No variable earns immunity because its implications are unpleasant, and none earns a presumption because its implications are humane. The moral ledger opens afterward and asks what people owe one another given what turns out to be true.

Separation works because human dignity does not require causal innocence. A poor man need not be a passive product of structures to deserve help. A man who made a disastrous choice keeps his claim on compassion. A group difference is not deserved merely because behavior mediates it. An institution is not innocent merely because individuals act. A society can ask responsibility of people while recognizing that the capacity for responsibility is partly socially produced. Grant those propositions and most of the moral pressure on causal explanation drains away.

Notes

On the term. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136. Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2-24, at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/368740 and https://www.jstor.org/stable/301910. Daston’s definition of a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values is the sentence the essay leans on, and her insistence that these economies are historically specific is what makes the present one a subject rather than a scandal. For the concept’s wider career, Norbert Götz, “‘Moral Economy’: Its Conceptual History and Analytical Prospects,” at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449626.2015.1054556. Robert Merton’s four norms come from “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), reprinted in The Sociology of Science (1973). For the counter-norms that run alongside them, Ian I. Mitroff, “Norms and Counter-Norms in a Select Group of the Apollo Moon Scientists: A Case Study of the Ambivalence of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 579-595, at https://www.andreasaltelli.eu/file/repository/mitroff_OCR.pdf.

On the Wax paper and its field review. Amy L. Wax, “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424. Her demolition of the structural accounts runs through the paper’s third section, and her own summary of the demographic estimates on marriageable men appears at notes 30 and 31. The Wilson hypothesis is stated in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), whose opening chapter also carries Wilson’s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep (2005), is the ethnography discussed above.

On the price of evidence, measured. Henning Finseraas, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, “Ideological Biases in Research Evaluations? The Case of Research on Majority-Minority Relations,” Scandinavian Political Studies 45 (2022): 370-381, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9477.12229, is the preregistered experiment in which the conclusion was randomized and the design held constant. George J. Borjas and Nate Breznau, “Ideological Bias in the Production of Research Findings,” Science Advances 12 (2026): eadz7173, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12757037/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41477854/, supplies the many-analyst result. Note that both papers concern immigration rather than family structure, and that neither observes the specific economy this essay describes. What they establish is that the pricing effect is real and measurable in an adjacent domain.

On how the boundaries get enforced. Joanna Kempner, Jon F. Merz, and Charles L. Bosk, “Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge,” Sociological Forum 26 (2011): 475-500, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2011.01259.x, with an open copy here. The earlier and shorter statement is Kempner, Clifford Perlis, and Merz, “Forbidden Knowledge,” Science 307 (2005): 854, at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/307/5711/854. Their finding that most constraints are informal or self-imposed, and that memories of past controversies mark the lines, is the empirical backbone of the argument here. The quantitative successor is Cory J. Clark and colleagues, “Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 20 (2025): 941-957, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12408927/ and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916241252085, whose crucial result is that belief in a taboo proposition predicts more self-censorship rather than less. For the collective-action engine, Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965). For the equilibrium it sustains, Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press, 1995).

On the trait literature and its asymmetric reception. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip Peake’s original delay-of-gratification papers ran in Science (1989) and Developmental Psychology (1990). The conceptual replication is Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan, “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” Psychological Science 29 (2018): 1159-1177, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661, with an open copy here. Their bivariate correlation ran half the size of the original and fell by two thirds under controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and home environment. The exchange that followed is worth reading in full, since it shows the field arguing about controls rather than about politics: Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, and Pia Pinger, “Re-Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” here with the Watts and Duncan reply on confounding and construct clarity. Lee Ross’s “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings” (1977) is where the attribution error gets its name.

On what the argument does not establish. Diego A. Reinero and colleagues, “Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15 (2020): 1310-1328, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691620924463 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32812848/, is an adversarial collaboration across 194 studies subjected to replication attempts, and it finds no relation between ideological direction and replication success, citation, or effect size. Anyone tempted to read this essay as a claim that congenial findings are false should read Reinero first. The Borjas and Breznau result runs the same direction, since both ideological camps showed the specification effect and moderate teams drew better blind-review scores.

