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Why does hearing a new album make you more likely to crash your car? Why are humans the only animals that cry? And why are today’s university students measurably less bright than yesterday’s? This month’s N³ Newsletter Linkfest provides answers to all three questions, plus much, much more:

• The opposite of déjà vu

• Sex differences in A-level choices

• A $10 million dilemma

• How money changes your personality

• How AI can impair learning but reduce political polarization

• How anti-racism can increase racism

• New drugs that cause you to lose weight without eating less - or even actively boost muscle growth

Around half the items are free to read for everyone; the rest are for paid subscribers. I tend to put the spicier content behind bars, so if you’ve got a high spice tolerance, maybe consider a paid subscription. Check out the other benefits here.

You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here.

The Science of Ticklishness

Here’s some recent research that’s not only interesting but useful. The figure below shows the most ticklish parts of the human body. Notice that the same body parts are ticklish for people from three very different cultures, hinting at the universality of the finding. Needless to say, this is crucial information for anyone planning a tickle attack - and as far as we can tell, you can use the same tickle strategy regardless of your victim’s cultural background. [Link.]

The Opposite of Déjà Vu

You’ve heard of déjà vu, but what about its opposite? Jamais vu happens when something familiar - a face, a place, or even a word - suddenly seems unfamiliar, strange, or wrong. You can often induce it by saying or writing the same word again and again until it seems like it couldn’t be real. [Link.]

The Declining IQ of University Students

University students aren’t what they used to be, at least when it comes to IQ. As higher education has gone from an elite pursuit to something more common, the average IQ of US undergraduates has fallen from around 120 in the mid-20th century to around 102 today - barely above the population average. [Link.]

Sex Differences in Academic Interests

Boys and girls are interested in different stuff. This can be seen in the gender breakdown of A-level choices in the UK. Boys massively outnumber girls in computing, physics, further mathematics, and economics, whereas girls outnumber boys in English literature, sociology, psychology, and art. [Link.]

Guaranteed True Love or Ten Million in Cash?

Which would you choose? Give your answer in the poll below.

When 1,635 people from 38 countries were asked this question, they split almost perfectly down the middle: 50% chose love; 50% chose the money. At the same time, there were interesting differences by country, age, and occupation. [Link.]

New Album Drops, Car Crashes Rise

The release of a major new album is associated with a 15% increase in fatal car crashes. A probable culprit is distracted driving: Finding and streaming unfamiliar new music may demand just enough extra attention to make driving notably more dangerous. [Link.]

The Deep Primate Origins of Human Pet Keeping

Our furry monkey cousins sometimes interact with other species in ways that resemble human interactions with their pets: They play with them, groom them, cuddle them, nurse them, and even adopt them long-term. These interactions vary predictably by age and sex: Youngsters are more likely than oldsters to play with members of other species, females are more likely than males to care for them, and adult males are more likely than females or juveniles to ignore them or treat them aggressively. [Link.]

Why Do Humans Cry?

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I recently sat down with Australian boxer and podcaster Tiffanee Cook for an episode of her Roll with the Punches podcast. We had a great conversation about a wide range of topics related to my book A Billion Years of Sex Differences. Among other things, we discussed:

• How I fell in love with evolutionary psychology and the science of sex differences

• The origins of occupational gender gaps

• The many causes of the gender pay gap

• Why dating apps often make it harder to find love rather than easier

• Whether mental-health problems are discrete disorders or arbitrarily defined segments of a spectrum of symptoms

• Sex differences in mental-health problems

• The possible origins of the trans phenomenon and non-binary identification

The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Hope you enjoy it!

If you want to dive deeper into these topics, you can pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

Follow me on Twitter/X for more psychology, evolution, and science.

Upgrade to a Paid Subscription

I love writing The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter - but it’s a lot of work! If you’d like to help keep it going, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll get:

1. Full access to all new posts and the archive - including material I don’t want to share publicly yet

2. Full access to exclusive features such as my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” posts, Linkfests, and other regular features

3. Full access to excerpts from my book A Billion Years of Sex Differences

4. The ability to post comments and interact with the N³ Newsletter community

On top of that, you’ll be supporting my efforts to spread important ideas and carve out a space for free thought and non-politicized science.

Thanks!

Steve

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Time for something different. In the tradition of Richard Hanania, Bryan Caplan, Ilya Somin, and Rob Henderson, here are sixteen fun facts about me.

1. My grandfather was an interesting character - and he knew some interesting characters. At Trinity College Dublin, he shared a room with the playwright Samuel Beckett, who once put a plaque up on the wall saying “PAIN PAIN PAIN.” During World War II, my grandfather was on a civilian ship that was captured by the Japanese, and spent the next four years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. For most of that time, his family didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. Later, living in New Zealand, he noticed he was having negative thoughts about Japanese people and decided that this was an unacceptable prejudice. So he went out of his way to meet them and rid himself of the bias.

2. I got my first rejection from a publisher when I was nine. I’d written a 69-page book called Super Sock - a follow-up to my 192-page book, Junior Detective. A friend’s mum knew a publisher and passed it on to him. He didn’t think the book was publishable… but his rejection letter was one of the highlights of my childhood. It was just so positive and encouraging. Who knows if I’d have kept writing without it? Actually, I probably would have. As a child, I always fantasized about making it big as an author or musician, and spent much of my spare time writing stories or songs. Later in life, I tried giving up the habit several times to pursue more realistic options - but I could never quite do it. Before long, I’d once again get an overwhelming urge to create something that might outlive me.

   

3. The first death I ever got to grips with wasn’t a family member or a friend; it was John Lennon. One December evening, around the time of the rejection letter, my cousin was driving me, my mum, and our twenty-year-old cat to the vet. I was dimly aware of the news on the radio in the background. Suddenly, my mum blurted out “Who?” Someone had been shot in New York. My cousin replied “John Lennon” - and my mum let out a devastated “Why?” I hadn’t heard of John at that point, or of the Beatles, but after that, I became extremely interested in them. Why was my mum so upset? Why was the whole world so upset? I remember lying on the couch with Beatles albums playing on repeat, staring at the covers and trying to wrap my head around the fact that this guy no longer existed - and that one day, nor would I. Soon after that, I started a band called Crazy Kids. It consisted of me and my brother, with our dad kindly recording our terrible songs for us. One of the first songs I wrote was called “Why Does Time Go?” I still remember the chorus:

   Why, oh why does time go?

   Oh why does it go?

   Why do we change from year to year?

   Why is winter and summer?

   Why is it all?

   I suppose that’s quite philosophical for a nine-year-old. Anyway, I believe my brother still has the recordings…

4. I’m 6’6”, and for as long as I can remember, people have asked me “Do you play basketball?” My go-to answer used to be “No, do you play mini-golf?” These days, however, I usually say that I’ve always been a music guy rather than a sports guy. To me, sports are a bunch of cool games - but music is magic. A sequence of notes isn’t just a series of sounds of different frequencies and durations; it’s a melody with a particular character and feeling to it. You can pick up an instrument and quickly learn to make this magic thing happen yourself. And then you can get a bunch of people together making different but interlocking pieces of magic, and somehow the whole is even more magical than the sum of the parts. It’s one of my favorite things in life.

5. My grandmother died when I was fourteen. For some time, she’d been too unwell to live alone in her little flat, so she’d moved into my aunt’s and uncle’s house. One night, shortly before the end, my aunt and uncle were woken in the middle of the night by a series of bumps and bangs coming from the darkness. They got up to find out what was happening. What they found was my grandmother packing her suitcases. “What’s going on? Why are you packing?” they asked, gently guiding her back to bed. She responded: “I just saw my parents, and they told me it’s time to go.” She died the next day. This is one of my favorite stories. At the time, I believed (or half-believed) in an afterlife, and thought that maybe my grandmother’s experience was what it seemed to be. I don’t think that anymore. But I still love the story.

