Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Kathryn Paige Harden is professor of psychology who belongs to the Turkheimerian ‘left psychometrics’ school. I’ve discussed the odd behavior of Eric Turkheimer before, but since then I found a rather amazing essay: The Search for a Psychometric Left 1997 (the journal seems to no longer exist). It’s definitely worth reading in its entirely, but…
Continue ReadingYou might have heard the DUF1220 hypothesis, it goes something like this: DUF1220 is a copy number variant poorly tagged by arrays, and thus would not be captured well by typical GWASs for education/IQ. Comparative species data suggests strong selection for DUF1220 with increased intelligence/brain size. There’s some data showing a relationship between IQ in…
Continue ReadingWühr, P., Lange, B. P., & Schwarz, S. (2017). Tears or fears? Comparing gender stereotypes about movie preferences to actual preferences. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 428. This study investigated the accuracy of gender-specific stereotypes about movie-genre preferences for 17 genres. In Study 1, female and male participants rated the extent to which 17 movie genres…
Continue ReadingBorsboom, D. (2006). The attack of the psychometricians. Psychometrika, 71(3), 425. This paper analyzes the theoretical, pragmatic, and substantive factors that have hampered the integration between psychology and psychometrics. Theoretical factors include the operationalist mode of thinking which is common throughout psychology, the dominance of classical test theory, and the use of “construct validity” as…
Continue ReadingPredictably, Stuart Ritchie doesn’t like our Ashkenazim intelligence paper (Why doesn’t he? He dislikes all group difference research. See more below.) He makes a big deal of the fact that the sample size for Wisconsin Ashkenazim was only 53. (He neglects to mention that the comparison group numbered 2000 Christians). It might seem like most…
Continue ReadingDunkel, C. S., Woodley of Menie, M. A., Pallesen, J., & Kirkegaard, E. O. (2019). Polygenic scores mediate the Jewish phenotypic advantage in educational attainment and cognitive ability compared with Catholics and Lutherans. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. So predictably, our study on Jewish IQ has elicited some rather harsh (and in some cases moralistic) criticisms from…
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