Chapter 7, PSYC 2550

• According to Hydes “Gender Similarities Hypothesis” in many domains there is no differences, in most domains there is a small difference, and very few have large differences  

• Cognitive abilities: mental skills, such as paying attention, reasoning, remembering, solving problems, speaking, and interpreting 

• Intelligence: the general capacity to understand ideas, think abstractly, reason, solve problems, and learn.

• Intelligence quotient is a standardized score that represents an individual’s level of intelligence relative to his or her same-age peers. 

• Phrenology: the discredited study of how the  size of your brain and shape of your cranium determines the mental abilities and personal attributes 

• essentialism : the belief that humans differences arise from qualities within individuals 

• Intelligence Quotient (IQ): a score representing an individual’s level of intelligence, as measured by a standarized intelligence test 

• eugenics : a movement whose member seek to control the genetic quality of the human population by preventing the reproduion fo those deeemed genetically inferior 

• Cognitive abilites differences: 

  • Visual spatial abilities: favor men to women a to a medium degree

  • Mental rotation abilities: earlier studies showed significant favor towards men, now have slightly reduced when adjusting to give females feeling of power

  • Spatial relation: small male advatangae that decreases into adulthood 

  • Spatial visualtization: shows small male advantages these do not emerge until the teenage years 

  • Spatial location memory: small favor towards women, but studies are inconsistent 

  • Verbal: small, mostly females more than male

• Greater male variability hypothesis: the prediction that men show more variability than women in their distributions of scores on cognitive performance measures, leading them to be overrepresented in the very bottom and very top of score distribution 

• •Earliest meta-analysis of reading comprehension found no overall sex difference.

• •More recent studies (some across many cultures), find some evidence of a reading advantage for girls.

• •Most research in writing ability, shows that girls again have an advantage.  

• –Writing advantage > reading advantage.

• •Verbal reasoning, or the ability to understand and analyze concepts, offers an exception to the general trend toward a female advantage in verbal abilities

• Autism Spectrum Disorder

  • 1/68 of births in USA

  • Boys 5/1 Girls

• Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)

  • Males > Female

• Alzheimer’s Disease

  • 11% of USA > 65 yo

  • Women 2/1 Men

•On the nurture side, greater male variability in math ability does not emerge in some countries and it tends to decrease as countries show greater evidence of gender equality. 

•On the nature side, research suggests that alleles (variant forms of genes), on the X chromosome can explain sex differences in the lower tails of ability distributions, for example, the  disproportionate numbers of boys and men with intellectual disabilities. 

•On the nurture side: Several large cross-cultural studies with hundreds of thousands of people find a fair amount of cross-cultural variation in the size of some cognitive sex differences.

•On the nature side: Verbal and visual-spatial sex differences generally show less (though still some) cross-cultural variation. 

•There is no consensus regarding why girls consistently outperform boys in reading or why boys consistently outperform girls in mental rotation across cultures.