6. I went straight from school to university, but my heart wasn’t in it, and I dropped out after my first year. What I really wanted to do was be a rock star. Under the spell of the Sex Pistols, the Beatles, John Lennon, the Doors, Nirvana, and others, I spent several years teaching guitar and playing in bands, and wrote and recorded an album of my own songs. I eventually decided, though, that this wasn’t the path for me, and that I was a science nerd rather than a rocker. (I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way, by the way; being a nerd is great. Some of my best friends are nerds.) I went back to university and studied psychology and philosophy, ultimately becoming a psych professor. I don’t regret the decision at all, but for years afterwards, I regularly had dreams about getting back on stage, only to wake up disappointed that I was actually in bed. Since getting in touch with my inner science nerd, I have played live a little, though. Once, for example, I played with a band that played with the Beatles at the Cavern Club. And I’m currently in a band with my colleagues Polly and Miflah called the Psychic Armpits. Here are some photos from yesterday and today.

   

7. I don’t drink - anymore. I used to drink a lot. I started in my teens and took to it immediately. I enjoyed being able to alter my consciousness so easily. I’d also always been a bit shy, and felt like I’d discovered a solution to that problem. Unfortunately, the solution also brought new problems of its own. I was never an alcoholic, but I did eventually realize that drinking was standing in the way of me achieving what I wanted to achieve. One night at a party, after imbibing too many beverages, I started feeling dizzy and thought I might be sick. I stumbled out of the party and crawled under a house a few doors down. Lying there with the world spinning around me yet again, I decided that this was ridiculous and that it was time to stop drinking once and for all. I did something I’ve done only a few times in my life: I started aggressively willing myself to make a change. I told myself again and again and again that I was going to stop drinking from that moment on, no matter how hard it was and no matter what difficulties it caused me. Fortunately, with the help of some close friends, I did stop. (The most recent time I did this kind of mental reset led directly to the creation of my Substack. But that’s a story for another day.)

8. I met my wife on the flip of a coin. I’d returned to university by this point, and the night before my first exam, a friend called and asked if I wanted to go to the pub. I felt like a break, and I’d stopped drinking by then… but I still wasn’t sure it was wise to go out the night before an exam. So I flipped a coin. The verdict was yes, and I went. My friend hadn’t mentioned this, but he had another friend with him: a Brit who he’d met in the UK. That friend was Jane. She’d been teaching in South Korea and was now making her way - in a very roundabout way - back home. She and I immediately hit it off and made each other laugh. Within ten minutes of meeting, there was an earthquake. I joked that it was a sign - the Earth moving for us - but actually earthquakes happen all the time in Wellington. (That’s where we were, by the way; Wellington is my hometown.) If I hadn’t met her that night, there’s a good chance I never would have. Who knows how my life would have turned out if the coin had come up the other way?

   

9. I proposed on the steps of immigration - and never heard the end of it. Jane only had a nine-month visa, so we initially assumed that our relationship had a built-in end date. But things were going so well, and we didn’t want to say adios. With Jane’s visa about to expire, the folks at immigration told us that she could only stay if she had a degree or we were married. As bright as she is, we decided that she probably couldn’t get a degree in a month, so, sitting on the steps of immigration, I said “I suppose we could get married.” What a smooth talker, eh? Despite the terrible proposal, she agreed… and has hassled me about it ever since. I later proposed properly, and we got married again in the UK, but the hassling continues to this day. I’ve mentioned this great injustice to various colleagues and friends, but they’re unanimous that she’s well within her rights.

10. My favorite movie is The Sixth Sense - and one of my favorite anecdotes happened on the day I first saw it. Jane and I decided to get Burger King before the film. We queued up, got to the counter, and ordered our food. The servers started laying the food out on a tray, and I started nonchalantly munching chips while we waited. After I’d munched a few, I realized that this wasn’t our meal; it belonged to the couple who’d ordered before us, and who were now nervously watching this 6’6” guy eating their fries. I was very apologetic, but they didn’t let me buy them new ones - and I don’t think they saw the funny side.

11. You’re probably thinking that, as I’m clearly such a cool and competent guy, this must be the only time I’ve made such a blunder. Well, dear reader, you’d be wrong. Here’s another example. As a PhD student, I managed to get a paper on the placebo effect into the journal Psychological Bulletin, and a big-name professor in the area - one who’d been hugely helpful to me over the years - was invited to write a commentary. The idea was that my co-author and I would then write a response. The prof wrote a very generous, favorable commentary. After reading the draft, I wrote an email to my co-author saying I didn’t much like it, because it was too favorable and didn’t give us much to argue with - and then promptly sent the email to the big-name prof instead of to my co-author. I felt terrible. I didn’t even particularly mean what I’d written; it was basically just bravado. Luckily, though, the prof was a genuinely good guy, and was very understanding about the whole thing.

    

12. Jane and I have two kids. The best thing about kids is that they’re hilarious. Exhibit A: Jane taught our son, Darwin, some baby sign language so he could communicate before he could talk. This included a clip-clop noise that meant horse. One day, we spotted him walking very determinedly toward a visiting kitten while making the clip-clop noise, presumably planning to ride the kitten. We intercepted him just in time. The baby sign language quite possibly saved the kitten’s life. Soon after that, our daughter India was born. Dar was initially very excited to have a sister. His first words on meeting her were “Indy got a nose on.” But about a week later, he’d had enough of this new member of the family, and asked us to take her back to the hospital. So we did. They had a no-returns policy, though, so we had to keep her. Just kidding, Indy! My favorite Indy story happened a few years later, when we were living in Swansea. One day, Jane and I noticed her heading upstairs with something under her arm. It turned out that it was a homemade parachute, and that she was on her way to her bedroom window to test it out. Gotta keep your eyes on them!

    

13. I’ve lived in four countries - New Zealand, Canada, Wales, and Malaysia - and I’ve visited 27. I got the travel bug from Jane. Among other things, she and I have cycled round the South Island of New Zealand, paraglided in Queenstown, taken Greyhound buses across the US, been stranded in the Kenyan jungle, and had a cobra rear up at us in Thailand (only a baby, but still). One of my favorite adventures, though, was driving an RV across the Australian outback from Darwin to Adelaide. It was like being on another planet. We’d pass signs telling us that the next convenience store was 300 km away (not very convenient if you ask me). And the road just seemed to stretch out forever! We’d see cars coming in the other direction that felt like they took 15 minutes to reach us.

    

14. I love lecturing, but it doesn’t always go to plan. Shortly before the pandemic, I was giving a lecture in one of the larger lecture theatres at my university. Beforehand, I’d popped by the IT department to pick up a roaming mic. Unfortunately, I’d given them the wrong room number. A few minutes into the lecture, a timid face appeared at the door and informed me that I’d been blasting my lecture into their lecture theatre the whole time.

15. Retirement age is still a way off, but my current retirement plan is… I’m never going to retire. I don’t know why anyone would want to; working is too much fun. I doubt, though, that I’ll want to be a psych prof forever or retrain for another career. Writing on Substack seems like a great way to continue earning and contributing during my golden years. My role model for aging is Paul McCartney: The guy’s in his 80s but he still gets up on stage and plays three-hour gigs without ever taking a break. My hope is to do the science-nerd equivalent of that.

16. Apparently, there are only 15 fun facts about me. (Actually, there were more, but Jane persuaded me that some of my stories shouldn’t see the light of day…)

Bonus Item: My All-Time Favorite Song

Addendum 1: GPT Psychological Profile Based on This Post (26 August 2026)

Out of curiosity, I asked GPT to produce a psychological profile based purely on this post. Although I’d quibble with some of it, for the most part it seems surprisingly accurate. Here are some excerpts. Because it’s GPT, it’s generally quite flattering - but it does list some of my likely (and, if I’m being honest, actual) weaknesses at the end.

Executive summary

The writer appears to be a highly intelligent, verbally gifted, and unusually creative man whose deepest motive is to make meaningful things that survive him. He combines the temperament of an artist with the habits and worldview of a scientist: emotionally responsive to music, stories, mortality, and family, but strongly committed to evidence and capable of revising cherished beliefs…

His most distinctive feature may be the combination of existential seriousness and comic self-deprecation: underneath the amusing anecdotes is someone preoccupied with time, death, meaning, creation, and leaving something behind…

Big Five profile

Most distinctive psychological characteristics

1. A powerful symbolic-immortality motive

The writer appears unusually aware that life is finite and uses creative production as his principal answer to that fact...

