Category: Psychology

A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect

Richard D. Fuerle

The Flynn Effect, discovered by Richard Lynn (Lynn, 1977) and documented and named for James R. Flynn (Flynn, 1984, 1987), is a world-wide increase in IQ scores of about 3 IQ points per decade.  That is, people today score higher on an old IQ test than people the same age did who took the same test decades earlier.

By suggesting the malleability of intelligence and the possibility that tweaking the environment might increase it, the Flynn Effect has raised the hopes of egalitarians, who believe that “all the races are equal in intelligence” (United Nations, 1950; also Flynn, 1999) and fervently want to erase the black-white IQ gap.  Unfortunately, the cause of the Flynn Effect has not yet been pinpointed and, until it is, a program cannot be designed that will put the cause of the Flynn Effect to work increasing black intelligence.  Moreover, as many experts suspect, the Flynn Effect may be only an increase in IQ scores, not an increase in real intelligence (i.e., the genetic potential for high intelligence), which may actually be declining (Lynn, 1996).

A possible explanation for the increase in IQ scores is that children today mature sooner, both physically and mentally, than children did decades ago (Sarich, 1999).  Today’s children score higher, not because their real intelligence has increased, but because their brains are more mature.  A 10 year old today has a brain that has grown faster and has more neural connections than the brain of a 10 year old who lived, say, 50 years ago.  Because today’s 10 year olds have brains that, perhaps, 12 year olds had 50 years ago, they do better on an IQ test taken by 10 year olds 50 years ago.  Psychologists think they are comparing identical groups of children – 10 year olds to 10 year olds, but they are actually comparing apples and oranges – 10 year old brains to 12 year old brains.  Real intelligence has not increased, children just acquire it sooner, and fully mature people today may actually be less intelligent than fully mature people were decades ago.

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Women drivers and homosexuals

How gratifying when some geek researches an area of extreme and totally unacceptable male prejudice, and only ... confirms it.  Plus, in this case, an unexpected bonus.

From the Mail article, with apologies for the eggregious use of dishonest homosexual labels:-

Gay men are as bad as women at navigating, research has shown.  Both share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around, a study suggests.  They are also slower to take in spatial information than heterosexual men.

... researchers say it is likely to make driving in a strange environment more challenging for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, conducted computer-based tests of spatial learning and memory on 140 volunteers recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines.  They showed that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses.  But there were also differences between gay and heterosexual men and straight and lesbian women.

The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University. In one,

... the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find a hidden submerged platform.  Cues in the form of pictures, doorways, a lamp, a bookcase and other landmarks were sited in different places.

The other task,

... the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” - musical tones - by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.

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The end of the Flynn Effect

We never knew for sure whether it was real, what caused it or whether it was limited only to the left side of the curve.  But the Flynn Effect appears to be at the end of its days in Europe, at least.

This from the Times:-

WE ARE ABOUT AS SMART AS WE’RE GOING TO GET, SAYS IQ PIONEER
* Test Results are starting to level out
* Morality skills are the next step

It is a common refrain, repeated in response to every new television reality show and every bumper crop of school exam results: society is dumbing down. Scientists have long argued the opposite, pointing to the now widely accepted “Flynn effect”, which shows that over the past century average IQ scores have improved across the developed world, irrespective of class or creed.

Now the man who first observed this effect, the psychologist James Flynn, has made another observation: intelligence test scores have stopped rising.

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Book review of “Breeding between the Lines” by Alon Ziv

This is a book review of “Breeding between the lines: Why interracial people are healthier and more attractive,” by Alon Ziv, 184 pp., Barricade Books, 2006, ISBN: 1569803064. My preliminary impression that the book most likely doesn’t have decent data in it is confirmed.

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Consciousness, power or truth … three points for a new compass

A subject that crops up pretty regularly at MR is the profound unsuitability of the standard left-right political spectrum, as expressed in the seating arrangements in revolutionary French parliamentary life and employed in the standard political compass.  The correlation of anarchism <> fascism and collectivism <> libertarianism simply cannot process, and so mischaracterises, radical-right or even fundamentally Conservative thinking.  Nowhere is that more true than with the very normal human characteristic of racial consciousness, and if you want to know why just visit the front page of politicalcompass.org where you can read:-

The idea was developed by a political journalist with a university counselling background, assisted by a professor of social history.  They’re indebted to people like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno for their ground-breaking work in this field.

