Update: Overcoming Bias responds.

Reading excerpts of the memoirs of the Mughal warlord Babur, founder of the dynasty in India, I note that his father was an alcoholic. This is not exceptional in the lineage, the Emperor Jahangir's reign was marred by problems due to his alcoholism. Nevertheless, these individuals were faithful Muslims by all their other actions. In fact, I have noted before that the early Arab Caliphs, who were responsible for the spread and dominance of Islam across what we now term the Islamic world, were by an large appreciators of wine. I was struck by Babur's mention of his father's weakness for alcoholism because I recently read about Glorious Revolution. As you know James II lost his throne because of his sincere Roman Catholicism. He rejected apostasy as the price of regaining his position. If his private correspondences did not attest to his sincerity, his public actions surely did. Nevertheless, despite James' relative religious seriousness and moral qualms for a ruler of his day (in contrast to his brother, Charles II), he retained his mistress as was customary for British kings.

I point out these moral failings because I have always been struck by starkness of human hypocrisy and its incongruity in the face of avowed beliefs. How can a sincere Muslim drink alcohol? Have can a sincere Christian engage in sexual vice? One might infer from their actions that men such as James II were cynics, but as I note above James was willing to greatly reduce his chances of retaking his throne for the sake of his sincere religious commitment. I have been oversimplifying in reducing James' moral quandary to these two issues, contrasting the manifest evidence of his religious commitment in the face of inducements to convert to Protestantism with his sexual practices which contradicted Christian teaching. There are certainly other complicating factors, but I think the point stands that sin is common, and human weakness in the face of contradiction the norm. Mens' hearts are easily divided, and simultaneously sincere in their inclinations.

All this leads to the point that I believe far too many of those of us who wish to comprehend human nature scientifically lack a basic grasp of it intuitively. I have never truly believed in an awesome God of history, so my hypothetical behavior in reaction to this transcendent truth is conjecture. I know how I believe I will behave, but I have no true intuitive grasp. Over the years I have come to the conclusion that many atheists simply lack a deep understanding of what drives people to be religious, and that our psychological model of those who believe in gods is extremely suspect. The "irrationality" and "contradiction" of human behavior may be rendered far more systematically coherent simply by adding more parameters into the model. Too many "rationalists" insist on the primacy of their own spare and minimalist axioms, while normal humans may lack both the eloquence and intuition to communicate to their "rationalist" interlocutors that they are missing key structural variables. When I engage with these sorts of issues with readers of Overcoming Bias or Singularitarians my suspicions beocme even stronger because I see in some individuals an even greater lack of fluency in normal cognition than my own. What I am lacking in becomes all the more obvious when I see with my own eyes those who are even more damned in the eyes of God.

From all this one should not conclude that I see the reality of the mystical truths of gods before unveiled before my eyes. I do not. Rather, my point is that understanding human nature is not a matter of fitting humanity to our expectations and wishes, but modeling it as it is, whether one thinks that that nature is irrational or not within one's normative framework. Readers of this weblog are well aware and conscious of this issue; that is why I believe it is important to broach topics such as IQ because this variable matters, and most of us would wish that retardation was simply not a phenotype which was extant, but we know that that will not be so. Similarly, those of who are psychologically atypical enough to be rather obsessed with modeling human nature into a framework which is analytically tractable need to be more conscious of the alien complexities of the normal human mind, in all its baroque paradox.

Labels: Psychology

Daniel Koretz of Harvard's Graduate School of Education took the lecture notes from his course, "Methods of Educational Measurement," and turned it into a book: Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It's readable, filled with funny anecdotes, and contains absolutely nothing that will be new to regular GNXP readers.

But because Koretz takes the math and most of the controversy out of the debate over standardized tests, he has time to actually drill home a couple of important points repeatedly: Modern standardized tests have little bias, are pretty reliable, and while they don't tell you everything about a person or a school or a city, they are good for making rough predictions.

Hence, the title of this blog post: Feel free to recommend Measuring Up as a "baby steps" book for your favorite sociologist or folk guitarist.

Koretz waves his political correctness card early on, letting us know that "IQ [is] just one type of score on one type of standardized test..." and he lets us know about the "pernicious and unfounded view that differences in test scores between racial and ethnic groups are biologically determined." But you already knew he was going to say that, right? And in an unintended parody of blank-slatism, he has a chapter entitled "What influences test scores" that never once mentions genetic factors, even to dismiss them.

Koretz does a great job dodging such troubling questions while focusing on what he really wants to talk about, with solid, candid chapters entitled "Validity," "Inflated Test Scores," "Error and Reliability," chapters that actually do a good job of conveying big ideas about non-experimental social science in jargon-free prose. Kudos to him for doing so.

Treat it as a book on the narrow field of psychometrics and its link to policy, not as a book on the broader field of standardized tests per se and its link to policy: You'll spend a lot less time grinding your teeth.

