Eric Turkheimer

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.

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. 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.”