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Intelligence, Biology and the Environment


The researchers set out to collect data from 57 studies, 30 different countries and to analyze the results. The researchers found relatively insignificant results in their two studies (slight difference in children at 15-19 years of age with 2 IQ points more for boys; 3-5 points more for undergraduate men and 5 points more amongst male adults). These results are considered to have a small effect size of the difference (near the d = 0.2) as described by Maltby, Day and Macaskill (2007).
             To summarise the previous findings it can be concluded that sex differences in intelligence between men and women cannot be generalised but have to be looked at from a perspective of different domains of intelligence. For example, Maccoby & Jacklin (1974) argued that men score higher on spatial ability tests than women, but on the other hand women do better on tasks involving verbal abilities and language vocabulary. Further meta – analyses` studies were carried out to investigate whether these findings and similar findings investigating sex differences in specific aspects of intelligence were valid. Five major studies were conducted (from which three studies involved participants of all ages) to explore sex differences of all main domains such as, spatial visualisation, mental rotation, reading comprehension, speech production, etc. (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974). These studies demonstrated medium effect for men in comparison to women on measures of spatial intelligence and there was no evidence for any effect of women scoring higher in comparison to men on verbal intelligence abilities (Feingold, 1988; Voyer & Bryden, 1995); Hyde & Linn, 1988; Linn & Petersen, 1985; hedges & Nowell, 1995).
             Consequently these findings raise questions about how these two sex differences came about and whether they occurred due to any environmental or heritability factors. It has also been argued that some sex differences can be explained in terms of differences of brain size between men and women as described in Willerman, Schultz, Rutledge & Bigler (1991).


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