Labels: Psychology

[this is a slightly edited version of what was originally a haloscan comment]

I have come to believe that it is crucial to realize that there are other factors in intelligence besides g and its subfactors (e.g. math/performance, visuospatial, verbal, short-term memory). This is important not only factually and scientifically, but politically as well; a less g/traditional IQ-based theory of intelligence and human biodiversity is probably both more accurate and more politically palatable than a heavily g-centered one. The main drawback is that such a theory is also unfortunately quite complicated and difficult to test.

Many apparently non-g factors are almost certainly correlated with g, but they are not the same thing. In terms of higher-visibility phenomena, this would mean factors like creativity, motivation/drive, consistency, effective planning. In terms of lower-visibility phenomena, this would mean factors such as (neocortical) left brain/right brain ability, efficiency, and interconnectedness, as well as the interaction of such entities with the paleomammalian/limbic/midbrain and reptilian/lower brain/brain stem.

The main problem, in my opinion, is that these factors other than g are much harder to measure, and virtually impossible to measure on a 3-hour test, much less a brain scan (given current technology). Of course there are self-report tests for personality, creativity, motivation, and the like, but self-report tests are not, in general, terribly reliable. Also, insightful multivariate data analysis and effective experimental design for such analysis is hard to come by because these tasks are extremely difficult for even an intelligent person (in both the g and non-g sense) to carry out. Thus the failure of "multiple intelligence" theories in spite of the fact that it is clear that there are multiple intelligences.

If you are still unconvinced, how else would one explain a 25-year old with a 150 IQ, but also with Asperger's Syndrome/autism spectrum disorder, living on the streets while a 90-IQ illegal immigrant is living reasonably comfortably, and an intellectually uncurious and largely vacuous (outside of the classroom/lab/workplace) individual with only a 115 IQ is living large?(if you want a picture of the latter individual, think of Julia from (Orwell's) 1984 transplanted to the real America ca. 2008, or the devoted Asian [1] college student who seems to always be studying (high motivation/drive/tolerance for long, boring tasks) but has no intellectual interests and spends most of her/his [2] free time with sleazy entertainment, sleeping around, smoking pot, drinking, and popping pills [3]). Of course social factors such as biases against more autistic personalities may be partially at work, but most stereotypes and social biases have *some* basis in reality, even if they all too often facilitate cruelty and inefficiency. It is also important to remember that biological phenomena can lead to social phenomena (e.g. autistics, due to their biology, are repelled by (and repel) others, leading to a negative social reputation for autistics) just as environmental/social phenomena can lead to biological phenomena (e.g. autistics, due to their negative social reputation, increasingly have their biology wired for being hermits).

[1] and [2] Being intelligent but uncurious seems to be substantially more common amongst Asians (and perhaps amongst high-IQ blacks and Hispanics/Amerinds as well) than whites, and more common amongst females than males. This is only my personal observation, and it may be an entirely sociocultural phenomenon even if it is real.

[3] Nothing against sleeping around, smoking pot, drinking, or popping pills, but these don't tend to be the most intellectual activities in the world, in spite of common protestations to the contrary by horny drug users (such as, admittedly, myself) to the contrary. Also, I realize that immigrant (and particularly Asian) cultures are strongly biased against such hedonistic behaviors, but this bias tends to quickly fade amongst the children of immigrants, and even more so their grandchildren, as they become more modernized, Westernized, and Americanized.

Labels: crimethink, human biodiversity, Philosophy of science, Psychology

Asian-White IQ variance from PISA results:

The NE Asians performed about .5 SD better on average (consistent with IQ test results), and exhibited similar (slightly higher) variance.

Interestingly, the Finns performed quite well on the exam, posting a very high average, but their SD is slightly smaller. The usual arguments about a (slightly) "narrow bell curve" might apply to the Finns, but apparently not to the NE Asians.

Read the whole post to see if you follow the logic of the inferences; I've done some digging on this before to spot check the Europeans-higher-variance meme and didn't find much to support it, and some data to disprove it (though you could explain away that data because of clumping of distinct populations, etc.). That's the main reason I get irritable whenever this meme pops up in the comments, it's one of those "facts" which exhibits circular citation dynamics and spreads like wildfire. Of course, it isn't as if the meme is totally emerging out of a vacuum: if East Asians are so smart why aren't they as scientifically creative??? It seems to me that the most plausible explanation has to be that individual intelligence isn't sufficient for intellectual creativity, though it is likely a necessary precondition. Some of the other variables might be rooted in individual psychology (personality), but I suspect others manifest on a larger scale (e.g., the top-down paternalism and emphasis on conformity which is the norm in most East Asia societies).

Labels: Psychology

I came across an interesting 2007 talk that social psychologist Roy Baumeister gave to the American Psychological Association, "Is There Anything Good About Men?" He informally reviews the literature on sex differences in ability and motivation. Some of it will be old news for readers, such as the discussion of Larry Summers, but there's quite a lot that will not. Some interesting tidbits:

- Most people in the West now believe that women possess more desirable qualities than men do. (Agreed -- I only interact with males as colleagues, keeping all of my friends female.)

- Women are more likely than men to commit violence against an intimate partner.

- About 80% of those who work 50-hour weeks are men.