There is a body of psychological research that affirms the conventional axes, as John Ray has often attested here.  I contend that this is prejudiced by the researchers’ own immersion in the liberal analysis.  They do not ask the questions that would test true radical-right motivation and represent it accurately.  The result is nothing more than a test of liberalism.

So, I wondered whether political orientation could be addressed by using a system that, from the outset, describes the radical right and allows the liberal sleepers to fall where they will.  It does not matter where (it would likely be bottom right, off the chart!).

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Oh for G-d’s sake: insane miscegenation propaganda

Interesting new book out this week

Breeding Between the Lines: Why Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive

by Alon Ziv

Book Description This book combines sex, race, health and genetics in a daring new theory. Written with accessible, direct prose, anecdotes, analogies, and examples from human and animal studies, it is sure to spark debate in a massive way.

Jay Phelan, Author of Mean Genes: Breeding Between the Lines is that rare book that is insightful and revolutionary, while remaining compulsively readable and downright fun.

Alon Ziv, Alon Ziv, why is that name pinging my Jewdar?

A member of the group least likely to miscegenate (with the world’s highest mean IQ as a direct result) persuades the rest of us to miscegenate in an insightful, revolutionary, readable and downright fun book.

Yay, more jewish psyops.

Addendum by J Richards

Svy, I simply have to add a few things to this entry, and I don’t think you would mind.

Here is the cover of the book by Alon Ziv.

Is the mixed race woman a match for white beauty?

Alon Ziv has to be insane if he believes that the broad-nosed and masculine mixed-race woman looks better.  Can people in their right mind believe that attractive white women can be improved upon if non-whites are absorbed into the white gene pool? 

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Interracial crime is worse than intraracial crime

This will be a short post.  Interracial crime is worse than intraracial crime because interracial crime leads to racism, which is a thought crime and grounds for firing, divorce, ostracization, anti-social behavior, etc.  In other words, interracial crime is worse because it does more damage.

Note: this is a speculative post, and its purpose is QA testing; rip it apart folks.

Neuropolitics

There is an interesting site here that appears to be run by two microbiologists named Brack and Zhang.  They have the entirely commendable aim of finding what the biological influences on political orientation are.  And some of their findings sound fun indeed.  For instance:

“In our most recent survey, Liberals in general were 43% more likely to report general anxiety disorder than Conservatives. They were 115% more likely to report panic disorders, 119% more likely to report agoraphobic symptoms, 118% more likely to report OCD symptoms. and 54% more likely to report social anxiety disorder.  When broken down further into Very Conservative, Conservative, Liberal and Very Liberal cohorts, the numbers spread further apart. The Very Conservatives have the lowest rates of anxiety disorders, the Very Liberals the highest.

Sadly, we cannot get too carried away by that finding.  It runs contrary to decades of previous research on the subject—research of which Brack & Zhang seem to be unaware.  In properly sampled surveys, the correlation between anxiety/neuroticism and politics has repeatedly been found to be negligible.  See for instance here.  And the “sampling” employed by Brack & Zhang is ludicrous.  They base their conclusions on people who respond to internet surveys—a group which can in no way be claimed to be representative of the population at large.

Another problem with the Brack and Zhang reports is that they give the statistical significance of the differences they find as if it were a big deal.  But statistical significance is only a means of allowing for small sample sizes and their “samples” are large in statistical terms.  It may help if I point out that with a sample of 400 people (the sort of “sample” they use) a totally negligible correlation of .10 would be shown as statistically significant.  They would be much more impressive from a scholarly point of view if the first report of their findings were in terms of standard descriptive statistics such as (say) the Pearson product-moment correlations between their variables.

‘g’ and its measures..

