Raise a glass to the newest study in @ICAJournal from Maximilian Krolo and @timothycbates, who find that smarter people know more about wine. 🍷 In a sample of 525 respondents, IQ and wine knowledge were positively correlated (r = .31), and this relationship did NOT diminish after controlling for exposure to the wine industry or drinking habits. If you're not a sommelier, this correlation doesn't matter much in real life. But the study has a lot of theoretical importance. Wine knowledge is complex, sophisticated, not taught in schools, and has little practical application for most people. This undermines the theory that smarter people know more facts because they have economic incentives to learn more or because they attend school longer. The people who knew the most about wine were those who had both (1) high IQ and (2) exposure to the wine industry. This likely means that exposure to a knowledge domain occurs that smarter people benefit more from that environment than less intelligent people. Cheers to the authors! 🥂 Read the full study (with no paywall) at doi.org/10.65550/001c.165719

A banger article in @ICAJournal reports the impact of intelligence and specific cognitive abilities on education level, socioeconomic status, and occupational prestige. Using data from the NLSY79 and NLSY97 samples, the authors replicated previous work showing that there is a hierarchy of jobs in which those with higher average IQs have greater prestige and pay. What's new in this article is that that--after controlling for general intelligence--the authors did the same analysis for specific abilities: tech (mechanical knowledge), math-verbal abilities, and processing speed. The results are fascinating: ➡️Jobs with workers who have higher average math-verbal scores tended to also be the same jobs with higher IQ (2nd image). ➡️Tech/mechanical knowledge tends to predict lower prestige, pay, and IQ. But there are exceptions: engineers tend to have high IQ, high tech levels, greater pay, and high prestige. ➡️Cognitive abilities and job interests are correlated. IQ is negatively correlated with realistic interests and most positively correlated with investigative interests (3rd image). ➡️The importance of different abilities fluctuates in the early 20s before stabilitizing. In early adulthood, high tech ability is associated with higher income, but that reverses after a few years (4th image). Apparently, a young person can enter a job with high tech ablity needs relatively quickly (e.g., electrician, factory work). But after a person with higher IQ or verbal-math ability gets some college training, they can ener a higher paying job in their mid 20s. This is a strong article that builds on knowledge, replicates old findings, and pushes the field forward with information that both theoretically and practically useful. Read the full article here: doi.org/10.65550/001c.162975

New research in @ICAJournal investigates how the Flynn Effect manifests itself in older populations. 🧠📈👴 Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the authors examined >128,000 people in 22 European countries who took cognitive tests between 2005 and 2022. Overall IQ increased between 0.9 and 4.0 IQ points per decade. But that overall increase masks a LOT of heterogeneity. Verbal fluency performance increased the most consistently (with most countries between 2.25 and 13.5 IQ points). But the other tasks--working memory, free recall, and numeracy--showing a lot more variability. There was especially a lot of variability from country to country (see second image). Controlling for age and education shrank many effects, many effects shrank, but some remained, especially in verbal fluency. The authors also found that score gains did not cause the general factor to necessarily strengthen or weaken over time. The strength of the general factor appeared to fluctuate randomly across years and countries. The results are still interesting, and the general pattern of findings line up with previous Flynn Effect studies. The authors believe that the environmental factors driving Flynn effects (e.g., better education, health, cognitively demanding environments) can improve particular cognitive skills in older adulthood without necessarily raising general intelligence. Read the full open-access paper here: doi.org/10.65550/001c.157760

🧠 Is creativity mostly just high intelligence? A new twin study in @ICAJournal says no. There’s a large genetically independent component. @timothycbates analyzed intelligence test scores and creativity data in three domains: business, military, politics/leadership). Key findings: ➡️Creative achievement is highly heritable (h² ≈ .56), shared environment ≈ 0 ➡️Latent creativity and general intelligence are genetically independent. ➡️g explains only ~10% of the genetic variance in creative achievement These findings support a hybrid view: g helps in many domains, but creativity has substantial unique genetic architecture. As Bates explains, "the genetic architecture of real-world creative achievement is not merely a downstream consequence of general intelligence but reflects a separate, heritable system that operates across artistic, scientific, and enterprising domains" (p. 6). Read the full open-access paper: doi.org/10.65550/001c.162501

This week, @ICAJournal published a major article by @Herasight scientists (@_twolfram et al.) on using "polygenic scores" (scores based on a person's DNA, abbreviated PGS) to predict intelligence, health diagnoses, and life outcomes. Here's a quick summary of their findings: ✅The PGS predicted intelligence pretty well: r = .45. (To put this in perspective, socioeconomic status usually predicts IQ at r ≈ .20 to .30). ✅Higher PGSs for IQ also predicted better higher occupational prestige (2nd image) and better mental health outcomes (3rd image). ✅The PGSs were less predictive for people with non-European ancestry (especially African Americans), which is expected. ✅The PGSs were equally predictive across the range of socioeconomic statuses (4th image), which is evidence against the Scarr-Rowe effect that predicts that genes will have a weaker influence in low-SES individuals than middle- and upper-class individuals. These findings have major practical and theoretical implications. From a practical perspective, Herasight is an embryo selection company. This study means that when their customers select the smartest embryo during in vitro fertilization, they are also generally picking a future child that has better mental health and a more prestigious occupation as an adult. It sounds like sci-fi, but it is reality today. From a theoretical perspective, this study reveals a lot about the genetic architecture of the psychological traits: generally, the same genes that make a brain smarter also make it less susceptible to mental health diagnoses. Read the full article (with no paywall) here: icajournal.scholasticahq.com…