On Boas. The immigrant anthropometry study is Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1912). The reanalysis dispute runs through Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2002) and Clarence Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William Leonard in American Anthropologist (2003), the latter concluding that Boas’s central plasticity finding largely held. The claim in the text is about the speed of a disciplinary displacement and the questions pursued afterward, not about an absence of evidence.

On the Moynihan aftermath. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (1971), supplied the phrase. Readers who want the controversy reconstructed rather than summarized should start with James Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough (2010).

On culture readmitted under conditions. Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (May 2010): 6-27, at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2131376, with the Harvard open copy at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lamont/files/reconsidering_culture_and_poverty.pdf and the full volume at https://archive.org/details/reconsideringcul0629unse. The volume includes a contribution from Wilson. Note the timing: this appeared the same season Wax circulated her draft, which makes the pair a natural comparison for anyone who wants to see the permitted and the forbidden versions of the same move side by side.

Further reading. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration (1997) and Rituals of Blood (1998), argue the agency point from inside the sociology of race; his 2006 New York Times essay “A Poverty of the Mind” states it compactly. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege (2023). Philip Tetlock’s work on sacred values and taboo tradeoffs supplies a psychology for the reaction described here, and readers who want it should start with “The Psychology of the Unthinkable” (2000). For a companion piece on who selects a normative regime and who bears its costs, see the essay on status hierarchy and normative selection that shares this argument’s premises.

Disruptive Papers

The strongest of these dissolve a morally convenient dichotomy rather than delivering an unwelcome result. A reader cannot neutralize them by switching political teams, which is what makes them expensive to price.

Augustine Kong and colleagues, “The Nature of Nurture: Effects of Parental Genotypes,” Science 359 (2018): 424-428. The design exploits alleles parents carry but do not transmit. Since the child never inherited them, any association with the child’s educational attainment cannot be a direct genetic effect on the child. A polygenic score built from nontransmitted parental alleles predicted the child’s educational attainment at 29.9 percent the strength of the transmitted score. They named it genetic nurture. The partition between heredity and environment stops being clean in both directions at once. A variable coded environmental can carry genetic covariance, and a genetic estimate can carry parental behavior.

Laurence Howe and colleagues, “Within-Sibship Genome-Wide Association Analyses Decrease Bias in Estimates of Direct Genetic Effects,” Nature Genetics 54 (2022): 581-592, free at PMC. 178,086 siblings across 19 cohorts. Comparing siblings strips out population stratification, assortative mating, and family-level genetic nurture. Estimated associations shrank substantially, roughly forty-seven percent for educational attainment, and many survived. Neither camp gets what it wants. Direct inheritance, indirect genetic effects, and social environment remain entangled, and nobody is granted causal innocence.

Aaron Chalfin, Benjamin Hansen, Emily Weisburst, and Morgan Williams Jr., “Police Force Size and Civilian Race,” American Economic Review: Insights 4 (2022): 139-158, free at PMC. 242 cities, 1981 to 2018, two instrumental-variable strategies. An additional officer prevents about a tenth of a homicide, and the per-capita homicide benefit runs roughly twice as large for Black residents as for white residents. More police also means fewer serious-crime arrests and more low-level arrests, with the second burden falling disproportionately on Black Americans. Both slogans about policing turn out true along different margins. The finding refuses to announce the researcher’s politics, which is the sorting device the moral economy runs on.

Michael Schaerer and colleagues, “On the Trajectory of Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis and Forecasting Survey Capturing 44 Years of Field Experiments on Gender and Hiring Decisions,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 179 (2023): 104280. Preregistered, 85 field audits, 244 effects, 361,645 applications, an independent red team, and a forecasting component. Discrimination against women in male-typed and mixed jobs declined and reversed slightly after 2009. Discrimination against men in female-typed jobs persisted. Then the second catch: scientists correctly anticipated improvement for women, overestimated how much anti-female discrimination remained, and did not anticipate the anti-male effect at all. The paper measures the phenomenon and the field’s expectations about it in the same design.