I am one of those awful people who mention IQ in public from time to time so I thought a few quick words of background on it might not go astray:

IQ tests exist because ‘g’ (general intelligence) exists.  It just is a fact that people who are good at solving one sort of problem tend to be good at solving lots of other different problems.  Some problems, however, are particularly good at detecting people who are generally good at solving problems.  Researchers speak of such “good-predictor” problems as ones that “load highly on ‘g’”.  And, pesky though it may be, the problems that load most highly on ‘g’ (i.e. the ones that are the purest measure of general intelligence) are also the ones that differentiate blacks and whites most strongly.  As Charles Murray explains:

“As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered ‘g’, proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be “most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g.” In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory.

A concrete example illustrates how Spearman’s hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as “forward digit span” and “backward digit span.” In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject’s score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order.

Digits-backward is much more ‘g’-loaded than digits-forward.  Try it yourself and you will see why.  Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder.  The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward.  It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income, or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant.  Reluctance to “act white” is irrelevant.  Motivation is irrelevant.  There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting”.

Blacks don’t care

Or very few of them do anyway

“A Harvard University study suggests white Americans are far more likely than their black counterparts to die soon after the death of a spouse.  The longitudinal study of 410,272 elderly U.S. couples indicates the “widowhood effect”—the increased probability of death among new widows and widowers—is large and enduring among white couples, but undetectable among black couples. That, say researchers, suggests blacks may somehow manage to extend marriage’s well-documented health benefits into widowhood.”

More here

Hey!  Fathers matter after all!

Mark Richo will like the report below but it must have the feminists grinding their teeth.  Fancy fathers being good even for DAUGHTERS!  I myself have always said (I’ve said it here) that “Daddy’s Girl” is one of the most beautiful human relationships so I am glad to see that the facts bear out that judgment.  I have always greatly regretted that I did not have a daughter but I had a very good relationship with a beautiful little stepdaughter so I do not feel totally deprived.  She is now a radiant and happily married young woman

Girls who have good relationships with their fathers tend to wait longer to have their first sexual intercourse experience, according to a new study by a University of Texas at Austin sociologist.  In a study published in this month’s Journal of Family Issues, Dr. Mark Regnerus reports that girls who claimed to have very low quality relationships with their fathers were nearly twice as likely to lose their virginity over the course of a year than girls who reported very high quality father-daughter relationships.  No similar correlation was found between girls and their mothers, or between boys and either parent.

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Boys will be boys: The path to social justice!

Science Daily reports that: “In addition to triggering a depression-like social withdrawal syndrome, repeated defeat by dominant animals leaves a mouse with an enduring “molecular scar” in its brain that could help to explain why depression is so difficult to cure”. I suspect one of the reasons “boys will be boys” public school violence is so tolerated is the fact that to oppose it would be racist due to the racial differences in testosterone level, age of onset of pubescent muscle mass and general aggression level.  After all, those young white males are just getting their commupance for their ancestral guilt!  And gays are born—not made—too.  If you don’t believe me, just ask The Federal Government of the United States: “sexual pressure [in prisons—JAB] ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening.” And since black and hispanics rape white male prisoners more often than any other interracial assault category we might think of this as more social justice from the government’s institutions.  On the other hand, since the government is doing those “born gay” white males a favor by “awakening” their homosexual potential, perhaps the white males should be charged a therapy fee for their being “sexually pressured”.  As a matter of fact, young white school boys should probably pay for having their neurological development altered by black and hispanic thugs in their schools since this, too, is simply to “usher, guide or shepherd” their naturally submissive posture toward their racial superiors!

The neurodevelopmental boost of moms from childbirth

A lot of feminists like to blither about how they aren’t mature enough to raise a child until they are running a risk of Downs syndrome if not menopause. Rational people wonder how they could be so stupid but it may be a natural result of childlessness.

The upshot of pregnancy, Dr. Kinsley says, is a maternal brain changed forever in critical ways—not just different, but vastly improved.

Can you imagine a drug to produce the neurological enhancements of pregnancy?  A number of young women might choose to enhance their mental function thinking they needed that “competitive edge” to “get established in a career”.  Then, much to their dismay, they realize they are being stupid and stand a hope of choosing to have children before it is too late!  Who knows, they might even choose to drop the entire project of political correctness for the sham it is.  As such they might start voting more rationally but also start demanding characteristics of the sires of their children that made more sense. 

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Rationalism versus fundamentalism.

