East Asian math/verbal split

YanShen · #1 by **YanShen** » Sep 26, 2011 10:36 am

Can an environmental/cultural explanation account for why East Asians seem to excel at mathematical reasoning relative to verbal reasoning, both in the United States and in their native homelands? Prima facie, this phenomenon seems to be explainable only by a biological rather than a cultural/environmental theory.

home_ · #2 by **home_** » Sep 26, 2011 8:38 pm

Where did you pick up that claim?

Mr.Samsa · #3 by **Mr.Samsa** » Sep 27, 2011 3:27 am

YanShen wrote:Can an environmental/cultural explanation account for why East Asians seem to excel at mathematical reasoning relative to verbal reasoning, both in the United States and in their native homelands? Prima facie, this phenomenon seems to be explainable only by a biological rather than a cultural/environmental theory.

Impossible to tell with the data you've presented (assuming for the sake of argument that everything you've said is perfectly accurate).

How do Asians adopted by Americans compare to Americans adopted by Asians? That's the only way to provide evidence for a biological difference. At the moment you've presented evidence that there is a difference between parenting styles of Asians and Americans (which I don't think anyone would argue against as a general statement) and we'd need to work out the extent that this affects the learning of their children before we can start discussing biological differences.

What we do need to be careful of, however, is leaping to conclusions before the data is in. Not for "political correctness" reasons of course, but simply so we can ensure we're doing good science. Otherwise we'd be no better than some of the idiots in evolutionary psychology who conclude that finding a cultural universal trait means it must be genetic.. :doh:

Biowatch · #4 by **Biowatch** » Sep 27, 2011 4:24 am

Slightly related, I remember Greg Cochran was asked in a series of interviews with 2Blowhards whether the differences observed in Richard Nisbett's 'The Geography of Thought' could be partially due to evolutionary factors. I think he suggested that was plausible.

There's some discussion in terms of that book, with comments from Jonathan Pritchard below.

In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago.

Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion, suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods.

Some of the genes are active in the brain and, although their role is not known, may have affected behavior. So perhaps the brain gene changes seen by Dr. Pritchard in East Asians have some connection with the psychological traits described by Dr. Nisbett.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/weeki ... wanted=all

YanShen · #5 by **YanShen** » Sep 27, 2011 4:41 am

How do Asians adopted by Americans compare to Americans adopted by Asians? That's the only way to provide evidence for a biological difference.

East Asians adopted by Westerners seem to exhibit the same stereotypical math/verbal split.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 6989902468

Several studies have found that Oriental populations tend to have high mean IQs, strong visuo-spatial abilities but relatively weaker verbal abilities, as compared with Caucasian populations in the United States and Europe. The present paper reports data on these claims for 19 Korean infants adopted by families in Belgium. The children were tested with the WISC at a mean age of 10 yr. Their mean IQ was 118.7, the verbal IQ was 110.6 and the performance IQ 123.5. The results are interpreted as confirming those obtained from other Oriental populations.

Perhaps one of the most consistent findings in the psychometric literature has been the math/verbal split amongst East Asians. It's hard to envision this being the product of culture or environment.

I'm not sure if similar studies exist for Americans being adopted by East Asians, but I would wager that given what we know from general adoption studies, i.e. that the IQs of adopted children don't correlate much if at all, with their adoptive parents, that they don't exhibit elevated math abilities at the expense of verbal abilities.

It's also hard to imagine how a cultural trait or disposition would tend to elevate mathematical reasoning over verbal reasoning often by as much as 1 SD.

YanShen · #6 by **YanShen** » Sep 27, 2011 4:50 am

Random thought/hypothesis

How likely is it that the high spatial ability of East Asians led to the adoption of a pictographic writing system? Or was that merely coincidence?

Mr.Samsa · #7 by **Mr.Samsa** » Sep 27, 2011 5:14 am

YanShen wrote:
How do Asians adopted by Americans compare to Americans adopted by Asians? That's the only way to provide evidence for a biological difference.

