Isegoria

In Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray discusses the McCrae study, which looks at differences in personality traits between men and women in 50 different countries, rich and poor, from around the world:

The great cultural and economic disparities across these countries make it difficult to see how all of them could produce uniform socialization of girls to be more warm, altruistic, sympathetic, sociable, and artistically sensitive than men.

I use gender egality in preference to gender equality to signify not just progress toward diminishing sex differences but also institutional, legal, and social changes intended to put men and women on an equal footing.

The question at hand is whether sex differences in personality are smaller in countries that have made the most progress.

The theories of socialization and of social roles that I summarized in chapter 1 necessarily expect that the answer is yes. If sex differences in personality are artificial, diminishing the causes of artificial differences must eventually lead to smaller differences.

The only question is how long it will take.

This brings us to a counterintuitive finding that seems to cut across a variety of sex differences: Many sex differences in cognitive repertoires are wider rather than smaller in countries with greater gender egality. Personality traits offers the first example.

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On average, women preferred altruism, trust, and positive reciprocity more than men and were more averse to negative reciprocity than men. In the two nonsocial preferences, men preferred risk-taking and waiting for a larger reward more than women.

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Five different studies, based on different measures of personality and national gender egality, analyzing data from dozens of countries, all found the same pattern: overall consistency in male-female differences in personality, but larger differences in the most advanced countries

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Perhaps we’re looking at a general phenomenon that goes far beyond personality traits. For example, the Schmitt study points out, sexual dimorphism in height increases with a country’s wealth. So too with sexual dimorphism in blood pressure. So too with competitiveness in sports — as opportunities and incentives increase for women to compete in sports, sex differences in performance increase as well. So too with differences between advantaged and disadvantaged groups in health and education when new opportunities are made available to all. Two years after the Schmitt study made these points, another study led by Richard Lippa found that sexual dimorphism in visuospatial abilities also increased with gender equality.

Another surprise from the Schmitt study was its finding that men do most of the changing, in both the physiological and personality traits. When sexual dimorphism in height increases, for example, it is primarily due to greater height among males. In the case of personality, the Schmitt study found that the wider sex gap in emotional stability in advanced countries is not the result of women becoming less emotionally stable, but of men self-reporting higher levels of emotional stability, and also lower levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness, than men in less advanced countries.

After discussing proto-feminist Mary Astell in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray discusses the differences in personality traits between men and women:

It is appropriate to begin by emphasizing that on many important personality traits, the differences between men and women are quite small. These trivial differences apply to many characteristics that are sometimes ascribed to men (e.g., “assertive or forceful in expression,” “self-reliant, solitary, resourceful”) and ones that are sometimes ascribed to women (e.g., “open to the inner world of imagination,” “lively, animated, spontaneous”).

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Among the traits on which men and women differ, some of the largest effect sizes are consistent with the higher prevalence of depression among women.

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Some of the substantively significant sex differences correspond to traditional stereotypes about feminine sensibility. In the FFM inventory, women were more appreciative of art and beauty than were men (d = +0.34 and +0.33 for the Costa and Kajonius studies respectively), were more open to inner feelings and emotions (d = +0.28 and +0.64), were more modest in playing down their achievements (d = +0.38 and +0.45), and were more reactive, affected by feelings, and easily upset (d = +0.53). In the 16PF inventory, several stereotypical characteristics were combined into one factor, “sensitive, aesthetic, sentimental,” with a whopping d of +2.29.

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A person who is warm, sympathetic, accommodating, altruistic, and sociable amounts to the stereotype of a human being, male or female, who is more attuned to people than things. Women are more likely to have that profile than are men.

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People who are somewhat to the other side of each trait in the table are reserved, utilitarian, unsentimental, dispassionate, and solitary — which amounts to the stereotype of a human being, male or female, who is more attracted to things, broadly defined, than to people. Men are more likely to have that profile than are women.

Despite his experience co-writing The Bell Curve, Charles Murray went ahead with Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class:

I’m also at a point in my career when I’m immune to many of the penalties that a younger scholar would risk.

He thought he was careful with The Bell Curve, and it wasn’t enough — if only because no one read the book before attacking it. He has tried being careful again:

Almost all of the findings I report are ones that have broad acceptance within their disciplines. When a finding is still tentative, I label it as such. I know this won’t deter critics from saying it’s all pseudoscience, but I hope the experts will be yawning with boredom because they know all this already.

