It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to be more mentally ill than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey. A search found 5 items measuring one's own mental illness in different ways (e.g.”Do you have any emotional or mental disability?”). All of these items were associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report. These results held up mostly in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race. For the variable with the most data, the difference in mental illness between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” was 0.39 d. This finding is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs.
Lists of top players for 12 different electronic sports (e-sports) or traditional mental sports were collected from a variety of sources (total n = 36k). National cognitive ability/IQ was found to be a predictor of the relative representation of countries among the top players. This was particularly true when an overall mental sports score was calculated. Controlling for population size, this metric correlated r = .79 with Lynn and Vanhanen’s published national IQs. The relationship was fairly robust to controls for geographical region (coefficient 74% of the original). Furthermore, it had been suggested that IQ estimates for Nigeria were spuriously low due to the country’s prominent performance on Scrabble. However, when performance across all other sports were taken into account, Nigeria’s performance was what one would expect based on the previously reported mean IQs near 70.
Taking countermeasures to protect against future events requires predicting what the future will be like. In late 2019, a novel coronavirus known as NCov-2019 emerged in Wuhan, China, and has since spread to most countries in the world. Anticipatory responses by civilians facing the crisis have included self-isolation measures, extreme stockpiling of food or medical supplies, and other forms of preparation to meet the expected crisis. However, no consensus exists as to the accuracy of civilian expectations, nor toward the relative value of different informational sources used by citizens to build these expectations (e.g. mainstream news as opposed to an educational background in virology). In the present study, we used an online survey (n = 333 in final sample) to collect individual characteristics and general knowledge regarding viruses and the novel coronavirus, in addition to their forecasts for the various outcomes expected to result from it in the near future. This will allow for the individual correlates of accurate forecasting to be known by 2021, which could prove important for assigning relative weights to forecasts for other events in the future.
There are few empirically derived theories explaining group differences in cognitive ability. Spearman's hypothesis is one such theory which holds that group differences are a function of a given test's relationship to general intelligence, g. Research into this hypothesis has generally been limited to the application of a single method lacking sensitivity, specificity, and the ability to assess test bias: Jensen’s method of correlated vectors. In order to overcome the resulting empirical gap, we applied three different psychometrically sound methods to examine the hypothesis among American blacks and whites in the Vietnam Experience Study (VES) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY ‘79). We first used multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to assess bias and evaluate the hypothesis directly; we found that strict factorial invariance was tenable in both samples and either the strong or the weak form of the hypothesis was supported, with 87 and 78% of the group differences attributable to g in the VES and NLSY ’79 respectively. Using item response theory metrics to avoid pass rate confounding, a strong relationship between g loadings and group differences (r = 0.80 and 0.79) was observed. Finally, assessing differential item functioning with item level data revealed that a handful of items functioned differently, but their removal did not affect gap sizes much beyond what would be expected from shortening tests, and assessing the effect this had on scores using an anchoring method, the differential functioning was found to be negligible in size. In aggregate, results supported Spearman's hypothesis but not test bias as an explanation for the cognitive differences between the groups we studied.
This document was written with intent to send to the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, as I was invited to submit an entry for their encyclopedia. However, upon completion, the editor, Todd Shackelford, sent me an email letting me know that “After further discussion, we have decided to eliminate this entry. You are now free to send to a different publication.”. This series of events should probably be interpreted in the light of a recent shaming of Shackelford by a journalist, which happened in between the invitation and the submission of the entry, which has made him more weary of taking on controversial material (Schulson, 2018).
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