Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)
news.yale.edu
news.yale.edu
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.1...
If I'm reading the results table in the linked paper correctly, it seems that household wealth was only a significant predictor of working memory in the combined group and the refugee group but not in the non-refugee group, indicating a possible interaction that it is trauma that increases the susceptibility to poverty.
Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. For example, with gender, one would ask the question are males really that much better at working memory, or is there a treatment of male children that would result in the noted difference. In the same way, poverty may result in different treatment during a refugee event or similar mass trauma that may have a larger impact on cognitive function. A simple hypothesis would be that wealthier refugees have better access to food which means that there is less cognitive decline associated with poor nutrition during childhood brain development that occurs during a war time event.
Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female advantage in short term memory. Jensen's 1998 book for example quotes Cohen's d between -0.2 and -0.3, favoring females.
The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.
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How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?
How robust are working memory differences between sexes across time, across different countries, across different subcultural groups, etc.?
If you don’t assume that the subtest scores are the same across sexes, the “qualified questioning speculation” that there is something wrong with control variables makes no sense.
How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?
This kind of unentanglement is usually done through twin studies: you compare how well correlated are monozygotic vs dizygotic twins. Since it’s reasonable to assume that both monozygotic and dizygotic twins share the same or at least very similar environments, if the correlation between monozygotic twins on a given trait is greater than in dizygotic twins, it means that genetic causation plays a role, while if the correlation is the same, there it is likely no genetic causation. Of course, it’s a bit hard to find monozygotic twins of different sexes, but similar ideas are used in that case.
The point is, we do have the tools to unentangle nature from nurture, and in general, all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits. I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book I mentioned.
> all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits
To be precise, some evidence points in the direction that some variation in cognitive traits is “heritable”.
It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma, and so on, as well as a substantial amount of variation that we currently don’t have explanations for (not to mention significant experimental noise and epistomological questions about the design and interpretation of the experiments). It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.
For example it was long thought by some people that there were inherent differences between boys’ vs. girls’ mathematical aptitude, as judged by scores on various standardized tests, but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear. A web search turns up https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/women-and-m...
> I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book
It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.
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Disclaimer: I am no expert on this subject. Just a layperson who has occasionally read about it, mostly in popular media.
Yes, this is more precise, but "heritability" is a technical term that I try to avoid, because when some people are not familiar with its technical meaning, it leads to all kinds of confusion when others do use it in the technical meaning. On the other hand, "heritability" very much implies genetic causation in every meaningful sense.
It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma
It is by no means obvious. It depends on what you count as "substantial", what degree of malnutrition, what diseases, what toxins, what kind of physical violence, etc.
It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.
It is plausible, alas I have not seen much evidence for that effect. There is scarce evidence for malnutrition having effect of cognitive ability, but there is some. However, I haven't seen any evidence on shared or non-shared environment causing any sex differences in cognitive ability.
but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear.
I think this is rather more of an artifact of their educational systems putting finger on a scale where it wants. Consider, for example, that in both Iceland and Sweden, mentioned in the article as places where girls matched or exceeded boys achievement, 5 out of last 6 contestants on IMO were boys, and similar disparity happened in previous years. Instead of focusing on outliers, I recommend looking at the whole picture.
It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.
This is an argument without an argument, and smear by association. Jensen is the most renowned scientist in the field of psychometry and intelligence research. You imply that there's something wrong with him, but do not actually give any concrete criticism.
The original comment was leaping to the assumption that finding sex differences means there must be something wrong with the study/analysis. That's dangerously wrong.
“May be an indicator”. Not quite the Olympic jumping-at-conclusions performance I’d expect from a “dangerously wrong” comment.
But all of this is caught up in a large nature vs nurture (vs both) question. Is it genetics that cause this? Is it the environment (social pressure/influence) that causes this? Is it a combination of genetics and environment that causes this?
The same sort of complexity would exist in any real life test like this, because this isn't a laboratory where you can make sure everything but a single independent variable is the same, modify that independent variable, and then measure the influence on the dependent variable.
It's pretty obvious that gender can't be a top predictor of memory, intelligence, etc. The reason is that even if there is a definite difference where males are better than females, it'd be a modest delta between two bell curves. That would leave huge numbers of pairings in which a female had better memory than a male, etc.
But see also https://sci-hub.tw/https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/1... , finding that the top predictor (among those investigated) of a police officer shooting a civilian is "the officer is black", narrowly beating out "the officer is rapidly accumulating negative marks in his file". Are there a large number of pairings in which a white officer shoots someone and a black officer doesn't? Sure, but the effect of race is still enormous in this case. ("Black officers were 3.3 times more likely to shoot than other officers.")
