I was doing some work on my first name study preparing it for publication and was reading some old papers. McDavid, J. W., & Harari, H. (1966). Stereotyping of names and popularity in grade-school children. Child Development, 453-459. The relation between rated social desirability of first names and socio- metric popularity status in elementary-school children […]
I don’t think Malcolm Gladwell has been debunked hard enough, so here’s my contribution towards that goal. For Steven Pinker’s take, see here. Gladwell is essentially a story teller, and while he doesn’t directly make stuff up, as far as we know (unlike e.g. Jonah Lehrer), he plays fast and loose with sources. Some years […]
Best estimate of Danish-Scandinavian IQ based on recent, large samples is ~103 relative to UK norms. What is the Danish national IQ? If we look at Lynn and Vanhanen 2012, it is estimated at 97.2. If we look at Becker’s re-analysis, it’s given at 98.45 (version 1.2). However, this is based on only two studies, […]
A traditional approach to studying altruism has been to do some kind of economic game. E.g. seeing how nice people are in ultimatum games. One such study: Oosterbeek, H., Sloof, R., & Van De Kuilen, G. (2004). Cultural differences in ultimatum game experiments: Evidence from a meta-analysis. Experimental economics, 7(2), 171-188. Levine, R. V., Norenzayan, […]
Often discussed, occasionally cited, but rarely read — certainly a highly suspicious combo — I post here the original German language final version (we think): Eyferth, K. (1961). Leistungen verschiedener Gruppen von Besatzungskindern in Hamburg-Wechsler Intelligenztest für Kinder (HAWIK). Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 113, 224-241. Eyferth, K. (1959). Eine Untersuchung der Neger-Mischlingskinder in Westdeutschland. […]
Recently, I took a poke at Eric Turkheimer. And now he’s ready with a retaliation: Only @KirkegaardEmil would proudly advertise support for the author of "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power" and "Swindlers of the Crematoria" as a list of "who's cool in behavioral genetics and IQ." He that lieth down with […]
I have written a lot about ancestry approaches, generally from a psychometric and genomic angle. However, economists can also play this game. Daniel A. F. Lopes, Geraldo A. Silva Filho, and Leonardo Monasterio. Culture, Institutions and School Achievement in Brazil This paper estimates the impact of culture on the academic performance of Brazilian students in […]
Eric Turkheimer is by many counts a good scientist. He has about 11.6k citations on Google Scholar, 6.3 since 2013 (i.e. last 5 years). He is prominent enough that he has a Wikipedia page, is a full professor at a University of Virginia (world rank ~150), and has published about 126 articles (according to his […]
Few people actually read this, which is a shame because the science is interesting for historical purposes, and the fulltext of his famous fallacy is rarely read. I believe this is a pity because it is really obvious when you actually read it. Lewontin, R. C. (1972). “The Apportionment of Human Diversity”. Evolutionary Biology. pp. […]
This page on Wikipedia claims rather surprisingly that: This list comprises laureates of the Nobel Prize who self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker or otherwise nonreligious at some point in their lives.[2] Many of these laureates were identified with a religion earlier in life. By one estimate, between 1901-2000 about 10.5% of all laureates, and 35% […]