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How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence
theodp writes "In investigating the question of whether men are smarter than women, British researcher Adrian Furnham came up with some startling results. His analysis of some 30 studies showed that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ, but women underestimate their own intelligence while men overestimate theirs. Surprisingly, both men and women perceived men being smarter across generations — both sexes believe that their fathers are smarter than their mothers and their grandfathers are more intelligent than their grandmothers. And if there are children, both men and women think their sons are brighter than their daughters."
Men have more variance in IQ, that's why there's more very smart men than very smart women. Of course, there's more very stupid men, which is reflected in crime rates etc.
There are so many theoretical & methodological problems IQ testing. Any analysis with IQ scores as a data set in inherently flawed. Garbage in, garbage out.
The problem with IQ testing has nothing to do with the science. The reason IQ is vilified is because of the unpalatable and highly inconvenient results that has been established time and time again over the last 100 years of intelligence research.
There may be more to it... Evolutionary pressure pushes men to sleep around, while women are the nest builders, even today. Guys look for young "hot" women and watch a lot of porn (I liked your link to Miley Cyrus pole dancing), because men want to leave their seed with a woman who will be around a long time to raise above-average kids physically (I'll bet her kids will be very healthy and good looking). Men rape women, not the other way around, because it succeeds in spreading their genes more widely, with nothing but a single night's work, while women have to actually birth the child and usually raise them. A lot of this may influence attitudes towards the relationship between men and women. A hot dumb drunk blond really gets my attention at the bars, and I don't think it's just me. And for a guy, I'm a nest-builder.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Another study of teachers, asked to estimate the IQ of their students, found they overestimated the IQ of extroverted kids, and underestimated the IQ of quiet kids. Males tend to be more extroverted than females, so that could explain the perception of males as 'smarter'.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Physically women will never be equal to men. It's in out genes to be able to bulk up more..
That may be genetic selection due to culture. Men don't choose women who are bigger than they are and women don't date short men.
I think in general, people perceive that bolder, outspoken people are smarter - as if their boldness comes from understanding and knowledge. I also think that men (by virtue of testosterone) tend to be bolder than women. This get misperceived as intelligence, thus men are generally perceived to be more intelligent.
I have to wonder how much a person's self-esteem has to do with their self-perception. I usually don't think that people with externally-visible low self-esteem are terribly bright. People who are unable to address and/or deal with their inner troubles, for instance, get a very low rating with me. More commonly than not, these "frail" people tend to be women, in my experience (though there are certainly some strong ones). Kinda interesting looking at these observations in writing, and thinking back to how things "used to be" where women were considered the weaker sex - not as mentally bright, not as intrepid, etc. (Contrary to the status quo belief of the 'sexism' of yore, the 'weakness' of women was generally considered to be mental/emotional, not physical.)
Also, testosterone (resulting in an more forward inner drive) probably has something to do with it, I imagine. If someone is driven, they are more likely to manifest their dreams, or to even have those dreams. From what I've seen, guys with more testosterone are not only more extroverted and have higher self-esteem, but also tend to accomplish more than their peers if they're the least bit intelligent.
I've got two children - a daughter, 3, and a son, 6. I don't think my son is more intelligent than my daughter, and don't necessarily think the inverse is true, either. I'm unsure due to age and gender related development. I do know that my daughter tends to learn better: she listens more carefully, and is generally more attentive to what's being told to her. But she's also nowhere near as headstrong or driven as my son, either.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
While I agree Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper are important pioneers, I'm not sure it's a particularly large number--- you've right there, with your 2-entry list, basically exhausted the list of prominent female pioneers of geekdom, while the equivalent male list (Alan Turing, Steve Wozniak, Donald Knuth, Edsger Dijkstra, ...) goes on for a while longer. Sure, there a few others once you move down the list into "famous among specialists"--- Radia Perlman (inventor of the spanning-tree protocol), say. But you can't even put together a list of 20 without digging pretty deep.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Please, before you go wanking all over the concept of "emotional intelligence," at least try to understand what you're pissed off by. http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1260144768/ref=sr_kk_2?ie=UTF8&search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=daniel%20goleman Have fun.
Her conclusion was that there is a dual outcome of this - not only do men present themselves as more qualified and more autonomous than women, they also appear more confident.
Overall, I remember thinking that women were more accurate in their descriptions, which is nicer, but counterproductive in context.
I can't believe you were modded up so far.
Are men and women innately different? Yes. Does that have any relevance in terms of modern society? Probably. Do their ideal roles in any way reflect their current societal roles? Not in any way shape or form.
There is one reason, and one reason only that you didn't see women in higher education before this past century: childbirth. Not child rearing, not pregnancy. Childbirth killed most women before they reach 30. Men, on the other hand, so long as they were kept out of the {mines, war, boats, etc.} would likely live to a ripe old age. These evolutionary pressures are gone, as are most of the unskilled tasks usually reserved for women. (You don't believe that, try doing laundry by hand. It's practically a full time job in and of itself.)
