Category: Psychology

Demography challenge

The number of whites stands at 500 million.  White women on average give birth to 1.4 children each.  Not all of these children are white, and the number of white children born per white woman on average is 1.2.  Very pessimistic assumptions, aren’t they?

Under the following assumptions, how long will it take to reduce the white population to 50 million, 10 million, 5 million and 1 million?  If the extinction point is reached at 500 white people, how many years will this take?  What can be inferred from this exercise?

At start, the age distributions are as follows, the birth and death rates remain constant throughout, only women between the ages of 20-40 give birth, and men and women are matched in numbers.

Age-Range | Percent | Death rate per 100k
0-20      |  20     |  300
20-40     |  40     |  150
40-60     |  25     |  500
60-plus   |  15     |  5000

Most answers in this excel sheet (if you can’t open it, install the free and open source open office or libre office suite).

Posted by R-news on Friday, December 30, 2011 at 08:07 AM in Demographics,  Psychology,  Race realism,  White Nationalism
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Civic happiness or ethnic meaning

More or less all my “thinking life” I have wondered at the third component in that little phrase in the American Bill of Rights, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  How, I asked myself, could serious people raise happiness (the pursuit of), a product of many factors and passing circumstances, most of them not within the gift of politicians, to the status of an existential absolute?  If one needed an explanation of how we children of the liberal age, when given the choice of wealth or goodness, choose wealth, choose materialism, hedonism, nihilism, it is pretty much enshined in those four words.

To my mind, happiness as an abstracted and singularised human purpose leads away from itself.  It does it by creating in the mind of the subject a cheap and cheapening, easily met standard for itself.  For example, civic nationalists are satisfied with the lowest-hanging of political fruit - a few gestures in the direction of la patria, a flag, some symbols of military power, a bit of back-slapping with perfect strangers over some feigned shared value ...  It means nothing.  It is nothing compared to the sum at which the true nationalist prices the human meaning and worth found in the familial and in kind, in brotherhood, rootedness, belonging, trust, love, and the good of his people.

These are, in reality, the psychological essentials. But, politically, they belong to another universe, a nationalist universe too discreet for non-nationalists to penetrate.  Even ones who are psychologists.

From a study published earlier this month in the Association of Psychological Science:

National Pride Brings Happiness—But What You’re Proud of Matters

Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life—and many people take that as good news. But Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium, suspected that the positive findings about nationalism weren’t telling the whole story. “It’s fine to say pride in your country makes you happy,” says Wright. “But what kind of pride are we talking about? That turns out to make a lot of difference.” The intriguing—and politically suggestive—differences they found appear in a commentary in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Reeskens and Wright divided national pride into two species. “Ethnic” nationalism sees ancestry—typically expressed in racial or religious terms—as the key social boundary defining the national “we.” “Civic” nationalism is more inclusive, requiring only respect for a country’s institutions and laws for belonging. Unlike ethnic nationalism, that view is open to minorities or immigrants, at least in principle.

The authors analyzed the responses to four key questions by 40,677 individuals from 31 countries, drawn from the 2008 wave of the cross-national European Values Study. One question assessed “subjective well being,” indicated by general satisfaction with life. Another measured national pride. The other two neatly indicated ethnic and civic national boundaries—asking respondents to rate the importance of respect for laws and institutions, and of ancestry, to being a true . . . fill in the blank . . . German, Swede, Spaniard. The researchers controlled for such factors as gender, work status, urban or rural residence, and the country’s per capita GDP.

Like other researchers, they found that more national pride correlated with greater personal well-being.  But the civic nationalists were on the whole happier, and even the proudest ethnic nationalists’ well-being barely surpassed that of people with the lowest level of civic pride.

The analysis challenges popular feel-good theories about nationalism. “There’s been a renaissance of arguments from political theorists and philosophers that a strong sense of national identity has payoffs in terms of social cohesion, which bolsters support for welfare and other redistributive policies,” says Wright. “We’ve finally gotten around to testing these theories.” The conclusion: “You have to look at how people define their pride.”

The findings, he adds, give a clue to what popular responses we might expect to “broad macro-economic and social trends”—that is, millions of people crossing borders (usually from poorer to wealthier countries) looking for work or seeking refuge from war or political repression. “It’s unclear what the political implications of the happiness measure are—though unhappy citizens could demand many politically dangerous, xenophobic responses. Ethnic nationalists, proud or not, appear relatively less happy to begin with and more likely to lead the charge as their nation diversifies around them.”

