Governments often base social intervention programs on studies done by psychologists and other social scientists. Often these studies fail to mention other research suggesting that such interventions may have a limited chance of actually working.
The omitted research that is not mentioned often shows that the behaviors and performances targeted for improvement by the environmental intervention programs are mostly caused by genetic differences between people and for that reason may be more difficult to change than implied in these studies. This is particularly true when the goal is to greatly reduce or eliminate differences between people in such domains as school achievement, impulsive behaviors, or intelligence.
This problem of omitted research creates two problems. It tends to call into question the credibility of all social science research, even the studies that do not omit relevant research. And from an applied point of view, it leads to the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on programs that are unlikely to produce the desired outcomes.
This article explores an important credibility problem in the research literature beyond the issue of questionable data analysis methods: the problem of omission of relevant previous research in published research articles. This article focuses on this problem in 2 areas: (1) studies purporting to demonstrate the effects of people’s experiences on their later life outcomes while failing to discuss or mention the probable causal role of genetic inheritance in producing these effects, despite the strong evidence for this connection from behavior genetics research; and (2) studies of specific aptitudes (specific abilities) such as verbal, spatial, or reasoning that fail to acknowledge or mention that such aptitudes are indicator variables for general mental ability (GMA; or intelligence) and that after proper control for GMA the residuals in these aptitudes make essentially no contribution to prediction of real world academic, occupational, or job performance. It is only the GMA component in such aptitudes that produces the ability to predict. As is well known today, the issue of the credibility of research conclusions is prominent (2005). In both the areas examined in this article, these deficiencies create serious and unnecessary credibility problems, and the doubts they inspire about credibility could unfortunately be generalized to other research areas in which these problems do not exist.
[Keywords: research credibility, behavior genetics, general mental ability, intelligence, specific abilities]