In Stanovich’s book The Robot’s Rebellion, reviewed here, he argues that humans have the capability to become rational rather than dogmatic, emotional, fundamentalist or fanatical. I wish he would have provided additional prescriptions for means to achieve that in a society, but we will have to be satisfied with some speculation rather than hard facts on how to approach that goal.

One of the reasons that I embrace eugenics is because with increased intelligence, humans can overcome their irrational emotional brains—with some effort. The more intelligent and educated a society is on average, the more rational and less emotional that society can become in making collective, and individual decisions, that will lead to better realized results. The most partisan and contentious conflicts all around us today are those that are laden with human emotion—abortion, affirmative action, warfare, labor disputes, etc. We have little conflict in doing medical research, but we become highly partisan when it comes to who will pay for medical treatment.

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Racist babies

I was not going to comment on this article (summarizing research by David J. Kelly reported in Developmental Science and Yair Bar-Haim reported in Psychological Science ) but perhaps I should.  What it shows is that babies are “racist” from 3 months old.  White babies prefer white faces and black babies prefer black faces.  But it all depends on exposure.  White babies exposed to an equal mix of black and white faces in their early weeks show no preference.

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The dimensionality of politics

It is a commonplace to observe that a simple division of politics into Left and Right fails to account for much of the real-world diversity of political attitudes.  People with extreme or unusual political views tend in fact to dismiss totally the utility of any Left/Right description of political attitudes.  People frequenting this blog seem generally to fall into that category.

Libertarians (another unusual minority) also are vigorously opposed to a single Left/Right dimension.  They are always promoting a two dimensional description of political attitudes.  The political compass and the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” are popular applications of such theories. Below is one example of such a description:

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Casting a Spelke on the times

I was intrigued to see this morning’s Times bravely announce that, to quote Harvard Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke, “core geometrical knowledge is a universal constituent of the human mind.”

The Times reports:-

THE people of an isolated tribe in the Amazonian rainforest can understand geometry as well as American schoolchildren, according to research that suggests the branch of mathematics is deeply ingrained in human nature.

Though they have never been taught about triangles, symmetry or right angles, the Munduruku people have an intuitive grasp of these concepts that shows basic geometry to be part of humanity’s innate intellectual tool kit, scientists believe. In a series of geometrical tests devised by French and American researchers, Munduruku children and adults achieved similar scores to schoolchildren from the US who had learnt the subject in maths classes for several years.

The findings offer strong evidence that the human mind has evolved a fundamental ability to understand geometrical forms and principles.

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Interesting data: Stupid interpretation

New research by economists Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick, and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee at London University’s Institute of Education, reveals that the more daughters a family has the more likely the parents are to vote for left of centre parties. Sons, by contrast, make people more right-wing.... On average, each daughter raises the likelihood of left-wing voting by 2% percentage probability points....

The researchers believe there are subconscious reasons behind the observed voting decisions. Women, they argue, are inherently collectivist while men are individualistic. They point out that because there is pay discrimination against women, and females put greater importance on public spending on issues like community safety, females are thus intrinsically more left-wing than males. As men acquire female children, those men gradually shift their political stance and, through subconscious concern for their daughters, become sympathetic to the “female” desire for more public spending and thus a steeper income tax schedule. Similarly, a mother with many sons becomes sympathetic to the “male” case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods....

Source

If women are inherently more Leftist, how come GWB got roughly 50% of the female vote in the 2004 Presidential election?  The finding above more probably reflects some hormonal influence

Update:

The original paper is here:  http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/phds/n.powdthavee/daughtersospowd2005.pdf

Ecological correlations between IQ, skin color, temperature and GDP per capita

Here is some cool research that is about to be published in the journal Intelligence, though this research is unlikely to get a lot of press in the MSM.  The researchers (Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa) computed the correlations between the predominant skin color in 129 nations, GDP per capita, high and low mean temperatures in the summer and winter, and skin color.  The correlation between predominant skin color and population IQ was − 0.92!  The meat of the data is presented in the Table below. 

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Male/female differences hard-wired too

There are girl brains, then there are boy brains. But there’s not one generic human brain, no matter what hand-wringing feminists may insist in their quest for sexual equality. Some stark new clinical evidence shows that men and women are just not the same upstairs. “The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man’s brain and a woman’s brain really do work differently,” a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday.

