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Abstract
We critique Steven Pinker’s acclaimed book Enlightenment Now (2018) at length. In his defense of an optimistic view of modernity, Pinker fails to mention a variety of negative trends, such as those indicating declines in important dimensions of human intelligence.
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Baumard proposes that life history slowing in populations over time is the principal driver of innovation rates. We show that this is only true of micro-innovation rates, which reflect cognitive and economic specialization as an adaptation to high population density, and not macro-innovation rates, which relate more to a population's level of general intelligence.
Human DNA polymorphisms vary across geographic regions, with the most commonly observed variation reflecting distant ancestry differences. Here we investigate the geographic clustering of common genetic variants that influence complex traits in a sample of ~450,000 individuals from Great Britain. Of 33 traits analysed, 21 showed significant geographic clustering at the genetic level after controlling for ancestry, probably reflecting migration driven by socioeconomic status (SES). Alleles associated with educational attainment (EA) showed the most clustering, with EA-decreasing alleles clustering in lower SES areas such as coal mining areas. Individuals who leave coal mining areas carry more EA-increasing alleles on average than those in the rest of Great Britain. The level of geographic clustering is correlated with genetic associations between complex traits and regional measures of SES, health and cultural outcomes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that social stratification leaves visible marks in geographic arrangements of common allele frequencies and gene–environment correlations.
In five preregistered studies, we assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations. Across three traits, American adults ( N =3,458; Mage = 33-51 years) believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits. Authoritarian people especially think youth are less respectful of their elders, intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less. These beliefs are not predicted by irrelevant traits. Two mechanisms contribute to humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids: (1) a person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels, (ii) a memory bias projecting one’s current qualities onto the youth of the past. When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.
Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between religiousness and IQ. It is in the region of − 0.2, according to meta-analyses. The reasons for this relationship are, however, unknown. It has been suggested that higher intelligence leads to greater attraction to science, or that it helps to override evolved cognitive dispositions such as for religiousness. Either way, such explanations assume that the religion–IQ nexus is on general intelligence (g), rather than some subset of specialized cognitive abilities. In other words, they assume it is a Jensen effect. Two large datasets comparing groups with different levels of religiousness show that their IQ differences are not on g and must, therefore, be attributed to specialized abilities. An analysis of the specialized abilities on which the religious and non-religious groups differ reveals no clear pattern. We cautiously suggest that this may be explicable in terms of autism spectrum disorder traits among people with high IQ scores, because such traits are negatively associated with religiousness.
In 1974, Richard Easterlin presented data showing that there is no relationship between economic growth and average happiness in the USA, but at the same time a higher personal income did go hand-in-hand with greater individual happiness in that nation. This phenomenon came to be known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox’. Easterlin explains this pattern using the relative income theory, which holds that the positive effect of income increase is offset by: (a) adaptation to income change and (b) social comparison. There is discussion as to whether this pattern is universal and, in this context, Easterlin et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci 107(52):22463–22468, 2010) claim that the enormous economic growth in South Korea over the last decade has not led to an increase in average happiness. In this paper, we report an empirical verification of this claim, using other data on South Korea. Contrary to Easterlin’s claim, we found that South Koreans became happier over time and that the relative happiness theory did not apply in this case.
With recent increases in international migration, some political and academic narratives argue for limiting migration because of possible negative effects on the host country. Among other outcomes, these groups argue that immigrant students have an impact on education, negatively affecting native-born students’ academic performance. The authors contextualize the relationship between immigrant status and academic achievement by considering a macro social setting: country-level foreign-born population. The authors examine achievement from the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment in 41 high-income countries. The authors use within- and cross-level interactions to examine (1) the relationship between immigrant status and academic achievement, (2) the moderating effect of student socioeconomic status on achievement, and (3) how country-level foreign-born population affects both immigrant and native-born students’ performance. The findings indicate that immigrant students perform similarly to native-born students when considering other contextual factors, with socioeconomic status moderating the effect of immigrant status. Furthermore, all students, immigrant and nonimmigrant students alike, benefit academically from more immigration.