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, December 18, 2011 at 08:35 PM in Psychology
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A neurological challenge to the “worse is better” scenario

From Nature Neuroscience:

How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality

Abstract

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. Distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex tracked estimation errors when those called for positive update, both in individuals who scored high and low on trait optimism. However, highly optimistic individuals exhibited reduced tracking of estimation errors that called for negative update in right inferior prefrontal gyrus. These findings indicate that optimism is tied to a selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 06:40 PM in Psychology
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Individualism and collectivism from China to the British Isles

James mailed me a link to Dienekes Pontikos’s copy and paste of this study by researchers in the psychology department at Northwestern university.

The study is interesting for two reasons.  First, it is pleasing to see the emergence of gene studies into the racial phenotypes of individualism and collectivism.  This, of course, is a live issue for us but as always much depends on its handling - which brings us to the second reason.  The two lady researchers have linked causal pathogens to the pressures producing collectivism, which has the effect of rather neatly pathologising the individualism of Europeans as anxiety-ridden and presenting Asiatic indifference as calm!

The ladies concerned are:

Dr Joan Chiao, an assistant Professor of Psychology working in the Brain, Behaviour, Cognition and Social Psychology programmes.  She is also affiliated with the Asian American Studies programme, among others;

Kate Blizinsky, a grad student interested in - wouldn’t you know it - the neurology of stress and well-being.

Speaking purely as a know-nothing racist white man, I find the dynamic opposites used in this study misleading from the European perspective.  To my cavalier mind, the individualism of Europeans is not polarised in that evolutionary human way against the collectivism of East Asians, but against the Europeans’ own weak cooperative nature.  We Europeans cannot and do not seek to collectivise, and lose ourselves therein.  That is an affront to our nature.  I strongly contend that if Europeans ever “slough off their anxiety” and so evolve away from individualism, it would not be towards indifference.

I am reminded from long ago of a couple of television programmes on military confrontations with East Asians, one being Slim’s campaign in Burma and the other the forced retreat from Gloucester Hill in Korea.  What those two programmes left me with was the negligible (not to say pathological) value which, respectively, the Japanese and Chinese soldiers attached to life.  In both programmes, the British ex-soldiers described them as vermin throwing themselves into the fire of the enemy.  These were not men, for they did not behave in any way the Brits knew men to behave, and killing them was not difficult or a cause for regret.

We Europeans can cooperate on the basis of our natural values, but it takes a certain effort.  It is not our default position.  We definitely cannot “do” blind collectivism like the East Asians, and I don’t accept that the polar opposite to East Asian collectivism is our innate individualism.  It might be something closer to the chaotic assertiveness endemic among Sub-Saharan Africans.  Perhaps a third leg to Africa - ending no doubt in West Africa - would make the research more complete and enlightening.  It certainly seems to me that more racial space and a greater degree of subtle thinking is required of anyone seeking to split this psychological log.  But what we have in this study is a Chinese woman who probably doesn’t comprehend very much about us, and a Jew whose “interest” would, in some hands, lend itself well to the tribal delights of pathologisation.

So with that (perhaps unfair) caveat, here are the money quotes:

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 09:18 PM in Psychology
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The Cult of Multi-Culturalism

I ran into a fantastic site about the formation and mechanics of cults that I thought I might post here; this site makes a point of not naming or listing any actual cults which I think is the right way to go about it.  Both Drs. Lifton and Singer engaged in years long study of cults and this link highlights their findings.    When you read the excerpts here think of Multi-Culturalism and your daily interactions with people at school, church, and work.    Multi-Culturalism clearly has many of the earmarks of a gigantic cult, with strong elements of mind-control, which is probably as good as explanation as any as why so many don’t seem to be able to look at the facts about things.    I’ve highlighted some portions of the website and added my own commentary in italics.

One thing though, most definitions of a cult include the presence of an individual, a living person who is at the center of the cult members’ attention and adulation, and Multi-Culturalism does not have such a person…yet!     

What is Mind Control?

