Catherine Page Harden

So you can measure different factors and you can loosely categorize them as I'm measuring your DNA, so I'm measuring your genes, or I'm measuring the amount of income that your family makes, and so I'm measuring your environment.

But as soon as we shift our attention from measuring how people differ to trying to understand why those differences matter,

We inevitably end up in the world of gene environment interaction.

So we know that poverty gets under the skin to change how your genes are expressed.

We know that children with genetic differences experience different environments because adults respond to them differently.

That line between nature and nurture gets real fuzzy real fast.

I'm going to use the word rongan.

I'm going to try to put that in my southern accent and take that from here.

So I think it's helpful to think about how we use other variables that are not deterministic but do make a difference.

So we know, for example, that children who are raised in poverty are more likely to develop substance use problems.

That's not deterministic.

If you're raised in poverty, you're not destined to have an addiction, but it does raise your vulnerability for that.

So how do we use that information?

One way we use that information is just it's another variable to control for when we're trying to develop these models of development.

We wouldn't compare a kid from a rich family and a kid from a poor family without taking that variable into account.

The other thing is that it serves to humanize people when we're confronted with their bad behavior.

I don't know how it is here, but in the American criminal legal system, it's very common in the sentencing phase for the defendant's representation to talk about, well, how has his or her life been shaped by these environmental factors?

And again, it's not that if you were maltreated or you were raised in a poor home, you were destined to commit a crime.

But it does help the jurors and the judge perhaps understand how might he have come to this place in their life.

So I think genetic information.