Eric Turkheimer

Eric Nathan Turkheimer Ph.D.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Professor of psychology
Known for	Behavior genetics, Gene-environment interactions
Title	Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of psychology
Spouse	Carol Manning
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Texas at Austin
Thesis	Cognitive development of adopted and fostered children (1986)
Doctoral advisor	John Loehlin
Influences	Irving Gottesman
Academic work
Discipline	Psychology, Behavior Genetics
Sub-discipline	GxSES
Institutions	University of Virginia

Eric Nathan Turkheimer is the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Education and career

Turkheimer received his B.A. in psychology from Haverford College in 1976 and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986. Also in 1986, he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he became an associate professor in 1992 and a full professor in 2001.

Research

Turkheimer is known for studying the effects of socioeconomic status and genes on IQ, especially in regards to gene-environment interactions. For example, in a 2003 study, he and his colleagues found that the environment accounted for about 60% of the variance in IQ among low-income children, while genes accounted for almost none of it. In contrast, this study also found that the reverse was true for wealthy children. A subsequent meta analysis showed this effect did not replicate outside the US, and even within the US the effect size was a third of Turkheimer's. Since then, along with his University of Virginia colleague David Fask, he has published other studies that also suggest that IQ is more heritable among wealthy families than among poor ones. In a 2011 commentary about environmental influences on human behavior, he wrote that “The nonshared environment, in a phrase, is free will. Not the kind of metaphysical free will that no one believes in anymore, according to which human souls float free above the mechanistic constraints of the physical world, but an embodied free will, tethered to biology, that encompasses our ability to respond to complex circumstances in complex and unpredictable ways and in the process to build a self.”

Media

Turkheimer was been featured on multiple Youtube talk shows, including Stefan Molyneux, The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, and David Pakman Show. In 2017, Turkheimer along with Richard Nisbett and Paige Harden, published a piece in Vox criticizing Charles Murray and Sam Harris' views on race and intelligence, following an appearance of Murray on Harris' show.

External links

• Faculty page
• Eric Turkheimer publications indexed by Google Scholar