Mind control (also known as “brainwashing,” “coercive persuasion,” and “thought reform”) refers to a process in which a group or individual systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s). Describes multi-culturalism in one succinct sentence, how do they do that!!??

Such methods include the following:

extensive control of information in order to limit alternatives from which members may make “choices”

pressured public confessions

Dr. Robert J. Lifton’s Eight Criteria for Thought Reform

Milieu Control. This involves the control of information and communication both within the environment and, ultimately, within the individual, resulting in a significant degree of isolation from society at large. Yep, print media, radio and TV are already largley controlled. Efforts are now under way to do the same to the internet.

Mystical Manipulation. There is manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated by the group or its leaders in order to demonstrate divine authority or spiritual advancement or some special gift or talent that will then allow the leader to reinterpret events, scripture, and experiences as he or she wishes. Hmmmm…The Summer of Love (1967), Woodstock (1969), the Manifestations of 1968 in Europe, the entire 1960’s ultimately as it is presented here in the states .  Peace bro!  

Demand for Purity. The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection. The induction of guilt and/or shame is a powerful control device used here.  Very much so,no question. 

Confession. Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group. There is no confidentiality; members’ “sins,” “attitudes,” and “faults” are discussed and exploited by the leaders.

Sacred Science. The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute. Truth is not to be found outside the group. The leader, as the spokesperson for God or for all humanity, is likewise above criticism.

Continued...

Posted by Alex on Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 06:41 PM in Psychology
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La Griffe on the math sex gap

An email arrived in my inbox today from that indefatigable chercheur de la vérité, he of the lion’s claw.  It announced a new addition to his website, titled The Math Sex Gap revisited: a Theory of Everyone.  It features Prodigy eviscerating two papers that have appeared in 2008, both of which found cultural bias to be the cause of the gap, then introducing his own Theory of Everyone which accounts for race, culture and geography.  Culture, you ask?  Only this much:-

We should all be grateful for the thought of La Griffe and all his like.  Without their contribution there would be no counter-argument besides commonsense to those who do their best to undermine intellectual salience for no better reason than it is white and male.  Or as Prodigy says to his feminist audience, “I always enjoy visiting La La Land where a gap-free society defines the goal of human striving.”

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 01:36 PM in Psychology
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Black-white student room-shares raise some black student grades - whites get to be less prejudiced

So Natalie Shook, a young and not unattractive, not-Jewish psychologist at Ohio State University, specialises in ...

exploring prejudice reduction through intergroup contact. Specifically, I am interested in how automatically activated racial attitudes are affected by successful interracial relationships, and vice versa.

Natalie may or may not be room-sharing with her gris eminence, Russell Fazio, but she certainly likes to work with him.  His research ...

centers upon the study of attitudes. ... We have proposed a model of attitudes as associations in memory between the attitude object and one’s evaluation of the object. Our concern has been with the likelihood that such evaluations will be activated automatically from memory upon the individual’s encountering the attitude object. ... In particular, the research has focused upon (a) the influence that accessible attitudes have upon attention, categorization, judgment and, ultimately, behavior, and (b) the functional value of such attitudes. The implications of this view of attitudes are currently being examined in the domain of prejudice. The role of both automatic and more motivated, controlled processes, on race-related judgments and behavior are under investigation. We also are conducting research on the implicit development of attitudes via classical conditioning, attitude formation via exploratory behavior, and implicit measures of attitude.

So what these intellectual lovebirds are setting out to do is prove that white prejudice is learned and can be unlearned.  Their latest two papers, which relate to studies conducted in 2001 and 2002, are:-

Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Roommate relationships: A comparison of interracial and same-race living situations. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 11, 425-437.

Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Interracial roommate relationships: An experimental test of the contact hypothesis. Psychological Science, 19, 717-723.

However, ISO’s press office marketed the Shook-Fazio papers thus:-

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 08:04 PM in Psychology
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Clues to the evolution of religious faith

This morning the Telegraph ran a short news feature titled, “People who believe in God are more helpful.

Scientists say that those who frequently pray and attend religious services report more charitable donations and volunteer work

However the review, published in the journal Science, does suggest that believers acting for the greater good may be doing so to enhance their own reputation among friends and acquaintances.

In one experiment, volunteers who had been told that a dead student’s ghost had been seen in the experiment room cheated less on a test than those who had not.