- 93% of those killed on the job in the US are men.

- Men appear more oriented toward large-scale social groups where relationships are shallow but many, women toward small-scale groups where they are deep but few. Baumeister suggests that this is a key source of male-female inequality after the transition to agriculture: men were more suited to the large-scale networks that came to run social, political, and economic life.

Labels: Psychology, sex differences

What Men And Women Say And Do In Choosing Romantic Partners Are Two Different Matters:

When it comes to romantic attraction men primarily are motivated by good looks and women by earning power. At least that's what men and women have been saying for a long time. Based on research that dates back several decades, the widely accepted notion permeates popular culture today.

But those sex differences didn't hold up in a new in-depth study of romantic attraction undertaken by two Northwestern University psychologists. In short, the data suggest that whether you're a man or a woman, being attractive is just as good for your romantic prospects and, to a lesser extent, so is being a good earner.

You can read the full preprint yourself. The standard caveats about taking one social psychological study of 20 year old college students tracked for 30 days and generalizing apply here; the point isn't that this punctures all of the trends which we observe (I doubt it does), rather, it refines our understanding of the pattern of variation and the central tendencies as a function of particular parameters. Additionally, instead of just trusting what people say, and their own self-conceptions, you need to actually study how people behave. With something like sexual preferences inferring that one's avowed preferences don't match one's revealed preferences isn't that difficult; psychologists have to use more tricky techniques when it comes to something like fleshing out how people really conceptualize the God they say they believe in. But the general lesson holds.

Update: See this comment. Hey, it's social psychology....

Labels: Psychology

Since we've been talking about anthropology, I am posting this mostly to satisfy my curiosity and get something off my chest. There was a time in the past when I was a hard-core libertarian. I was at a book store recently and flipped through Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty's intellectual history of the libertarian movement. I already knew most of the key players from my past readings. Now, I'm not one of the few dozen people in the world who has actually read Ludwig von Mises' Human Action (I'd be willing to bet some gold that half of these individuals who've gotten through von Mises' magnum opus are virgins!), so my libertarian nerdishness only went so far. All that being said, there was a time I would have said I favored the Austrian School of economics. This was during a period when I was busy boning up on the Krebs cycle, I wouldn't have had any clue what an indifference curve was. I was a libertarian, and the Austrian School was congenial to libertarianism, ergo, I supported the Austrian School (I knew I opposed Keynesians as well as the neoclassical models).


But I'd always had issues because I knew that the Austrian school rejected econometrics and positivism; and being steeped in experimental science I'd always viewed positivism as a Good Thing. Eventually I read Bryan Caplan's Why I am Not an Austrian Economist, the definitive smackdown of the school of thought derived from von Mises (an aside: the aspersions cast in this post are aimed primarily at the Misesian tradition, not the Hayekian; the reason for the distinction is made clear in Caplan's piece). I'd already lost my interest in libertarianism by the time I'd stumbled upon this polemic, but it confirmed my growing suspicions that Austrian economics had turned into a cult of personality. Caplan, being an economist, has some pointed technical criticisms. But over the past few years, and especially over the past months, I've been doing some reading on Google Books and elsewhere on the intellectual history of the Austrian School, and especially praxeology. What the hell is praxeology? Well, from praxeology.net:

Praxeology is the study of those aspects of human action that can be grasped a priori; in other words, it is concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of preference, choice, means-end schemes, and so forth.

The "grasped a priori" part has really bothered me. I mean, I read psychology and history, I can't derive it a priori. Recently I was going over some issues in modern Middle Eastern history, and learned that King Hussein of Jordan had apparently asked Israel for permission to send a brigade to Syria to invade the Jewish state during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Honestly, I really don't know if I could ever grasp Arab psychology a priori. The more and more I read about psychology the more I think that anyone who believes that they could develop an axiomatic system of human action from insights they grasped a priori is totally retarded (mad props to Aristotle though, he worked before the cognitive revolution). More specifically I have to wonder if they are socially retarded. I have suggested that an attraction to libertarianism is in part a function of your personality. Normal people rarely become libertarians, rather, it's a ideology driven by young non-alpha males with Roark/Galt fantasies. There are many more Justin Raimondo & Eric Garris types than Mark Cubans in hard-core libertarianism. Any survey of the biographies of von Mises or Murray Rothbard emphasizes their stubborn heterodox tendencies; but at this point I just wonder if they were social retards to whom their a priori logic was plausible because they really weren't as complicated as most humans, who engage in habitual and casual hypocrisy and contradiction. I recall reading Rothbard once explaining how one might buy and sell children in "flourishing child markets" in an anarcho-capitalist order. Even then I remember thinking, "Dude is weird...."

Now, why am I posting this? Many readers of this weblog are sympathetic to the Austrian School of economics (e.g., Mencius Moldbug). On occasion readers have even emailed me pointing to chapters in Human Action. Seeing as that around 1/3 of the readers of this weblog are libertarian that's never surprised me, and I haven't cared enough about economics to ever elaborate my distaste for the Austrian School. There are three reasons I'm going on the record now though.

