There’s no getting around it. Having a certain genetic makeup can make you prone to bad behavior and psychological problems. But what if those same genes can be turned around? What if the bad versions of genes are really just extra-sensitive and therefore can be turned into the good versions with the right parenting and environment?
Could so-called bad genes be the key to your success?
Recent thinking, illustrated in the Atlantic’s The Science of Success, suggests that this could be the case.
This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.
Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.
For what it’s worth, my JV football coach constantly insisted that the key to our success was to identify our weaknesses and make them our strengths. We continued to suck, but we were all pretty clear on why.