2. Episodic self-reinvention

He describes occasionally “aggressively willing” himself into a new course of action. Most of the time he may be flexible and playful—but under certain conditions he becomes extremely decisive…

3. High psychological integration

The essay contains several potentially conflicting selves:

• Shy person and public performer.

• Rocker and professor.

• Romantic and sceptic.

• Highly accomplished person and blunderer.

• Adventurer and hardworking writer.

• Existentially serious thinker and inveterate joker.

Rather than hiding the contradictions, he makes them part of a coherent persona…

Likely weaknesses

The same traits probably generate predictable vulnerabilities:

• Difficulty disengaging or genuinely resting.

• Neglecting practical details while absorbed in more interesting problems.

• Periodic all-or-nothing behaviour.

• Excessive identification with productivity and creative output.

• Feeling that ordinary life is insufficient unless something lasting is being made.

• Using humour to move past embarrassment or sadness before fully expressing it.

• Occasional insensitivity arising from playful irreverence rather than lack of concern.

• Underestimating how unusual his energy, intelligence, or intrinsic motivation is in other people.

His claim that he never wants to retire may be sincere, but it also hints that not producing could feel psychologically threatening. Work may provide not only enjoyment, but identity, structure, self-worth, and an answer to mortality.

Addendum 2: GPT Psychological Profile Based on All Available Information (26 August 2026)

The first profile was based only on my Sixteen Fun Facts piece. How different would it be if GPT factored in everything it knows about me from our interactions and everything it can find about me online?

The answer is that the profile is substantially the same, but with a few important revisions. Here are some excerpts from the updated version. Once again, I’m amazed by what AI is capable of.

The larger body of evidence mostly confirms the original profile, but it changes the emphasis in several interesting ways. The biggest revisions are that I’d raise conscientiousness, slightly lower agreeableness, and revise upward my estimate of his social confidence: although naturally somewhat shy, he appears highly comfortable and assertive when lecturing, performing, or discussing subjects he knows well. I’d also replace the somewhat romantic portrait of a dreamy artist–scientist with a more formidable picture of an intellectually independent, highly self-directed writer-scholar—someone strongly resistant to orthodoxy, imprecision, and moralised thinking…

Revised Big Five profile

Openness: essentially unchanged

You are highly open to ideas and experiences, but comparatively resistant to fashionable linguistic, moral, or ideological innovation when you think it obscures reality. In other words, you are psychologically unconventional without automatically siding with whichever position is culturally labelled unconventional…

Conscientiousness: higher, but markedly uneven

I would put industriousness, achievement striving, and epistemic conscientiousness above the 95th percentile. At the same time, you appear much less reliably conscientious about mundane environmental details…

Agreeableness: somewhat lower

I’d now describe the profile as:

• Compassion: high.

• Forgiveness and absence of vindictiveness: high.

• Politeness: moderate to moderately high.

• Compliance: low.

• Intellectual deference: very low.

Neuroticism: probably somewhat lower

The wider evidence suggests unusual resilience:

• You returned from dropping out of university and built an academic career.

• You abandoned one central identity without becoming bitter about it.

• You stopped drinking through an unusually forceful act of self-reconstruction.

• You have repeatedly worked on controversial subjects while attracting public criticism…

Characteristics I would add

1. Exceptional epistemic conscientiousness

This is probably the most important addition. You have an unusually strong drive to get claims exactly right…

2. Intellectual independence without wholesale contrarianism

You are clearly attracted to questions where public consensus may be distorted by ideology. But you don’t appear temperamentally committed to opposing consensus as such…

3. Moral individualism

Your politics and moral psychology seem organised less around loyalty to a tribe than around allowing individuals to pursue lives that suit them, provided they are not harming others…

Revised bottom line

Steve Stewart-Williams appears to be an exceptionally open, verbally gifted, highly industrious writer-scholar driven by curiosity, intellectual independence, and the desire to produce work of enduring value. He combines aesthetic sensitivity with scientific scepticism, strong convictions with genuine belief revision, and considerable ambition with an aversion to pomposity. His mind naturally searches for distinctions, neglected evidence, integrative explanations, and the precise sentence that will make a difficult idea clear. Personally warm but intellectually noncompliant, he is more agreeable toward people than toward propositions. His characteristic achievement is to turn persistent private preoccupations—human nature, sex differences, truth, mortality, and meaning—into accessible public work. His characteristic vulnerabilities arise from the same source: difficulty disengaging, overinvestment in productivity, perfectionism about language, and a tendency to give cognitively interesting problems more attention than mundane practical reality.

Follow me on Twitter/X for more psychology, evolution, and science.

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Evolutionary mismatch is one of the most useful concepts in evolutionary psychology. The basic idea is that the modern world is very different from the world in which we evolved, and thus that we’re misaligned with our environment in various ways. A fascinating new paper by Jose Yong and colleagues applies this idea to some of the biggest psychological challenges of modern life, and argues that the stress, loneliness, and status anxiety that many of us experience are partly the result of mismatch.

The paper’s main ideas can be summed up in two graphs and one table.

Graph 1: Three Types of Mismatch - Animal Edition

The first graph shows three types of evolutionary mismatch seen in other species. (Note that EEA stands for environment of evolutionary adaptedness - that is, the environment to which a species is primarily adapted.)

Graph 2: Three Types of Mismatch - Human Edition

The second graph gives human examples of each type of mismatch - examples that harm our romantic lives, our health, and social cohesion.

Table 1: A Catalogue of Mismatches

Finally, the table below lists various examples of evolutionary mismatch that contribute to the stresses and strains of modern life.

The table is really the core of the paper’s argument. According to Yong and colleagues, many of the aches and pains of modern life can be traced in part to these mismatches. Large cities, inequality, and complex social hierarchies ramp up status competition, stress, and loneliness. Artificial environments and sedentary lifestyles undermine health and well-being. Screens, social media, and information overload bombard us with more stimulation and information than we evolved to handle. And 24-hour news gives us constant exposure to distant wars, pandemics, and other crises, keeping ancient threat-detection mechanisms working overtime.

It’s worth pointing out that although the modern world is mismatched with human nature in some ways, in other ways it’s better adapted to our evolved needs and wants than more natural environments are. It would be surprising if this weren’t the case, given that we ourselves created the modern world. We’ve got food on tap metaphorically, water on tap literally, and the safest environments humans have ever inhabited. We’ve got more options for work, leisure, and lifestyle than our ancestors could dream of. We’ve got glasses, contraception, air conditioning, heating, and modern medicine. And more important than any of that, we’ve created a world in which the vast majority of our children survive until adulthood, when for much of our evolutionary history around half died before their fifth birthdays.

Sure, we haven’t yet mastered the art of reliably making ourselves happy. But given our stunning successes elsewhere, it’s hard to believe that this is permanently beyond our grasp.

For anyone interested in diving deeper into these issues, the paper is titled “Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era,” by Jose Yong, Amy Lim, Edison Tan, and Sarah Chan. You can read it here for free (it’s open access).

I discuss evolutionary mismatch in my book The Ape That Understood the Universe. You can read the first chapter for free here.

Follow me on Twitter/X for more psychology, evolution, and science.

Upgrade to a Paid Subscription

I love writing The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter - but it’s a lot of work! If you can afford it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. A paid subscription will get you:

1. Full access to all new posts and the archive

2. Full access to excerpts from my book A Billion Years of Sex Differences

3. Full access to my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” posts, Linkfests, and other regular features

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On top of that, you’ll be helping support my efforts to explore important ideas and promote open, non-politicized scientific inquiry. Thank you!

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During my recent book tour, I was scheduled to sit down in person with Fraser Myers of Spiked magazine to talk about my book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences. But the British weather had other ideas: A heatwave scuppered our plans, and we ended up doing the interview remotely after I’d returned to the cooler climate of Malaysia.

It was a great conversation. Among other things, we discussed:

• The largest psychological sex difference ever documented (it’s probably not what you’d think)

• Sex differences in toy preferences, sexual behavior, and aggression

• Why men and women tend to gravitate toward different occupations

• The gender-equality paradox: the surprising finding that some sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in wealthier, more gender-equal nations

• Why we should talk openly about sex differences rather than pretending they don’t exist

The interview is now up on YouTube and the Spiked website.