I would expect the effect of sex to dwarf the effect of race, but the study is limited to police officers that exist, of which more than 92% in the sample are male. So probably there's some restriction of range.
https://www.keranews.org/post/kids-living-poverty-living-chr...
Based on the abstract in the OP, the study seems to focus on acute war-related trauma. Poverty can be a kind of slow-rolling, unending trauma of its own. Not criticizing the article/headline, just a cautionary note to avoid extrapolating too much from this.
I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on this complicated problem.
What still seems unknown to me is what specific environmental traits of "poverty" have the strongest negative impact? I mean, we've all heard of "rags to riches" stories --- how do they differ?
I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.
Poverty is relative, not absolute. Even if you gave everyone in the country $50,000 in UBI, you'd still have poverty, because you'd have people at the bottom of the income range who can't afford what others can.
The only way to possibly eradicate it is if you made everyone equal - same take home pay, no inheritance, no monetary gifts, etc. Everyone has the same net income at the end of the day.
That's.... just not true, and I feel like you don't really know what poverty is if you say that. Poverty is not just definitionally being in some lower percentile. Poverty is misery because you don't have financial power to meet your basic needs, or have to sacrifice all your time and comfort to do so. There's nothing relative about going hungry, living in bad housing with heat that doesn't work, working 2 jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night, etc.
your argument is so pedantic that it is insulting. it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's classic tweet [0] "Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass." You're like Ben Shapiro saying "eradicating poverty?? that's literally impossible... since poverty is defined as the lowest 5% of income and there will always be someone there. Learn percentiles, dumbass"
It would be interesting to refine "poverty" to identify exactly what the minimum healthy level of "consumption" for a typical human is going to be. It doesn't seem to me that it's very high: food, clean water, safe housing, a bit of electricity for cooking etc., and ideally connectivity to the wider world, e.g., a computer with an internet connection. I suppose you could say that that's actually quite a lot, and brings you up to Western industrial society standards. But I suspect that with an industrial economy, all of that can be provided to the entire population with relatively little effort, e.g., if people were working a couple of days a week.
Any medical requirements would be on top of that of course.
Who are landlords going to find to replace their tenants that didn't have a job for 6 months? Another unemployed tenant?
> a screen that displayed one, two, or three dots for 2 s and instructed to remember where the dot(s) were located (Figure S2b). The screen then went blank (for 0.1 or 3 s), after which it changed color indicating that participants should touch the screen precisely where the dot(s) had appeared.
Not a serious criticism, more about the nature of WM and how to measure it.
1. Here's coke being terrible https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-fought-regulatio... and there are some other wonderful examples around tobacco use in south east asia.
Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.
How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.
It's then up to half-hearted social/governmental intervention to prevent it from becoming the same for the child's eventual offspring - a hail Mary that rarely lands with some individuals getting on a better path.
[1] https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
[2]https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...
[3]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761876166...
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Do they try to disambiguate that at all?
Still, unless you have zero influence on your circumstances, I would always expect the clever to end up in better situations than the less gifted.
Therefore it's highly likely that high IQ refugee children, have high IQ refugee parents, who are earning a higher household income after they resettle into their new country. For example a doctor from Syria could likely retrain as a doctor in Jordan. Statistically speaking his kids are probably more intelligent than someone who was a janitor in Syria.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#cite_note-6 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
>A common error is to assume that a heritability figure is necessarily unchangeable. The value of heritability can change if the impact of environment (or of genes) in the population is substantially altered.[15] If the environmental variation encountered by different individuals increases, then the heritability figure would decrease. On the other hand, if everyone had the same environment, then heritability would be 100%. The population in developing nations often has more diverse environments than in developed nations.[citation needed] This would mean that heritability figures would be lower in developing nations. Another example is phenylketonuria which previously caused mental retardation for everyone who had this genetic disorder and thus had a heritability of 100%. Today, this can be prevented by following a modified diet, resulting in a lowered heritability.
I know that the intentions appear to be benevolent but I'd just point out that this isn't really an unbiased source, so it may be prudent to take their results with a grain.
What if we looked at the link between self perceptions of victimisation, life outcomes, and symptoms of poverty? I'd posit it's the necessary condition. The overlap in solutions, particularly education, financial independence, social equity are all there, but the difference would be chicken vs. egg, where authors like this would say the victimized identity is caused by the lack of these solutions, whereas many working people would say that inculcating and encouraging the beliefs that support that identity cause and reinforce the barriers to those solutions. The argument that individuals experience poverty for lack of a bureaucracy that is concerned with it should seem a bit specious.
Or as W.H. Auden put it, "The friends of the born nurse Are always getting worse."