We examine the relationship between cognitive ability and childbearing patterns in contemporary Sweden using administrative register data. The topic has a long history in the social sciences and has been the topic of a large number of studies, many reporting a negative gradient between intelligence and fertility. We link fertility histories to military conscription tests with intelligence scores for all Swedish men born 1951 to 1967. We find a positive relationship between intelligence scores and fertility, and this pattern is consistent across the cohorts we study. The relationship is most pronounced for the transition to a first child, and men with the lowest categories of IQ-scores have the fewest children. Using fixed effects models we additionally control for all factors that are shared by siblings, and after such adjustments we find a stronger positive relationship between IQ and fertility. Furthermore, we find a positive gradient within groups at different levels of education. Compositional differences of this kind are therefore not responsible for the positive gradient we observe-instead the relationship is even stronger after controlling for both educational careers and parental background factors. In our models where we compare brothers to one another we find that, relative to men with IQ 100, the group with the lowest category of cognitive ability have 0.56 fewer children, and men with the highest category have 0.09 more children.
Although the relationship between social dominance status and reproductive success is universally positive in those species in which the relationship has been studied, in human societies today the relationship is more often negative. The present study uses detailed information from the General Social Survey in the United States to address this apparent paradox. Results show that education and intelligence had negative relationships with number of children across birth cohorts during most or all of the 20th century. Family income has only minor effects, especially when marital fertility rather than total cohort fertility is considered. The results do not support sociobiological predictions that modern humans turn material resources into reproductive success. Religion, ideology and income are identified as factors that influence the relationship between intelligence and fertility. Results are discussed in the broader context of emerging knowledge in demographics and molecular genetics, especially with respect to the direction of biological and cultural evolution in the modern United States and in modern societies more generally.
Background
Previous research has identified a vulnerability paradox in global mental health: contrary to positive associations at the individual level, lower vulnerability at the country level is accompanied by a higher prevalence in a variety of mental health problems in national populations. However, the validity of the paradox has been challenged, specifically for bias from modest sample sizes and reliance on a survey methodology not designed for cross-national comparisons.
Aims
To verify whether the paradox applies to suicide, using data from a sizable country sample and an entirely different data source.
Method
We combined data from the World Health Organization 2014 suicide report and the country vulnerability index from the 2016 World Risk Report. Suicide was predicted in different steps based on gender, vulnerability and their interaction, World Bank income categories, and suicide data quality.
Results
A negative association between country vulnerability and suicide prevalence in both women and men was found. Suicide rates were higher for men, regardless of country vulnerability. The model predicting suicide in 96 countries based on gender, vulnerability, income and data quality had the best goodness-of-fit compared with other models. The vulnerability paradox is not accounted for by income or data quality, and exists across and within income categories.
Conclusions
The study underscores the relevance of country-level factors in the study of mental health problems. The lower mental disorder prevalence in more vulnerable countries implies that living in such countries fosters protective factors that more than compensate for the limitations in professional healthcare capacity.
Declaration of interest
None.
A newly released multivariate polygenic score for educational attainment, cognitive ability, and self-rated mathematical ability in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study was examined as a mediator of the group difference between Jews (n = 53) and 2 Christian denominations, Catholics (n = 2,603) and Lutherans (n = 2,027), with respect to educational attainment, IQ, and performance on a similarities measure. It was found that the Jewish performance advantage over both Catholics and Lutherans with respect to all 3 measures was partially and significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score. This result is consistent with the prediction that the high average cognitive ability of Jews may have been shaped, in part, by polygenic selection acting on this population over the course of several millennia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
There is growing evidence that human ideology as well as social and political attitudes also have a genetic basis. In case of some genetic predisposition of political attitude, an association with fertility would be a hint of potential selection on political ideology. We therefore investigated on the basis of men and women that have completed, respectively, almost completed reproduction, of three different data sets (the World Value Survey 1981-2014 covering a wide range of countries and developmental levels, n = 152,380, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe of 2005, n = 65,912, and the General Social Survey of the United States 1972-2014, n ⇠ 6200) whether political attitude is associated with number of children. Overall, in the world wide survey, both extreme political attitudes, albeit more pronounced for right/conservative than for left/liberal attitude, are associated with higher average offspring number compared to intermediate attitudes. If countries are analyzed separately, however, the picture is inconsistent, and in most countries, the association is non-significant. In the European and the US-survey, only the political right is associated with above average number of children. The time series of US data from 1972 to 2014 shows that at least in the US-sample, this pattern emerged during the 1990s: in the 1970s and 1980s, also in the US-sample both political extremes had a reproductive advantage, which vanished for left wing individuals during the 1990s. From an evolutionary perspective, we are not able to draw final conclusions as the association between political attitude and reproduction varies across countries and time. Nonetheless, the overall pattern suggests that in human evolutionary history, both left and right political attitudes may have conveyed fitness benefits so that both attitudes have been kept in the population.