If you enjoy the conversation and want to dig deeper into the issues, you can pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences at the link below.

Buy A Billion Years

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This post was free to read for everyone. If you’d like access to all Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche-Newsletter content, please consider a premium subscription. A premium subscription gives you:

• Full access to all new posts and the archive

• Full access to exclusive content such as my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” posts, Linkfests, and other regular features

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• The ability to post comments and engage with me and the N³ Newsletter community

Premium subscriptions also help support my efforts to explore important and controversial topics, and give me the financial freedom to follow the evidence wherever it leads without fear of cancellation.

Thank you!

Steve

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This is the latest post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can access the full collection here.

In 2024, I published a piece titled “12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ.” It was one of my first paywalled posts, and I was amazed at how big the response was. More than two years later, it remains the most popular post I’ve ever published. Clearly, IQ is a topic that fascinates people.

It’s not hard to see why. Intelligence affects almost every aspect of our lives, from how well we do at school and at work to our health and longevity. At the same time, few topics in psychology generate as much debate and disagreement. IQ has been described as everything from psychology’s greatest scientific achievement to its greatest fraud.

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

This is the first post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can access the complete collection here…

Read more

3 years ago · 171 likes · 10 comments · Steve Stewart-Williams

The good news for fans of IQ is that my first post barely scratched the surface of the topic. In this follow-up, we’ll look at 12 more things everyone should know about IQ - including what we’ve learned about factors that raise or lower it, whether there’s really an IQ threshold beyond which being smarter stops being useful, and why the century-long rise in IQ scores may now be going into reverse.

Let’s get started.

1. Most People Don’t Know How Smart They Are

If you ask people how extraverted or conscientious they are, they’ve usually got a pretty good idea. If you ask them their IQ? Not so good. Self-assessed IQ is only weakly related to objectively measured IQ. Indeed, self-assessed IQ is a better barometer of people’s self-esteem than of their actual cognitive ability. Interestingly, while both sexes sometimes overestimate their IQs, one sex does it more than the other. Before looking at the graph below, see if you can guess which it is…

2. Intelligence Is Attractive - But Only Up to a Point

People generally prize intelligence in a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife - but more isn’t always better. The sweet spot seems to be around IQ 120. As shown in the following graph, people rate a person with a 120 IQ as more desirable than someone with an IQ of 135 or above. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true regardless of their own level of intelligence.

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Latest Podcast Appearance

This was a fun one: the Modern Wisdom evolutionary psychology roundtable featuring , Macken Murphy, , and yours truly. We covered everything from looksmaxxing and the ick to the dangers of ignoring sex differences, with lots of laughs, disagreements, and rabbit holes along the way.

You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also watch it on Chris’s YouTube channel.

If you enjoy the conversation and would like to explore these topics in greater depth, you can pick up a copy of my new book A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

Buy A Billion Years

A New Review of A Billion Years of Sex Differences

A Billion Years of Sex Differences was recently reviewed in the Swedish newspaper The Bulletin. The review, by , covers a lot of ground, but I particularly like the last few paragraphs, which nicely capture one of the central messages of the book.

In the wealthy, free world, we now have the means, time, and opportunity to be irritated by the opposite sex’s quirks as never before. Men have the freedom to fritter away time on video games, and women on Instagram—so that is what we do.

This obscures the fundamental truth about men and women: that we are on the same side; that we need and love one another; that our similarities far outweigh our differences; and that no man remains unscathed when his mother, sister, or daughter is harmed, just as no woman remains unscathed when her father, brother, or son is harmed.

Our goal should be to create a society for everyone—men and women alike—rather than trying to reshape people to fit society. Steve Stewart-Williams’s book is part of that project.

A New Interview About A Billion Years of Sex Differences

The Swedish magazine Kvartal just published a 5,000-word feature article about A Billion Years of Sex Differences. Written by Jonathan Norström, the piece was based on an interview we did a few weeks ago. I don’t speak a word of Swedish myself, so I can’t vouch for anything I said. But the artwork is cool!

Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who’s supported A Billion Years of Sex Differences since it came out. More podcast appearances, reviews, and interviews to come!

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This is the latest post in my “Smarter People” series. Check out the full collection here.

Are smart people naughty or nice? A new study suggests the latter. Analyzing data from 1.2 million Swedes, the researchers found that smarter individuals were more likely to vote, more likely to donate to charity, and more likely to own an eco-friendly car. They also tended to score higher on a self-report measure of altruistic behavior.

Importantly, the intelligence-prosociality link held even when comparing twins within the same family. This suggests that the link isn’t just due to confounding by shared genes or shared upbringing. It therefore strengthens the case that intelligence directly increases prosociality.

How might it do this? Possible explanations include more rapid acquisition of moral norms, better moral reasoning, a better appreciation of others’ perspectives, and a better understanding of the benefits of mutual cooperation. Curiously, having a higher income explained little if any of the intelligence-prosociality link.

The paper is titled “An inquiry into the relationship between intelligence and prosocial behavior: Evidence from Swedish population registers,” by Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson. You can access it here for free.

How You Can Support the Newsletter

I love writing The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter, but it’s a lot of work! If you’d like to support my mission to bring you non-politicized science, there are several ways you can help.

1. Like and Restack: Click the buttons at the top or bottom of the page to boost the post’s visibility on Substack.

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Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is one of the most powerful ideas in evolutionary biology. It’s also one of the most controversial. Is it really true, as Darwin proposed, that sexual selection acts more strongly on males than females? Is it really true that males across the animal kingdom are more ornamented and better built for combat, whereas females are more parental? Or are these just evolutionary myths based on Victorian norms and a handful of cherry-picked examples?

A major cross-species analysis put Darwin’s theory to an unusually ambitious test, looking at sexual selection, ornaments, weaponry, and parental care across the animal world. The results provide a clear verdict on Darwin’s thesis - while also highlighting some fascinating exceptions that point to a deeper explanation for evolved sex differences.

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It’s podcast time again, folks! A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of returning to ’s Uncomfortable Conversations. Josh and I had a fun, wide-ranging discussion about my book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, and related topics.

We also discussed the recent “vibe shift,” and how ideas that got me into hot water a few years ago are gradually becoming acceptable topics of conversation again (touch wood). At one point, Josh made the very funny observation that,

When you first came to my attention three years ago, you were this defiant voice standing up to the mob and now, fortunately, you’re just the - no offense - boring academic that you should be by just saying true things accurately.

My immediate response was that I much prefer the latter! I did add, though, that it was kinda cool being a badass just for making a commonsense observation backed by a mountain of research: that men and women are different.

Here’s the blurb for the episode:

Are men innately more violent? Are women innately more people-focused? What explains gay people, campness, transgenderism? How much of the sex differences are cultural, and how much is hardwired by our evolutionary psychology?

The science of the sexes has come a long way. Steve Stewart-Williams is a psychology professor who wrote the groundbreaking book The Ape That Understood the Universe and whose new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women.

Steve joins Josh to explore the science of the sexes, from aggression to promiscuity to parenting, and what recent research reveals about how, and why, men and women behave the way we do.

The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. It’s also available on the Uncomfortable Conversations YouTube channel.

If you enjoy the conversation and would like to explore these ideas in more depth, you can pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

Buy A Billion Years

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If you’d like access to all Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche-Newsletter content, please consider a paid subscription. A paid subscription gives you:

• Full access to all new posts and the archive

• Full access to excerpts from A Billion Years of Sex Differences

• Full access to exclusive content such as my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” posts, Linkfests, and other regular features

• The ability to post comments and engage with me and the N³ Newsletter community

Paid subscriptions also help support my efforts to explore important and controversial topics, and give me the financial freedom to follow the evidence wherever it leads without fear of cancellation.

Thank you!

Steve

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Why are men so much more likely than women to die doing something spectacularly unwise? Why are they overrepresented among extreme sports enthusiasts, workers in dangerous occupations, and people whose last thought is, “Yeah, this seems like a good idea”?

