Inductivist

A new Italian study led by a female researcher and published by the flagship journal Intelligence reports that men, on average, have higher levels of perceptual reasoning and working memory.

Perceptual reasoning refers to mental operations used to analyze novel problems, rules, and logical relationships, and to create and test solutions. By working memory, researchers mean storing, focusing attention on, and manipulating information for a relatively short period of time.

The researchers are concerned with sex differences in subtest scores that could be due to test bias or social ways that the sexes might differ, and not due to differences in general ability (that are presumably due to biological factors).

They reasoned that if subtest scores are due to broad abilities, the size of the sex difference for the subtest should correspond to the factor loading on the broad ability. For example, if the sex difference on the arithmetic is large, the sex difference on working memory (i.e., a higher-order ability) should also be large. If the latter is small but the former is larger, the authors contend that there is bias in the arithmetic test.

While authors find evidence of some bias in the WAIS-R test, they conclude that the WAIS-IV is "quite fair." If we focus on the results from the WAIS-IV data, we find that men have a small advantage in perceptual reasoning and a moderate advantage in working memory (3 IQ points).

By contrast, there are no significant sex differences in verbal reasoning or processing speed. (Some studies have found a female advantage in processing speed). When indices are combined to created a full-scale IQ score, men have a small advantage--perhaps 1 or 2 IQ points. And, according to the authors, these differences are due to broader abilities, not various forms of bias.

UPDATE: An interesting sidenote: When analyzing WAIS-IV, the researchers look at the sex differences for 15 subtests. You might expect that if there is unintentional test bias, men would come out ahead in some tests, while women might in others. But in zero of the 15 tests do women have a statistically significant advantage.

Everyone who does social research knows that correlations about people are typically weak. You suspect that IQ predicts criminality, but then the data tell you the association is a mere .2. This is the rule rather than the exception. People are complicated. You can't reduce their behavior to a single factor. Plus, measurements are far from precise.

But on rare occasion, connections can be strong. The correlation between your education and your spouse's is .6 or .7.  The link between number of delinquent friends and one's own involvement in delinquency--about .6. Pretty good.

The largest individual-level correlate I've ever calculated (macrolevel correlations tend to be bigger) deals with sexual attraction: Using data I collected myself on 330 people, the point biserial correlation between being male and level of attraction to females is .82. For women being attracted to men, it's .84. Those are huge numbers.

Another way of describing it is in terms of standard deviations: the gap between male and female attraction toward females is 3.6 standard deviations. The difference between the two sexes on liking males is just as big--3.6 sds. You've probably heard that the black-white IQ gap is big. It is, at ONE standard deviation. The attraction gap is enormous.

Now you might be saying, duh, we would expect men to like women and women to like men.

Well, you might expect that, but then again you don't have a PhD in Gender Studies. Many years after the idiot Kinsey claimed that sexual attraction is a continuum, not categorical, researchers are still making similar claims.

With a continuum, one assumes that males will range from being strongly attracted to females to being strongly attracted to males, but most men will be somewhere in the middle with various levels of attraction for both sexes. The same for women. Most of them will have a mix of attractions. If this were the case, being male would not be a strong predictor of level of attraction to females. But common sense and my data predict the outcome very well: what do you know, men like women! And women like men!

I'm afraid a great deal of social research makes us dumber, not smarter. I'd love to see a great deal of it scrapped.

UPDATE: The latest sex theory I've come across claims that our ancestors were indiscriminate copulators: They would hump anything that moves. So males and females being attracted to each other was not the original system. With its de-privileging heterosexual sex, I predict the theory will be wildly popular.

Stefan Molyneux retweeted today the claim that young single women now make more than young single men.  Is that true?

Using General Social Survey (GSS) data, I calculated median incomes for never-married men and women ages 18 to 29 without children who are working full-time.  The numbers shown below are the sex difference between medians, and I include all decades since the 1970s for comparison (sample size = 2,539).  The figures are in constant dollars.

Difference between median male and female incomes 
1970s    1,366
1980s    5,484
1990s       538
2000s    2,625
2010s    6,309

Young men have made more than young women in every decade for five decades, and the biggest gap has been this decade.

The gap is not due to some patriarchal conspiracy (Remind me guys, when and where is the next meeting?) to keep women down. Young men take jobs that make higher wages like construction, while young women are more likely to do something like childcare which doesn't pay crap.

More women are in college, too, so that will make them earn less in the short-term.

Looking at sexual orientation, gender, and variety of sex partners is a good way to show how men and women really are very different. (The need to document this shows the crazy times we live in.)

