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Report Claims Men More Intelligent Than Women
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."
Every woman on earth believes that men should be able to read minds. Every man knows this is impossible. Ergo, we are more intelligent.
Now if we could just find a way to explain this to the ladies, there'd be much less unhappiness in this world.
Why exactly do we have to battle at all? What's the reason to have any sort of contest over which 'side' is 'better' than the other? It just seems like a waste of energy to try and 'prove' that one sex is in any way superior to another. We are who we are, and most of our achievements aren't due to how our brains and bodies are wired at birth, it's what we do with our brains and bodies.
I hate how people get all pissed off and offended by "controversial" studies like this. If the study was done correctly, then there's really nothing you can do except shutup and live with it or do your own study that proves it wrong.
If the study was done correctly, then getting offended by the results is like getting offended when somebody says "The sky is blue." You just look like an idiot, no matter what gender you are.
Maybe not
Mi niece told me the other day that she would rather be beautifull than intelligent.
Society tells women to be stupid and popular and then asks itself why women, on average, seem less inteligent than men.
My question is this... who wrote the tests?
I would be willing to bet that if a woman were to come up with an IQ test that women would do better at it than men.
Being smart doesn't make you better at anything other than being smart. If you can add two 8 digit numbers in your head then great. If you can lift a car over your head, good for you. If you can stomach the sight of blood enough to become a doctor, guess what... good for you.
Women, men, children, black, white, grey, whatever.... who you are is not defined by what you can do better than others. Nobody is the best at everything. Some people throw great parties or know how to make others laugh and feel better about themselves. If that is their greatest skill then so be it. Everyone should be happy with themselves or at least be given sufficient opportunity to be happy with themselves.
If your only way to be happy about yourself is to be better at something than others, find a new hobby.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
(Will this post survive the political-correctness police? Lets watch...)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
There is so much confusion about the notions of intelligence, cleverness, wisdom, creativity, etc., etc. that belief in the signficance of IQ testing only proves someone to be an elitist fool--usually because that person "does well" on certain tests.
By the way, I almost always score in the top 1% on every standardized written test, including IQ tests. The only exception I can recall was the LSAT, where I only scored in the top 10%. However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Seems to me the Emotional Quotient is a simple reaction to IQ. "So, men perform better in one test, let's find another evaluation that is broadly similar in name, mixes concepts and in which woman get the best results".
Nobody complains that women and asian people are smaller on average then men and african people, but when it comes to IQ, seems every group on average should get the same average (men, women, caucasian, black, rich, poor, Britney Spears fans, music lovers, and so on). Absurd.
Why should these quotient measurements give equal score to all sides? Why would nature divide intelligence equally between gender and races?
All Political Correct crap to me.
I thought about why measuring intelligence is so taboo. It seems that it's one of the few things that scientists are not allowed to study, not because it violates the law, but because it's simply taboo. It seems that as soon as we are able to devise methods of measuring intelligence, such measurements also became taboo or at best are viewed as curiosities flaunted by the arrogant.
Perhaps that's because correlating these measurements with any kind of social categorization, whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, eye color, etc ignites a socially unacceptable controversy. If these correlations are taken seriously, it often leads to attempts at eugenics and strengthens discrimination against the group that is deemed "less intelligent". These correlations are not false in that they violate generally accepted statistical practices, it's just that we feel that we're better off not knowing and entertaining the illusion that all are roughly equal.
If our modern atheist society has a religion which facilitates social cohesion than this is probably part of it: That we're all of equal ability and if we just work at it anyone has the same chance of acheiving a goal as anyone else. Intelligence correlations contradict this idea directly and are therefore considered heresy and hence are taboo.
Success in the real world is defined by one's ability to use logic to regulate emotions so that they do not become dominant. That's your EQ (what I think it should be). If emotion controls logic, you're probably entangled so far into your ideals that you'd contradict their very meaning in the process. i.e. being so anti-fascist that you become fascist.
Balancing logic and emotion means to balance the man with the beast.
Unless I was, uh, not white.
Incidentally, I get treated like SHIT compared to women, simply because I am, in a word, unattractive.
You haven't been denied the right to vote
Nope. And you have?
This whole idea is rather obvious and simple.
Look, men are groomed from childhood to be smart, be athletic, make money, get a hot girlfriend or wife and work for a living their entire life.
Women are groomed to be cute, pretty and attract a rich, athletic, successful, smart man.
Women have as much potential as men. It's just a matter of where we, as a society, influence them to go. Girls are never praised for being so smart, but you're praised for being so cute and adorable the day you're born, then hot and sexy the rest of your life after some teen-ish age.
So, if they can charge men more for car insurance because statistically they are worse drivers then can employers pay women less because statistically they are less intellegent?