Across cultures, throughout history, and in many other species, males are consistently more willing than females to roll the dice. In this excerpt from my book A Billion Years of Sex Differences, I explore what the research says about sex differences in risk-taking and where they come from. Among other things, we’ll discuss:

• How we know that sex differences in risk-taking aren’t just a mirage - and aren’t just a product of culture

• Why men dominate both the Darwin Awards and the Carnegie Hero Awards

• Why natural selection sometimes favors traits that reliably get people killed

• Why sex differences in risk-taking explode after puberty

• What chimpanzees can teach us about human risk-taking

You can find the full collection of excerpts here, or pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

Reckless Abandon

The fact that men engage in more aggression than women – and more of a range of antisocial behaviours – stems in part from another important sex difference: the sex difference in the tendency to take risks. As most people are all-too aware, boys and men are bigger risk-takers than girls and women. This sex difference helps explain various stubborn facts. It helps explain why boy toddlers are more likely than girl toddlers to end up in the emergency room; why men are over-represented on the Wikipedia page of inventors killed by their own inventions; and why more men than women participate in extreme sports – that is, sports extremely likely to kill you, such as base jumping, hang-gliding, and motor racing. It helps explain why men do most of the riskiest jobs in the world – including construction worker, fisherman, logger, taxi driver, and truck driver – and why more than 90% of workplace fatalities are men. And it helps explain why men are more likely than women to accept stupid dares, gamble away their life savings, invest in cryptocurrencies, die while taking extreme selfies, and hit send on an email without reading it through first.

It’s quite a résumé . . . and we’re only just getting started! Men are more likely than women to get into car accidents, even when you statistically control for the fact that men drive more. This isn’t because men are less skilled at handling a vehicle; it’s because they more often drive too fast, tailgate, and drive drunk. At the same time, despite their Russian roulette driving habits, men less often wear seatbelts. Not only are men more likely to crash a car, they’re more likely to get hit by a car while crossing the road. This isn’t because motorists try to run men down; it’s because men are more likely to try to cross when it’s unsafe. Yep, scientists have sat by the side of the road tabulating men’s and women’s road-crossing habits, and that’s what they’ve observed. And not only are men more likely to be struck by cars, they’re more likely to be struck by lightning. This isn’t because God hates men; it’s because men are more likely to work outdoors and less likely to think ‘Hmmm, there’s a storm coming; maybe I should go inside.’

Every year, the British Medical Journal publishes a light-hearted Christmas edition. The 2014 offering included an article testing the hypothesis that men engage in more ‘idiotic risk-taking’. To that end, the authors looked at the demographic makeup of Darwin Award recipients. Darwin Awards are bestowed on individuals whose actions ensure ‘the long-term survival of the species, by selectively allowing one less idiot to survive’. Notable recipients include the would-be aviator who strapped helium balloons to a lawn chair then drifted over Los Angeles for 14 hours before being rescued, and the terrorist who put insufficient postage on a letter bomb, then unthinkingly opened it when the parcel was returned to his door. Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that 88% of Darwin Award winners were men, consistent with their ‘male idiot theory’.

To be fair, although men take more idiotic risks, they also take more heroic ones. More than 90% of Carnegie Hero Awards go to men, to give just one example. Still, whether idiotic, heroic, or a mixture of both, the root cause of the sex difference is the same: Men are more tolerant of risks.

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If you’ve taken an introductory psychology course, you’ll have heard about general intelligence, also known as g. g is a general-purpose cognitive ability that’s brought to bear on every cognitive task. It’s what IQ tests aim to measure.

What makes us think that there’s any such “thing” as g? Simple: the fact that people who do well on one kind of cognitive test also tend to do well on others. Good at vocabulary? You’re more likely to be good at math as well. Good at math? You’re more likely to have a good memory - and good spatial abilities and good processing speed. The positive correlation among cognitive tests suggests an underlying factor that contributes to performance on all of them. Whatever exactly that factor is, it’s what psychologists call g.

The evidence for g’s importance is overwhelming. People with higher IQs tend to stay in education longer, enter higher-status occupations, earn more, enjoy better health, and even live longer. These aren’t just cherry-picked, small-sample, yet-to-be-replicated flukes. They’re among the strongest and most consistent findings in psychology.

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

This is the first post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can access the complete collection here…

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3 years ago · 169 likes · 10 comments · Steve Stewart-Williams

But although people who do well on one cognitive task tend to do well on others, no one does exactly as well on every task. Two people can have exactly the same IQ score but different profiles of strengths and weaknesses. Jojo may have exceptional verbal skills but only somewhat above average math skills. Loretta may process information at lightning speed but fall behind on abstract thinking. Martin may have an intuitive feel for machinery and electronics but lack the gift of gab.

Should we expect these individuals to end up having similar life outcomes simply because their overall IQs are the same?

For many years, the conventional wisdom in psychology was basically “yes.” General intelligence was thought to do almost all the heavy lifting. As one influential paper put it, specific cognitive abilities contribute “not much more than g.”

But recent research by Tobias Edwards and Colin DeYoung, published in the journal Intelligence and Cognitive Abilities, suggests otherwise. Using data from nearly 19,000 Americans across two generations, the researchers showed that your specific abilities shape your occupation, income, and job status, over and above IQ.

Edwards and DeYoung extracted three specific abilities statistically independent of g: technical ability, processing speed, and math-vs-verbal ability - a factor reflecting the extent to which people are better with numbers than words. They then looked at the extent to which IQ and these specific abilities correlated with people’s life outcomes.

The following four graphs summarize their main findings.

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Graph 1: IQ Matters More with Age - But Specific Cognitive Abilities Matter Too

The first figure shows how cognitive abilities predict income and occupational status across the adult years. The key message is that IQ becomes increasingly important with age, while specific abilities have a fairly stable impact.

The effect of cognitive abilities on earnings is worth zooming in on. As you can see, in people’s late teens and early twenties, general intelligence barely predicts earnings at all. Indeed, in one of the two datasets, the relationship is briefly negative. This is presumably because, in their first years out of high school, many cognitively gifted individuals are still in education, trying different jobs, or not yet in positions where their cognitive talents can fully express themselves. It takes until the mid-twenties for IQ to really start making waves - but when it does, it soon becomes the strongest cognitive predictor of income.

Meanwhile, tech ability shows almost the opposite pattern. It has a positive effect on income in the late teens and early twenties - the exact time when general intelligence does nothing - but then crosses the zero line and drifts negative as people age. That’s the earnings fingerprint of the kid who left school to become an electrician or mechanic before their classmates had even decided on a major. It pays off in the short term, but then traditional academic pathways overtake it.

Graph 2: It’s Not Just Family Background

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Taking Stock

It’s been a month since I got back from the book tour for A Billion Years of Sex Differences, and I’ve finally had a chance to catch my breath and take stock of how things have gone. Overall, I’ve been extremely pleased with the reception the book has received. Among other things:

• It’s been featured in the four major UK newspapers: The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent.

• Reviews of the book have been overwhelmingly positive, even in outlets where I expected a tougher ride, such as The Guardian and The New Statesman. Highlights include reviews in The Australian, The Bulletin (Sweden), Male Psychology Magazine, The New Zealand Herald, Quillette, The Sunday Telegraph, and ZNews (Vietnam).

• I’ve been on more podcasts in the last two months than I’d been on in my entire career before that. Most notably, Chris Williamson flew me to Austin, Texas, to make a second appearance on his Modern Wisdom podcast: one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

• I’ve done interviews for various outlets, including The Telegraph, Skeptiker, How To Academy, and The Scottish Herald. The Herald interview was for a long-form piece about me and my ideas, which should be out in late August.

• Next week, I’ll be making my first TV appearance on BBC Business Today, which has an estimated global audience of 15 million viewers. [Update: The BBC cancelled on me at the last minute because of breaking business news. My publicist is trying to get them to reschedule, but we’ll see. BBC Radio 4 Today did the same thing a few months ago but never rescheduled, so I’m not holding my breath. Rather annoying…]

• I published my first op-ed in The Independent: an overview of some of the book’s key ideas.

• My publicist is working on getting an excerpt from the book into The Spectator in the near future.

• A Billion Years made The New Zealand Listener’s list of the best books of 2026 so far. To my surprise, appearing in The Listener meant more to me than earlier mentions in The New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine, because my family always got The Listener when I was growing up. Also, my mum happened to spot my name there unexpectedly, which made it particularly special.