This article explains perceived loneliness among people in Europe by accounting for cultural factors as well as social isolation. Culturally, it measures the impact of both personal and societal individualism-collectivism on loneliness. It accounts for social isolation by looking at the separate effects of living alone, emotional isolation, and relational isolation. Using a 2014 European Social Survey sample comprising 36,760 individuals in 21 countries, the study predicts loneliness using multilevel logistic regression modeling using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation procedures. Results indicate that societal individualism may strongly reduce loneliness, even after taking into account that social isolation partially mediates this relationship. Further, the effects of living alone and relational isolation depend upon whether one is personally an individualist or collectivist. Living alone and relational isolation greatly increase loneliness, and such negative effects are somewhat reduced for individualists. However, individualists are not protected from the negative impacts of emotional isolation at all, and the above moderation effects do not hold for the most severe forms of loneliness. Based on this analysis, the best case for reduced loneliness for individualists and collectivists alike is that they maintain a strong degree of multiple forms of social integration and live in an individualist society.
Human cultures are not static. An emerging body of research has documented cultural changes in a wide variety of behaviors, psychological tendencies, and cultural products. Increasingly, this field has also begun to test hypothesis regarding the causes of these changes and to create forecasts for future patterns of change. Yet to date, the question of how our brains may change as a function of systematic changes in our environments has received relatively little attention and scant empirical testing. In the present chapter we begin by reviewing the literature on cultural change, including Varnum and Grossmann's program of research using a behavioral ecology framework to understand patterns of cultural change. Next we offer some initial predictions for changes in neural structure and function that may occur in the coming decades. Finally, we offer some ideas about how empirical research testing these predictions might be conducted and discuss challenges and opportunities for extending the study of cultural change to neuroscience.
Population intelligence quotients increased throughout the 20th century-a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect-although recent years have seen a slowdown or reversal of this trend in several countries. To distinguish between the large set of proposed explanations, we categorize hypothesized causal factors by whether they accommodate the existence of within-family Flynn effects. Using administrative register data and cognitive ability scores from military conscription data covering three decades of Norwegian birth cohorts (1962-1991), we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families.
This paper proposes a unifying evolutionary framework for understanding the genesis of a wide range of psychological disorders. Psychological disorders as a whole appear to develop at significant frequencies only under conditions of “evolutionary mismatch,” where people or animals live in environments, such as modern cities or industrialized cultures in general, that they are not evolutionarily or biologically adapted for. Evolutionarily mismatched environments appear to often cause disruptions in drive states that have evolved to maintain homeostasis. Based on several lines of evidence, I will suggest that painful, distressing emotional states can provide unconscious biochemical rewards in the brain and, under mismatched environmental conditions, can become reinforced, creating unconscious, compulsive “emotional addictions.” This core phenomenon may be the main driving force for the great majority of psychological disorders. The maladaptive drive or force that emotional addictions appear to generate, referred to here as the “non-homeostatic drive” or “addictive drive,” is suggested to dysfunctionally, unnecessarily, and repeatedly throw people out of homeostasis, creating systemic imbalances that can result in a variety of psychological dysfunctions.
The field of intelligence research has seen more controversies than perhaps any other area of social science. Here we present a scientometric analysis of controversies involving intelligence researchers working in the democratic Western world since 1950. By consulting books and articles, conducting web searches, and contacting some of the individuals involved, we assembled a large database of controversies. Each entry in our database represents a controversy involving a particular individual in a particular year. We computed a measure of controversy by combining the number and severity of incidents, separately for each individual and each year. The individual-level distribution is highly skewed, with just a few individuals accounting for a disproportionate share of the controversy. When tracking the level of controversy over time, we find four relatively distinct ‘eras’, of which the most recent era—the ‘LCI era’—may be the most significant to date.
This book provides an up to date, high-level exchange on God in a uniquely productive style. Readers witness a contemporary version of a classic debate, as two professional philosophers seek to learn from each other while making their cases for their distinct positions. In their dialogue, Joshua Rasmussen and Felipe Leon examine classical and cutting-edge arguments for and against a theistic explanation of general features of reality. The book also provides original lines of thought based on the authors’ own contributions to the field, and offers a productive and innovative inquiry into on one of the biggest questions people ask: what is the ultimate explanation of things?
Purpose:
Past work has evidenced increased utilization of mental health services on college campuses, as well as rising rates of mood and suicide-related pathology in adolescents and young adults in recent years. We examined whether such findings are reflective of large-scale, nationwide trends in college student mental health in the past decade.
