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Men Smarter than Women, Scientist Claims
By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 08 September 2006
02:39 pm ET
Men are smarter than women, according to a controversial new study that adds another cinder to the fiery debate over whether gender impacts general intelligence.
"For 100 years there's been a consensus among psychologists that there is no sex difference in intelligence," said J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Recent studies, however, have raised questions about the validity of this claim, he said. One such study showed that men have larger brains than women, a 100 gram difference after correcting for body size. Rushton found similar results in a study of gender and brain size.
To determine if there was a link between gender and intelligence, and perhaps between brain size and intelligence, Rushton and a colleague analyzed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores from 100,000 17- and 18-year-olds.
G-factor
When Rushton and colleagues weighted each SAT question by an established general intelligence factor called the g-factor, they discovered that males surpassed females by an average of 3.6 IQ points.
The g-factor works like this. "If I tell you the last four digits of my telephone number and ask you to repeat them back to me, that's a low g-loaded memory test," Rushton explained. "But if I then ask you to repeat them back to me in the reverse order, that suddenly requires a tremendous amount more cognitive processing. It is a very high loaded g-item.”
So the g-factor "is really the active ingredient of the test," Rushton said. "It's the single best, most predictive part of the test."
Rushton suspects that the results are due to males having more brain tissue than females on average. "It's a very reasonable hypothesis that you just need more brain tissue dedicated to processing high ‘g' information," Rushton said.
The study, which Rushton co-wrote with Douglas Jackson, also of the University of Western Ontario, is detailed in the current issue of the journal Intelligence.
You can read the full article here.
Not only are men's brains larger on average compared to females, but also males have to rely more on their intelligence as opposed to women in their lives which is one of the main reasons why men are smarter then women.
Why? Because it’s more important for males to achieve things in life. Men need to attain certain higher social, economic levels in their lives in order to become attractive enough to mate with. Since looks are less important in regards to males. It's more about status, the higher status the male is the more desirable he becomes.
In contrast, women who are beautiful enough can just use her beauty to get a man to love her and take care of her. Males look at women more in terms of physical attributes. The more beautiful, healthier women are the better candidates they are to produce the male's babies.