1) I've developed an interest in economics as an academic discipline. In other words, I do know what an indifference curve is, or comparative statics, or business cycles. My adherence to Austrian economics seems analogous to a young man's infatuation with the prose stylings of Piers Anthony; I didn't know any better.

2) My readings in psychology and history makes it very difficult for me to understand how anyone could adhere to a Misesian form of Austrianism with its commitment to praxeology. In short, I really think praxeology is a rotten foundation for any system of thought. Certainly when someone espouses Austrian economics it makes me question if they're a bit nuts.

3) That being said, I'm curious to see how GNXP readers would respond to my objections and sentiments. Your responses should go in the comments (no emails please). I'm curious for two primary reasons: I want to know a bit more about the psychologies attracted to the Misesian school, and, there's an chance I'll revoke my critique and explore Austrian economics in more depth (more practically, I won't dismiss readers who espouse Austrianism as bizarros if I think I've been too harsh on Mises' work).

Labels: Psychology

Just a follow up on the post where many of the comments examined the utility of social science. I happened to walk by my copy of Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases today. Anyone who thinks that social science doesn't uncover "surprising" findings should check out this research program; it isn't a coincidence that Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. If the median human IQ was 4 standard deviations above what it is now there might be less concern about understanding the shape of human stupidity and how it manifests itself, but as it is we don't live in that world. From Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World:

...95 out of 100 physicians estimated the probability of breast cancer after a positive mammogram to be about 75%. The inference from an observation...to a disease, or more generally, from data D to a hypothesis H, is often referred to as a "Bayesian inference," because it can be modeled by Baye's rule...The important point is that Equation 1 [Bayes rule -Razib] results in a probability of 7.8%, not 75% as estimated by the majority of physicians....

To think in a Bayesian manner might not be natural, but neither is it cognitively taxing with some training (the equation isn't rocket science, though repeated utilization is probably essential to its practical value). Time is finite and human cognitive capacity and aptitude places constraints upon what is in the realm of the possible. By examining common cognitive errors and biases we can alert ourselves to the fallacies which we are all prone to. For a typical patient a new diagnostic device is a salient example of the utility of engineering; but if medical doctors routinely make statistically naive inferences because of the nature of human psychology then the utility of more precise and powerful devices is sharply reduced. Changes in the emphasis of topics in the curriculum of medical schools guided by psychological science is rather distant from the minds and experiences of the average person, but it may have a significant affect on our experienced utility.

Labels: Psychology

Absence of contagious yawning in children with autism spectrum disorder:

This study is the first to report the disturbance of contagious yawning in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty-four children with ASD as well as 25 age-matched typically developing (TD) children observed video clips of either yawning or control mouth movements. Yawning video clips elicited more yawns in TD children than in children with ASD, but the frequency of yawns did not differ between groups when they observed control video clips. Moreover, TD children yawned more during or after the yawn video clips than the control video clips, but the type of video clips did not affect the amount of yawning in children with ASD. Current results suggest that contagious yawning is impaired in ASD, which may relate to their impairment in empathy. It supports the claim that contagious yawning is based on the capacity for empathy.

Someone should do behavioral economics studies on groups of autistic individuals. Would surely validate the mid-20th century microeconomic consensus.

Labels: Psychology

James R. Flynn is a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, as well as Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University. His best-known paper, "Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations," (Psych. Bulletin, 1987), documented what Herrnstein and Murray later called the "Flynn Effect": A long term increase in average IQ's across the developed world. This widely-reaffirmed result contradicted the folk wisdom that a coarsened culture and dysgenic fertility were making the rich nations less intelligent. In his new book, "What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect," (Cambridge University Press), he argues that changing social and economic forces can explain both the Flynn Effect and group differences in IQ. To fully understand the Flynn Effect, he contends, we need to understand the "cognitive history" of the 20th century. Perhaps most importantly, he proposes a variety of practical empirical tests so that one can see whether his explanations are correct.

The author of four books and dozens of articles in the fields of moral philosophy and psychology, Professor Flynn has repeatedly spurred psychologists to rethink exactly what it is that intelligence tests measure.


1. In your new book, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect, you emphasize that IQ research is so focused on g, the general factor of intelligence, that they've been unable to see other important features in the IQ data. In particular, the "g-men," as you call them, seem to think that if the Flynn Effect is an overall increase in all IQ subtests, or an overall increase in a random subset of IQ subtests, then they can just ignore the Flynn Effect completely. So, what are the g-men missing out on?

Over time, changing social priorities alter the cognitive demands made on our minds. For example, society may want more and more people to put on scientific spectacles so they can understand the world rationally through education. IQ tests like Similarities and Raven's pick this up as enhanced performance. Yet, thanks to a more visual culture, society may not require us to enlarge our vocabularies - meaning no higher scores on the WISC vocabulary subtest. These trends are of great significance. If you dismiss these trends because they do not tally with the various tests' g-loadings, you miss all of that. G rather than social significance has become your criterion of what is important.