In another, children who were told that a fictional character called Princess Alice was watching them were less likely to disobey their instructions.

In Science, the authors wrote: “These findings are consistent with the idea that outward evidence of religious devotion may engender more trust.”

The evidence also suggests that trust in other members of a religious group is higher when those groups involve a greater degree of commitment, for example in stricter forms of religious belief, such as Mormonism.

The authors say that the research supports the idea that in early societies religion helped to foster social cohesion by encouraging cooperation.

The original paper is titled The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality and is by Norenzayan and Shariff, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.  The abstract reads:-

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, October 3, 2008 at 07:32 PM in Psychology
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A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect

Richard D. Fuerle

The Flynn Effect, discovered by Richard Lynn (Lynn, 1977) and documented and named for James R. Flynn (Flynn, 1984, 1987), is a world-wide increase in IQ scores of about 3 IQ points per decade.  That is, people today score higher on an old IQ test than people the same age did who took the same test decades earlier.

By suggesting the malleability of intelligence and the possibility that tweaking the environment might increase it, the Flynn Effect has raised the hopes of egalitarians, who believe that “all the races are equal in intelligence” (United Nations, 1950;  also Flynn, 1999) and fervently want to erase the black-white IQ gap.  Unfortunately, the cause of the Flynn Effect has not yet been pinpointed and, until it is, a program cannot be designed that will put the cause of the Flynn Effect to work increasing black intelligence.  Moreover, as many experts suspect, the Flynn Effect may be only an increase in IQ scores, not an increase in real intelligence (i.e., the genetic potential for high intelligence), which may actually be declining (Lynn, 1996).

A possible explanation for the increase in IQ scores is that children today mature sooner, both physically and mentally, than children did decades ago (Sarich, 1999).  Today’s children score higher, not because their real intelligence has increased, but because their brains are more mature.  A 10 year old today has a brain that has grown faster and has more neural connections than the brain of a 10 year old who lived, say, 50 years ago.  Because today’s 10 year olds have brains that, perhaps, 12 year olds had 50 years ago, they do better on an IQ test taken by 10 year olds 50 years ago.  Psychologists think they are comparing identical groups of children – 10 year olds to 10 year olds, but they are actually comparing apples and oranges – 10 year old brains to 12 year old brains.  Real intelligence has not increased, children just acquire it sooner, and fully mature people today may actually be less intelligent than fully mature people were decades ago.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, January 11, 2008 at 04:35 PM in Psychology
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Women drivers and homosexuals

How gratifying when some geek researches an area of extreme and totally unacceptable male prejudice, and only ... confirms it.  Plus, in this case, an unexpected bonus.

From the Mail article, with apologies for the eggregious use of dishonest homosexual labels:-

Gay men are as bad as women at navigating, research has shown.  Both share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around, a study suggests.  They are also slower to take in spatial information than heterosexual men.

... researchers say it is likely to make driving in a strange environment more challenging for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, conducted computer-based tests of spatial learning and memory on 140 volunteers recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines.  They showed that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses.  But there were also differences between gay and heterosexual men and straight and lesbian women.

The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University. In one,

... the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find a hidden submerged platform.  Cues in the form of pictures, doorways, a lamp, a bookcase and other landmarks were sited in different places.

The other task,

... the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” - musical tones - by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, January 4, 2008 at 06:05 PM in Psychology
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The end of the Flynn Effect

We never knew for sure whether it was real, what caused it or whether it was limited only to the left side of the curve.  But the Flynn Effect appears to be at the end of its days in Europe, at least.

This from the Times:-

WE ARE ABOUT AS SMART AS WE’RE GOING TO GET, SAYS IQ PIONEER
* Test Results are starting to level out
* Morality skills are the next step

It is a common refrain, repeated in response to every new television reality show and every bumper crop of school exam results: society is dumbing down. Scientists have long argued the opposite, pointing to the now widely accepted “Flynn effect”, which shows that over the past century average IQ scores have improved across the developed world, irrespective of class or creed.