According to evolutionary theory, since men can pass on their genes with minimal commitment, they have evolved the tendency to desire non-committal sex with a variety of partners.  Since having children is such a tremendous investment for women, they have been selected to be much choosier about sexual partners.  It's not typically hard for a women to get sex, but it can be a challenge to find partners who have the willingness and ability to provide resources to the offspring, or at least who have high-quality genes to pass on to one's children. 

If you're paying attention, you can see that a conflict arises: men who want many partners, and women who want few.  So many men are not able to get what they want.  But what about gay men?  There is no sexual conflict for them: just a bunch of guys who want novelty.

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked adults about: 1) sexual orientation, and 2) the number of male and female sex partners since age 18 (sample size = 23,579). Let's look at the numbers for male partners first:

















Gay men average 43 male partners--much more than any other group. Coming in at a distant second is male bisexuals with close to 15 men.  Female bisexuals have a mean of roughly 12 male partners, and straight women report an average of 5.5.  The average for lesbians is a little over two men.

Now for the number of female sex partners since 18: 

















The category with the most women partners is bisexual men with a mean of almost 20.  Next is straight men with almost 16 1/2.  Lesbians average close to eight female partners, and the mean for female bisexuals is around 5.  The mean for gay men is 2.6 women.

If we add together partners of either gender, the ranking for the total number of sex partners since 18 looks like this: #1) gay men, #2) bisexual men, #3) bisexual women, #4) straight men, #5) lesbians and #6) straight women.

So, sexual minorities have the most partners, but gay men and lesbians stick out; gay men because their numbers are so much higher, and lesbians because their numbers are atypically low.  Compared to lesbians, gays have around 4 1/2 times the number of partners.

This is consistent with evolutionary theory: men like sexual variety much more than women, and they show this most clearly when they are pursuing partners who also like variety; namely, other men.  Lesbians are not like other sexual minorities in that they do not pursue variety much. Why? Because they are women dealing with female partners.   

Liberals are so insensitive to reality, they don't realize that their advocacy of sexual freedom generates more rape. How? Despite the stereotype of getting jumped like Ford claims about Judge Kavanaugh, most rape is date rape. It's casual intimacy gone wrong. At some point in the seduction, the girl wants to stop, but the guy keeps going. The sequence is typically persuasion, pressure, then force.

So the more casual sexual interactions, the greater the odds of interactions that go south.

Sex liberationists would deny the connection -- again, these kinds of people are immune to reality --but if an honest one came along, perhaps he might argue it's worth it because free "love" generates so much overall happiness. Is that true?

One measure of lots of causal sex is the number of partners one had in the past year. The General Social Survey asks this question, so I looked to see if this and control variables predict being happy. Here are the ordinary least squares (OLS) results for almost 15,000 cases.

Being happy (standardized OLS coefficients)

Age  -.01
Male  -.01
White  .09***
Size of city   .01
Native-born  -.02*
Education  .12***
Church attendance  .11***
Liberalism  -.05***
Number of sex partners  -.01

* p < .05,  ***p < .001, two-tail test

So what predicts being happy?  Being white, an immigrant, educated, religious, and conservative. Race, education, and religious involvement are most important.

Age, sex, and city size don't matter, and people get nothing out of many sex partners.

Now you're thinking, maybe lots of partners don't make women happy, but c'mon, it's a man's paradise.

I ran the numbers for men only: the coefficient is negative (-.02) but the p-value is .074. In other words, more partners makes no difference in a man's happiness. Same thing if I run the numbers for women only.

Like Greg Cochran says: Sociologists are useful because if you take the position that is the opposite of theirs, you're probably right.

UPDATE: By the way, if you suspect that I added a bunch of controls to wipe out a positive partners/happiness correlation, you're wrong: it's -.02 (and not significant).

This new, large meta-analysis of 761 effects sizes with a sample of over 400k people looks at the relationship between personality traits sand sexuality. 

People who score high on neuroticism (the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety) are less sexually satisfied (r = .18) and have more symptoms of sexual dysfunction (r = .16). 

Extraverts engage in more sexual activity (r = .17) and risky sexual behavior (r = .18) and have less sexual dysfunction (r = −.17). 

People who are open to experience are more likely to be homosexual (r = .16) and to have liberal attitudes toward sex (r = .19). 

Highly agreeable and conscientious (i.e., self-disciplined) people are less sexually aggressive (r = −.20; r = −.14) and are less like to be unfaithful (r+ = .18; r+ = .17). 

So, if you're looking for a trustworthy partner who enjoys sex, your best bet is to find a person who is even-keeled, cooperative, and diligent. 

By the way, these traits are highly influenced by genes, so don't assume you can change someone into a desirable partner. A major theme among people who take genes seriously is, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG).

In a new meta-analysis of eleven studies, teens who use marijuana around the time of sex were only 62% as likely to use a condom as those not using the drug. One more reason why pot is dumb.

