5 New Findings on Sex Differences, Reverse Gender Bias, and Why You're Wasting Your Time on Tinder
The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Linkfest for June the 22nd, 2024
Welcome to my latest Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that have grabbed my attention over the last few weeks. Topics covered this time include the nature and nurture of IQ; how politics breaks your brain; sex differences in prescription drug use, school performance, and imposter syndrome; four surprising findings on gender bias; and why most men are probably wasting their time on Tinder. (Sorry, guys.)
You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here.
Hot Off the Press: New Findings in Psychology (Plus an Oldie But a Goodie)
Individual Differences
Identical twins reared apart become more similar in IQ as they get older. Meanwhile, unrelated adopted siblings reared together become less similar in IQ. Increasing twin similarity may be a product of what’s called active gene-environment correlation: People shape their environments in ways consistent with their genetic propensities, then those environments shape them back. Link.
The family environment seems to have no effect on people’s self-esteem, contrary to earlier findings. Link.
The Big 5 personality traits strongly predict life satisfaction (r = .8 - one of the largest effects I’ve seen in a psychology paper). Neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness are particularly strong predictors; agreeableness and openness are less so. The graph below shows how responses to various items from personality inventories correlate with life satisfaction. Blue indicates a positive correlation, red a negative correlation. Link.
Clinical Psychology
More and more people - young people, in particular - are diagnosing themselves with mental-health problems. According to new research, part of the reason for this is that our mental-health concepts have broadened over the last few decades to include milder and milder symptoms - an example of a phenomenon known as concept creep. Link.
Political Psychology
An oldie but a goodie: People’s attitudes to policies depend to a large extent on whether the policies are attributed to their own party or the opposing party. People will often accept policies advocated by their own party that they’d reject if they were advocated by the other. Link.
Relatedly, when their own party is in power, people tend to think the economy is doing well, whereas when the opposing party is in power, they tend to think it’s doing badly. Further evidence that politics knocks 10 points off your IQ! Link.
