Report Claims Men More Intelligent Than Women 1523
Jeremy Dean writes "In controversial research reported all over the place, Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University claims that, on average, men are more intelligent than women. Let battle commence!
As the research is not yet published there's nothing more to go on than the press reports. The co-author of the study, Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, is apologetic about the findings.
In the BBC News report he states that the paper will go on to argue that despite their disadvantage in IQ, there is evidence that women utilise their (lesser!) talents better than men. This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
The good professor (Score:5, Informative)
The professor has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than blacks and that criminal traits are genetically inherited.
Re:Just in... (Score:3, Informative)
Because apparently you don't know the difference between opinions and measurable data. Whether or not the conclusion in TFA is correct, at least it's possible to measure intelligence.
It is not possible to scientifically measure whether one color or flavor is "better" than another; the closest you could get is polling ice cream lovers to see which flavor is more popular.
Old Psych Joke (Score:4, Informative)
A: "Intelligence is what IQ Tests Measure."
(Yeah, I know it's not actually funny)
Basically, the psychologists make this construct they term intelligence quotient, and they try to make a test that will measure the construct. If they can get reliability across a number of tests, plus a few more things, then you have a number that you can attribute to "Intelligence," which is really handy if you want to make a test that determines if men or women have more of this "Intelligence".
That's pretty much it. Oh, okay, that's not all, but in effect, you see if anything else correlates with Intelligence, and if so, then you'll be relatively safe in betting that, whatever positively correlates with it, means that other correlations will similarly relate. So if people who are more intelligent are more likely to get a particular neurodegenerative disease, and men have more intelligence than women, then chances are, more men will have this disease than women.
However, presuming that Intelligence means anything other than what it correlates with in tests is foolish. It's not necessarily a predictor of success, it's not necessarily a predictor of the ability to solve problems other than the ones covered in the IQ tests, and it's not necessarily a predictor that you're a better person. It just means that you have a higher amount of the traits covered by this particular construct.
=Brian
Problem is (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mod parent (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at Wikipedia's entry on race and intelligence [wikipedia.org].
There might be some truth to it.
But none of that means people should discriminate, of course. Everyone needs to be given a chance. Just don't expect equal outcomes.
Eight types of intelligence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EQ (emotional intelligence) (Score:5, Informative)
IQ is a load of bunk. So is EQ. The whole notion of what we call human intelligence can be described in one, two or even 10 simple, easily quantified parameters is stupid and unscientific.
The idea that emotion and intelligence (or: Sense and Sensibility) are two distinct things is antique philosophical claptrap, with little justification in reality.
Results in neurology (a real science, as opposed to most psychology) indicate that not only are these things nondistinct, but rather that human emotions provide the foundation for what we call 'intelligence', even of the abstract kind.
Read, for instance Descartes' Error [amazon.com], by Antonio Damasio.
Re:Oh boy... (Score:5, Informative)
It has to be something about instability of that Y chromosome. The X seems to be much more stable.
Yeah, whatever... (Score:5, Informative)
While I'm sure the average Equatorial Guinean is poorly educated and might well have received insufficient iodine as a child, that figure is so insanely low (more than 2.7 standard deviations below the global mean of 100) as to fail the laugh test.
Re:Obviously, we *are* more intelligent (Score:2, Informative)
IQ tests are crap (Score:2, Informative)
Tests and other things have repeatedly suggested that i was lame and dumb, so i'm biased. My parents were told to not send me to school, cause i wouldn't succeed the wise people said.
Well i succeeded more than other *normal* people.
Don't believe the hype, yo.
Using my brain for a second here, i wonder how this *expert* told his wife about his findings. Or maybe he prefer men.
Stolen from the bbc article :
The only thing IQ tests prove is how good you are at doing IQ tests.
Matthew, Cheshire, UK
why the outrage? (Score:4, Informative)
I'd also note that many of the things you describe as "rights", aren't or shouldn't be. "The right to vote" is newspeak for "the 'right' to aggress against others" (namely, to openly express and act upon one's desire to take that which they haven't earned). Regarding discrimination in the workplace, no-one has the "right" to work at a specific company. I'd argue, however, that there are alot of managers who would like nothing more than to have all female employees. Furthermore, to the extent that women are discriminated against* in the workplace, this creates a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs willing to hire them at lower wages.
On a related argument, a professor of mine gave a very interesting lecture, for which I have notes [mises.org], discussing the wage-gap between men and women and the glass ceiling. He argues that the "wage gap" (women receiving 70% the pay of men) is really nothing more than the result of the fact that women (not men) get pregnant, and tend to thus take time off and stay at home to be parents. When you look at never-married men vs. never-married women, and teenaged boys vs. teenaged girls, there is no statistically significant wage-gap.