New from Personality and Individual Differences:

As reproductive rates have the potential to be higher in men than women, it is more costly (from an evolutionary perspective) for men to miss a mating opportunity than women. This asymmetry in costs has been proposed to result in men being more sensitive to cues to sexual opportunity than women, and thus men are more likely than women to misperceive sexual interest from opposite sex others. To investigate this sexual misperception bias, smiling male and female faces were presented to participants who were asked to judge whether the face appeared friendly or flirtatious. Participants also completed a sociosexual orientation questionnaire in order to assess their current attitudes towards sexual relationships. In general, we found that males perceive female faces as flirtatious significantly more often than females. However, our results also suggested that people with high scores on the sociosexuality inventory (who rated themselves as more likely to engage in short-term, casual relationships), regardless of sex, had a tendency
to perceive the faces of potential mates as more flirtatious, and that this variable explained more variance than sex alone. Our findings demonstrate that sociosexuality may mediate biases in perceiving the sexual intent of others.

Looking at ADD Health data, I see that 36.9 percent of young males wear eyeglasses, contacts or both. The number for young females is 53.4 percent. The difference is statistically significant. The pattern is the same for all races. Since this is an adolescent/young adult sample, I assumed the sex difference is due to the earlier maturation of girls, but the gap is just as big for those in their mid-20s. How do we explain this? Male stubbornness? Male hunting/warfare?

I lived with my aunt and uncle for a summer when I was attending college, and my aunt got comfortable enough with me to tell me that she had seen a therapist because she didn't enjoy sex. The two decided that religion was to blame. My aunt had felt that sex was bad and had to learn to enjoy it. 

Is this a general phenomenon? The MIDUS Study asked about how often people go to church and how much of the time do they get pleasure from sex. The correlation for 1,188 men is .05, and it's -.05 for 1,200 women. Neither association is statistically significant. There's basically no link between religiosity and enjoying sex.   

I've heard people claim that cohabitation is superior to marriage because life with a girlfriend or boyfriend is more romantic and exciting than life with a spouse. If this is true, then I would expect cohabiting couples to have sex more frequently than married people. 

The MIDUS Study asked people about their relationship status--cohabiting, married, etc.--and also asked about frequency of sex. Answers ranged from "two or more times a week" (6) to never (1).  Age matters so I limited the sample to people in their 30s. The mean for 250 married people is 4.58; it's 4.30 for the 20 cohabitors. The difference is not statistically significant, but keep in mind that married people tend to have the disadvantage of more years together.

Whites




Remember this scene from "Annie Hall"?


[Alvy and Annie are seeing their therapists at the same time on a split screen]

Alvy Singer's Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Annie Hall's Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Alvy Singer: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie Hall: [annoyed] Constantly. I'd say three times a week.


You hear all the time about how married couples have sex three times a week. I always thought that sounded a bit high because there is a woman involved. (In the case of "Annie Hall", three times a week sounds high with a man involved who looks like Woody Allen).

Based on more than 11,000 GSS cases, I generated the two graphs above. The top one--whites--shows that 2-3 times a week is modal for couples in their twenties, but "weekly" becomes modal by the time the couple is in their forties. and even when it's modal, it's still well under 50%. And even among twenty-somethings, there's a detectable number who have sex once a month or less.

You can see even more of those types among blacks (lower graph). But, on the other hand, 2-3 times a week is modal until married blacks are retirement age.

I also looked to see if men were giving different stories than women. For whites, the only difference was that elderly men are less willing to admit they never have sex. For blacks, more men of all ages report that they have sex four or more times a week and fewer admit to having sex once a month or less. This could be evidence for male cheating--the question asks about frequency of sex, but does not specify with one's spouse--or just exaggeration.

"You Catholic girls start much too late": Another observation from "Adventureland": Where does this stereotype of the Catholic girl who won't put out come from? It must be old. I looked at GSS numbers for single white girls 18-22.


Percent not having sex in past year (N = 459)

Protestant 25.3
Catholic 17.4
Jewish 8.3
None 15.2

Compared to Protestants, Catholic girls are putting out. Was the stereotype developed by Jewish Hollywood types who had an easier time with Jewish girls (look at their numbers)? Speaking of that, I thought Jewish women were uptight about sex. Another stereotype from frustrated Jewish men?

Sex education, birth control, and sex: What's the relationship between sex education and behavior? The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health asked 6,411 teens in 1994 if: 1) they had learned about pregnancy in school, 2) they've had sex, and 3) they used birth control the first time.