2. Over the decades, you've carried on an extensive correspondence with Arthur Jensen, the controversial and enormously influential intelligence researcher at UC Berkeley. You summarized some of your early thoughts about Jensen's work in your 1980 book Race, IQ, and Jensen, a book that, in my opinion, sets the standard for how do discuss this controversial topic. What have you learned about Jensen over the years, and what have your interactions with him taught you about the nature of scientific research?

I never suspected Arthur Jensen of racial bias. Over the years, I have found him scrupulous in terms of professional ethics. He has never denied me access to his unpublished data. His work stands as an example of what John Stuart Mill meant when he said that being challenged in a way that is "upsetting" is to be welcomed not discouraged. Before Jensen, the notion that all races were genetically equal for cognitive ability had become a dead "Sunday truth" for which we could give no good reasons. Today we are infinitely more informed about group differences. Equally important, the debates Jensen began are revolutionizing the theory of intelligence and our understanding of how genes and environment interact.

3. In an earlier book, Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ, you contended that Asians appeared to do just as well as Whites on IQ tests-no worse or no better, with the possible exception of some narrow visuospatial abilities. You showed, in fact, that a lot of the apparent high Asian IQ scores were driven by the Flynn Effect. Since then, a number of studies catalogued by Lynn and Vanhanen seem to reinforce the conventional wisdom that Asians are usually doing better than Whites on IQ tests. Are you still convinced that there's no substantial difference in average IQ between whites and Asians, and if so, what's wrong with the recent data?

The Chinese Americans I studied were the generation born in 1945-1949. They were no higher than whites even for non-verbal IQ yet out-performed whites by a huge margin in terms of eventual occupational status. That meant that they could give their own children the kind of privileged environment they had never had. The result was a pattern of IQ that put the subsequent generation of Chinese Americans at an IQ of 109 at say age six gradually falling to 103 by the late teens, as parental influence faded away in favor of peers. The extra 3 points the present generation has as adults is due to the fact that they are in cognitively more demanding universities and professions and because they have internalized a positive attitude to cognitively challenging activities and companions.

4. At least at first glance, reading comprehension appears to involve a high degree of abstraction. If, as you argue in your new book, the Flynn Effect is largely driven by an exogenous rise in abstract thinking, then why hasn't the reading comprehension score increased by very much?

The Comprehension subtest of the WISC does show significant gains, though not nearly as great as Similarities and Raven's. But it is not a test of reading comprehension but a test of perceiving the "logic" of social arrangements - for example, why streets are numbered in order. The reading tests of the Nation's Report Card show no gain at age 17 because you are expected to read adult novels. Since young people today have no larger vocabularies and funds of general information than their ancestors did, they cannot read these works with any greater understanding.

5. In What is Intelligence?, you discuss the importance of "Short Hand Abstractions" or "SHAs" as part of an educated person's mental toolkit. What are they and how do they relate to your intelligence research?

IQ tests have missed a striking cognitive development of the 20th century, namely, that the various sciences and philosophy have enriched our minds by gradually giving educated people short-hand abstractions (SHAs) that allow us to critically analyze our world. For example, the word "market" no longer stands for a place but for the law of supply and demand and you can use it to see why rent controls are self defeating. The concept of "tautology" can make us more sophisticated about history. If someone says "Christianity has been a force for good", and explains away all the slaughter Christians have perpetrated by saying that they "were not real Christians", we can immediately see the flaw. If only good people qualify as Christians, the goodness of Christians has been established by definition! Sadly universities never give their graduates a full tool kit of these wonderful analytic concepts.

6. Recently, some IQ researchers have argued that if the Flynn Effect is g-loaded, then we should see a fall in the factor loadings across subtests over time. Their story is that cross-sectionally, we know that people with high IQ scores have more specificity–that is, they have greater strengths and weaknesses relative to the average person. Do you place much weight on that hypothesis, and do you think it might explain why IQ gains over time are distributed the way they are?

The IQ gains are not g-loaded so the prediction is beside the point. The importance of cognitive trends over time is a matter of their social utility. Whether they happen to be greatest on skills that have the highest g-loading is a distraction.

7. The Dickens-Flynn model (Psych. Review, 2001) attempts to explain the apparent high heritability of IQ by arguing that people with good genes end up endogenously in good environments, which in turn raises their IQs even more. In your new book, you propose a number of ways to test this hypothesis. Do you think that the Dickens-Flynn model is all that's needed to explain differences in average IQ across ethnic groups, or do you think that other explanations might be needed?

The Dickens-Flynn model does nothing to evidence that IQ gaps between groups are environmental rather than genetic in origin. That evidence must come from specific environmental hypotheses about what handicaps (say) black Americans suffer as they age. What the model shows is that twin studies (which emphasize the effects of genetic differences between individuals) do nothing to prejudice an environmental explanation of group differences.

8. Out of the many research designs you propose in What is Intelligence, which one would you most like to see performed and why?

The one that calls for investigation of urban and rural Brazil. I think the former approximates where Americans are today, and the latter approximates where Americans were in 1900. We could get direct evidence for or against the cognitive history of Americans in the 20th century that my book relates.

