Our capacity to negotiate the complex social world represents the remarkable evolutionary development of a wide range of mechanisms for the processing of social information. Some of our most advanced skills, such as language and empathy, mediate our interaction with our social environment. Our social skills are crucial in navigating our social milieu, in terms of independent living, vocational success and wider interpersonal relationships. Using a variety of experimental paradigms research is now beginning to unravel the brain’s mechanisms for social skills. Moreover, twin and family studies have demonstrated that a number of these mechanisms are heritable, pointing to an underlying genetic contribution; however, the specific genes involved are not known. We therefore plan to undertake a study to map the genes involved in one aspect of interpersonal interaction termed ‘theory of mind’ (or ToM). We will use a method called genomewide association. This method looks for relationships between many genetic markers and variation in ToM skills as measured using an established experimental paradigm called the ‘triangles task’. Any markers that demonstrate a significant relationship with ToM indicate that a gene important in this skill is located nearby. We will leverage additional power to map these genes using available low-coverage whole genome sequence data. We anticipate that this will be the first step in furthering our understanding of the genetic basis of social skills.