Vivre la Difference

A key trend in modern society is the rise of assortative mating. It explains so many diffferent things that people complain or worry about.

Briefly and simply what we mean by “assortative mating” is that, to a much greater extent, like is marrying like. No, we’re not making some sly joke about gay marriage here, rather, that looking along many of the different fault lines that divide society, more people are marrying those who are like themselves than used to be the case.

Marriage used to come pretty much from within that group of friends and family that one knew. Maybe from high school even: but things have, as we know, rather changed. We’re all marrying later, we’re more likely to marry someone we met either at work or college, thus we’re more likely to marry someone who has been pre-selected to be like us anyway.

If we marry someone from work, it’s likely that it will be someone who works in the same field as us: so if there is anything genetic that makes one likely to be an engineer, or a nurse, then it’s likely that this whatever it is will be fortified in the next generation. This is pretty much Simon Baron Cohen’s view of the rise in autism. Certain characteristics (roughly measured by our EQSQ personality tests) do indeed make you more likely to be in one job or profession than another and that like marrying like (say, systemisers marrying systemisers) reinforces those traits and thus we get that rise in autism (which he describes as a form of”super systemiser”).

But this isn’t the only such fault line. Assortative mating has also been used to explain the divergence in houshold incomes in the country. We are marrying later, as above and we are meeting out prospective mates at college or work. So we who go to coeelege are choosing our mates from that pool of people who have also gone to college. Or lawyers and other professionals are choosing from a pool of other similar professionals.

Thus we see the rise of the two professional household: and of course its side effect, the rise of the no professional household. This, whatever is happening to individual incomes, whatever is happening to he wage distribution or inequality in general, is going to have a very large effect on the household income distribution.

Further, given that we calculate the inequality rate from household distributions (because that is the way the tax data we use is collected) then it’s highly likely that we will be overstating the effect of economic changes upon inequality, rather than the more social aspects such as assortative mating. As, indeed, many economists try to point out.

What’s prompted all of this is a snippet of information from the TaxProf blog:

A key finding of the report is the partner status of full-time faculty:

• Academic Partner:  36%
• Employed, Non-academic Partner:  36%
• Single:  14%
• Stay-at-Home Partner:  13%

That is assortative mating for you: professors are marrying professors. It’s one thing if, say, someone earning $60 k a year marries someone earning $30k or so: but when there’s two $60k salaries in the same household that’s a household income up in the top 10% straight away. But more importantly, these figures give us an actual number for how prevalent assortative mating is.

There’s nothing wrong with it of course: we certainly wouldn’t want to change people’s behavior either, or even try. But it is a powerful explanation for many of the changes which are going on in society.

About the only divider which I know of which isn’t leading to more such assortative mating is race: there are many, many, more inter-racial marriages than ever before, an excellent outcome as it gives us the hope that the issue of race will, over the generations, simply dissolve away.

This is an interesting little right brain test. So interesting in fact that I still haven’t found the man after about 15 minutes of looking at the picture.

Have a look here for the picture and the rules.

To be honest with you, I’m not even sure that there is a man in the picture: either that or I have no right side brain at all.

Anyone mind if I stick with our own EQSQ personality tests? They are at least based on science: and I can do them too, which always helps.

An excellent blog from the other side of the world. Very much worth a read. In this particular post the mother of an autistic lad has been reading Simon Baron Cohen and then relfects that there’s a great deal of similarity between his theoretical descriptions and their personality types.

One thing though:

Another concern about buying into Mr. Baron Cohen’s hypothesis is that if the cause is purely due to genes, then this means other children of the same parents will be autistic too, which is not necessarily the case. Yes, there is a higher chance of them being autistic too but it is definitely not definite. Alhamdulillah, my 19 month old Alisha seems neurotypical to me, talking and playing in accordance with the milestones of typical children.

That’s not quite how genetics works. Take something that we know is absolutely genetically determined, like cystic fibrosis. Even if both parents are carriers the chance of any individual child actually having cystic fibrosis is one in four.

Think of it this way. There’s one specific variation of a gene which leads to cystic fibrosis. And you get a pair of genes, one from each parent, for each gene. To have the actual disease, rather than simply be a carrier, both copies of the gene must be the cystic fibrosis types. OK, now, the parents are both carriers but not suffering from the disease. So their copies of the genes are gene (cf) and gene (not cf). Yes? And you inherit one copy of each gene from each parent, yes?