As regards the glass-ceiling, he argues this is due to a difference in the dispersions of IQ among men and women. He argues that although the average IQ of men and women may be the same, the distribution for women is more concentrated on the mean, while the distribution for men is less concentrated on the mean (fatter tails). That is, there are fewer very dumb or very smart women, and more very dumb or very smart men. Likewise with regards to other social characteristics, such as aggression. If you look at the highest peaks of many areas -- chess, business, science, etc -- they are dominated by men; however, you also see prisons and insane-asylums overwhelmingly occupied by men.
The reason for this is that men are expendable, and women are not. If 99% of the female population dies out, the human race is in severe trouble; if 99% of the male population dies out, the remaining 1% (provided adequate fecundity and stamina) can relatively quickly repopulate.
Interestingly, someone else brought up the issue of "emotional quotient" or "EQ". From their description of it, it seems to measure maturity, the ability to sacrafice immediate gratification for more long-term gratification. As emotional intelligence is "an awareness of and ability to manage emotions and create motivation", this would seem to be an appropriate characterization of part of the issue. Economists -- particularly those of the Austrian school -- call this "time-preference". Lower time-preferences are civilizing forces, and lead to success. Criminals and children, for example, are characterized by high time-preference (a rapist is someone who simply can't wait; children will give up $1000 tomorrow for $1 today; etc). I don't see why this doesn't fall under the rubric of general "intelligence".
* The term "discriminate" here is used in the very narrow sense, in that being female is considered as a negative aspect, all else equal. In reality, all private property, and every choice of free people, is based on discrimination.
Re:Let me be the 1st (Score:4, Informative)
So in conclusion -- according to him -- blacks and women are dumb. Caucasian males is the way to go.
But there is! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Prevent Misinformation: Mod Parent UP (Score:3, Informative)
Of course not. Go read the post again. IQ is predictive, not causitive. As a predictor it's very good. I would be quite willing to bet $100 that a person with a 120 IQ is more successful than a person with an 80 IQ. I'll even let you choose the success metric. This doesn't mean that everyone with an 80 IQ is a failure, or that everyone with a 120 IQ is a success. It only means its predictive enough that I'm willing to bet $100 on it.
My high school had a "gifted" program for students with high IQs, and a "special" program for students with low IQs. I'll let you take a wild guess as to which group has more successes today, twenty years later. Or if you prefer, you can guess as to which had the fewest failures.
Asperger's (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, I looked it up on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and found a description of myself - thanks for the info.
Re:History, people, history (Score:5, Informative)
Unless she is over 100 years old or so, she's full of shit. She hasn't been denied a damn thing; in fact, if she's under 30 or so, chances are she's gotten more opportunity than most males due to female-specific scholarships and affirmative action.
How do you know this? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You're even dafter than the other moron (Score:3, Informative)
Furthermore, after reading all this, I can certainly understand the concerns some people have over the numbers presented in this study. Perhaps it is indeed best to wait with conclusions and see if there will be any other studies, quite possibly disproving this one. Or maybe the guy did get it right this time - even if he was biased, he might've been right all along...
Either way, people who dismiss the study solely because it is "non-PC" (or, simply put, conflicts with their dogmas) are still missing the point.
Occams Razor (Score:2, Informative)
That's not begging the question. (Score:4, Informative)
This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world.
No, it doesn't. That's not what begging the question means. Perhaps it raises that question. Begging the question is assuming the wanted conclusion.
So, for instance, if the professor said, "IQ tests measure immutable intelligence. Women do less well on IQ tests. Therefore, women are less intelligent," when it's not precisely known if there is a single thing measurable as intelligence (as opposed to a number of factors which tend to correlate, but don't lend themselves to organizing humans on a Great Chain of Being, white boys up near the top and black folks down near the bottom.)
Remember, Steven Jay Gould said that there are four factors that are necessary for this interpretation of intelligence: it must be reliably measurable. It must be a single linearly-rankable quality. It must be heritable (well, for the race-based portion of this trope). And it must be immutable. Drop any of those four (three for the sex-based portion) and the whole argument collapses.
All that his data shows is a correlation between sex (or, elsewhere, race) and what is measured by IQ tests. (Did You Know that the Alfred Binet, inventor of IQ tests, was strongly opposed to any interpretation of IQ as a real thing instead of just an average, or of its being considered immutable? Yeah, he's been doing a slow rotisserie in his grave since Yerkes and Goddard brought his work to America.)
