Discover the Best Books Written by Robert Plomin

Robert Joseph Plomin, CBE FBA (born 1948), is an American/British psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology. Plomin was born in Chicago to a family of Polish-German extraction. 

He graduated high school from DePaul University Academy in Chicago; he then earned a B.A. in psychology from DePaul University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1974 from the University of Texas at Austin under personality psychologist Arnold H. Buss. He then worked at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 1986 until 1994 he worked at Pennsylvania State University, studying elderly twins reared apart and twins reared together to study aging and since 1994 has been at the Institute of Psychiatry (King's College London). 

He has been president of the Behavior Genetics Association. In 1987 Plomin married Judith Dunn, a British psychologist and academic. In 2002, the Behavior Genetics Association awarded him the Dobzhansky Memorial Award for a Lifetime of Outstanding Scholarship in Behavior Genetics. He was awarded the William James Fellow Award by the Association for Psychological Science in 2004 and the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

In 2017, Plomin received the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. Plomin was ranked among the 100 most eminent psychologists in the history of science. In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for humanities and social sciences. Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.

Plomin has shown the importance of a non-shared environment, a term that he coined to refer to the idiosyncratic environmental factors that reduce the similarity of individuals raised in the same family environment. In addition, he has shown that many environmental measures in psychology show the genetic influence and that genetic factors can mediate associations between environmental measures and developmental outcomes.

Plomin currently conducts the Twins Early Development Study of all twins born in England from 1994 to 1996, focusing on developmental delays in early childhood, their association with behavioral problems, and educational attainment. In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to intelligence research following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.