Percent who have had sex

Taught about pregnancy in school 41.0
Not taught 33.7


Percent who used protection the first time

Taught about pregnancy in school 67.4
Not taught 57.9


Percent who have had sex and did it unprotected the first time

Taught about pregnancy in school 13.4
Not taught 14.2


Looking at the top numbers, those taught about pregnancy in school were more likely to have sex. They were also more likely to use protection the first time. The two patterns basically offset each other: the bottom numbers show us that the percent of kids who have had sex and did it with no birth control is roughly the same for the two groups.

Sex and scIQ: I showed in an earlier post that the male-female scIQ (basic knowledge of science) gap is around one-third of a standard deviation. Folks of all political stripes would agree that sexism in American society has diminished over the past few decades. If the sciIQ gender gap is due to a pattern of men holding women back that has weakened over time, we should see a larger difference among older Americans and a smaller one among younger people.

Here are the means for the "young" and "old" groups (I equalized the number in each group as much as possible since the sample isn't very big):


Mean scIQ score

Ages 43 and up
Men 98.8
Women 94.5
Gap 4.3
N = 213

Ages 18-42
Men 99.5
Women 95.0
Gap 4.5
N = 221

The gender gap is essentially the same for older and younger Americans. Although it might make some female professors pass out upon hearing the news, the data are consistent with the thesis that the sexes differ in their interest and aptitude for science.

Celibacy among girls seems to be up a bit: Agnostic has an interesting post at Gene Expression which presents evidence that previous generations of young people were sluttier than this one.

It has seemed the case that many social indicators have at least plateaued, if not improved slightly since the early 90s, but increasingly coarse pop culture does give older people the impression of a continuing slide.

For example, phenomena like Jackass or Eminem leave one with a sense that the march toward the next, even more shocking fad continues apace. One mistake is to assume that young people are what they seem to older people. Fashion always involves a certain amount of the absurd, and once you move out of those years when it's so important to impress peers, one becomes more disinterested, and many fashions then just seem stupid. "Wearing your pants down below your butt? Idiotic. Only a delinquent would do something that irrational. Wearing a thong that everyone sees? Slutty. Only a girl who sleeps with anyone would do that."

What older folks fail to realize is that fashion--even when it seems extreme--is ultimately about show, and is a poor indicator of behavior. I've got a friend who was a headbanger as a teen. He looked like a two-time felon, and all the grownups at the mall were terrified of him. But I've never known a bigger pussycat--it was all pose, and it usually is.

That's what so great about data--it gets past appearances. Which is a nice segue to my purpose--analyzing General Social Survey data to document trends in sluttiness. I list below the percent of males and females ages 18-25 who report having had 5+ sex partners so far, and the percent who have remained celibate:


Percent--1988-1991 average (N = 624)

5+ partners
Males 11.7
Females 1.8

Celibate
Males 14.0
Females 10.8


Percent--1993-1998 average (N = 1009)

5+ partners
Males 8.2
Females 3.2

Celibate
Males 15.2
Females 11.2


Percent--2000-2006 average (N = 1,133)

5+ partners
Males 10.8
Females 2.2

Celibate
Males 14.3
Females 14.1

I'm not surprised to see what basically looks like a plateau, but one encouraging sign is that the number of girls who are remaining celibate appears to be up. I'm damn happy to see it.

By the way, I'm a bit of a cultural declinist, but Agnostic and other young bloggers I've read seem to be targeting Boomers and X-ers. My reference--and for a lot of thoughtful declinists, I think--is not any of the last four decades. It's WWII through the late 50s. I see a steady decline (with important exceptions) since then, with a flattening more recently. (This is a complicated question, of course, since there are so many trends one could choose to look at).

The only reason why I have a little bit of nostalgia--not much--for my childhood and adolescence is because I was raised in a place that was decades behind every place else. In other words, it was a bit like the 50s. It's easy for me to wax nostalgic as people much older than I (Pat Buchanan for example) do because in a weird way I grew up in that.

More on astrology: A reader suggested in the previous post that most of those nutty astrology people are women. Here's the breakdown, according to the General Social Survey:


Percent who think astrology is very, or sort of, scientific

Women 36.1
Men 27.8

And while we're at it:

Blacks 49.4
Whites 28.4

Wow, half of blacks. Moonbeam Obama Mamas is about right.

Women

Ignore your sociology professor who comments on blogs: A sociologist commented in an earlier post that married women are, on average, more likely to be depressed than unmarried women. I'm not sure if he means never-married women or all unmarried women of all types, but either way the General Social Survey says he's wrong. Here are the percent of women by marital status who felt depressed in the past 30 days, either some, a good bit of, most, or all of the time:


Percent of women feeling depressed

Married 26.6
Never married 33.2
Separated 58.9
Divorced 23.7
Widowed 45.0

Here we have another sociologist rattling off facts that make marriage look bad that are false. I can understand how a discipline could get wrong results because of study flaws, but isn't it funny how errors always somehow support the liberal/feminist view?