• The book has been nominated for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

• Several academics have confirmed that they’ll be using it in their classes.

• Readers from around the world have been posting photos and videos of the book online. This one wins the book-in-the-most-exotic-location award:

• A friend from London texted last week to say she’d spotted a random stranger reading the book on the train. For some reason, out of everything that’s happened, this was one of the highlights.

• I’ve started working with Prometheus Books on the North American edition of A Billion Years, which will hit the bookshelves on January 19. I’m looking forward to another book tour and round of promotional work then.

• Most gratifying of all, though, is the sense that the conversation about sex differences is changing. Ideas that seemed almost unspeakable a few years ago are increasingly being discussed openly and seriously. If A Billion Years of Sex Differences is helping nudge the conversation in that direction - even a little - I’ll consider it a success.

A New Review in Quillette

The latest review of A Billion Years of Sex Differences has just appeared in Quillette. It’s by the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who described the book as “essential reading.” Here’s an excerpt:

In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, Steve Stewart-Williams argues that it’s time to engage these questions with data. Summarising existing research, he comes down closer to genetic determinism than to blank-slatism. That is, he sees significant sex differences in thinking, behaviour, and preferences as having a substantial genetic basis, but he recognises too a role for sociocultural influences.

Stewart-Williams handles his hot potato gently. He is careful to admit when we lack good evidence for a purported sex difference; when we lack information about the genetic basis of a difference we can document; and when, as with homosexuality, we have that genetic information but remain ignorant about how the difference evolved. (Homosexuality is one such puzzle, since it has a partial genetic basis, but, under simple Darwinian logic, genes that reduce reproduction should be eliminated from populations.)

And he addresses at length—and counters—the view that inherited sex differences will lead to bigotry. Instead, he recommends that both sexes should have equal opportunities, with everyone free to choose their own path. In the end, it’s obvious that the more we understand the basis of sex differences, the better equipped we are to address them. This measured, timely, and informative book is essential reading at a time when many scholars not only insist that male–female differences are culturally generated but go further, denying that there are just two sexes.

My Appearance on the Michael Sartain Podcast

This was a fun one. Michael Sartain is a Las Vegas–based dating coach who also runs bikini beauty pageants and a popular podcast. He’s a longtime fan of evolutionary psychology, and has been a very generous supporter of my last book, The Ape That Understood the Universe. We recently sat down together - Michael in Las Vegas, me in Kuala Lumpur - to discuss A Billion Years of Sex Differences, and evolutionary psychology in general. Here’s the blurb for the episode:

In this episode, I sit down with evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams for an in-depth conversation about human nature, biological sex differences, attraction, relationships, personality, and the controversial science behind evolutionary psychology.

Steve is a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia and the author of Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life, The Ape That Understood the Universe, and his latest book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences.

We explore why evolutionary psychology remains one of the most misunderstood and politically controversial areas of psychology. Steve explains why both traditionalists and progressives can misrepresent sex differences, why recognizing biological influences does not mean defending traditional gender roles, and why describing human nature is not the same as deciding how society should operate.

The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. It’s also available on Michael’s YouTube channel.

You can pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

Buy A Billion Years

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This post was free to read for everyone. If you’d like access to all Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche-Newsletter content, please consider a paid subscription. A paid subscription gives you:

• Full access to all new posts and the archive

• Full access to excerpts from A Billion Years of Sex Differences

• Full access to exclusive content such as my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” posts, Linkfests, and other regular features

• The ability to post comments and engage with me and the N³ Newsletter community

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Thank you!

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Our personality traits help predict which story elements we enjoy in movies. People high in openness prefer movies involving exploration, discovery, and intellectual debate; people high in extraversion prefer movies involving romance, friendship, and nurturing children; people high in conscientiousness prefer movies in which characters defend their values or condemn wrongdoing; and people high in agreeableness prefer movies that involve warm, empathetic characters - and that don’t involve rage or revenge. These and other personality-preference links are found in the following graph.

The links are modest, indicating that personality is just one factor among many shaping people’s movie preferences. Still, they’ve been replicated in 22 of 23 countries. That’s a remarkable degree of cross-cultural consistency.

Dubourg and co.’s work suggests that people’s movie preferences are better understood in terms of fine-grained narrative themes than broad genres. Two films in the same genre can attract very different audiences if they foreground different themes, while the same person may enjoy films from different genres if they share the same themes.

The findings come from a fascinating recent preprint by Edgar Dubourg and colleagues. Here’s the abstract.

Why do people prefer certain fictional stories over others? Personality traits capture stable individual differences in motivational sensitivities: Openness reflects exploration, Neuroticism reflects threat-reactivity, and so on. If so, these traits should systematically predict preferences for narrative features that engage the corresponding motivational systems. We test this hypothesis across three preregistered studies. In Study 1, we directly measured individual preferences for motivationally salient narrative features in a cross-cultural survey of 9,201 participants from 23 countries. Personality traits predicted preferences and the overall pattern replicated in 22 of 23 countries. In Study 2, we confirmed these predictions using ecologically valid data from 574 movies, annotated by large language models for the same narrative features and linked to the Big Five profiles of 3.5 million Facebook users. The predicted associations replicated at the population level. In Study 3, we tested a complementary structural prediction: if story preferences reflect an underlying motivational architecture, then the co-occurrence structure of narrative features in stories should mirror the co-preference structure across individuals. Using Mantel tests, we found strong structural correspondence, replicated across all 23 countries. Together, these findings support a model in which story preferences arise from universal motivational systems whose sensitivities vary across individuals.

If you want to dig deeper into the details, you can read the preprint for free here.

Follow me on Twitter/X for more psychology, evolution, and science.

How You Can Support the Newsletter

This post was free to read for all. If you like what I’m doing with The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter, and want to support my work, there are several ways you can do it.

1. Like and Restack: Click the buttons at the top or bottom of the page to boost the post’s visibility on Substack.

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Welcome to the July 2026 edition of the N³ Newsletter Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that grabbed my attention over the last month. On the menu today…

• The classic study showing that experts often predict the future no better than chance

• Why dating apps may be making romance harder, rather than easier

• The female multitasking myth

• Why the gender-equality paradox might not be about gender equality at all

• The downside of belief in free will

• How AI cheating is undermining education

• How spraying mosquitoes may be creating a new breed of super-mosquitoes

On top of that, we’ll ask: Are mRNA vaccines safe? Does paracetamol during pregnancy increase the risk of kids developing autism and ADHD? And why have autism and ADHD diagnoses skyrocketed in recent years?

Around half the items are free to read for everyone; the rest are for paid subscribers.

You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here.

Orangutan Playdates

Even orangutans arrange playdates for their kids. Drawing on fifteen years of data, researchers found that orang mothers make extra trips to the territories of other mothers with similarly aged offspring so their youngsters can play together. Play isn’t just fun and games, you see; it’s crucial for social development. That’s why it evolved - and presumably why orang mums evolved to facilitate it. [Link.]

Chimpanzee Muscles

This chimp with alopecia reveals a truth usually concealed in fur: Chimps. Are. Ripped. [Link.]

Two Classic Findings in Psychology

1. Choice Blindness

   How well do we know our own preferences? Not as well as we might imagine. In a classic demonstration of “choice blindness,” researchers secretly swapped participants’ preferred jams and teas for the options they’d rejected, then asked them to explain their choices. Around two-thirds failed to notice the switch - and happily justified a choice they’d never made. [Link.]

2. The Expert Illusion

   In one of the most sobering studies in all of psychology, Philip Tetlock had hundreds of academics and political pundits make predictions about various economic and geopolitical matters. The experts often did no better than chance in their predictions. Not only that, but they did worse than simple rules like “assume no change” or “extrapolate the current trend.” [Link.]

The Latest from Political Psychology

A 30-year longitudinal study found that adolescents prone to internalizing problems such as depression and anxiety were more likely to lean left politically in midlife, whereas those with externalizing problems such as impulsivity and aggression were more likely to lean right. [Link.]

The recent birth decline in the US is driven largely by people on the left. Conservatives and centrists have maintained roughly replacement-level fertility since World War II, while fertility has slumped among left-leaning individuals. Education is associated with fewer children, religious attendance with more. [Link.]