East Asians adopted by Westerners seem to exhibit the same stereotypical math/verbal split.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 6989902468

Several studies have found that Oriental populations tend to have high mean IQs, strong visuo-spatial abilities but relatively weaker verbal abilities, as compared with Caucasian populations in the United States and Europe. The present paper reports data on these claims for 19 Korean infants adopted by families in Belgium. The children were tested with the WISC at a mean age of 10 yr. Their mean IQ was 118.7, the verbal IQ was 110.6 and the performance IQ 123.5. The results are interpreted as confirming those obtained from other Oriental populations.

This is a study from 1989 looking at 19 subjects - is there anything more recent and more methodologically sound? The basic problem is that there are very likely important differences between families who are willing to adopt children of different nationalities than those who are less willing to do so (e.g. more open minded, higher educated, etc), and this is supported by the fact that all of the parents were at least middle class (extending to higher classes) and around half of them even had tertiary degrees. On top of this, the majority of the children were female which of course means that it's less likely to have low outliers that will bring the average down, and with only 5 boys in the study, it's possible that high outliers have skewed the results.

As such, we should initially expect their results to be significantly above average, and given a few chance results from such an incredibly tiny sample size, the result isn't too surprising or unexplainable in terms of environment. Also, if the math/verbal split was biological, how come these subjects didn't show an increase in mathematical abilities? Since those scores weren't reported, we can only assume that they weren't significantly different from their verbal scores.

YanShen wrote:Perhaps one of the most consistent findings in the psychometric literature has been the math/verbal split amongst East Asians. It's hard to envision this being the product of culture or environment.

How would consistency help confirm or disconfirm the idea that the results could be due to culture or environment? :scratch:

It's not hard at all to imagine how these results could be explained by environment, which is why the debate still exists. These researchers still need to demonstrate their case using evidence though, it simply is not appropriate for them to point to weak evidence like the study above and make an appeal to ignorance (i.e. "I can't see how it can be explained by environment!").

YanShen wrote:I'm not sure if similar studies exist for Americans being adopted by East Asians, but I would wager that given what we know from general adoption studies, i.e. that the IQs of adopted children don't correlate much if at all, with their adoptive parents, that they don't exhibit elevated math abilities at the expense of verbal abilities.

It's also hard to imagine how a cultural trait or disposition would tend to elevate mathematical reasoning over verbal reasoning often by as much as 1 SD.

Well we won't be able to speculate over possible causes until the studies on adopted children are done. At the very least, we'd need to find a study of adopted East Asian kids that show the verbal/math divide that you mention, rather than a verbal/visuo-spatial divide that was identified in the study you linked to.

Delvo · #8 by **Delvo** » Sep 27, 2011 1:28 pm

YanShen wrote:Random thought/hypothesis

How likely is it that the high spatial ability of East Asians led to the adoption of a pictographic writing system? Or was that merely coincidence?

Occidental writing systems began as pictographic too. Drawing a picture of the idea, rather than drawing an abstract symbol which represents a sound made in speaking about the idea, seems to be the more straightforward and simple approach to humans in general, at least from the perspective of having never written anything before and not planning from the start to make the system able to express any and all concepts that speech can express.

The difference between Oriental and Occidental cultures is how they dealt with the fact that, once they had a way to record some concepts with the earliest handful of written symbols, they started seeing potential benefits in recording more and more concepts. In the Orient, the basic pictographic concept was retained and simply had more and more symbols added to it. In the Occident, the same increase in demand placed on writing systems was met by ditching the pictographs in favor of phonetics. (Japan started to do something similar, but not until millennia later, and it didn't get developed as far, spread to the neighbors, or become the dominant/exclusive system even locally.)

This looks to me less like a development of something in the Orient that Oriental people were particularly good at, than like a failure to create something better in an area that they weren't.