Jump to content

What's your IQ


Sriman Dutta

Recommended Posts

Is there a reference to what that actually means? Because I was pretty sure that IQ scores were normalized for a 100 average for both genders, with the primary difference being that men tend to group slightly more at the extreme ends with women bunching more towards the center. That could easily be an artifact of women being acculturated to squash their academic potential combined with the process of bringing everyone to a 100 hundred average with a bell curve for the total population, and the difference could be being eliminated or even swing slightly in the other direction now, but it's difficult to tell exactly what they mean because it seems like the article is implying that women are scoring higher than men on average, which I didn't think was physically possible based on how the tests were scored.

 

Then again, I'm not an IQ test expert, so I could just be mistaken.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a personal belief that obsession over IQ is directly related to how narcissistic you are,.


 

I wonder whether it makes any sense to claim that women have a higher average IQ than men (or vice versa). Men and women have different mental strengths, so whether they do better or worse than men depends on how IQ is defined. I think the only realistic way of defining it is to declare that men and women have equal average IQs by definition, and devise IQ tests to reflect that.

 

Or we could just count the number of people of both sexes who follow utter crap such as X factor or Strictly Come Dancing, or follow the personal lives of celebrities, and let us draw our own (totally predictable) conclusions. :)

Men generally have stronger spatial intellect that women. It's been proposed because they hunted while the women gathered.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Men generally have stronger spatial intellect that women. It's been proposed because they hunted while the women gathered.

 

Actually it is not quite as clear-cut and unfortunately the hunter-gathering narrative, while powerful, may be one of the "just so" stories, as they are hard to test. Consequently, there are a few more hypotheses out there with various degree of support. As usual with evolutionar scenarios, it is very difficult to ascertain what is the likelies and/or had the highest impact.

What seems to be mostly in agreement is that men and women recall spatial memory differently but depending on the specific task, e.g. women are better at object location tasks (Montello 1999) as well as memory-type games. So the outcome depends highly on what elements of spatial memory are being tested.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Actually it is not quite as clear-cut and unfortunately the hunter-gathering narrative, while powerful, may be one of the "just so" stories, as they are hard to test. Consequently, there are a few more hypotheses out there with various degree of support. As usual with evolutionar scenarios, it is very difficult to ascertain what is the likelies and/or had the highest impact.

What seems to be mostly in agreement is that men and women recall spatial memory differently but depending on the specific task, e.g. women are better at object location tasks (Montello 1999) as well as memory-type games. So the outcome depends highly on what elements of spatial memory are being tested.

Evolutionarily speaking, they needed to be adapted to know where and how near the threats were, which would be just as skillful as locating prey or enemies and using pretty much the same areas of the brain. They are probably equivalent in spatial ability are they not?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tough to tell. We have rough idea about how humans may have lived but it is difficult to assign contributions of the various elements as selective forces. After all, we cannot run models with them. I am therefore always hesitant to provide evolutionary explanations for physiological mechanisms.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Men generally have stronger spatial intellect that women.

 

 

I do wonder if this "stronger spatial intellect" is cultural. Anyone know of any research in that area? (I assume it is a thing and not a myth?)

 

There are languages where directions are always specified in absolute terms (so instead of saying "what is that in your left hand" you would say "what is that in your north-east hand" - and that obviously changes with the position of the speakers). I am not aware of any studies on gender differences in fluency in these languages, though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.