So the possible combinations in any child are gene (cf) gene (cf), gene (cf) gene (not cf), gene (not cf) gene (cf) and gene (not cf) gene (not cf).

Four possible combinations and only one means that the child suffers from cystic fibrosis (where it is gene (cf) gene (cf)), two that it is a carrier and one that it is entirely free of it.

This is true of any recessive gene.

Now, we’re also pretty sure that there is no one gene for autism, rather, that there’s a combination that cause it. That reduces the chances again: say that it’s two genes and everything is the same as before. Instead of there being four possible genetic combinations, there will be 8, and the chance of any one child being autistic will be one in 8. If there’s three then the number goes up again…to 24, and thus a one in 24 chance.

Actually, you can try and run this back the other way. We know that if one child is autistic then the chances of a second being so rise from those of the general population. But if we can work out how much higher, then we might be able to see how many genes are interacting.

Just a quick note for the blogger over at The Education Maze.

Yes indeed, Simon Baron Cohen has produced an Autism Quotient test. He’s also produced something called the EQSQ personality test, a version of which we host here.

The connection between the two is this. Baron Cohen’s theory rests upon the idea that there is a spectrum of brain types. From those who are very much empathizers to those who are extremely systematic. To accord with stereotypical language we call these “female” and “male” brain types. Be sure to note that being male does not mean possession of the male brain type, nor female, female. There’s about 17% of the population who cross over in either direction. Sex (or more accurately, haplotype) gives a probability of brain type, but not a certainty.

The connection between this and the AQ test is that Baron Cohen then goes on to describe autism as an extreme type of that male brain: one that is excessively systemizing.

If you do go on to take the EQSQ tests, remember that the actual numbers aren’t the important thing: it’s the difference you get, the difference between the two numbers.

There’s been much amusement recently about how well online dating does in matching people up. John Tierney of the New York Times conducted a little experiment with eHarmony. If he and his wife filled out the profile forms (accurately) would the special algorithm the site uses match them together? Unfortunately not, nope, no matter what tweaks and twiddles they made to their profiles, they couldn’t actually manage to get the site to match up people who were already married to each other.

Clearly, they have each married the wrong person and there is nothing for them to do except divorce and start again on their search.

No, of course, that would indeed be too much: it’s important to remember that all such personality tests (yes, including our own EQSQ ones) are there as guidance, as information to add to the decision making process. They do not, at least in the current state of play of our knowledge about humans and their compatibility, contain all of the information necessary. Whether it’s a dating algorithm or our own tests, take it all with a pinch of salt: yes, we might say that you might be suited to a career in nursing or something similarly empathic, or a more systemising occupation like engineering. But remember that we don’t have all of the information, we’re simply offering some part of the puzzle to you.

The Freakonomocs blog then picked up on Tierney’s experiment and added their own twist to the tale:

A recently divorced friend of mine just dipped her toes into the online dating world for the first time. She entered her information: lives in a large city, late thirties, divorced, well-educated, loves to dance, etc. Then she let the algorithm find her soul mate.

I’d love to say that it was like the old “Pina Colada” song by Rupert Holmes and the perfect match the system spit out was her ex-husband.

Nope, it was her boss.

Well, her boss might not be all that bad a match: certainly more of us now meet our partners at work than we used to so why not? Clearly, both he and she are in the same line of work, one might presume that they have similar interests and so on. So why not?

Or perhaps the algorithm had been reading this:

But one of the main reasons given by women for beginning an affair with their boss was, like anywhere else, the prospect of promotion and higher pay.

Who knows? Might work, mightn’t it?

I see that Laura’s Psychology Blog has been over here and taken our EQSQ personality tests. Just a quick note for her (and of course others) about how to actually interpret the numbers that come out of the tests.

I’m not really sure how to interpret my scores–I’m apparently above average compared to other women on BOTH scales, but much more extremely so on the systemizing test. My EQ was 51, which was just slightly above the female average, but my SQ was 97, which is far above both male and female averages.

Yes, this can indeed be done but it is, I’m afraid to say, a very rough and ready way of looking at the figures. For we face the problem faced by every self-reporting test. If we use a word like “very”, or a phrase like “a lot”, or “not much” how are we to know that different people are putting the same value on those phrases? Certainly, we’ve got the bounds of ordinary language usage to guide us, but those in themselves are very rough and ready.

