Spouses - which one is the smartest?
In varius (drunk) social situations i hav claimed that in most relationships, the male is smarter. however, it has been quite hard to find actual data about this. most data ar about a general sex-linked IQ difference, which is compatible with either sex being the smartest in the relationship, altho most likely going in the same direction. that direction is most likely towards males.
a bit harder to find, but definitely possible is data about spouse correlations in IQ. correlations vary, but often in the .3-0.6 area. one sample had 0.9, which seems too large, altho the sample size was excellent. im not sure what is wrong with it, if anything.
it has however been hard to find the even mean sex scores in spouses, but i found some, see below:
A biological survey of a Cambridge suburb Assortative marriage for IQ and personality traits
Ann Hum Biol. 1979 Jan-Feb;6(1):1-16.
they mostly show as expected that the husbands/boyfriends ar smarter. however, the difference is often not that large, except for the high-social class sample where husbands wer about 10 IQ higher than their wives.
however, this technically doesnt show that in most relationships, husbands ar smarter. the alternativ, that husbands ar on average smarter, but this is due to a less than 50% of very bright husbands is still a technical possibility, but i dont consider it very likely. still, the exact % of relationships wher husbands ar smarter is still out of reach.
however, it wud be possible to calculate it easily if the data wer openly available.
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I hav found the email of the author. he seems still to be alive. i hav sent him the following email. hopefully, he will get back to me so that i can finally settle this nagging question!
Hi,
Regarding your 1979 paper, A biological survey of a Cambridge suburb: Assortative marriage for IQ and personality traits. Are the data publicly available anywhere?
The reason I ask is that for some time I have been interested in the question: in which percent of relationships is the man the smartest? Assuming heterosexual relationships. It has been hard just to find papers where the averages of the sexes were mentioned. In fact, yours is the first I've come across. Usually, papers only compute the correlation between the spouses, which is interesting enough, but does not show which one is smarter on average, if any.
Is it possible that you either send me the data, or run a quick analysis to see in how many of the spouse pairs, it is true that TIQhusband>TIQwife?