9. You've long said that you disagree with Richard Lynn's view that the Flynn Effect is largely driven by better nutrition. One of Lynn's pieces of evidence is that IQ gains show up at very early ages, which would be surprising if the Flynn Effect were entirely sociological. Why do you think IQ gains show up at such an early age, and about what fraction of IQ gains do you think might be due to nutrition?

Changing ratios of adults to children in the home (smaller families) and changed modes of dealing with infants affect cognitive development from birth. The nutrition hypothesis explains little in America since 1950 - the evidence is in the book.

10. You've shaken up the field of intelligence research every time you've published a book on the topic. What are you working on for your next project?

My next book is in press. It will be called: The hollow center: race, class, and ideas in America. It will attempt to shake Americans into awareness that they are blind to the state of black America, that their foreign and domestic policies have perverse priorities, that they are class blind, and have lost their way it terms of Jefferson's humane ideals. It is, however, a hopeful book in the sense that there is much in America's history that can show us how to find our way.

Labels: Psychology

The current issue of CATO Unbound is about IQ. James Flynn has already put something up, Linda Gottfredson, Stephen Ceci and Eric Turkheimer on deck.

Labels: IQ, Psychology

Chris has a post, Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?, which addresses issues relating to women in science. Like the debate about IQ I'm not too interested in this...basically one's priors strongly effect their perception of the weight of the evidence and I don't see much value add in getting into arguments. That being said, a few quick points which I discussed with Chris:

1) During the Larry Summers affair I noted that though the proportion of women in mathematical fields differs cross-culturally, the rank order of fields is basically the same in terms of male & female ratio. In other words, the relative underrepresentation of women in mathematical fields seems culturally universal (e.g., in Mongolia where males are discouraged from pursuing higher education only in the mathematical sciences is there a sex ratio parity).

2) In female dominated fields males tend to increase in frequency as one ascends the ladder of achievement and prestige. Some of this might be due to age (e.g., established professors are from a time when women were extremely underrepresented in academia); but Chris points out that even across the undergrad to grad student chasm within his own field, cognitive psychology, it still plays out.

3) Speaking of which, the principle seems to operate on a very fine grained level. Within psychology it is cognitive psychology and psychometrics where women are least dominant. These are also fields where knowing some linear algebra is handy. Within the social sciences women are relatively thin on the ground in economics, which is the most formalized and mathematical discipline.

4) From a biological perspective it seems to me that some of this is likely going to be due to gene/gene expression/environment correlation. That is, small initial differences in biologically rooted propensities can lead to a "virtuous feedback" cycle.

5) Peer groups matter. To be succinct about it, I think female peer groups are nerd-killers.

6) The last two points are important. I think most reasonable people will agree these sorts of outcomes which manifest in young adulthood have many upstream variables (even if some are of relatively larger effect). This is why prior values matter so much in how plausible you find alternative explanations. That being said, I do think that the complexity of the issue here poses a problem for social engineers: a one-size-fits-all solution often presupposes one clean predictor of the difference (e.g., in this case a form of stereotype threat), which I don't think is really tenable. These solutions are unlikely to shock the social dynamic to a new equilibrium, so to maintain outcome you'll have to continue applying the "solution." The other alternative is to engage in radical social engineering and flip a host of parameters. I am skeptical that most people have the stomach for that, so what you're going to continue to see are "solutions" which will never address the underlying causes but apply a band-aid upon the "problem."

7) In the most general and big picture sense James F. Crow's observation that when you extract a set of individuals highly deviated from means across a wide range of traits the likelihood that intergroup differences will emerge are going to be very high. In other words, to be a world class sprinter or mathematician requires a joint set of traits where the mean for the candidate population is highly deviated from the central tendency. Even if the distribution of said traits differs only minimally across groups it is extremely likely that different groups will yield very different numbers of individuals who match the appropriate criteria.

Finally, if you are going to comment on Chris' blog, be civil. He's had my back before, so I am not intending to send hecklers his way.

Labels: Psychology

The topic of facial attractiveness came up at Cognitive Daily, and it presents a good opportunity to contrast the two main approaches in psychology -- correlational and experimental. I'll start with an informal chat, and then proceed to look at a published study. Since the literature is vast, this will just touch on a few key points. And a warning to our mostly male readership: I'm only going to focus on what makes male faces attractive, both for "equal time" and because it's more mysterious.

Do girly eyes, lips, and skin make a guy less attractive? Hardly -- just look at any of those "teen hearthrob" magazines. In one response to a PNAS study, a photo of various dream guys features Billie Joe Armstrong next to the qualities "music" and "looks." What makes him look better than Bear Grylls and Kurt Vonnegut? Well, he has large girly lips and eyes, and tighter skin. This is typical of "pretty boys": other examples are Johnny Depp, Ryan Phillipe, and so on. However, the skeletal morphology (jaw, cheekbones, chin, brow) is masculine. It's only the non-boney parts that are girly.

