Manterrupting, Six Sex Differences, and Weed Takes the Lead over Booze
The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Linkfest for January 2025
Welcome to the January edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that grabbed my attention over the last month or so. On the menu today, we’ve got the truth about manterrupting; the latest evidence that politics warps your brain; how personality shapes movie preferences; evidence that the family home has little impact on IQ; evidence that IQ gets more important as we age; and sex differences in talkativeness, Machiavellianism, infidelity, scientific productivity, and more.
You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here. Hope you enjoy the post!
The Truth About Manterrupting
1. A while ago, I came across an old meta-analysis looking at sex differences in interrupting. It was very interesting. As the stereotypes suggest, men interrupt more than women. Contrary to the stereotypes, however, the sex difference is small. In statistical terms, it has a Cohen’s d effect size of 0.15. That means that if you were to pick pairs of people at random, one man and one woman, the man would interrupt more than the woman in 54% of the pairs. By way of comparison, if there were no sex difference, it would be 50%. For intrusive interrupting, the gap is larger, with a d value of 0.33. That means that the man would interrupt more in 59% of the pairs. The graphs below, which I created with Kristoffer Magnusson’s Cohen’s d visualization tool, show what effect sizes of 0.15 and 0.33 look like.
The differences aren’t exactly huge. It’s worth noting, however, that even small differences at the mean often translate into large differences at the extremes of the distribution. Thus, although the interrupting sex difference is small among the majority in the middle, among the minority who interrupt a lot, many more are men than women. This might help explain the stereotype of the compulsive male interrupter. [Link.]
Postmodern Views are Linked to Authoritarianism
2. New research shows that people who hold strong postmodern views tend to score high on left-wing authoritarianism. Postmodernism is the school of thought - popular in certain corners of the university - that denies objective truth, questions the value of science and reason, and holds that reality is socially constructed. [Link.]
Misunderstanding the Enemy
3. I recently came across a fascinating website which documents how people’s perceptions of their political opponents’ views diverge radically from the reality. Here are two graphs from the site. There are plenty more where these came from, though, so check the whole thing out! [Link.]
The V-Shaped Perception Gap: The stronger people’s political commitments, the less accurate their understanding of what the other side thinks. The politically disengaged have the most accurate picture of their fellow citizens’ views
Education and the Perception Gap: Among Democrats, more education is associated with a less accurate view of what Republicans believe. Among Republicans, in contrast, education makes little difference: They get the other side wrong no matter how well or poorly educated they are.
Personality and Movie Preferences
4. The graph below shows the average personality profiles of fans of various genres of movies. Values higher than 0 indicate that fans are above average in the trait in question; values lower than 0 indicate that they’re below average. [Link.]
