Determinism and mass-media portrayals of genetics

Determinism and mass-media portrayals of genetics are of concern to scholars looking back on the two decades leading up to 1998. Contents of a randomly selected structured sample of American public newspapers and magazines published 1919-95 have been analyzed to test the hypothesis that an increase in biological determinism has occurred in public discourse. Introduction of discussions of medical genetics was found to correlate with a statistically significant decrease in the degree to which articles attribute human characteristics to genetic causes and a statistically significant increase in differentiation of attributions to genetic and other causes.