So, for guys, we've already found two principal components of facial attractiveness: a manly skull and girly soft parts that fill it out. But this brings up a very important point in asking such questions. That is, cognitive scientists often hew to the experimental approach -- let's keep two faces exactly the same, but change one feature, and see which is more attractive. This game of Mr. Potato Head purportedly avoids the entangled mess of confounding factors that would turn up in a correlational study, such as one using principal components.

But there are good reasons to believe that there are non-trivial statistical interactions between facial features, so that isolating one and varying it misses the point: whether girly eyes are attractive depends on what the rest of the face looks like. It's just hard to judge the attractiveness of facial features out of context since facial perception is a pretty gestalt process.

It's clear that part of the variation in facial appearance is due to genetic differences between individuals. Whatever these variational genes may be, their effects are pretty fundamental. There are probably significant epistatic (or gene-gene interaction) effects in skull morphology just because so many different parts have to coordinate their work to make the face look right. (Here is a study showing epistatic effects on the symmetry of mice teeth.) Throughout development, a single gene could have pleiotropic effects on various parts of the face, and ditto for a single circulating hormone.

The point is, if we keep all of those the same and vary just one piece, we've lost the correlation structure. We could get wacko results for that reason alone. Imagine if a very ugly guy had his photo manipulated so that he had large girly eyes -- they would look very out of place, unsettling, perhaps jarring. We'd cringe from the bizarro effect alone. (For female faces, consider that very tight skin is attractive -- unless you take an old woman's head and give her a tight facelift, resulting in that extraterrestrial transvestite look.) In reality, though, girly eyes probably go along with other features that make them neutral or attractive.

With that in mind, let's turn to a study on girly facial features in guys. Here is a free PDF, so if you comment, at least look at the pictures and read the graphs. What the experiments show is that, keeping everything else the same, increasing the luminance contrast between the (darker) eyes and lips vs. the (lighter) rest of the face made a female face increasingly more attractive, but a male face increasingly less attractive. The interpretation is that female-typical traits are attractive in females but ugly in males.

If you look at the male pictures, though, it's clear why the feminized photo scored so low: he looks like a damned weirdo. Later in the paper, there are pictures of his entire head -- you can see that he has a very unattractive, schlubby male face. We react by cringing at his picture with high-contrast eyes and lips because it's so incongruous. Again, in real life, guys with more female-typical eyes and lips look like pretty boys, so it's not unsettling but rather attractive. I've already mentioned some mechanisitic reasons why that may be, but there could also be correlational selection on the skeletal and soft traits, or cross-assortative mating between males with manly skulls and females with doe eyes, pouty lips, and taut skin.

As a reality check on the unsexiness of high-contrast eyes and lips for male faces, in the picture of Billie Joe Armstrong that The Intersection chose to showcase his good looks, he is wearing heavy mascara -- just as Johnny Depp did for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I'll bet that's also part of the hunk appeal when attractive football or baseball players are photographed with that black stuff under their eyes (functionally unnecessary for having your picture taken).

Also, have a look at another study which created "average faces" from many real faces (these studies always show that the composite is most attractive). Their characteristics of beautiful faces shows a protypical sexy and ugly male face. First, note how similar the sexy non-skeletal features are for both sexes. It's hard to tell which face show a higher luminance contrast between the eyes and lips vs. rest of the face, since the sexy guy has darker skin. To me at least, the sexy guy has more pop-out-of-the-background eyes and lips, while the ugly guy has more uniformly drab features. But maybe a more sophisticated instrument than my eye will say that the sexy guy has lower-contrast features than the ugly guy. If so, the conclusion would be more believable since it did not come from a Mr. Potato Head experiment.

So, on a constructive note, the way these studies of facial attractiveness should be done is to do something like PCA on a huge dataset of certified dreamy and drab guys. Just "by inspection," it's clear that "manly skull" and "girly soft features (eyes, lips, skin)" are two. Symmetry is another one, although as I mentioned at Cognitive Daily, symmetry is not heritable, so don't think that says anything about "good genes" sexual selection using "fitness indicators."

Labels: babes and hunks, Psychology

A functional circuit underlying male sexual behaviour in the female mouse brain:

We report here that Trpc2^-/- female mice show a reduction in female-specific behaviour, including maternal aggression and lactating behaviour. Strikingly, mutant females display unique characteristics of male sexual and courtship behaviours such as mounting, pelvic thrust, solicitation, anogenital olfactory investigation, and emission of complex ultrasonic vocalizations towards male and female conspecific mice...These findings suggest that VNO-mediated pheromone inputs act in wild-type females to repress male behaviour and activate female behaviours. Moreover, they imply that functional neuronal circuits underlying male-specific behaviours exist in the normal female mouse brain.