The way the tests are more accurate (for we’re certainly not claiming that they are perfect, or to be used as anything more than a guide) is to look at the difference between the two numbers coming out from the two tests. This allows a little control over that difference in the meanings of the words.

For example, in the first way of looking at the tests the difference between 20 SQ and 40 EQ, and 40 SQ and 80 EQ would seem rather large. Certainly, that puts people on different sides of the average results. But we could in fact find someone taking the tests twice and they get those different results: one day they’re really not bothered about anything very much (and so place a low value on “very” for example) and the other day they’re much more concerned about things (and thus place a low value on “not very”).

If, however, we look at the difference between the two numbers as being what is interesting, we can see that we’re finding out something more interesting about the person. EQ is always (in this example) higher than SQ, so we would say that someone is tending towards the empathizing end of the spectrum. And consistently so, which is after all one of the hallmarks of a useful test, that it gives the same answer to the same question, every time it’s asked.

Now quite how we measure the gap between the scores (there are many possiblities, put it on a curve, take an arithmetical look at it, log, percentage….you can get me lost in this sort of math in moments) is another matter and fortunately far above my pay grade.

Wifi Autism is something that is making the intertubes hum at present.

For us, here, who know something about both subjects, our answer on wifi autism is here.

The answer is: “No”, just to make it clear.

Arrgh! The charlatans are after us again! Yes, it is clearly and obviously true that autism is real and that it can be, for some sufferers (depending upon where on the spectrum they are), something that makes a normal life entirely impossible. However, we do think we know what causes it, as Simon Baron Cohen’s research tells us (and you will recall that he is the inventor of our EQSQ personality tests as well, something that comes directly out of his research).

Simply put there is a spectrum of brain types: from female to male, passing through balanced. The female brain type is associated with greater empathy and the male with more systemizing. There is a probability that those who are genetically female will have the female type brain and those male the male: but it is a probability, not a certainty. Some 17% of men have the female and vice versa female the male. That, within the definitions we’ve set ourselves, is observable. Quite why and how this happens is as yet unproven, although the thought is that it’s something to do with exposure to fetal testosterone.

The link with autism is that it is an expression of an extreme type of the male brain. There has been a rise in autism in recent years and so there are a lot of people wanting to point to a reason for that rise. One paper blamed TV (although it was pointed out that his association worked just as well for rain). Others have blamed the MMR vaccine, something that is now conclusively disproven. Another line has been the use of mercury in vaccines. As Japan took mercury out and the autism rate didn’t fall that one has fallen by the way side as well.

The fact is that, as best we know, autism is a genetic problem (it certainly runs very strongly in extended families) and not an environmental one. The best explanation for the rise is assortative mating. However, there do seem to be those who are insistent that there must be an environmental cause. Perhaps out of idiocy, perhaps out of a predatory instinct to feed off the fears and hopes of the parents of autistic children, but no less mistaken for that. The latest candidate is Wi-Fi: yes, it’s the old radio waves scam again.

The autistic children followed specific detoxification protocols in an environment that was mitigated with regard to sources of EMR including mobile phones and WiFi. Heavy metal excretions were monitored from hair, urine and feces over periods ranging from several weeks to several months. The researchers found that with protocols administered in the mitigated environment, heavy metals were cleared from the children?s bodies in a pattern dependent on time and molecular weight. The heaviest metals, such as mercury and uranium, cleared last. In many of the children, the decrease in metals was concomitant with symptom amelioration.

This is simply the worst poosible preying upon the gullible yet from the “alternative” health field. Well, until you get to this one:

Although Mariea believes that autism is a complicated condition that must have several factors at play for a child to fall to this diagnosis, she does believe that the three largest factors at play are:

• Genetically determined detoxification capacity,
• Early insult to immune system via contaminated vaccines and
• Being born with high levels of toxic burden and into a technologically advanced society riddled with ever increasing levels of radiation.

These are the key areas for research regarding the cause and etiology of autism spectrum disorders. Perhaps the genetic mutations that are being discovered in autism research are created through the DNA damage from radiation emitting devices used by families and in the households of ever member of our global society.

Nope, it’s not true. It’s the charlatans coming out of the woodwork again.

Yes, autism exists, yes there are indeed ameliorative treatments (Simon Baron Cohen reports some success with a DVD of trains with faces on them for example) but it isn’t Wi-Fi, it’s not heavy metals, it’s not DNA damage and it most certainly is not the MMR vaccine that causes it.