Keeping women in their old roles as housekeepers is a massive waste of brain power. By your (bullshit unverified) claim that women are average and men are at the extremes, it doesn't matter. In fact it's likely that genius and idiot alike are unsuited to making advances in the new era, which rely on hours and hours of work by large teams of people. Both geniuses and idiots work badly on teams.
But in any case, the issue of childbirth is the only reason for the old roles. We've solved that problem, and it's time to redefine the roles.
I'm third generation Californian (but live in NC now). As a result, I've got a lot of Mexican uncles, cousins, and such. My uncle Fernando told me when I was younger, "Intelligence in a woman is overrated." That's the excuse I give myself for marrying a complete moron in my first marriage. She is still a very sweet, attractive woman. I hope she's happy. I spent eight years figuring out what a mistake that was. Second time around, I went the other way, and I tell all my friends to look for a smart girl. After 11 years, my second marriage is still going gang-busters.
You're obviously a big geek. You post on slashdot. I can't even tell you how attractive I find that, but as you know, guys like me are in the minority. If I could give you one bit of advice... make your way to Silicon Valley
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
your point about how men contribute to female insecurity over looks also applies to the self-censorship of men regarding things that don't conform to "traditional notions of gender" - since probably the biggest reason why men try to conform to those notions is because they feel not doing so will hurt their chances at getting laid.
weinersmith
IQ tests can be biased and based on knowledge and wisdom instead of intelligence and potential to learn or think.
For example people here on Slashdot, we are very good with computers and technology, we find managers and rich people are not as smart with computer as we are. But while we consider rich business people to be stupid, they find us to be stupid when it comes to business and business decisions just as we find them stupid when it comes to computers and technology decisions. The thing is that everyone is intelligent at at least one subject, maybe even more. Even if it is street maintenance that only an autistic person is good at, they are intelligent at that if nothing else because they really have a passion for street maintenance or whatever their interests are. Usually one is intelligent at their interests, and the average Slashdot readers are good at math and science and computers because of their interests, and the rich business people are good at investing, finances, accounting, and turning over a profit. The Dotcom busts showed us that when computer people try to run a business without any business classes or experience, they tend to fail just as bad as the business person who tries a computer business but lacks the computer knowledge.
Men and Women have different interests and are intelligent at different areas. It even goes by political party as liberals are usually better in liberal arts and science than business management and accounting, while conservatives are better in business management, finances, and investing than liberal arts and science. I think it is the right brain verses the left brain, as people like me want to try and balance out the usage of the brain to use both sides.
But my theory is that everyone is intelligent at least at something. The people that score low in IQ tests are usually smart at stuff the IQ test doesn't cover like NASCAR, the WWE/TNA Wrestling, TV shows and movie trivia, culture, traditions, social skills, etc. So one person's idiot is another person's genius so to speak.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The reason there's 6 billion people on the planet instead of a few hundred million is because of technology. Intelligence developed technology - therefore it has an enormous survival advantage on the macroscale.
The reason we can talk so much to each other is because of technology.
"Maleness" is a brain that develops and is modified by testosterone, resulting in increased risk taking behavior and improved mapping functions and possible a whole host of subtler changes.
Due to technology, physical strength matters an enormous amount less. Hence women are now being valued more, because nearly all jobs don't need as much physical strength.
"Equal protection", statistics, discrimination suits - none of this would be possible without technology.
Or as a Biologist would say: Sexual dimorphism in primates is a result of dominant male reproductive success. However, your statement does have a certain pithiness.
Interestingly, species which share child-rearing have less difference between males and females. It will be interesting to see what happens to humans over the next 10 or so generations as physical strength becomes less important and women achieve more equal status.
Hot, blonde: why you want to sleep with her. Dumb: increases the odds that she'll sleep with you, since presumably you can manipulate her.
The female corollary is the preference for guys who are assholes: the dismissive treatment is a social signal of higher status, which is desirable.
While you might argue that this isn't a valid metric, Sanford/Binet IQ testing almost exactly coorilates with income in virtually all social strata. It also almost exactly coorilates with education completed and on average, with grades on almost all different sorts of standardized evaluations across dieverse spectrums of age, race, gender and backgrounds.
It almost exactly coorilates with success at higher math and with success in many "core" persuits, such as engineering, science, architecture, art and music.
The concept of "multiple intelligences" is probably accurate to some limited extent, but what does it measure? I don't think it's simple irony or happenstance that all NFL quarterbacks are in the top 5% of intelligence on standardized IQ tests, as are the majority of star hockey players. They may "also" rank in the top 1% for the "physical IQ" as defined by the "multiple" theory, but the standarized Binet testing measures a combination of mathematical, linguistic, spatial, logical and even interpersonal.
While someone may have an "aptitude" in many of the various "multiple" intelligence areas defined by the theory, someone who scores very high on Binet testing is likely to have a very high aptitude in MULTIPLE of these categories.
The best horticulture expert I know... can grow anythingg, anywhere, and just has a "sense" about that stuff might score high on the wacky sounding "naturalist" area of the multiple-iq theory... just happens to score in the 150s on a Binet test. I don't find this ironic.