Yes, yes, I know people aren't mice. But check out this piece on female autistics in The New York Times Magazine. Here's an interesting part:

No doubt part of the problem for autistic girls is the rising level of social interaction that comes in middle school. Girls' networks become intricate and demanding, and friendships often hinge on attention to feelings and lots of rapid and nuanced communication - in person, by cellphone or Instant Messenger. No matter how much they want to connect, autistic girls are not good at empathy and conversation, and they find themselves locked out, seemingly even more than boys do. At the University of Texas Medical School, Katherine Loveland, a psychiatry professor, recently compared 700 autistic boys and 300 autistic girls and found that while the boys' "abnormal communications" decreased as I.Q. scores rose, the girls' did not. "Girls will have more trouble with social networks if they're having greater difficulty with communication and language," she says.

I have offered the conjecture before that a lot of the social phenomena we see around us has to be filtered through the reality that men and women socialize very differently. Roughly, I believe that male socialization norms are more coarse, inflexible and girded by clear heuristics. In contrast, I think female social networks are more natural and leverage innate abilities of women to read faces, manner and engage in extreme intentionality. I believe this is one reason that patriarchy emerges in mass societies: though more coarse and less informative, I believe that simpler male interaction dynamics scale much more easily than the way women operate in groups. It naturally makes sense that high IQ autistic males could "fake it" or "get by" much more easily than high IQ autistic females, the male social system is much more clumsy and probably requires less innate cognitive skill.

Addendum: An example by analogy. A typical human has lighting fast numeracy perception. For example, compare someone who "recognizes" a set of objects from the 1 to 4 in quantity vs. someone counting 1, 2, 3, 4. Obviously the latter method is relatively slow and depends on a lot more cognitive scaffolding (various aspects of human intelligence). Gestalt recognition on the other hand is fast and almost unconscious. But now imagine the number of objects increasing. Soon you really don't have a good sense of numbers via innate numeracy, you can recognize proportions, but you can't recognize 73 objects. On the other hand, though counting is slow, and continues to take more time as the number of objects increases, but it scales so that you can feasible continue to count an increasing number so long as you're willing to put more time in it.

Labels: Psychology

Religious concepts promote cooperation:

Participants primed with religious concepts gave their partner an average of $4.22, compared with only $1.84 in the control group. But those who declared themselves religious before the study were no more generous than non-believers.

"The effect of the religious prime was both large and surprising, especially considering that during exit interviews the participants were unaware of having been religiously primed," says Shariff.

A second study introduced a third group, primed with words associated with civic responsibility such as "jury", contract", and "police." This group behaved almost identically to that primed with religious concepts.

You can read the full working paper for free. There were two groups. One consisted of 50 UBC students, and the second a somewhat larger and more diverse group from the Vancouver, BC, area. The basic finding was that "priming" subjects with religious terms seemed to elevate generosity during an un-iterated Ultimatum Game, where the 'rational actor' should just keep all the money. In the first sample there wasn't even a statistically significant difference between religious & irreligious students in how they reacted to the priming. The second study was more equivocal, and the authors in the discussion suggest that part of the reason that the irreligious tended to be less responsive toward religious priming was that the greater stringency of the test for 'atheism' filtered the individuals to a greater degree who were defined as non-religious, and a small number of subjects might simply even lack the implicit resonances of supernatural agents. Finally, the second study also showed that subjects could be primed toward generosity by exposing them to civic terminology.

First, the authors note the problems with their small and narrow sample sizes. Though statistically significant and powerful, the effects were derived from people from the Vancouver area, or, college students at UBC. I didn't see controlling for the fact that there is likely some correlation between ethnicity and religion in British Columbia. Specifically, a disproportionate number of secular British Columbians are likely to be Chinese origin. Second, cognition expresses and develops within a cultural context. In a society with less civic engagement and activity than Canada I would not be surprised if the effect of secular priming was trivial. Similarly, in a society that is extremely secular (Japan?) one might see far greater response to civic priming than the supernatural equivalent. Third, the authors suggest that the response of theistic and non-theistic individuals in the first group to supernatural concepts suggests an implicit association between religious concepts and altruistic behavior. I have suggested myself that the anthropomorphic bias which is a pillar of religiosity exists in many, or all, atheists. Rejection of a deity might be sincere on the explicit level, but the implicit mind might still be strongly shaped by early cultural conditioning. The secular individuals in the UBC sample were no doubt aware of the valences and power of religious beliefs and ideas, and it seems plausible that lifetime implicit associations would have been built up.

Overall, this study is good because as the researchers point out there is a lot of armchair bullshitting on this topic. I get plenty of it in the comments of my weblogs. This study shows supernatural agents can act as mediators of human action as posited by many. It also shows that secular institutions and values can trigger the same change in behavior. What does this tell us on the fundamental level? I'm not sure, after all, the typical modern human has been exposed to several thousand years of philosophical religion which has embedded within it an explicit moral/ethical dimension. Similarly, bureaucratic government and the ideologies of mass societies are "in the air," so to speak. In some "primitive" societies gods are seem as much more amoral creatures than in "advanced" cultures; they are mischievous agents who humans must placate and deceive. Additionally, they have no well developed theories of statecraft or a conception of law enforced by political fiat. It would be interesting to do this sort of study in a primitive society, though obviously the lack of literacy would cause problems with the priming the researchers used in this case.

Labels: Psychology, Religion