Morning Ed: Society {2016.04.14.Th}

veronica d in reply to LeeEsq says:

Right.

The article talks of women who don’t want men of “greater intelligence,” not that they don’t want men who are intelligent-full-stop. In other words, a woman in STEM might want a man just as smart as she is. And look! She is surrounded by them. So the link text, that smart dudes should avoid STEM gals — well that depends. Are you an insecure jerk who wants to feel dominant? Then indeed, avoid smart techy women. If you are smart and want someone like you, then go STEM!

Note, here is the actual paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jasp.12354/full

Consider this:

Although the close relationships literature suggests that both men and women desire intelligence in their partners […], when it comes to preference for partners smarter than oneself, there is reason to believe that women, on average, would have a stronger preference for smarter partners than men. Research by Prentice and Carranza (2002, Study 1) examined the content of gender stereotypes by asking undergraduate students to rate how desirable and typical it was in American society for a woman/man to possess a series of attributes. Of particular relevance to the present research was their finding that the trait “intelligence” was viewed as less desirable in a woman than in a man in American society (Prentice & Carranza, 2002, Study 1). It therefore seems plausible that women, relative to men, would desire partners who are more intelligent than themselves, given the gender norm that intelligence is less desirable in women than in men.

Later,

To provide initial evidence for the assumption that (a) women show stronger preference for smarter romantic partners than do men; and (b) that preference for smarter partners is linked to traditional gender role attitudes, 947 heterosexual, English-speaking undergraduate students at a large, moderately selective public research university in the Eastern United States (461 women, Mage?=?19.02, SD?=?3.96; 732 Caucasians, 88 Asians, 70 Blacks, 39 Hispanics, and 18 did not indicate ethnicity) reported their preference for smarter partners (i.e., “I would prefer to date someone who is smarter than I am” and “I would feel comfortable dating someone who is smarter than I am”; r?=?.41, p?<?.001) on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) as part of a larger mass testing survey.

There are a few more experiments done, which look like this:

A few weeks after completing the preference for smarter partner items (two items, r?=?.56, p?<?.001) described in the preliminary study, participants came to the lab in same-sex groups of up to five and were seated at private cubicles. They were told that the purpose of the study was to examine the relation between aspects of people's personality and cognitive outcomes. After giving consent to participate, they were randomly assigned to one of three priming conditions.

In the romantic goal prime condition, participants were given the following instructions:

Please think about a time when you wanted to be attractive/romantically desirable to others. Think about your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to this goal of wanting to be perceived as desirable. Now, please write an essay in the space below describing what you were thinking, feeling, or doing to be desirable to others.

In the intelligence goal prime condition, participants received the instructions:

Please think about a time when you wanted to appear competent/intelligent. Think about your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to this goal of wanting to be competent/intelligent. Now, please write an essay in the space below describing what you were thinking, feeling, or doing to be competent.

In the control condition, participants received the instructions:

Please think of the objects that you see in this room. Now, please write an essay in the space below describing this object in detail.

Next, participants reported how anxious, worried, tense, ashamed, and insecure they felt at the moment on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much); these items were later averaged to create a composite measure of anxiety (five items, ??=?.77). They also completed the Body Surveillance subscale of the Objectified Body Consciousness scale (eight items, ??=?.76; McKinley & Hyde, 1996) in reference to how they felt about their bodies (e.g., “I think more about how my body feels than how my body looks,” reversed). Participants were then given 20 minutes to complete a paper and pencil test that consisted of 30 challenging questions (e.g., complex algebra, math word problems) from a quantitative section of the Graduate Records Examination (GRE).

So this is a combination survey data and self-report. It measures what men and women say they want, not their actual behavior. Those often don’t match, particularly in romantic and sexual contexts.

Anyway, if I get some free time later today I’ll read the whole thing. But the summary is bullshit.

Please stop summarizing gender badly. It’s difficult. There are already so many bogus preconceptions. We don’t need to reinforce them.Report