NOTE: I'm ripping on the car insurance, not advocating paying women less. It's all foolishness.
The real point is what if they reported that women were found to be more intellegent? Would there be the same hesitation to report the findings? I've heard other reports that claimed women were superior with some subjects and those were thought to be reporting accurately but when the opposite is found to be true it's a vicious lie. Have we hit the point that the facts must fit into political correct position? I guess the answer is obvious but the real victim in the end may be science and the truth. What if you take it to the next level and said it's wrong to report that some races and sexes were more prone to some deseases? We're close to that and I've heard complaints about those findings as being potentially racist. Burying those facts could cost lives all in the name of sparing some one's feelings.
The point is, when you have a scholarly paper (presumably there is a real scholarly paper behind this) you evaluate the paper on it's own merits. You read the research, the methods, the results and the conclusions. You then deicde what merit, if any it has. Maybe the methods are wrong, maybe the results don't substantiate the conclusions, maybe it's just plagarized Harry Potter text.
Whatever, the point is you judge the paper based on it's own merits. You do not read the brief conclusion in the abstract and start decrying it just because you don't like what it says. The truth is not always what you want ot hear and what you agree with, so just because you disagree doesn't make it wrong.
You yourself are guilty of this, you immediatly launched an ad homenim attack. You claim this guy is a proponent of Eugenics, and infer that therefore his paper is worthless. Further you use a straw man in saying that he favours shutting down ideas he disagrees with. Both of these presented with no proof.
Now frankly, I don't know if these are true, and I'm not going to take the time to research it, because I just don't care. The point is simple: IS the paper good research? I won't know until I've read it, so I'm certianly not going to start villifying it. Who cares who the author is? Science is not a popularity contest, it's not a democracy. It's a way of knowing about the universe. Thus you judge scientific research based on it's own merits, is the research sound or not.
While IQ is theoretically justified, EQ is just a bunch of big crap for people to believe in and to make some BIG bucks:
:)
EQ "tests" were validated with samples that are NOT available to scientific scrutiny. The samples are property of a company (forgot the name), and are not being released on basis of intellectual property. All of you people, who read that EQ tests are valid and read the validation scores - must take them as they are - you will not be able to check them personally.
Replication studies have been made, and not a few of them:- none - NONE - have been succesful. Yet people still believe this crap.
EQ is defined by the psychologists who use this concept as the ABILITY to understand other's reactions and actions, act upon them in accordance. They say this ability is LEARNED: (otherwise they wouldn't make a penny). Ok, so we now take the 10th grade psychology book and look at keywords as ability, learning and look, we find the term: SKILL not EQ! We already have a word for this! EQ is being sold as THE next best thing in seminars and coaching workshops because they 'predict' success. Not true, but this is not what i can say about IQ: though definitions may differ - the concept remains and IQ is the predictor for things such as (and these are real): School success, a big part of work performance and a bunch of other stuff. OK; rant off!!!
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Your post is an example of how ideology and dogma can confuse the issue.
I base this on a couple of things you wrote.
What a clear example of the harm of using non-scholarly sourcing (for the record, I love Wikipedia for getting a general idea of a topic, but I would never use it as an authoritative source on a complicated topic such as this one).
Even worse than these flaws, though, is your conclusion that "there may be some truth to it."
The only reason you might consider this harmful is if you already believe what the source suggests is false. It's unlikely that you would claim that that there was much harm in believing a non-scholarly source if what that source was claiming what you believed already to be true.
I also said that there may be something to it. And there might. There is no evidence that you've given that rules it out. If anything, you're the one implying the much stronger claim that there is no relationship.
How can you make such a strong claim? The only thing that might engender that level of confidence in you without strong evidence is ideological, not scientific, thinking.
If you think you've got evidence that rules out a connection between race and intelligence then let's have it. Until then you can keep your sense of moral superiority to yourself. I'm not interested in what you think should be true or comforting.
I am so tired of hearing that. It didn't take YOU years to get anything. YOU haven't been treated as ANYTHING for centuries. I am willing to bet you haven't been alive for a third of a century, let alone a full century. Last I checked, you had a bunch of rights, as well as laws and government agencencies to protect those rights.
No, but I have been denied due process, discrimated against at work, been DENIED positions, been objectified as a source of income and security, been judged on my appearance... All because I am an intellegent overweight white male who generally makes good money.
To use a favorite phrase of so many women, GET OVER IT.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
- taking the research to be directed at each woman individually
- suggesting the research and researchers are biased
- behaving as though the difference was much greater than it actually is
- assuming that women are only the victims and never the perpetrators
This scientific study shows there is a difference between the average man and average woman. It says nothing of any two given individuals.A difference of 5 points is small. It is so small that I have no doubts that one's messured IQ would vary by more than that from day to day. Which leads me to ask why there is no margin of error included in the numbers. I would be most interested to see how they arrived at their numbers.