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

12 Things Everyone Should Know About Political Psychology

This is the latest post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can access the full collection here…

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2 years ago · 101 likes · 3 comments · Steve Stewart-Williams

More Dating Apps, Fewer Relationships

Why are rates of pairing up and having children falling, even while dating apps serve up more options than ever? According to a 2020 study, part of the answer is that when we have too many options, we automatically become pickier - and suddenly no one’s good enough for us. This effect is particularly pronounced for women. [Link.]

Are Single Women Happier?

Most single women believe they are: 76% of those aged 18-29, according to one survey. On average, though, married mothers are happier than their unmarried, childfree counterparts. [Link.]

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The latest review of A Billion Years of Sex Differences is out!

It’s by Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman, and I’m happy to report that it’s very positive. I’m particularly excited about this one because The New Statesman leans progressive, so I was bracing myself for a bumpy ride. I’m therefore over the moon that it went down so well. (Admittedly, part of my excitement might be the extra-shot latte I just downed.)

Barnes’s piece is titled “Ignoring sex differences harms us all: The tendency to ignore sex variations harms men and women both – and damages scientific credibility.” Here’s an excerpt:

Men and women are different. But saying so has become taboo, according to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams. A vocal minority, he states, sees positing the existence of sex differences as “a moral transgression”, to which the typical response is to “cancel, punish and shun”. This is particularly pronounced in academia, where biases distort discussion, he argues. In the Western world, there’s a predisposition towards minimising sex differences. There are other biases. “Studies finding anti-female bias are shouted from the rooftops,” while “those finding no bias or bias against men are reported in a whisper or simply ignored”, Stewart-Williams writes in his new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences.

This lack of honesty matters. “If we want to make the world a better place, we need good science,” he maintains. That’s not possible “if scientists are afraid to diverge from the pre-specified conclusions of an academic political monoculture”. He argues that not only are there clear differences between the sexes, but the basis for them – in large part – is our “million-year journey of human evolutionary history”. This goes for everything from dating and toy preference to mental and physical health.

“In large part” is key. Stewart-Williams is no gender traditionalist. He rejects those who “exaggerate” differences between men and women. So too, the sex difference-minimisers who argue that if differences exist they’re “a product of discrimination and socialisation” – and that equality requires their abolition. Both views lack balance and fall foul of the science, he says.

Stewart-Williams advocates for a third way: one that acknowledges both nature and nurture, and which neither overstates nor underplays sex differences…

[T]his is an important book. In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, Stewart-Williams is making a profound argument: magnifying or minimising sex differences doesn’t just ignore science, it leads to harm. By failing to treat us as individuals, we end up discriminating against men and women. In medicine, both exaggerating and denying sex differences can be dangerous: doctors overlook gender atypical problems or presentations, for example missing eating disorders in men and heart attacks in women.

Gender-role individualism is Stewart-Williams’s proffered solution. We should “establish a fair and level playing field”, and let people make informed choices. We can work towards eliminating sex differences “created or amplified by unjust bias or barriers”. But we must acknowledge that “the sexes do differ on average, and we can’t just lie about that”, he says. Instead, we should “tell the truth carefully”.

This is the book’s ultimate message. Truth matters. If we deny differences that “everyone can see with their own two eyes”, the public simply won’t trust scientists on “politically charged topics”. Perhaps that ship has already sailed. Trust in “experts” has been in freefall for years. But an environment in which scientists, politicians, academics and others feel able to tell the truth – however uncomfortable – and not to be punished for doing so, is worth fighting for.

You can read Hannah Barnes’s full review here.

And if you’d like to pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences, you can order it here.

Follow me on Twitter/X for more psychology, evolution, and science.

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Another highlight of my recent book tour was my trip to the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in Hay-on-Wye. It was a amazing festival with a great vibe, incredible food, and stimulating conversations. The organizers really know how to look after their speakers, covering transport to and from the festival, meals, and accommodation in the Welsh countryside - and even providing drivers to ferry us around. I could get used to that kind of treatment…

While I was there, I led a “Champagne, Cake, and Philosophy” event on my book A Billion Years of Sex Differences, caught my first glimpse of the book in the wild (in the festival bookshop), and took part in a debate on the notion of being “spiritual but not religious.” I spotted various famous faces, including Simon Baron-Cohen, Kathleen Stock, and Rowan Williams, and at one point found myself sitting next to Jeremy Corbyn in the green room. And I finally met several people in person who I’d previously known only online, including , , , and .

Meeting Michael, in particular, was long overdue. He wrote the foreword to my second book, The Ape That Understood the Universe, and kindly endorsed A Billion Years of Sex Differences. He also published one of my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” posts in his Skeptic magazine. Despite knowing each other for years, however, we’d never actually met. It turns out we have a lot in common - including remarkably similar stories about how we proposed to our wives.

As well as speaking at the festival, Michael was recording episodes of his podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. He and his Strategy Director, Alexander Reiman, rented a nearby village hall to use as a makeshift studio, and interviewed various festival attendees - including yours truly. Michael and I had a wide-ranging conversation about A Billion Years and various other topics I’ve written about over the years.

Among other things, we discussed:

• The evolutionary origins of sex differences

• Sex-role-reversed species - that is, species where all the usual sex differences are flipped into reverse

• Greater male variability and the Larry Summers controversy

• Why both sexes prefer research that puts women in a better light than men

• Sex differences in STEM

• Whether murder-suicide has an evolutionary basis

• The young male syndrome and sex differences in crime

• Whether IQ is a valid scientific concept or pseudoscientific nonsense

• The replication crisis in psychology

The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. It’s also available on the Skeptic YouTube channel.

Hope you enjoy it!

• You can order A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

• You can read the first chapter of The Ape That Understood the Universe for free here.

Follow me on Twitter/X for more psychology, evolution, and science.

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The capacity for violence is one of the oldest and most troubling features of human nature. Why, though, are some people so much more prone to it than others? And why, across cultures and throughout history, have men committed the overwhelming majority of violent acts?

In this extended excerpt from my book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, I look at what decades of research reveal about one of the largest and most consequential sex differences known to science. Among other things, we’ll see that:

• Men are not only the main perpetrators of violence but also the main victims

• Five lines of evidence point to an innate contribution to sex differences in aggression

• Contrary to popular opinion, the most violent members of society aren’t young men

• Greater male aggression often appears despite culture, not because of it

• Greater male aggression has the same evolutionary underpinnings as the stag’s antlers and male gorilla’s canines

If you enjoy this excerpt, you can explore the full collection of excerpts here, or pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

The Strong, Violent Type

Let’s start our tour of the dark side with the antisocial trait that looms above all others: aggression. As mentioned, men are more aggressive than women, at least when it comes to face-to-face or direct aggression. Men shout more, fight more, and kill more. In experiments, they’re more likely to give people electric shocks, and in the real world, they’re less likely to back down from a trivial altercation. Even men tamed by modern civilization – men who’d never throw a punch in real life – watch more violent movies, play more violent video games, and have more fantasies about killing people.

To be fair, when it comes to indirect aggression – spreading rumours about people, excluding them from the group – we find either no sex difference or that women engage in slightly more. For everything else, though, men are in pole position.

As with most sex differences, the sex difference in aggression gets progressively larger for rarer, more extreme acts: a good example of the tail-of-the-distribution effect. Men are somewhat more likely to engage in verbal aggression; much more likely to engage in physical aggression; much, much more likely to engage in violent crime; and much, much, much more likely to kill someone – or, for that matter, to kill themselves.

It’s not that men are vastly more anger-prone than women; the sexes don’t particularly differ in how angry they get or how often. Instead, men tend to be less self-controlled, and less concerned about the negative consequences of overt aggression, from ruptured friendships to injuries and imprisonment.

Few would deny that men are the main perpetrators of violence. Who are its main victims? Many assume that it’s women – and when it comes to sexual violence, they’re right. For every other kind of violence, however, men are more often found in the victim column. This pattern is particularly stark when we look at homicide data. In almost every society on Earth, men are more likely than women to be murdered. Most of the time, the killer is a man as well. Women kill much less often, but when they do, the victim is usually a husband or a boyfriend. Apparently, both sexes prefer to kill men.