Social scientists tend to be leftists, Steve Sailer notes, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists:

Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has been pointing out this paradox since his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980.

Now 77, Murray began planning to write his new book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class four years ago.

The title Human Diversity is impertinent because we are supposed to simultaneously worship diversity and pretend it doesn’t exist. Humanity is proclaimed to be both a rainbow of diverse delights and a beige putty that is wholly molded by arbitrary social injustices.

But would writing an honest book entitled Human Diversity be worth the abuse? Murray’s wife was skeptical. He explains in its Acknowledgments:

My wife and editor, Catherine…initially tried to talk me out of writing ‘Human Diversity.’ When I began work in the fall of 2016, the nastiness associated with the reaction to The Bell Curve was a distant memory. Did I really want to go through that again?

A kind and sensitive man, Murray had found the ignorant and malignant backlash against his 1994 magnum opus coauthored with the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, to be a depressing experience. The hate campaign against Murray contributed to virtually nobody paying attention to his fascinating 2003 book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.

But Murray finally got out of the media’s doghouse with 2012’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by the expedient of applying his superb analytic skills solely to white Americans.

Still, in early 2017 a leftist goon squad at expensive Middlebury College assaulted Murray and a professor, Alison Stanger, who was attempting to interview him:

Then came the radicalization of the campuses, when we learned that the bad old days were back no matter what. “Confound it!” said Catherine, or two syllables to that effect, on the day I returned from the riot at Middlebury. “If they’re going to do this kind of thing anyway, go ahead and write it.”

On the other hand, Human Diversity is not intended to be a sharp stick in the eye for Murray’s abusers. It is aimed instead at intelligent readers who want to learn about the state of the human sciences a fifth of the way through the 21st century. Human Diversity is something of a meta-review of recent meta-analyses that have been published in dozens of subdisciplines to summarize countless individual studies.

We’re lucky to have Murray to guide us through so much. Although Murray has made his career largely at think tanks rather than in academia, he is by nature less argumentative than professorial. He works hard at making his vast amount of material comprehensible. His prose style is pleasingly informal.

And Murray’s books have always been appealing physical objects, with elegant fonts, uncluttered graphs, and a little extra leading between the lines to make the text look less daunting.

He’s almost got me considering the hardcover edition — but the Kindle edition is too convenient, especially for quoting.

In the third chapter of Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, while discussing sex differences in neurocognitive functioning, Charles Murray presents a simple test of visuospatial skills, the Piaget water-level test.

Go ahead and give it a try.

Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question.

After you’re finished, go ahead and read the text below the diagram:

The test-taker is asked to draw a line to show how the water line would look in the tilted bottle. The correct answer is a horizontal line relative to the earth. Halpern reports that the best estimate, summarizing results over many studies, is that about 40 percent of college women get it wrong. Effect sizes favoring males range from –0.44 to –0.66. In Halpern’s words, “It is difficult to understand why this should be such a formidable task for college women.” And yet the result has been replicated many times, has been confirmed internationally, and is just about impossible to explain as a product of culture or socialization (if you doubt that, give it a try).

Almost all human traits are partly heritable, Charles Murray notes:

That’s been known for decades. But until a few years ago, no one knew what specific bits of DNA code determine any given trait. Now, however, geneticists have identified at least a few hundred variants in the DNA code that are statistically associated with important traits such as intelligence, depression and risk tolerance. Over the next decade, they are on track to identify thousands of variants associated with dozens of traits. That achievement will open up the ability to score genetic potential on those traits and thereby revolutionize the social sciences.

The methods of scoring are improving almost monthly, but the essence is simple. Each variant has a version (more precisely, one of the alleles in a single nucleotide polymorphism) associated with a small boost to the trait in question. If you add up those small boosts, you have a score for that trait, in the same sense that you have an IQ score if you add up all the correct answers to the questions on an IQ test. In the case of DNA variants, it is called a “polygenic score.”

Polygenic scores are revolutionary because they are causal in only one direction. They don’t drop because tests make you nervous or rise because you grew up rich. They’re impervious to racism and other forms of prejudice. Socioeconomic and cultural environments can play an important role in how those bits of DNA are expressed, but they don’t change the codes themselves. That means polygenic scores will offer social scientists something they’ve never had before: a secure place to stand in assessing what is innate and what is added by the environment.