This blogger, Dismal Aesthetics, took our EQSQ personality tests and found that, while being genetically female, she had very much a male brain, right at the very systemizing end of the possible results. This then leads to the thought that:

Could it be that I’m on the autistic spectrum instead of being a female-to-male transsexual?

Now as regular readers know, I’m not a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, I’m an economist by training. I’m simply an interested amateur in these matters, blogging here to find out things as much as to try and tell them to anyone.

But could there be a link between sexual attraction and having either a male or female brain as determined by our personality tests? Certainly, there could be, it’s possible. We think that the formation of the male/female brain comes from the exposure to fetal testosterone, more leading to a more male type brain. This then leads to the greater systemizing behaviour.

But looking at the actual figures, I’m not sure that we can then make that leap to thinking this might lead to either same sex attraction or to transexuality (and yes, I’m aware that the two things are different yet intertwined). For weactually find that some 17% of men have the female or empathic brain type. But the numbers of men who are either gay or transexuals is (depending upon who you ask, the higher numbers relate to those who have had a homosexual experience, the lower to those who self-define as gay) is somewhere between 1or 2% and 10%. Similarly, we also find that 17% of women have the male or systemizing type brain and the number of those who self-define as lesbian is, I think, even lower than those men who identify as gay.

Further, we’ve found no evidence that the number of gays/lesbians in the men /women who have the female/male brain type is any different from their number in the general population.

So while it is still possible that there is a connection between systemizing and empathizing and sexual identity, as we can’t actually see any correlation I tend to think that it’s unlikely. Trivialising slightly, being left or right handed is also something determined by hte structure of the brain, but we see no correlation betwen male and female brain types and this, either. It may just be that there are many things determined by difference in brains and what we’re looking at here with the EQSQ tests is only one of them, the others caused by, umm, different differences in the brain.

Jackie Ashley, over in The Guardian in the UK, is getting most annoyed about the way in which people regard women and women as voters. She’s actually very funny about it:

There is a caricature of the female voter which I’ve heard, with numerous variations, for years from all parties. It goes like this. First, she is fickle. Men have grown-up, fixed ideas about politics which are difficult to shift. Women? All over the shop - suggestible, easily impressed, quick to take the huff. In the past I’ve heard pollsters, columnists and MPs describe “the female voter” as if she’s an amalgam of all their worst girlfriend experiences. It’s a wonder they haven’t got round to blaming election results on the time of the month.

And of course there’s a lot of truth to this: not that women voters are like this, but that they are regarded as being like this. However, it’s also true that male voters are looked upon in a certain similar manner. Look at the way in which all US Presidential candidates end up going hunting, to show how “manly” they are, and to connect with the Bubba vote. That is just as much a sexist discrimination, isn’t it?

Much of the truth, I think, lies in the results of our very own EQSQ personality tests, what they show us about the division in the way people think. We divide people up into those with systemizing or empathic brain types, with a goodly chunk in the middle having balanced ones. OK, we’d expect systemizers to look at politics in a systematic manner. Here’s a problem, here are potential solutions, which politician is supporting the one most likely to work?

We also have empathizers, who would be much more interested in whether they connected with the politician. Hunting being one way of doing so with male empathizers, kissing babies perhaps (an old political activity of course) with the female empathizers.

One thing though which I think makes empathizers of almost all of us. Modern politics is incredibly complex: there are thousands of issues. So we can’t in fact be systemizers about it, we have to go the emapthy route. Who amongst those standing “feels right”?

Next, and closely related to that, she is dangerously easily swayed by pretty men. A glossy head of hair, a sexy, growly voice, excellent dental work, the hint of a six-pack behind the well-cut shirt and a melt-your-heart smile - that’s what wins the woman voter. She is unimpressed by her own kind and she wants a man in charge. A second element is that she is attracted in particular to the faithful, reliable new man. Be filmed washing the dishes, or with a tousle-headed mite clinging on to your shoulders, and you’ll improve your leadership magnetism no end.

And that’s why politicians assume that such things will attract the female vote. Not because women don’t care about policy, not because it isn’t important, but because there’s so much of it that we are all, in the end, both male and female, forced to make our political judgements on just such matters. Who looks good, who has the trustworthy smile?

Of course, we’d all like a better way to run a country but we’ve not found one yet.