Methods:
We examined trends in mood, anxiety, and suicide-related outcomes among U.S. college students from 2007 to 2018 across two large national datasets: (1) the National College Health Assessment (n = 610,543; mean age = 21.25 years; 67.7% female; and 72.0% white) and (2) the Healthy Minds Study (n = 177,692; 86% students aged 18-22 years; 57% female; and 74% white). Participants, randomly selected by their educational institution, completed self-report measures of past-year mood, anxiety, nonsuicidal self-injury, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Results:
In both samples, rates of depression, anxiety, nonsuicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts markedly increased over the assessed years, with rates doubling over the period in many cases. Anger, low flourishing, and suicide plans, each assessed in only one dataset, also exhibited upward trends.
Conclusions:
Findings demonstrate a broad worsening of mental health among U.S. college students over the past decade, a concerning result meriting further attention and intervention.
Using newly available polygenic scores for educational attainment and cognitive ability, this paper investigates the possible presence and causes of a negative association between IQ and fertility in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study sample, an issue that Retherford and Sewell first addressed 30 years ago. The effect of the polygenic score on the sample’s reproductive characteristics was indirect: a latent cognitive ability measure, comprised of both educational attainment and IQ, wholly mediated the relationship. Age at first birth mediated the negative effect of cognitive ability on sample fertility, which had a direct (positive) effect on the number of grandchildren. Significantly greater impacts of cognitive ability on the sample’s fertility characteristics were found among the female subsample. This indicates that, in this sample, having a genetic disposition toward higher cognitive ability does not directly reduce number of offspring; instead, higher cognitive ability is a risk factor for prolonging reproductive debut, which, especially for women, reduces the fertility window and, thus, the number of children and grandchildren that can be produced. By estimating the effect of the sample’s reproductive characteristics on the strength of polygenic selection, it was found that the genetic variance component of IQ should be declining at a rate between −.208 (95% CI [−.020, −.383]) and −.424 (95% CI [−.041, −.766]) points per decade, depending on whether GCTA-GREML or classical behavior genetic estimates of IQ heritability are used to correct for ‘missing’ heritability.
The standard view in Life Satisfaction research is that economic well-being has only modest effects on subjective well-being, at least in relatively well off Western countries. More pointedly, the Easterlin Paradox (Easterlin RA, ‘Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence’. In David PA, Reder MW (eds) Nations and households in economic growth: essays in honour of Moses Abramowitz. Academic, New York, pp 89–125, 1974, J Econ Behav Organ 27:35–47, 1995; Easterlin RA, Angelescu L, Happiness and growth the World over: time series evidence on the happiness-income paradox. IZA Discussion Paper No. 4060, Bonn, IZA, 2009) is the claim that ‘economic growth does not improve the human lot’. Using panel data from the Household Incomes and Labour Dynamics Survey Australia (HILDA), this paper investigates the combined effects of changes in wealth, income and consumption on changes in Life Satisfaction; most previous research has focussed solely on static income effects. Results provide strong confirmation of the Easterlin Paradox. The effect sizes of even multi-year measures wealth, income and consumption on Life Satisfaction are small, although statistically significant. In the later part of the paper, it is shown that substantial wealth losses incurred in the Global Financial Crisis (2007–2008) had only a short term effect on Life Satisfaction. As Easterlin would predict, the Life Satisfaction even of individuals whose wealth remained below GFC levels was back to ‘normal’ within 6 years.
In nationally representative samples of U.S. adolescents (age: 13–18) and entering college students, 1976–2017 (N = 8.2 million), iGen adolescents in the 2010s (vs. previous generations) spent less time on in-person (face-to-face) social interaction with peers, including getting together or socializing with friends, going to parties, going out, dating, going to movies, and riding in cars for fun. College-bound high school seniors in 2016 (vs. the late 1980s) spent an hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction, despite declines in paid work and little change in homework or extracurricular activity time. The results suggest that time displacement occurs at the cohort level, with in-person social interaction declining as digital media use increased, but not at the individual level, where in-person social interaction and social media use are positively correlated. Adolescents’ feelings of loneliness increased sharply after 2011. Adolescents low in in-person social interaction and high in social media use reported the most loneliness.