Now for the usual disclaimer: The fact that, on average, men are more aggressive than women doesn’t mean that men are the aggressive sex whereas women are the gentle sex. That would be like saying that, because more men than women have a same-sex sexual orientation, men are the gay sex whereas women are the straight sex. Some members of both sexes are highly aggressive, and most members of both are not, at least in the modern world. You know what I’m going to say next, though: Among the minority who are highly aggressive, more are XY than XX.

An Unfortunate Inheritance

Where does the aggression sex difference come from? For some the answer is obvious: culture. A standard cultural explanation would be that, in various ways, society encourages male aggression but discourages aggression in females. Parents, teachers, and peers reward boys for aggressive behaviour, at least in its milder forms. And even when they don’t reward it, they often turn a blind eye to it in boys in a way they never would with girls: Boys will be boys, after all. Meanwhile, movies and other media constantly model male aggression for impressionable young male minds. The subtext is clear: ‘This is the way you should be.’

As always, no one should deny that social factors help shape the sex difference in aggression. But is the difference entirely due to social factors?

Some would say yes. Writing in The New York Times, for instance, psychologist Michael Reichert argued that, although males are more violent than females, this tendency is not innate. However, at least five lines of evidence suggest that Reichert was wrong, and that there’s also an innate contribution.

1. Stubbornness of the Sex Difference in Aggression

One line of evidence for an innate contribution is the fact that the aggression sex difference persists even in the face of countervailing social pressure. Contrary to the idea that we encourage male aggression, parents and teachers spend a lot more time telling boys not to be aggressive than they do girls. This isn’t because they approve more of girls’ aggression; it’s because boys are more often aggressive. But notice the implication: Rather than being created by socialization, the sex difference survives even in the face of socialization in the other direction.

To pre-empt a common misunderstanding, this isn’t to say that socialization has no effect on the sex difference. Clearly, it does; the size of the difference varies considerably from culture to culture and time to time. The point is that socialization couldn’t be the entire explanation, because the difference persists even when socialization pushes harder against male than female aggression. Indeed, socialization may often make the difference smaller than it would otherwise be, not larger.

2. The Developmental Trajectory of Male Aggression

A second line of evidence concerns the unfolding of the aggression sex difference over the lifespan. As psychologist John Archer observed, if socialization alone were pulling the strings, we’d expect to find no difference in aggression in infants, followed by a steady increase in the size of the difference across childhood, as socialization makes its mark on our minds. But that’s not what we find at all.

First, the sex difference in aggression is apparent from the moment kids are mobile enough to make aggression an option: Boys fight more and lash out more, and engage in more rough-and-tumble play. Importantly, these differences appear long before boys and girls start selectively imitating same-sex role models, and long before they even understand that they’re boys or girls.

Second, rather than starting at zero then escalating in boys as the effects of socialization compound, aggression starts out high for both sexes. The most violent category of human being is the toddler, and the only reason we don’t worry more about the epidemic of toddler violence is that toddlers are small and cute, and can’t do much damage with their tiny fists. From this early summit of violence, both sexes become progressively less violent as the years go by. This is a major stumbling block for the theory that children are socialized to be aggressive. To my eye, it suggests instead that they’re socialized not to be. Throughout the process, however, boys are always more aggressive. Is this because anti-aggression socialization is stronger for girls than for boys? No; as we’ve already seen, it’s usually the opposite. But even if it were stronger for girls, the data don’t readily fit with a socialization explanation. Rather than the sex difference getting bigger as children absorb the message that female aggression is less acceptable, the gap remains roughly static throughout childhood.

So far so bad for the socialization hypothesis – and it’s only downhill from here. The next point where the facts come unstuck from the theory is in the decade or so following the onset of puberty. During this biologically critical window, the aggression sex difference suddenly explodes as men ramp up their aggressive antics. The evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly dubbed this rapid-onset increase in male misbehaviour the young-male syndrome. The most reliable evidence for the syndrome comes from homicide records. In childhood, neither sex is particularly homicidal. In the years after puberty, however, homicide rates suddenly skyrocket for males. Is this because society starts socializing males to be more aggressive? On the contrary, young male aggression is a serious problem facing every society, and thus most try to restrain rather than inflame it. Nevertheless, it persists.

Finally, as young adulthood gives way to middle age, the sex difference in aggression shrinks, largely because men begin mellowing. The socialization explanation gives us no reason to expect this. As we’ll see soon, though, an evolutionary explanation does.

3. Getting Hormonal

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One of the highlights of my recent book tour was my trip to Austin, Texas, for my second appearance on the Modern Wisdom podcast with .

After flying in from London, I did a one-on-one interview with Chris about my new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, followed by a roundtable with Chris, , and Macken Murphy: four hours of podcasting on four hours’ sleep. After that, I took my first ride in a self-driving car. All in all, it was an amazing trip.

Chris and his team released the one-on-one interview last week, and in typical Modern Wisdom fashion, it’s doing the kind of numbers that most podcasters can only dream of. Here’s the blurb for the episode:

Why is it so difficult to talk about the differences between men and women today? It’s important to recognize that men and women deserve equal respect and opportunity, but that does not mean they are exactly the same. There are differences between the sexes that can be meaningful, valuable, and even beautiful. So what are those differences, and why has discussing them become so polarising?

Expect to learn why talking about sex differences is so controversial, what the actual definition of sex is, why there are challenges to the binary idea of sex, the largest sex differences between men and women, how sex differences reveal themselves via personality, the danger of denying and/or not respecting the differences in sex, and much more…

The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. It’s also available on Chris’s YouTube channel.

If you enjoy the conversation and would like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.

Buy A Billion Years

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A fascinating new paper explores the evolutionary psychology of parental care, and comes to two major conclusions.

First, parents differ in how they treat their sons vs. their daughters: Daughters receive more relationship guidance, protection, and emotional support, whereas sons receive more athletic training and encouragement to be competitive. Sons also have fewer restrictions on their sexual behavior.

Second, mothers and fathers differ in the types of parental care they provide. Mothers are more involved in direct care, bonding, social/moral guidance, and discipline. Fathers are more involved in athletics and in teaching mechanical and practical skills.

These findings are summarized in the following graph.

According to study authors Francis (Sid) Dougan, William Costello, and David Buss, these results make good evolutionary sense. Throughout our evolutionary history, daughters and sons faced different adaptive problems, and needed different kinds of parental input. At the same time, evolved differences between men and women meant that fathers were often better equipped to provide certain forms of input, while mothers were better equipped to provide others.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Most research on human parental investment has focused on overall parental effort or resource allocation, overlooking the fact that human investment spans a broad suite of material, instructional, and social forms of investment. This array of investment enables examination of how evolutionary processes have elaborated parental care into distinct domains. Where daughters and sons historically faced different recurrent adaptive problems, selection should have favoured biases in parental investment that cultivate in each offspring the competencies relevant to its sex-specific challenges (e.g., navigating greater reproductive costs for daughters; navigating contest competition for sons). Likewise, mothers and fathers should differ in parental investment domains where their own evolutionary and life histories afforded greater sex-specific expertise. To test these hypotheses, we used linear mixed-effect models to analyse 105 adults’ (49.5% female) ratings of parental investment received across 73 behaviours organised into 13 domains. Results were largely consistent with predictions. Daughters received more parental investment in mating and relationship guidance, protection, and material support. Sons received greater parental investment in athletic training, permissiveness regarding sexual behaviour, and competitive encouragement. Mothers invested more than fathers in direct care, bonding, social and moral guidance, and discipline. Fathers invested more in athletics, and mechanical and practical skills. Domains linked to adaptive challenges common to both sexes (e.g., direct care) showed no offspring-sex differences in parental investment. The patterns accord with the evolutionary hypothesis that parental investment maps onto sex-differentiated adaptive problems. Discussion explores hypotheses about the interactions between socialisation practices of parents and sex-linked predispositions in offspring.

• You can access the paper for free here.

• You can read a user-friendly Twitter/X thread about the research by first author Sid Dougan here.

• I discuss the evolution of sex differences in parental care in my new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, and in my earlier book, The Ape That Understood the Universe.

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