Can You Say ‘Average’?
Oh, come on, Beeb – can’t you write headlines better than that? “‘Men cleverer than women’ claim”? “Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women.”? Come on – pull your socks up, or get on your bike, or something.
A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.
Hello? That’s not the same thing as saying ‘men are more intelligent than women’? At all? Surely, surely, you know that, if you think about it for five seconds. Think of the stupidest man you know. Now think of the cleverest woman you know. Is he more intelligent than she is? I rest my case.
But, maybe they really don’t know that. It is a common mistake. I heard Andrew Marr make it a few months ago, and he’s not thick – in fact he’s probably one of those men who are more intelligent than quite a few other men. But he said to Steve Pinker on ‘Start the Week’ that Larry Summers had said ‘men are better at science than women.’ I let out one of those exasperated whines one does let out when hearing people say stupid things on major media outlets: ‘That’s not what he said!’ and Steve Pinker said wearily, ‘That’s not what he said.’ But if Marr got it wrong, the chances are that most people get it wrong. The comments on that BBC article seem to confirm that, too – hardly anyone points out the mistake.
That’s quite tragic, really. It could mean that most people actually do think that all men indeed are more intelligent than all women. How depressing.
Fortunately, most of the comments on the article are more intelligent than those I tend to see on most BBC news stories, with, it seems, a greater preponderance of comments from women. ;)
Unfortunately, based on my personal experience, many (if not most) people do seem to buy into the idea that if men on average score more highly on a certain characteristic than women do (or vice versa), that this must apply to each individual comparison between a man and a woman. (It’s possible that I remember more of the encounters with idiots.)
I think that one of the best things we could do to end violence against women would be to hammer it into the public consciousness that the differences in physical strength between men and women are not absolute. (The idea that they are is particularly heinous because it means that many women avoid heavy lifting if there’s a man available to do it, effectively hypertrophying the difference.)
Hey, Ophelia, lighten up. I believe it is still technically the silly season in journalism.
This crap shows up every summer, in between ‘Does This Secret Code Reveal The Secrets Of The Ancients’ and ‘Diana; The Shocking Truth’.
It’s a worthless piece of pseudo-research by people of no particular standing and very dubious associates, given a flicker of publicity by an under-employed journo.
What do we not do with a butterfly?
“What do we not do with a butterfly?”
Except that this kind of crap shows up repeatedly in the respectable mainstream media and influences how lots of people think about such things. Yeah, you and I don’t take it seriously, but thousands (no, hundreds of thousands) will dimly remember the headline as “scientific proof” that (all) men are smarter than (all) women.
Let’s call pernicious bullshit whenever and wherever we see it.
Karl,
Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s just such a tedious chore when there are bigger fish to fry.
Yeah, after all, Don, this story is on the Beeb, not in the Sun or the Enquirer. And it’s not even the academics I’m quarreling with, it’s that fool headline and the fool subhead. It’s so basic – journalists need to get this stuff right. Because people do pay attention to them.
Note that there is no quote from Professor Lynn . He has made a career out of confusing IQ and intelligence (see his website http://www.rlynn.co.uk/). [Edited: You’ll get us sued with that kind of thing Paul – JS]
People continue to confuse ability to do IQ tests with intelligence
There may be a correlation – but that is all it is – there are far too many variables in the way the test and questions are presented.
I, along with others, was part of a test program where the problems with IQ tests were being evaluated – the variability in the results was so great that the examiners were unable to gain any meaningful results – the variability on the same test given at different times was also highly variable.
I Q measures how well you did on a particular test at the time that you took the test – that’s all !
G Lynn
According to one test I took, I am highly intelligent. I am not. Ask my wife.
IQ tests are usually designed so that women and men score the same. I wonder what test he used. I’ll go look at the paper.
Ah, not published yet, good move, do the press release first, but don’t let anyone look at the quality of the paper, then they can only make very vague objections to it, making them look shifty. Clever.
Centuries ago, when I was at university, Lynn managed to get a paper published in Nature claiming the Irish are less intelligent than the English. Since IQ tests are supposed to be designed to produce the same distribution of scores in women as in men, I have always wondered why the same cannot be done for ethnic groups/people living in different countries etc
PaulP, that is what they’re supposed to try and do, although it isn’t always feasible to have a test normalised to massively disparate groups (e.g. Kalahari bushmen and the English middle classes), but then you have to point out that it hasn’t been so tested.
“Professor Lynn argued in a letter to The Psychologist this month that the differences between the sexes were explained by a link between IQ and brain size. He said: “Men have larger brains than women by about 10 per cent and larger brains confer greater brain power, so men must necessarily be on average more intelligent than women.””
Making elephants the most intelligent land animal.
Quotes from Lynn:
“My book Dysgenics showed that the eugenicists were right in their belief that modern populations have been deteriorating genetically in respect of health, intelligence and the personality trait of conscientiousness. This deterioration began in the second half of the 19th century and has continued up to the present.”
“In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.”
“Presents new evidence showing conclusively for the first time that lighter skinned blacks have higher IQs than darker skinned blacks. This supports the theory that the proportion of white ancestry is a determinant of the intelligence of African Americans.”
Obviously not seen his latest, but looking at a previous article by Lynn purportedly showing the same thing:
Sex differences in intelligence and brain size: a developmental theory.
Intelligence,1999,27,1-12.
I think I can see how he could get a higher IQ for men than women, even though they’re not really designed for you to be able to do that. Look at this quote:
“The adult male advantage of around 4 IQ points
obtained by averaging the verbal comprehension, reasoning and spatial abilities is not
generally found in the full scale IQ of the Wechsler tests or in the overall IQ of similar
tests because the spatial abilities are typically under-represented in these tests.”
I.e., I can make men have a higher IQ than women by rejigging the test items so that the ones men do better on are given more weighting. Easy peasy. Can I be an emeritus professor of psychology now?
PM: It’s a lot worse than that. We have to question the composition of IQ tests completely.
Why should the various skills – verbal, mathematical etc- that are tested be included? Why should others not be tested? Why should the various skills be given the weight they are given, when calculating the single IQ score? Why not weight each differently?
And then why should men and women average the same score (and distribution around this value)? Perhaps men really are more skilled on average in one are than women and vice versa.
Indeed if you take two people with the same IQ then they are unlikely to be considered by others to be equally intelligent since their total score will be the sum of different scores for each of the tested skills.
It’s an unholy mess!
in the above “Perhaps men really are more skilled on average in one are than women and vice versa” should be “Perhaps men really are more skilled on average in one area than women and vice versa”