As every student enrolled in Psychology 101 is taught, simply making an individual aware of something (such as their being in a psychology study) can change behavior. More widespread recognition of the issues surrounding the study of gene-environment interactions, as delineated above, will hopefully lead to more thoughtful and careful evaluations of hypothesized gene-environment interaction effects. Studying gene-environment interactions is not as simple as plugging a genotype and environment into a regression equation and seeing if the interaction term yields p < 0.05. Scientists conducting gene-environment interaction research and reviewers of papers evaluating gene-environment interaction effects need to be keenly aware of these issues so that due diligence can be carried out to evaluate interaction effects that are detected (or not) in a given sample.
