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Abstract
The effort to understand the genetic basis of human sociality has been encouraged by the diversity and heritability of social traits like cooperation. This task has remained elusive largely because most studies of sociality and genetics use sample sizes that are often unable to detect the small effects that single genes may have on complex social behaviors. The lack of robust findings could also be a consequence of a poor characterization of social phenotypes. Here, we explore the latter possibility by testing whether refining measures of cooperative phenotypes can increase the replication of previously reported associations between genetic variants and cooperation in small samples. Unlike most previous studies of sociality and genetics, we characterize cooperative phenotypes based on strategies rather than actions. Measuring strategies help differentiate between similar actions with different underlaying social motivations while controlling for expectations and learning. In an admixed Latino sample (n = 188), we tested whether cooperative strategies were associated with three genetic variants thought to influence sociality in humans—MAOA-uVNTR, OXTR rs53576, and AVPR1 RS3. We found no association between cooperative strategies and any of the candidate genetic variants. Since we were unable to replicate previous observations our results suggest that refining measurements of cooperative phenotypes as strategies is not enough to overcome the inherent statistical power problem of candidate gene studies.
Highlights
The questions of why and when people are willing to cooperate, bearing individual costs in the pursuit of collective benefit, have been a major focus in the social and natural sciences [1,2,3,4]
Our findings did not replicate previous results by Mertins et al [27] for MAOA-uVNTR and did not match expected associations based on previous results linking OXTR rs53576, and AVPR1 RS3 with sociality
This suggests that when cooperative phenotypes are measured more precisely as strategies—which exclude learning and expectations—associations with candidate genetic variants cannot be consistently replicated in small samples
Summary
The questions of why and when people are willing to cooperate, bearing individual costs in the pursuit of collective benefit, have been a major focus in the social and natural sciences [1,2,3,4]. Cooperation is widespread among humans, there is considerable diversity among cooperative behaviors [5,6,7,8]. Evidence supporting the heritability of social traits has encouraged efforts to understand the genetics underlying this diversity [9,10,11]. No association between cooperative strategies and genetic variability granted to GR and CR. The funders did not participate in the research in any capacity
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