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An article that slipped through the net

It is part of the conventional religion among psychologists to believe that conservatives are the ones who are “authoritarian”.  Joe Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers party just did not happen, you see.  And like most Leftist beliefs, this one is impermeable to evidence.  I have reported in the academic journals heaps of carefully conducted research showing the belief to be false but I was wasting my time of course.  You can’t argue with something that people need to believe.

Still, every now and again, a piece of research pops up which questions the orthodox faith and one such article is: “Is political conservatism synonymous with authoritarianism?”, in The Journal of Social Psychology of Oct 2005, volume 145, issue 5, p571ff. by H. Michael Crowson, Stephen J. Thoma and Nita Hestevold.  Their research is of course the usual rubbish that passes for science in psychology:  No attempt at sampling, no awareness of what the questionnaires they use actually say, internally inconsistent indices treated as informative, negligible correlations reported as if they offered useful information etc. but it is still nice to see a challenge of sorts to the orthodoxy being put up.  I would give a more detailed critique of what they did but I don’t want to discourage them too much.  They should probably read this and this and this, though.

The Evolution of IQ: Stupidity Kills

The humorous theory behind the Darwin Awards may be grounded in fact. Psychologist Linda Gottfredson’s new paper , Innovation, accidents, and the evolution of general intelligence, argues convincingly that a negative correlation between accidental death and IQ was a major selective pressure in hominid evolution. 

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Rushton’s latest

In case people here have not all seen this yet:

Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory

ABSTRACT. Genetic Similarity Theory extends Anthony D. Smith’s theory of ethno-symbolism by anchoring ethnic nepotism in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Altruism toward kin and similar others evolved in order to help replicate shared genes. Since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia is the ‘dark side’ of human altruism. A review of the literature demonstrates the pull of genetic similarity in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships, and even large groups, both national and international. The evidence that genes incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves comes from studies of social assortment, differential heritabilities, the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, blood tests, and family bereavements. DNA sequencing studies confirm some origin myths and disconfirm others; they also show that in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins.

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More on assortative mating

The reason our friends seem a bit kooky, and our mates may seem strange compared to ourselves, is that opposites attract.  Right?  Nope.  A large body of research suggests that we pick our friends, as well as our mates, because underneath it all they are very much like us.  So if our friends are kooky, and our mates a bit strange, chances are we are too.  And the latest study in this ongoing research takes it a little further.  We can blame it at least partly on our genes.  People tend to like others who have the same inheritable traits, so we often choose friends and mates who are genetically similar to ourselves.

“People prefer their own kind,” says J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario.  “Extroverts favor extroverts; traditionalists, traditionalists.” That may not jibe with your own experience, but Rushton notes that genes are not the only players.  We’re not a bunch of robots that are being led around by genes that even pick our friends.  Other factors, according to the researchers, play a significant role.  Rushton says our friends and our mates may also be a product of the “unique environmental effects such as being in the right place at the right time.” You can’t link up with an ideal mate if the two of you never meet.  Our genes, Rushton says, probably account for about a third of the reason why we pick someone else as a friend or a mate.  “But that’s still pretty strong,” he says.  “Let’s say it’s a strong whisper from the genes.” ....

Rushton, who has been researching the subject of friendship for 20 years, says clear patterns emerged from a study of hundreds of identical and fraternal twins, as well as their spouses and friends. It’s no surprise that identical twins, who share 100 percent of the same genes, picked friends and mates who were very similar to those picked by their twins.  But here’s the twist. Fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes, picked friends and spouses who are so much like themselves they could be their brothers and sisters.  And, Rushton says, so do the rest of us.  “It’s almost as similar as siblings,” he says. “Not quite, but almost.” That “was not previously recognized,” Rushton and a colleague, Trudy Ann Bons, report in the July issue of Psychological Science.

More here:  http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=1023122&page=1

More on kin preference

My previous post on kin preference ended up with a rather sharp tease for the white nationalists but I subsequently put up a more serious version of the post on Dissecting Leftism.  That post resulted in a number of emails to me which made some interesting points and I would like to share those.

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