We used Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS (MTAG)16 to increase the precision of our estimates of the SNPs’ effects on general risk tolerance. We used as inputs the summary statistics of the meta-analysis combining our discovery and replication GWAS of general risk tolerance; the summary statistics of our GWAS of adventurousness, automobile speeding propensity, drinks per week, ever smoker, and number of sexual partners; and the summary statistics of a previously published GWAS on lifetime cannabis use52. Because SNPs that have no effect on one phenotype but a sizeable effect on another can bias MTAG results, we excluded from this analysis SNPs in the proximity of several genes implicated in biological processes that are likely to be specific only to one of the phenotypes. Specifically, we excluded all SNPs located within 1Mb of the genes CHRNA5 and CHRNB3 (nicotinic receptors), CNR1 and CNR2 (cannabinoid receptors), and ADH1B (Alcohol Dehydrogenase). We imposed a MAF filter of 0.01 and a sample size filter that selected, for each GWAS, the SNPs with sample sizes larger than two-thirds of the ninth decile of the GWAS’s