Remember, folks, correlation ain't causation. Very basic stuff, here. And yet so persistent.
--grendel drago
Why anemia isn't the same. (Score:3, Informative)
The reason why the debate over intelligence is so turbulent is because while saying "black folks get sickle-cell anemia more often" isn't an effort to place everyone on a partial order, to rank them and decide that one group is better than another. The effort to consider intelligence as a single number, as something unitary and immutable (and heritable, if we're talking about race) is irrevocably tied to the idea that we're all on a scale from nothingness to divine perfection---the same idea that leads to people thinking of "evolution" as inevitably proceeding "upward", of spiders and giant redwoods as "less evolved" than humans.
This is a holdover from the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which was a method by which scientists used to arrange everything on a scale, with snot and rocks at the bottom, then monkeys and black people, then finally white people, angels and God. Except the angels and God weren't around, so white people were in charge. 'Cause that's the way it was meant to be.
Do you see why talking about intelligence is different from talking about sickle-cell anemia?
--grendel drago
IQ as a Function of Race, Sex, Environment (Score:3, Informative)
Good study, bad test. (Score:3, Informative)
But not because white men are, at birth, smarter than black men or women. It's because you can be trained to do better at IQ tests, and also because IQ tests show a bias towards certain skills.
If you have done a lot of problems that are similar to the problems on IQ tests, you'll do better at IQ tests. People who have access to good education will do better on IQ tests than people who do not, a trend that follows wealth, which in the United States at least, tends to follow race.
I'd also expect men to do better on IQ tests than women because a lot of IQ test questions relate to spacial reasoning (figures that need to be manipulated in space), something men's brains may be better at doing that women's brains. This may make men naturally ore "intelligent" in regards to this particular subset of problems, but put some emotional reasoning questions on that IQ test and you may find that bias goes away.
If you were to do this same study with POOR white people and POOR black people, at a young age, in the same set of school districts, I would guess you would find that the IQ scores were pretty much the same.
Anyway, the moral ofthe story is that if this test is based on IQ test scores, it doesn't say 'Men are smarter than women". It says that "Men get better IQ test scores than women", which could very well just show a gender bias in the test.
Re:Oh boy... (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of people don't realize just how wealthy she is. As I mentioned to a poster below who brought up Steven King - King's net worth is around 65m$. Rowling's is around 1B$.
In modern times, excepting in technical fields (where there still is a gender gap) and historically male-dominated styles (such as sci-fi), female authors tend to be as high grossing or higher grossing than male authors.
Some people here are only considering "classic" works as defining "great authors". This introduces a huge bias, however, because women used to be heavily, actively discouraged from professional work except for in a handful of fields (writing not among them).
Author is a huge racist. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Role of women in society. (Score:1, Informative)
Er... Crossing Jordan... The Closer... Law & Order (Realizing that it has had a 15yr run and an ensemble cast: The DA has been a woman, attorneys for the defense and prosecution are often female and very smart / competent, the captain of the detective squad is currently female and quite in charge, the medical examiner is female and smart...), add in SVU with Det. Olivia Benson and assistant DA Novak, Boston Legal (OK, only sometimes a drama... but Schmidt is a partner, and wouldn't you call her smarter / more competent / in-charge than Crane?), Veronica Mars (I haven't seen it, but appears to focus on the life of a smart 17yr old female private investigator). Maybe you watch the wrong shows.
Re:Role of women in society. (Score:3, Informative)
Profiler, Dark Angel, Firefly, Xena.
Then again, I haven't had my satellite hooked up in about two years, so I don't know how shows are trending these days. All the above shows are "archaic".
Re:Role of women in society. (Score:2, Informative)
"The Closer"
Re:Politically Correct != Correct (Score:3, Informative)
Attempting to find this answer for you I instead found a research paper (with references) that stated the opposite conclusion.
From the article Gender Differences in Cognitive Functioning by Heidi Weiman [luc.edu]
Website with a little background on Lynn (Score:3, Informative)
Here's some choice bits:
This guy would be a cartoonish sci-fi villain if he wasn't real.
Re:Politically Correct != Correct (Score:3, Informative)
Hey, thanks for the info.
Well, that sure kills the GP's "Visual Acuity falls as a no contest for women. ". There's a contest, right there!
I knew that couldn't be right...
From my art background, I can tell you one thing though: Women are (usually) better at colours, men at lines.
In fact, in the comic book industry, women are usually colorists, or doing the word bubbles. While men (admitedly, there's more of them to begin with) are more likely to be pencillers or inkers.