Drawing from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH; N = 611,880), a nationally representative survey of U.S. adolescents and adults, we assess age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorders and suicide-related outcomes since the mid-2000s. Rates of major depressive episode in the last year increased 52% 2005-2017 (from 8.7% to 13.2%) among adolescents aged 12 to 17 and 63% 2009-2017 (from 8.1% to 13.2%) among young adults 18-25. Serious psychological distress in the last month and suicide-related outcomes (suicidal ideation, plans, attempts, and deaths by suicide) in the last year also increased among young adults 18-25 from 2008-2017 (with a 71% increase in serious psychological distress), with less consistent and weaker increases among adults ages 26 and over. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, period, and birth cohort suggest the trends among adults are primarily due to cohort, with a steady rise in mood disorder and suicide-related outcomes between cohorts born from the early 1980s (Millennials) to the late 1990s (iGen). Cultural trends contributing to an increase in mood disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors since the mid-2000s, including the rise of electronic communication and digital media and declines in sleep duration, may have had a larger impact on younger people, creating a cohort effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
We investigate the implications of the persistence of traditional patterns of state organization by examining the relationship between property rights and the economy for monarchies and republics. We argue that, relative to republics, monarchies protect property rights to a greater extent by reducing the negative effects of internal conflict, executive tenure, and executive discretion. In turn, a better protection of property rights results in greater standards of living. Using panel data on 137 countries between 1900 and 2010, we formulate and test a model with endogenous variables. We find strong evidence that monarchies contribute to a greater protection of property rights and higher standards of living through each of the three theoretical mechanisms compared to all republics. We also find that democraticconstitutional monarchies perform better than non-democratic and absolute monarchies when it comes to offsetting the negative effects of the tenure and discretion of the executive branch. We discuss the implications of the persistence of traditional patterns of political authority and rule for political sociology and economic sociology. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
We provide evidence that democracy has a positive effect on GDP per capita. Our dynamic panel strategy controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise confound the effect of democracy. To reduce measurement error, we introduce a new indicator of democracy that consolidates previous measures. Our baseline results show that democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20 percent in the long run. We find similar effects using a propensity score reweighting strategy as well as an instrumental-variables strategy using regional waves of democratization. The effects are similar across different levels of development and appear to be driven by greater investments in capital, schooling, and health.
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This book deconstructs the story of liberalism that John Rawls, author of Political Liberalism, and many others have put forward. Peter L.P. Simpson argues that political liberalism is despotic because it denies to politics a concern with the comprehensive human good; political illiberalism overcomes this despotism and restores genuine freedom. In Political Illiberalism, Simpson provides a detailed account of these political phenomena and presents a political theory opposed to that of Rawls and other proponents of modern liberalism. Simpson analyses and confronts the assumptions of this liberalism by challenging its view of liberty and especially its cornerstone that politics should not be about the comprehensive good. He presents the fundamentals of the idea of a truer liberalism as derived from human nature, with particular attention to the role and power of religion, using the political thought of Aristotle, the founding fathers of the United States, thinkers of the Roman Empire, and contemporary practice. Political Illiberalism concludes with reflections on morals in the political context of the comprehensive good. Simpson views the modern state as despotically authoritarian; consequently, seeking liberty within it is illusory. Human politics requires devolution of authority to local communities, on the one hand, and a proper distinction between spiritual and temporal powers, on the other. This thought-provoking work is essential for all political scientists and philosophy scholars.
Objective
Social relationships supply purpose to life. How can socially disconnected people, who show lower levels of purpose, compensate for purpose in life? We propose that religious beliefs can compensate for the purpose in life that social relationships would otherwise provide, through providing (a) greater purpose to turn to and (b) divine figures that can substitute for social relationships.
Method
In three studies, we analyze three nationally representative and longitudinal data sets (N = 19,775) using moderated regression and cross‐lagged panel analyses.
Results
Consistent with our hypotheses, religious beliefs were of minimal influence on purpose in life for socially connected individuals, who already held higher levels of purpose than socially disconnected individuals. However, for socially disconnected individuals, being highly religious predicted higher levels of purpose in life.
Conclusions
Results suggest that although people primarily derive purpose from social relationships, socially disconnected individuals may leverage their religious beliefs for purpose and social comfort until they can reconnect.
Existing scholarship attributes various political and economic advantages to democratic governance. These advantages may make more democratic countries prone to financial crises. Democracy is characterized by constraints on executive authority, accountability through free and fair elections, protections for civil liberties, and large winning coalitions. These characteristics bring important benefits, but they can also have unintended consequences that increase the likelihood of financial instability and crises. Using data covering the past two centuries, I demonstrate a strong relationship between democracy and financial crisis onset: on average, democracies are about twice as likely to experience a crisis as autocracies. This is an empirical regularity that is robust across a wide range of model specifications and time periods.
