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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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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...