Group items tagged

There's little correlation between a group's collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.

" Kanazawa concluded that the famous halo effect is not a cognitive illusion, as so many academics had assumed, but rather an accurate reading of the world: We assume that beautiful people are smart, he argues, because they are."

We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end-that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.

"Boosting women's participation further may become even more important as the nature of the military's tasks changes in many regions. Countries are increasingly fighting asymmetric wars against terrorist groups. This demands less outright combat and more effective peacekeeping, through strategic decision-making, intelligence gathering, and civil engagement. Most of the vulnerable population in conflict areas are women and children. Against this background, women's involvement becomes even more valuable. Women offer perspectives that are typically not found in male-dominated organizations. Moreover, as Major General Kristin Lund, the first-ever female commander of United Nations field operations, has pointed out, access to the local population is vital to support peacekeeping, and women have access to 100% of the population, compared to only 50% for men - an invaluable advantage for, say, intelligence gathering."

"there is a more complex, though no less disturbing, process at play when we objectify not only girls and women, but boys and men as well. In contrast to popular belief, when we 'objectify' we don't treat people as objects with no intelligence or emotions of their own. Several notable psychologists are beginning to argue that, when we objectify someone, we don't assume that they have less mind overall, but that they have a different type of mind."

"identical twins, whether reared together or reared apart, were more similar to each other than their fraternal counterparts were for traits like personality and, more controversial, intelligence. One unexpected finding in his research suggested that the effect of a pair's shared environment - say, their parents - had little bearing on personality. Genes and unique experiences - a semester abroad, an important friend - were more influential."

" Albert Einstein has been widely quoted as saying, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." Sometimes, a corporate mandate or group-think or your desire to produce a certain outcome can cause your rational mind to go in the wrong direction. At times like these, it is intuition that holds the power to save you. That "bad feeling" gnawing away at you is your intuition telling you that no matter how badly you might wish to talk yourself into this direction, it is the wrong way to go. Smart people listen to those feelings. And the smartest people among us - the ones who make great intellectual leaps forward - cannot do this without harnessing the power of intuition."

"Every man casts himself into the world by making himself a lack of being; he thereby contributes to reinvesting it with human signification. He discloses it. And in this movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of existing. They then manifest existence as a happiness and the world as a source of joy. But it is up to each one to make himself a lack of more or less various, profound, and rich aspects of being. What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being. Doubtless, every one casts himself into it on the basis of his physiological possibilities, but the body itself is not a brute fact. It expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or repulsion. And on the other hand, it determines no behavior."

The concept of intersectionality recognizes that people can be privileged in some ways and definitely not privileged in others. There are many different types of privilege, not just skin-color privilege, that impact the way people can move through the world or are discriminated against. These are all things you are born into, not things you earned, that afford you opportunities that others may not have. For example: Citizenship: Simply being born in this country affords you certain privileges that non-citizens will never access. Class: Being born into a financially stable family can help guarantee your health, happiness, safety, education, intelligence, and future opportunities. Sexual orientation: If you were born straight, every state in this country affords you privileges that non-straight folks have to fight the Supreme Court for. Sex: If you were born male, you can assume that you can walk through a parking garage without worrying that you'll be raped and then have to deal with a defense attorney blaming it on what you were wearing. Ability: If you were born able-bodied, you probably don't have to plan your life around handicap access, braille, or other special needs. Gender identity: If you were born cisgender (that is, your gender identity matches the sex you were assigned at birth), you don't have to worry that using the restroom or locker room will invoke public outrage. As you can see, belonging to one or more category of privilege, especially being a straight, white, middle-class, able-bodied male, can be like winning a lottery you didn't even know you were playing. But this is not to imply that any form of privilege is exactly the same as another, or that people lacking in one area of privilege understand what it's like to be lacking in other areas.

In companies that advertised job openings, good-looking females (as judged by a panel we assembled) received 6% fewer callbacks than plain-looking females and 23% fewer than women without pictures. The beauty "penalty" was much smaller and less significant when it came to employment agencies, perhaps because the women screening CVs wouldn't have had to work side-by-side with the candidates. In both the hiring companies and the agencies, screeners reacted favorably to pictures of attractive-looking men, giving these candidates significantly more callbacks than plain-looking men and males who didn't attach photos. This male beauty premium did not come as a surprise in light of the large body of psychological research showing that attractive people are generally viewed positively along numerous dimensions. They're believed to be happier, healthier, more intelligent, luckier in marriage, and so on. Thus the responses to the CV photos of attractive women really stand out and tell us a lot about the screeners' biases.

It is official: Racial attacks against white people are excusable. Much of the judicature can be relied upon to deliver justice according to liberal-left, Frankfurt School ideology.  What other explanation is there for Judge Robert Brown's decision to excuse a quartet of "Muslim" girls that attacked Rhea Page, kicked her in the head and tore out her hair. In case there was any doubt that the attack was racially aggravated, the four-piece gang (actually clan, as they comprised of three sisters and a cousin) yelled "kill the white slag". Now, if the racial profile was reversed and four white girls attacked a person of another race, while cajoling and exhorting one another to "kill", then I'm pretty confident a custodial sentence would have been passed.

the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.

There's no need to say, Shrey what did you expect when you auditioned for Hack Neo's Ah Boys to Men? That unlike the film, the audition process won't be crass and insulting to the intelligence?

"1. Change promotion criteria The Peter Principle is alive because promotions are mostly based on an employee's current performance. This doesn't make any sense as the research clearly shows: there's a negative correlation between current job performance and the added value of that person as a manager. Progressive organizations therefore change the promotion criteria. They focus on assessing other characteristics of candidates that are better predictors of managerial success. Characteristics such as collaboration experience, leadership traits, emotional intelligence and communication skills are much better predictors, and therefore much more valuable in predicting who will add the most value as a manager."

culture is an adaptation, which exists because it conferred a reproductive advantage on our hunter-gatherer ancestors. According to this view many of the diverse customs that the standard social science model attributes to nurture are local variations of attributes acquired 70 or more millennia ago, during the Pleistocene age, and now (like other evolutionary adaptations) "hard-wired in the brain." But if this is so, cultural characteristics may not be as plastic as the social scientists suggest. There are features of the human condition, such as gender roles, that people have believed to be cultural and therefore changeable. But if culture is an aspect of nature, "cultural" does not mean "changeable." Maybe these controversial features of human culture are part of the genetic endowment of human kind.

The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, "continually demeaned and insulted" by women without a whimper of protest. Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a "lazy and insidious" culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.