The next group holds a design constant and gets an answer the field did not want.

Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel, “Why Do Women Earn Less than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators,” Journal of Labor Economics 40 (2022): 283-323, PDF at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_gendergap.pdf. One unionized employer, identical posted wages, seniority-driven promotion, and still eighty-nine cents on the dollar, arising from 1.5 fewer overtime hours and 1.3 more unpaid hours off per week. Occupational sorting, managerial discretion, and negotiation are removed by construction.

Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, Jonathan Hall, John List, and Paul Oyer, “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers,” Review of Economic Studies 88 (2021): 2210-2238, PDF at https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf, working version at NBER 24732. More than a million workers, a sex-blind algorithm setting pay and dispatch, and a seven percent hourly gap accounted for by experience, where and when people drove, and speed. Customer discrimination explained none of it. The result does not show that gaps elsewhere are preference-driven. It shows that a substantial gap can appear where the standard suspects are absent.

Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom on Harvard admissions, principally “Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions,” European Economic Review 144 (2022): 104079, and “Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard,” Journal of Labor Economics 40 (2022): 133-155, with everything collected at https://psarcidi.github.io/. Two competent teams working the same applicant-level records, with David Card running the opposing analysis for Harvard. That is the rarest thing in social science and it lets a reader watch specification choice operate in daylight. The second paper is the one that keeps it from being a partisan document: more than forty-three percent of white admits were legacy, athlete, dean’s list, or faculty children, and roughly three quarters of those would have been rejected otherwise.

Lincoln Quillian, Devah Pager (1972-2018), Ole Hexel, and Arnfinn Midtbøen, “Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time,” PNAS 114 (2017): 10870-10875, free at PMC. Twenty-eight audits, 55,842 applications, whites receiving thirty-six percent more callbacks, no decline since 1989. This one points the other way and belongs on any list that expects to be taken seriously. Correspondence audits also have the cleanest identification in the discrimination literature, which is precisely why the result is hard to price down.

The last group is about the machinery of belief rather than about any social outcome.

Patrick Forscher, Calvin Lai, Jordan Axt, Charles Ebersole, Michelle Herman, Patricia Devine, and Brian Nosek, “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 117 (2019): 522-559, preprint at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dv8tu/. 492 studies, 87,418 participants. Implicit measures move, effects run small, behavioral effects run trivial, and changes in implicit measures do not mediate changes in behavior. Devine and Nosek built the field. The paper does not deny implicit attitudes. It removes the inference that moving a score is a demonstrated route to changing conduct, which is the inference the training industry sells.

Jeffrey Dahlke, Paul Sackett, and Nathan Kuncel, “Effects of Range Restriction and Criterion Contamination on Differential Validity of the SAT by Race/Ethnicity and Sex,” Journal of Applied Psychology 104 (2019): 814-831. 363,004 students at 107 institutions. Correcting for admissions-induced range restriction and for students taking different courses, first-year predictive validity for Black and Hispanic students was not significantly different from validity for white students, with four-year outcomes and other comparisons more complicated. The disruptive proposition is narrow and load-bearing: a group difference in average scores is not itself evidence that the instrument is biased. Disparity and measurement bias are separate empirical claims.

George Borjas and Nate Breznau, “Ideological Bias in the Production of Research Findings,” Science Advances 12 (2026), eadz7173, record at PubMed. Seventy-one teams, 158 researchers, identical data and question, 1,253 models. Prior views predicted estimates, and five ordinary design choices carried about two thirds of the difference between camps. Both directions showed it and moderate teams drew better blind-review scores. No fraud, no censorship, no gatekeeper. The dependent variable here is science, which makes it the closest thing to an experimental demonstration of a price of evidence.

Cory Clark and colleagues, “Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 20 (2025): 941-957, belongs alongside these as a companion rather than a peer. It is a survey and carries no causal design. Its value is the finding that professors who judged taboo propositions more likely to be true reported more self-censorship, which is the shape a pluralistic-ignorance equilibrium leaves in survey data.