But, I would not say that the researcher or research is biased. With the current state of science, I would not be surprised to find that the methodology was suspect or that the outcome incorrect due solely to poor work.
You state:
Interestingly, you totally ignore the following- In the media, men are portrayed as:
- Incompetent, sloppy, conivings, lazy oafs, especially in "comedies" where they are paired with smart, capable, attractive women.
- Ugly, mean, vicious criminals.
- Poor, abusive, uncaring failures.
- Rich, handsome, successfuly business men
- Rich, powerful, ugly men with trophy wives
- A good portion of the greeting card industry thrives on portaying men in the worst terms. Try a little experiment: Go to a card shop and pick out some of the "humorous" ones involving men and women and reverse the sexes and ask yourself "Would this card be sold like that?"
- In many instances, if a man is accused of a crime, especially a sex crime, the man is automatically considered, and treated, as guilty. In a He said/She said situation, what She said is considered truth. Also, as we have seen recently in my home state of Florida, if a woman has sex with a young teen she is considered "sick" and in need of help, not inprisonment. If a man were to do the same, there would be calls for life sentences, castration, and execution. She is "mentally ill and in need of care" and he is a monster deserving of the worst punishments imaginable.
- Many women's groups lie. My favorite is the statement that spouse abuse complaints and emergency room visits jump drastically on Superbowl Sunday in the US. This has been proven false. It was made up on the spot during a press conference.
- Women are just as shallow as men, but do not own up to it. And, often they are even more mercenary.
Perhaps you are just blind to anything that does not directly effect you.There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Putting my Caucasian (are Finns caucasian?) intellect to work, I'd like to say who cares. Point of these studies is to boost the researchers ego. Variation of IQ within the population is so large that generalization is just inflammatory and serves no purpose.
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible? Show me the emotion that doesn't have a logical cause? If I'm angry with someone, I have a reason. If I'm afraid of something, then I have a reason. It is not always wise to act on these feelings straight away but that has little to do with whether I can comprehend them or not.
Girls tend to do better at school (statistically shown many times) than boys because girls tend to study more. But I make the case that study, both through learning from others and from excercising the memory and analytical capabilities of the brain, does increase that hard to define thing called intelligence.
But the most important thing to consider when reading this report is that there are over six billion people on this planet and that's a lot of people to generalize over. I'm not going to dispense with the scientific method just because of the subject matter, but if it were the case that men were more intelligent than women on average, then that statistical difference would have to be enormous to justify taking it into consideration in daily life. And it clearly isn't, or people wouldn't be debating this.
We'll have to wait for the actual paper to be published to see what the basis is, since TFA(s) contain nothing except flamebait. But research into this has been going on for a long time so which has come first? The definition of intelligence and the realization that men fit it best? Or the ever finer analysis of the differences between men and women and the definition of intelligence based on that? Surely the latter should be considered as a factor as by this stage in the game, no scientist designing these tests is entering the field without prior knowledge of these differences.
And does it make a difference to how you evaluate this post if you knew whether I was male or female? Because it shouldn't, but this report implies it should.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Leave aside for a moment the question of whether or not IQ tests are fair measures of "intelligence" (whatever that is), and consider the following question:
Hypothetically, in our enlightened modern climate of equality and fairness, even if were proven beyond doubt that (for example) men are more intelligent than women, would we accept it or (as most of the comments above, and on the BBC News feedback page) merely reject it out of hand?
Nobody would be up in arms if asian students were proven better at maths, or if gay people made better artists, or if women were proven more intelligent than men.
However, the first suggestion that the perceived majority group (straight white males) might be better than any minority, at anything, threatens us - just listen to the knee-jerk reaction of almost-unanimous disapproval.
The experimental procedure and results haven't been published yet - nobody even knows what the numbers are, how the trial was conducted or even what IQ test(s) were used, and yet here we have people who know nothing but a soundbite about the final conclusion of the study, already feeling justified in ripping it to shreds.
This has none of the justifications of considered intellectual doubt, and all of the hallmarks of instinctive emotional rejection.
Regarding the researcher's other work, does this necessarily prove he's a bigot? Could he (in fact) be merely discovering unexpected and therefore interesting statistical trends?
Racists claim that one race is unilaterally better than another, and this is (rightly) universally recognised as bad. However, wishful-thinking political correctness stipulates there's no difference between any groups of people, and this is clearly bullshit. Adults are stronger than kids. Men are generally stronger than women. Women are generally more empathic than men. And yes, black men on average have bigger (longer but thinner) penises than white men - look up the statistics.