Now the man who first observed this effect, the psychologist James Flynn, has made another observation: intelligence test scores have stopped rising.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, December 18, 2006 at 08:38 PM in Psychology
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Book review of “Breeding between the Lines” by Alon Ziv

This is a book review of “Breeding between the lines: Why interracial people are healthier and more attractive,” by Alon Ziv, 184 pp., Barricade Books, 2006, ISBN: 1569803064. My preliminary impression that the book most likely doesn’t have decent data in it is confirmed.

Continued...

Posted by J Richards on Saturday, October 14, 2006 at 12:06 AM in Anthropology,  Books,  Ethnicity and Ethnic Genetic Interests,  Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity,  IQ and Heredity,  Psychology,  Race realism,  That Question Again
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Consciousness, power or truth … three points for a new compass

A subject that crops up pretty regularly at MR is the profound unsuitability of the standard left-right political spectrum, as expressed in the seating arrangements in revolutionary French parliamentary life and employed in the standard political compass.  The correlation of anarchism <> fascism and collectivism <> libertarianism simply cannot process, and so mischaracterises, radical-right or even fundamentally Conservative thinking.  Nowhere is that more true than with the very normal human characteristic of racial consciousness, and if you want to know why just visit the front page of politicalcompass.org where you can read:-

The idea was developed by a political journalist with a university counselling background, assisted by a professor of social history.  They’re indebted to people like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno for their ground-breaking work in this field.

There is a body of psychological research that affirms the conventional axes, as John Ray has often attested here.  I contend that this is prejudiced by the researchers’ own immersion in the liberal analysis.  They do not ask the questions that would test true radical-right motivation and represent it accurately.  The result is nothing more than a test of liberalism.

So, I wondered whether political orientation could be addressed by using a system that, from the outset, describes the radical right and allows the liberal sleepers to fall where they will.  It does not matter where (it would likely be bottom right, off the chart!).

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, October 8, 2006 at 04:46 PM in Psychology
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Oh for G-d’s sake: insane miscegenation propaganda

Interesting new book out this week

Breeding Between the Lines: Why Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive

by Alon Ziv

Book Description This book combines sex, race, health and genetics in a daring new theory. Written with accessible, direct prose, anecdotes, analogies, and examples from human and animal studies, it is sure to spark debate in a massive way.

Jay Phelan, Author of Mean Genes: Breeding Between the Lines is that rare book that is insightful and revolutionary, while remaining compulsively readable and downright fun.

Alon Ziv, Alon Ziv, why is that name pinging my Jewdar?

A member of the group least likely to miscegenate (with the world’s highest mean IQ as a direct result) persuades the rest of us to miscegenate in an insightful, revolutionary, readable and downright fun book.

Yay, more jewish psyops.

Addendum by J Richards

Svy, I simply have to add a few things to this entry, and I don’t think you would mind.

Here is the cover of the book by Alon Ziv.

Is the mixed race woman a match for white beauty?

Alon Ziv has to be insane if he believes that the broad-nosed and masculine mixed-race woman looks better.  Can people in their right mind believe that attractive white women can be improved upon if non-whites are absorbed into the white gene pool?

Continued...

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 at 09:06 PM in Anthropology,  Ethnicity and Ethnic Genetic Interests,  Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity,  Psychology,  Race realism,  That Question Again
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Interracial crime is worse than intraracial crime

This will be a short post.  Interracial crime is worse than intraracial crime because interracial crime leads to racism, which is a thought crime and grounds for firing, divorce, ostracization, anti-social behavior, etc.  In other words, interracial crime is worse because it does more damage.

Note: this is a speculative post, and its purpose is QA testing; rip it apart folks.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Friday, August 18, 2006 at 04:20 PM in Law & Order,  Psychology,  Race realism
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Neuropolitics

There is an interesting site here that appears to be run by two microbiologists named Brack and Zhang.  They have the entirely commendable aim of finding what the biological influences on political orientation are.  And some of their findings sound fun indeed.  For instance:

“In our most recent survey, Liberals in general were 43% more likely to report general anxiety disorder than Conservatives. They were 115% more likely to report panic disorders, 119% more likely to report agoraphobic symptoms, 118% more likely to report OCD symptoms. and 54% more likely to report social anxiety disorder.  When broken down further into Very Conservative, Conservative, Liberal and Very Liberal cohorts, the numbers spread further apart. The Very Conservatives have the lowest rates of anxiety disorders, the Very Liberals the highest.