What happens on the inside when an elite academic who regards himself as a disinterested servant of the truth reads a disruptive paper?

Claude says:

Nobody has written the scene you want. Three things come close.

Robert Putnam (b. 1941) wrote the nonfiction version about himself. His 2007 paper on ethnic diversity and social capital found that diversity depressed trust in the short run, including trust within groups, and he said in print that he had delayed publication while looking for countervailing evidence and had wanted to be able to report a remedy alongside the finding. That is a man describing his own hesitation, in a journal, with the delay itself as part of the record.

Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger, 2015, is the memoir of watching this happen from inside and then deciding to become an inconvenience about it.

For fiction, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, 2006, is the closest thing that exists. A postdoc’s result is too good, and the novel is about who wants it to be true, who is permitted to doubt it, and what doubting costs. C. P. Snow (1905-1980) is the ancestor, particularly The Affair, where a college decides what it can afford to have happened.

SCENE:

The paper comes in from a former student on a Tuesday, with no message, only the subject line: thought you’d want to see this. He opens it between the eleven o’clock and the department lunch. He reads the abstract twice.

The first thing he does is scroll to the affiliations. This is not a political act. He has done it for thirty years, because a name and a department tell him how much weight the standard errors will bear, and because he can save himself forty minutes by learning that the third author trained under someone whose work he already distrusts. The affiliations are good. Better than good. One of them is a place he has sent his own students.

So he reads the data section.

He reads it the way he reads a referee assignment, which is to say he reads it looking for the place where it breaks. This too is not political. It is the only way anyone reads anything in his field. He finds three candidates in the first pass. The sample is drawn from administrative records that exclude a population he happens to know is excluded in a nonrandom way. The controls include a variable that is plausibly post-treatment. And the main specification uses a fixed effect that will absorb more variation than the authors seem to want it to.

He writes these down on the back of a seminar announcement. He feels, writing them, the small clean pleasure of competence. He is good at this. He was good at it when he was twenty-eight and he is better now.

Then he goes to the appendix, because the appendix is where a serious team puts the robustness checks, and he wants to know whether they anticipated him.

They anticipated him. All three.

The exclusion is addressed in Table A4, with bounds. The post-treatment control is dropped in column five and the coefficient moves by four percent. The fixed effect is relaxed in three ways across two pages, and the result survives all of them, with the confidence interval widening in the direction he would have predicted and not far enough to matter.

He sits back.

What happens next takes about four seconds and he will not remember it by dinner.

He thinks: the effect size still seems large. He does not think this because he has a prior about the effect size. He has no prior about the effect size. He has never worked on this outcome. He thinks it because the number, if true, would require him to say something in a seminar that he does not want to say in a seminar, and the not-wanting has arrived before the reasoning, dressed as the reasoning, and he has no instrument that can tell the two apart.

So he looks for a fourth problem.

He finds one. The outcome is self-reported in the second wave. This is a real limitation and he is right to note it. He notes it. He notes it with more energy than he noted the first three, and he does not observe the difference in energy, because energy is not something he has ever been trained to measure in himself.

He looks at the clock. He is late for lunch.

Walking down the corridor he composes, without deciding to, the sentence he will use if the paper comes up. He is not going to attack it. He would never attack it. He is going to say that it is careful work and that he would want to see it replicated on a different population before drawing conclusions. Every word of that is true. He would want that. He wants that about everything.

He has never once said it about a paper whose result ran the other way.

At lunch a colleague mentions the paper. There is a pause of the kind that is not long enough to be called a pause. Someone says the authors are serious people. Someone else says he heard the identification is fragile, and the man who read the appendix that morning, who knows the identification is not fragile, who has the seminar announcement in his jacket pocket with three refuted objections written on the back of it, says nothing at all.

He says nothing because the room has not asked him anything. He tells himself this on the walk back, and it is true, and he is a scrupulous man, and it is the last time he thinks about the paper for six weeks.