PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tim T Morris
AU  - George Davey Smith
AU  - Gerard van Den Berg
AU  - Neil M Davies
TI  - Investigating the phenotypic consistency and genetic architecture of noncognitive skills
AID  - 10.1101/470682
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 470682
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/14/470682.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/14/470682.full
AB  - Noncognitive skills have been demonstrated to predict a range of socioeconomic outcomes including educational attainment and employment. There is however little evidence of how consistent and reliable noncognitive skills are over time or across different measures. Using data from a UK cohort, we show that some key indicators of noncognitive skills are inconsistent, that phenotypic relationships between them are generally weak, and that they associate with educational and labour market outcomes inconsistently and less strongly than cognitive skills. Genomewide analyses reveal that noncognitive skills exhibit low heritability and no clear shared genetic architecture with cognitive skills or outcomes. Our results implicate a high noise to signal ratio and suggest caution in the use of noncognitive measures as reliable indicators of underlying traits. Some noncognitive skills, particularly behavioural difficulties, may provide malleable targets for interventional educational programmes, but many current measurements may be too imprecise and inconsistent to be reliably used.