Sadly, we cannot get too carried away by that finding.  It runs contrary to decades of previous research on the subject—research of which Brack & Zhang seem to be unaware.  In properly sampled surveys, the correlation between anxiety/neuroticism and politics has repeatedly been found to be negligible.  See for instance here.  And the “sampling” employed by Brack & Zhang is ludicrous.  They base their conclusions on people who respond to internet surveys—a group which can in no way be claimed to be representative of the population at large.

Another problem with the Brack and Zhang reports is that they give the statistical significance of the differences they find as if it were a big deal.  But statistical significance is only a means of allowing for small sample sizes and their “samples” are large in statistical terms.  It may help if I point out that with a sample of 400 people (the sort of “sample” they use) a totally negligible correlation of .10 would be shown as statistically significant.  They would be much more impressive from a scholarly point of view if the first report of their findings were in terms of standard descriptive statistics such as (say) the Pearson product-moment correlations between their variables.

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, April 10, 2006 at 09:13 PM in Psychology
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‘g’ and its measures..

I am one of those awful people who mention IQ in public from time to time so I thought a few quick words of background on it might not go astray:

IQ tests exist because ‘g’ (general intelligence) exists.  It just is a fact that people who are good at solving one sort of problem tend to be good at solving lots of other different problems.  Some problems, however, are particularly good at detecting people who are generally good at solving problems.  Researchers speak of such “good-predictor” problems as ones that “load highly on ‘g’”.  And, pesky though it may be,  the problems that load most highly on ‘g’ (i.e. the ones that are the purest measure of general intelligence) are also the ones that differentiate blacks and whites most strongly.  As Charles Murray explains:

“As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered ‘g’, proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be “most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g.”  In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory.

A concrete example illustrates how Spearman’s hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as “forward digit span” and “backward digit span.” In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject’s score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order.

Digits-backward is much more ‘g’-loaded than digits-forward.  Try it yourself and you will see why.  Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder.  The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward.  It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income, or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant.  Reluctance to “act white” is irrelevant.  Motivation is irrelevant.  There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting”.

Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, March 25, 2006 at 10:13 AM in Psychology
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Blacks don’t care

Or very few of them do anyway

“A Harvard University study suggests white Americans are far more likely than their black counterparts to die soon after the death of a spouse.  The longitudinal study of 410,272 elderly U.S. couples indicates the “widowhood effect”—the increased probability of death among new widows and widowers—is large and enduring among white couples, but undetectable among black couples. That, say researchers, suggests blacks may somehow manage to extend marriage’s well-documented health benefits into widowhood.”

More here

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, March 3, 2006 at 09:29 AM in Psychology
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Hey!  Fathers matter after all!

Mark Richo will like the report below but it must have the feminists grinding their teeth.  Fancy fathers being good even for DAUGHTERS!  I myself have always said (I’ve said it here) that “Daddy’s Girl” is one of the most beautiful human relationships so I am glad to see that the facts bear out that judgment.  I have always greatly regretted that I did not have a daughter but I had a very good relationship with a beautiful little stepdaughter so I do not feel totally deprived.  She is now a radiant and happily married young woman

Girls who have good relationships with their fathers tend to wait longer to have their first sexual intercourse experience, according to a new study by a University of Texas at Austin sociologist.  In a study published in this month’s Journal of Family Issues, Dr. Mark Regnerus reports that girls who claimed to have very low quality relationships with their fathers were nearly twice as likely to lose their virginity over the course of a year than girls who reported very high quality father-daughter relationships.  No similar correlation was found between girls and their mothers, or between boys and either parent.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 at 08:10 PM in Psychology
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Boys will be boys: The path to social justice!

Science Daily reports that: “In addition to triggering a depression-like social withdrawal syndrome, repeated defeat by dominant animals leaves a mouse with an enduring “molecular scar” in its brain that could help to explain why depression is so difficult to cure”.  I suspect one of the reasons “boys will be boys” public school violence is so tolerated is the fact that to oppose it would be racist due to the racial differences in testosterone level, age of onset of pubescent muscle mass and general aggression level.  After all, those young white males are just getting their commupance for their ancestral guilt!  And gays are born—not made—too.  If you don’t believe me, just ask The Federal Government of the United States: “sexual pressure [in prisons—JAB] ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening.”  And since black and hispanics rape white male prisoners more often than any other interracial assault category we might think of this as more social justice from the government’s institutions.  On the other hand, since the government is doing those “born gay” white males a favor by “awakening” their homosexual potential, perhaps the white males should be charged a therapy fee for their being “sexually pressured”.  As a matter of fact, young white school boys should probably pay for having their neurological development altered by black and hispanic thugs in their schools since this, too, is simply to “usher, guide or shepherd” their naturally submissive posture toward their racial superiors!

