Isegoria

Non-shared environment doesn’t just mean schools and peers, Scott Alexander reminds us:

The “nature vs. nurture” question is frequently investigated by twin studies, which separate interpersonal variation into three baskets: heritable, shared environmental, and non-shared environmental. Heritable mostly means genes. Shared environmental means anything that two twins have in common – usually parents, siblings, household, and neighborhood. Non-shared environmental is everything else.

At least in relatively homogeneous samples (eg not split among the very rich and the very poor) studies of many different traits tend to find that ~50% of the variation is heritable and ~50% is due to non-shared environment, with the contribution of shared environment usually lower and often negligible. This is typically summarized as “50% nature, 50% nurture”. That summary is wrong.

I mean, it’s tempting. All these social developmentalists were so sure that the way your parents praised you or didn’t praise you, or spanked you or didn’t spank you, had long-lasting repercussions that totally shaped your adult personality. The underwhelming performance of shared environment in twin studies torpedoed that whole area of study. But at least (these scholars of social behavior could tell themselves) it provided a consolation prize. The non-shared environment contributes 50% of variation, just as much as genes. That means things like your friends, your schoolteachers, and even that time you and your twin got sent away to separate camps must be really important. More than enough there to continue worrying about how society is Ruining The Children, right?

Not necessarily. Non-shared environment isn’t really “non-shared environment” the way you would think. It’s more of a dumpster. Anything that isn’t genetic or family-related gets tossed into the non-shared environment term.

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