Does assortative mating work?
In my recent post about differences on the tails, a good comment was posted by Kristine: Is there any correlation between IQ gap and divorce, I wonder... The generation observation…
Assortative mating and differences
Cremieux has a viral post showing the absolute IQ gaps for spouses/partners as a function of the smartest spouse: This finding is trivial but apparently surprising to many people judging…
Educated birds of a feather
Parent-child similarity is a much studied topic. So much studied that various fields have come up with many different terms for the same thing: intergenerational elasticity, intergenerational persistence, intergenerational mobility…
Can you only talk to people within X IQ of your own?
There is this claim sometimes seen when discussing highly gifted people. One interested reader emailed me to ask where it was that Arthur Jensen made this claim: Anyway, what I…
People do not overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ by 30
It's all based on this article, which received ample media attention: Gignac, G. E., & Zajenkowski, M. (2019). People tend to overestimate their romantic partner's intelligence even more than their…
What have we learned from the 2022 education GWAS?
Okbay, A., Wu, Y., Wang, N., Jayashankar, H., Bennett, M., Nehzati, S. M., ... & Young, A. I. (2022). Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide…
Loving your family members too much
Most people know that married couples tend to be more similar than expected by chance for many attributes whether age, race, politics, intelligence, personality, music taste and so on. This…
New video: Are There Complex Assortative Mating Patterns For Humans?
Forgot to blog this one earlier. It's a video walkthrough of the usual sorts, based on my paper in Mankind Quarterly back from March: Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2021). Are…
Beware small biases: the case of height
See prior post on self vs. other measurements of personality for a similar take. Height is the favorite trait in 'behavioral' genetics: it's easy, fast and cheap to measure, continuous…
Thinking about intergenerational stability of socioeconomic status
I read the following interesting paper: Braun, S. T., & Stuhler, J. (2016). The Transmission of Inequality Across Multiple Generations: Testing Recent Theories with Evidence from Germany. The Economic Journal,…