I know plenty of people who are very "in touch" with nature and love growing things... but frankly, they aren't that good at the actual activity of doing it at it because they have a poor sense of spcial logic and mathematical reasoning and an "average" short term memory, etc, etc... which all impacts their ability to be teh best at whatever their chosen "expertise" is.
In all, I fiew the "multiple IQ" theory as a simple subset of intelligence. To say someone is brilliant on the "naturalist" or even "physical" scale of the theory only takes them so far, after which, they could go much further with a combination of many traits...... which is what the "simple" IQ testing sets out to accomplish.
Sure, it's a blunt instrument, but it's HIGHLY relevant to what our society (and many other societies) view as "success" in life.
I don't know what world you live in, but the one I live in, regardless of whether or not they go to school or have a career, most (not all) women eventually want to raise children of their own. In an ideal world, women could raise children AND have a career. We live far away from an ideal world on a place called Earth, where months out of work are a serious setback, and where raising kids well AND dealing with workplace responsibilities is impossible unless you sleep 2 hours a day.
Don't worry, it's true, smart men appreciate smart women, it's just that smart women tend to adopt a more defensive, cynical distant attitude while dumb ones tend to be too friendly for their own good, but that makes them more approachable.
But... the future refused to change.
Agreed. As a gay man, my ex-best female friend went through an emotional period towards me (her actions suggested that she had feelings for me and was frustrated that my sexuality was in the way of that, as we got along brilliantly in every other regard). This resulted in her entering into a violent stage out of the blue where she felt compelled to hit me, often quite hard, and she had no shame about doing it in public. It hurt a lot, and I was extremely unhappy about it and did not feel that it was deserved in the slightest. Our female friends thought that it was funny and laughed about it despite the fact that it was clearly upsetting me, and they told me that I was being too uptight about things when I made it clear that I was really displeased with the situation. My male friends were actually quite sympathetic and told me that what she was doing was wrong and that it made them uncomfortable to watch.
Of course, hitting her back was not an option, because to do so even once would make me look like a complete asshole and possibly get me in serious trouble, while she held carte blanche to smack me around on her whims. In the end, because neither she nor our female friends would take what she was doing seriously or acknowledge it as a problem, it was just easier to end all of those friendships. Good riddance. I will think twice before striking up friendships with women again. Many of my gay male friends also feel the same way, especially after living second-hand through this situation, and prefer the company of men for more than the obvious reasons.
There are so many double standards for men that I find it funny we haven't responded against these more strongly.
"We would just like things to be fairer becuae we tend to like thing to be fair."
LOL. Yeah right. I've seen too much women backstab each other in the most vile, ruthless ways thinkable by man to believe this.
Lets stop idealization of women, okay?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
My problem with this is that, as women aren't more intelligent than men, the ideas that women come up with aren't any better than the ones men come up with. Hence, women's impression of "fairness" may be as stupid as what an IQ=100 dolt would produce.
To take an example from my country: The women's movement campaigned extremely hard against sports clubs and gentlemen's clubs (all 5 of them in the whole nation) that allowed only male members. Most of them opened up to women members. That was 5-6 years ago. But today, when I walk on the street, I see a "Female First" women's only gym on every corner. How is such a mindblowing contradiction possible?
By women's sense of 'fair' being no better product than Average Joe's. There's no particularly strong sense or logic more than any street movement in it.
In fact, this survey should have been done with 'Wisdom' as well as 'Intelligence'. Women subscribe to the view that they are 'wiser' than men, which justifies decision making without principles or logic to it.
I think many regular people avoid smart people for various reasons, mostly not knowing what they are getting themselves into. Well, smarter people have numerous other problems, like higher risks for alcoholism.
I have found the smart girls that I've dated had more emotional problems then the dumber ones. Well, the worst emotional problems came with girls who weren't very smart but tried to succeed in careers that required significant intelligence, but ignoring those outliers the smart ones had more emotional troubles. Or maybe I just tolerate more emotional issues from women who are smart.
I'd say all these issues apply equally for both genders, with the one caveat that some smarter males that use their intelligence to get rich, which then overrides any concerns about personality problems for many many women.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
In cases of having the kid, I only agree with you if the guy wore a condom and did everything in his power to prevent pregnancy.
Women have a plethora of birth control choices; pills, IUDs, implants, the list goes on. Men have only three:
Really fair, ain't it?
If she gets pregnant, she can choose to abort or give birth, and the man has no say. He may be adamantly opposed to abortion and feel that his child is being murdered and the fetus will still be aborted. He may wish an abortion but it's her call, not his. He can't force an abortion or birth of HIS child.
If she chooses birth, the man pays for the next 18 years, even if he's denied contact with the child that he was tricked into fathering in the first place.
In many states, you are reponsible for any children your wife has after you marry her, even if you're not the biological father. There is no penalty whatever for adultery.
Isn't it time for men to have some reproductive rights? We have none whatever.
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