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 at 02:19 PM in Psychology
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The neurodevelopmental boost of moms from childbirth

A lot of feminists like to blither about how they aren’t mature enough to raise a child until they are running a risk of Downs syndrome if not menopause. Rational people wonder how they could be so stupid but it may be a natural result of childlessness.

The upshot of pregnancy, Dr. Kinsley says, is a maternal brain changed forever in critical ways—not just different, but vastly improved.

Can you imagine a drug to produce the neurological enhancements of pregnancy?  A number of young women might choose to enhance their mental function thinking they needed that “competitive edge” to “get established in a career”.  Then, much to their dismay, they realize they are being stupid and stand a hope of choosing to have children before it is too late!  Who knows, they might even choose to drop the entire project of political correctness for the sham it is.  As such they might start voting more rationally but also start demanding characteristics of the sires of their children that made more sense.

Continued...

Posted by James Bowery on Sunday, February 19, 2006 at 02:31 PM in Psychology
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Rationalism versus fundamentalism.

In Stanovich’s book The Robot’s Rebellion, reviewed here, he argues that humans have the capability to become rational rather than dogmatic, emotional, fundamentalist or fanatical. I wish he would have provided additional prescriptions for means to achieve that in a society, but we will have to be satisfied with some speculation rather than hard facts on how to approach that goal.

One of the reasons that I embrace eugenics is because with increased intelligence, humans can overcome their irrational emotional brains—with some effort. The more intelligent and educated a society is on average, the more rational and less emotional that society can become in making collective, and individual decisions, that will lead to better realized results. The most partisan and contentious conflicts all around us today are those that are laden with human emotion—abortion, affirmative action, warfare, labor disputes, etc. We have little conflict in doing medical research, but we become highly partisan when it comes to who will pay for medical treatment.

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Saturday, February 18, 2006 at 12:45 PM in Psychology
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Racist babies

I was not going to comment on this article (summarizing research by David J. Kelly reported in Developmental Science  and Yair Bar-Haim reported in Psychological Science ) but perhaps I should.  What it shows is that babies are “racist” from 3 months old.  White babies prefer white faces and black babies prefer black faces.  But it all depends on exposure.  White babies exposed to an equal mix of black and white faces in their early weeks show no preference.

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Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 10:27 AM in Psychology
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The dimensionality of politics

It is a commonplace to observe that a simple division of politics into Left and Right fails to account for much of the real-world diversity of political attitudes.  People with extreme or unusual political views tend in fact to dismiss totally the utility of any Left/Right description of political attitudes.  People frequenting this blog seem generally to fall into that category.

Libertarians (another unusual minority) also are vigorously opposed to a single Left/Right dimension.  They are always promoting a two dimensional description of political attitudes.  The political compass and the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” are popular applications of such theories. Below is one example of such a description:

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Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, February 5, 2006 at 09:01 AM in Psychology
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Casting a Spelke on the times

I was intrigued to see this morning’s Times bravely announce that, to quote Harvard Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke, “core geometrical knowledge is a universal constituent of the human mind.”

The Times reports:-

THE people of an isolated tribe in the Amazonian rainforest can understand geometry as well as American schoolchildren, according to research that suggests the branch of mathematics is deeply ingrained in human nature.

Though they have never been taught about triangles, symmetry or right angles, the Munduruku people have an intuitive grasp of these concepts that shows basic geometry to be part of humanity’s innate intellectual tool kit, scientists believe. In a series of geometrical tests devised by French and American researchers, Munduruku children and adults achieved similar scores to schoolchildren from the US who had learnt the subject in maths classes for several years.

The findings offer strong evidence that the human mind has evolved a fundamental ability to understand geometrical forms and principles.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 06:51 PM in Psychology
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