Progress during the past five years has been rapid for many traits. In the case of IQ, the share of the variation in scores that can be explained from genetic material alone went from zero in 2015 to 5% in 2018 and 11% in 2019. That doesn’t tell us much about any individual’s IQ, but it’s enough to be useful in addressing many important issues.

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I don’t expect such analyses will be free of controversy. I am asserting that they are technically feasible, will be conducted within a few years, and will offer powerful tests of questions that have been argued for decades.

I expect we’ll be discussing Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class quite a bit in the coming weeks.

The current efforts to curb coronavirus should remind us of the Samoan experience with the 1918 flu — or, rather, with the two very different Samoan experiences:

In 1918 the Samoan archipelago was split between American Samoa (a United States territory) and Western Samoa (previously a German colony but under New Zealand governance from 1914). The 1918 influenza pandemic killed a quarter of Western Samoans, while leaving American Samoa unscathed. Why were their experiences so different?

In late 1918 a second wave within a single pandemic of influenza was spreading throughout Asia and the Pacific. On 30 October 1918 the Union Steamship Company’s Talune left Auckland for its run through Polynesia. The new, more lethal influenza variant had arrived in Auckland with the spring, and several crew members were ill. On 7 November the Talune reached Apia, the main port of New Zealand-occupied Western Samoa.

In 1918 the two Samoas had been divided for nearly twenty years. The United States had sought American Samoa for Pago Pago harbour, a protected anchorage and coaling stop. Western Samoa had become a German colony, and under German rule efforts were made to increase its economic viability and attract European settlers. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Britain had asked New Zealand to occupy Western Samoa to prevent its use by German naval forces.

The two Samoas were in regular contact with each other, and controlled all access to the outside world through two ports: Pago Pago in the east and Apia in the west. The dangers of ship-borne disease were well known, and exclusion of many diseases, especially plague, had been implemented since the imposition of colonial governance nineteen years before.

How then to explain the differing responses to the approach of the pandemic? When the Talune docked in Western Samoa she was not put in quarantine. No word had come from Auckland by wireless, and the ship’s captain did not mention that influenza was in New Zealand. In fact, the captain instructed ill crew and passengers to hide their malady so as to prevent being delayed in Apia.

The Germans had developed their colony of Western Samoa as a commercial enterprise. European-owned plantations occupied one-fifth of the land, supported by a network of European planters and shipping agents. Three times more foreign ships visited Apia than Pago Pago. When the issue of quarantine arose, the New Zealand Governor, Colonel Logan, faced the hostility of this trading community, as well as significant logistical difficulties. Logan needed a larger infrastructure to cope with the number of ships quarantined, and would have had difficulty enforcing any such restrictive edict.

This disinclination to act also had an institutional element. Western Samoa had been taken by New Zealand only four years before, and Logan had received little guidance regarding the territory. In addition, the civilian medical staff in Samoa were both widely scattered and not well respected, and no medical advice regarding quarantine reached Logan.

German administration in Samoa had undermined traditional local authority by taking away the distribution of chiefly titles and reducing the stature of these leaders in local eyes. Thus when New Zealand forces assumed control they found a diminished set of traditional power bases, too weakened to act as effective proxies.

Facing a lack of experience, a dearth of instructions and an unhelpful infrastructure, Logan perceived little support. He chose to wait for directives. The port remained open.

American Samoa presented a different set of circumstances. During nineteen years of benign neglect the administration in Pago Pago had learned to act autonomously. Without oversight from Washington the naval bureaucracy had left most affairs to the traditional Samoan nobility and did not interfere in the granting of titles. The medical staff were naval officers with knowledge of quarantine.

To officials in Washington, American Samoa was a naval station with an incidental indigenous population. There was scant need for traders to maintain a permanent presence in the colony and no effort to attract settlers. This facilitated the American Governor’s use of quarantine: the absence of a trader community allowed General Poyer to impose measures without resistance, and the small number of ships visiting Pago Pago made such an effort manageable. When descriptions of the flu reached Poyer, he acted decisively. Quarantine was established, and implemented under the leadership of traditional chiefs. With modifications, the quarantine in American Samoa continued, with no fatal cases of influenza reported, until late 1921.

In contrast, Western Samoa suffered the highest known mortality of any state during the 1918-1921 pandemic. At least 24 percent of the population died, and most who died were between 18-50 years of age. Half of the most productive age cohort of Western Samoa, and the chiefly and religious elites, died. Western Samoa collapsed.