According to the cognitive human capital theory, cognitive ability furthers at the individual, institutional and societal level productivity, production, income and wealth. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies using various indicators (psychometric IQs, student assessment tests, education vs. GDP per capita, growth), different methods (correlations, regressions, path models) and different controls have supported this theory in two research paradigms (psychology, economics). An especially revealing test is, whether historical increases in IQ within countries would lead to later economic growth, i.e. about 10 to 20 years later. This design can exclude national differences being associated with human capital and growth (e.g., in culture, economic freedom and politics) which may bias the results. We used a data set of national IQ changes (“FLynn effect”) from Pietschnig and Voracek (2015). For a maximum of 28 nations and 262 periods between 1909 and 2013 IQ development was related to concurrent or lagged GDP per capita development (growth; 5, 10, 15, 20 years). In a second analysis with at least three IQ-GDP periods per country the single within-country correlations for concurrent and later intervals were estimated (13 nations). Finally, we controlled for previous wealth (advantages of backwardness). All analyses show substantial relationships between increases in IQ and GDP, the highest were found for the 5 to 15 years lagged economic growth (r = .25 to .44 resp. .46 to .77). The results back the theory that cognitive ability contributes to wealth.
We examine the role of General Mental Ability (GMA or g), versus specific abilities, in predicting wages among 69,901 participants from 19 countries in the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). We define GMA as the first principal component in a battery of three ability tests, and specific abilities as the low order components. Our initial results – a difference of 52%, between a g only model and a g + specific abilities model (R²s of 0.061 and 0.093, respectively) – is considerably different from earlier results suggesting that "there is not much more than g" in predicting performance. However, further analyses show that this difference is reduced to 0.5% when crucial non-cognitive individual differences (age and sex) are controlled for (R²s of 0.0763 and 0.0767, respectively). Path models of the relationships between individual differences, specific abilities, GMA and wage shed light on these results. Implications for the understanding of the relationship between mental abilities and wage, and to the understanding of cognitive test scores as representing various skills versus general ability, are discussed.
The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature on the relationship between general cognitive ability and fertility among modern humans. Our goals were to (a) evaluate the state of the extant literature, and (b) provide a quantitative summary of effect sizes to the extent possible (given the limitations of the literature). A thorough search identified 17 unique datasets that passed the inclusion criteria. Using a Random Effects Model to evaluate the data, the overall weighted effect was r = −0.11, although the data also indicated a sex effect (stronger correlations among females than males), and a race effect (stronger correlations among Black and Hispanic populations compared to Whites). Importantly, the data suggest the correlation has been increasing in strength throughout the 20th century (and early 21st). Finally, we discovered several notable limitations of the extant literature; limitations that currently prohibit a psychometric meta-analysis. We discuss these issues with emphasis on improving future primary studies to allow for more effective meta-analytic investigations.
This book examines the misuse of history in New Atheism and militant anti-religion. It looks at how episodes such as the Witch-hunt, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust are mythologized to present religion as inescapably prone to violence and discrimination, whilst the darker side of atheist history, such as its involvement in Stalinism, is denied. At the same time, another constructed history—that of a perpetual and one-sided conflict between religion and science/rationalism—is commonly used by militant atheists to suggest the innate superiority of the non-religious mind. In a number of detailed case studies, the book traces how these myths have long been overturned by historians, and argues that the New Atheism’s cavalier use of history is indicative of a troubling approach to the humanities in general. Nathan Johnstone engages directly with the God debate at an academic level and contributes to the emerging study of non-religion as a culture and an identity.
Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.
Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Cultural Evolution - by Ronald F. Inglehart
Countries differ with respect to human rights. Using the cross-country CIRI data (Cingranelli & Richards), the authors tested two theories. The cognitive-moral enlightenment theory going back to Piaget and Socrates postulates that individuals and nations with higher levels of cognitive ability think and behave in a way more conducive to human rights. The culture-religion theory going back to Weber, Sombart and Voltaire postulates that different religious beliefs shape attitudes, and propel societies toward institutions that are more or less supportive of human rights. Cognitive ability had a positive impact on human rights but its effect varied depending on the country sample. More important was religion, both in cross-sectional and longitudinal models. Percentage of Christians had a positive impact (r = .62, total effect β = .63), percentage of Muslima negative one (r = -.57, total effect β = -.59). Political institutions are highly correlated with human rights, but religion is the decisive background factor.
Cambridge Core - Cognition - Cognitive Capitalism - by Heiner Rindermann