These facts have been statistically proven time and time again, yet because they don't fit with our prevailing ideology we pretend they don't exist. This is no less intellectually dishonest than creationists who selectively ignore evidence that contradicts their position.
If we truly believing in science, mathematics and rationality means sometimes having to confront facts or possibilities that make us uncomfortable. Putting our hands over our ears and singing "Lalalalalala" is just as bad when we do it as when the ID or creationist crew do the same.
Assuming the study's accurate and valid, does this mean that women are stupid? No, it means that the average woman is (almost unmeasurably) less "intelligent" (whatever that means) than the average man. It means that men are more likely to be geniuses, not that women can't be.
Get down off your high-horses, reign in the emotion and behave in the same way we demand of the creationists - rational, sensible, and valuing Correct thoughts over Comfortable ones.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.
The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.
Interestingly there is an accepted and known test for machine intelligence --the Turing test, but for humans it is not as clear. Is a tribesman from Africa less intelligent than me? He knows how to kill a lion, while I might know what a Hilbert space is, so who is more intelligent?
Until there is a concrete and accepted definition of human intelligence there can be no study about who is more intelligent than whom.
One might as well say that "men have been shown to be better at 'blah' then women, while women consistently outperform men at 'foo', and both are equally good at 'x'." Untill those 'blah', 'foo' and 'x' are defined the statement will make no sense.
Actually IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. It takes our current perception of intelligence, that is, figuring out solutions different problems, that don't really require that you know specific facts, at least outside the basic math/language skills,
Except most IQ tests I've ever seen don't properly test that. First of all, the "figuring out solutions to problems" is restricted to a very small set of problems, usually of the form "spot the pattern". Secondly, they still require some knowledge, as you admit yourself. They are certainly biased towards people who are good at maths for example, and it is possible to improve your "IQ" with practice.
IQ tests are not useless, but it is important to remember they test a very specific sort of "intelligence" - namely, logic, or ability to spot patterns. I had to do some for an interview with a software company - here it is relevant, because those skills are needed in computer programming, but can you really say that computer programming is a better measure of intelligence than say, being a historian?
Whilst an IQ test may require less knowledge than a maths or history exam, it is possible to construct academic tests which are less dependent upon knowledge - eg, a maths test geared towards your natural mathematical ability, a history test geared towards your ability to judge evidence rather than remember dates and other facts, or a science test that involves you working out what's happening by experimentation and forming a hypothesis rather than recalling facts.
However, it would be ludicrous to suggest that because these tests are less dependent upon knowledge, that they therefore test "Intelligence" in general. IQ tests are tests of logic/pattern spotting, which is no more a factor in intelligence than that required for maths, history or science.
IQ tests are the best tool we have to measure, what we understand to be intelligence. It's like saying physics tests don't test physics knowledge, just because we don't fully understand all the laws of physics.
We have many ways to measure intelligence, and we shouldn't discard the rest for one arbitrary type. It's like saying we can measure someone's physics knowledge by setting them a quick quiz on Astronomy.
Not everything that gets flamed is flamebait.
This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.
There are FEW people capable of seriously and objectively investigating it, but far fewer who are willing to listen to them.
The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.
FTFA:
I.Q. tests aren't perfect, far, far from it, I tend to say that they measure your ability to take an I.Q. test more than your intelligence, but it's something that can be measured, logged, and compared.
This study is interresting. It's not comforting, it's not in line with the current vogue of "everyone is the same" discourse, but that's no reason to NOT do the study, nor to refrain from publishing it.
If you want to debate the interpretation of the results, or the methodology, please, be my guest.
But if you object to the study itself because it's subject is sensitive, by god, STFU&GBTW!
You can't take the sky from me...
I fear what the next thing is to piss off your parents will be.
Extremist religion. No shit, that's a large part of where Muslim extremists are getting there support in the west--Muslim kids trying to piss off their moderate parents. Fanatacism is the new punk. But it'll pass...
Funny? Insightful! I wish your message would catch on universally - and for boys, too.
I just sent my little girl to kindergarten for the first time last week. I sat her down and had a heart-to-heart talk about what school would be like. I told her about how fun it's going to be to get better at reading, and learning math, and seeing the world of science, and I could see her eyes light up at the idea of the wonders in front of her.
I also told her that some people would tell her that girls can't learn or do as much as boys. I told her that those people are stupid and scared, and most importantly, wrong. She's lucky in that she has an automatic counterproof: my wife's a doctor, and graduated from Army Airborne school while in ROTC. My daughters and son know what women can do because their mommy showed them.
I also want the other little girls (and boys) to know that while there are differences between all of us, each individual can rise to the level they want. People who would tell them otherwise are murderers, as far as I'm concerned.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?