Kathryn Paige Harden on How Genetics Shapes Human Behavior
The Good Fight
Yascha Mounk
4.7 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or |
| 0:06.8 | crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. |
| 0:13.5 | Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. |
| 0:18.0 | I think that can be part of the sort of implicit negative reaction to genetics is we love control. And thinking about this factor that's not fully within our control can be, again, it's both liberating and horrifying in equal measure. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. |
| 0:43.5 | To what extent is our behavior determined by genetic influences? |
| 0:51.0 | Are many social outcomes downstream from the genes we have? Or do they depend on things like our |
| 0:57.8 | parents' wealth, the kind of household we grew up in, the kind of opportunities we had? And why |
| 1:03.6 | are so many people resistant to looking at the scientific evidence that comes from things like twin studies, |
| 1:12.9 | which do seem to suggest that one important component of these outcomes is driven by genetics. |
| 1:19.2 | Why more broadly is much of that work right-coded? |
| 1:21.8 | Why do people tend to assume that when you look at genetic influences on behavior, you must be favoring right-wing policies |
| 1:31.4 | to deal with questions of education or social ills like crime. |
| 1:36.6 | Well, the best scholar who has thought about these topics and who combines an emphasis on |
| 1:42.7 | the genetic influences on our behavior with left-wing political |
| 1:47.5 | commitments around questions like education and crime is Catherine Page Harden. |
| 1:53.2 | Page is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and she is the author |
| 1:59.9 | of two really interesting books for The Genetic Lottery, |
| 2:02.8 | Why D&A Matters for Social Equality, which came out about five years ago and was widely |
| 2:07.4 | discussed, and a new book called Original Sin, How We Became Evil and What We Can Do About It. |
| 2:14.4 | And the last part of this conversation, we really go deep into questions of how to |
| 2:19.6 | grapple with the genetic influences on evil behavior. If there is no such thing as free will, |
| 2:28.9 | does that undermine the extent to which we should judge our friend for treating us poorly, or to which we |
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