Moronic meatheads, yuppie tennis aficionados, Very Important People with courtside seats, and braindead couch potatoes -- with so many true stereotypes about the relationship between brains and liking sports, how do we get a clearer overall picture? I'm sure people have looked into this before, but my graphs will be more informative.
The General Social Survey, a large and representative national survey, asks people sports-related questions, as well as giving them a quick IQ test. The graph below shows the probability of doing some sports-related thing in the past year as a function of how smart you are. I excluded IQ groups that contained fewer than 40 individuals, but this still keeps most of the intelligence spectrum. All the results below come from white respondents only.
The two top lines don't specify which sport you do or attend, while the bottom two are more specific. (Unfortunately, the GSS didn't ask this sample specifically about upper-class / smarty sports like tennis or golf.) Overall, doing and attending sports are most popular with people who are a bit above average in brains, and decline in popularity as you look at dumber and smarter people. So, neither of the two increase or decrease significantly as IQ increases (Spearman rank correlation for attending sports and doing sports with IQ is +0.66, two-tailed p = 0.08 and +0.77, p = 0.077).
But when we break down "sports" into particular sports, trends show up. Hunting and fishing, and attending auto races, decline in popularity as you look at smarter people (Spearman rank correlation for hunting / fishing and auto race attendance with IQ is -0.88, two-tailed p = 0.019 and -0.95, p = 0.012).
Right after I moved to the Mountain Time Zone, my department began fruitlessly trying to peer-pressure me to go shooting ducks with shotguns, etc., but ain't gonna happen. Some high-IQ hunters and fishers grew up doing this stuff, and that's fine, but others are just indulging in faux populism to make themselves feel cool. It's too bad the GSS didn't ask about baseball -- my impression is that, aside from clearly upper-crust sports like tennis and golf, baseball is the one plebe sport that smart people are allowed to pretend like they care about. It seems part of Ellis Island worship -- honoring that golden age when your ancestors were crammed into ramshackle Lower East Side tenements, did good honest work, and would go to a baseball game to unwind. I find the sport heart-stoppingly boring.
What about using the internet to follow sports? The GSS has more fine-grained data for this, asking how many times in the past month you've used the internet to visit sports websites. Here is a graph of the average number of times you've done so as a function of your IQ:
The title sums it up. * The Pearson correlation is -0.74, two-tailed p = 0.056. I'm willing to overlook the tiny above-threshold p-value since I have one less IQ class than before, so it's remarkable to get anything at all. This is the closest test of the "braindead couch potato" hypothesis regarding sports fans. Merely attending or doing sports may not decline with IQ, but time spent in front of a screen soaking in sports sure does.
GSS variables used: ATTSPRTS, DOSPORTS, AUTORACE, HUNTFISH, SPORTS30, WORDSUM.
* The possible responses are Never, 1-2 times, 3-5 times, and More than 5 times. I counted these as 0, 1.5, 4, and 6.
It's too bad the GSS didn't ask about baseball -- my impression is that, aside from clearly upper-crust sports like tennis and golf, baseball is the one plebe sport that smart people are allowed to pretend like they care about.
ReplyDeleteBaseball's absolutely loaded with statistics, so it has a certain intellectual appeal that most other sports don't. Some MLB teams have even hired quants to do serious number crunching for analyzing draft and trade prospects (see the book Moneyball).
With respect to hunting, it wold be nice if the GSS distinguished between different types of hunting. My impression is that deer hunting is more of a Joe Sixpack activity, while waterfowl hunting is more upscale. As for fishing, fly fishermen have long looked down on bait fishermen.
When something has a prole connotation, like hunting or NASCAR, there will always be a reverse correlation with IQ.
ReplyDeleteSmart people avoid prole activities if only to fit in with other smart people.
It's worth noting that Sarah Palin's favorite hobby, hunting, is generally not enjoyed by people of above average intelligence.
The NFL is so broadly popular that I suspect there is very little correlation to IQ. In fact, if you controlled for Jews I suspect there would be none at all.
ReplyDeleteYes, "hunting and fishing" is a pretty huge category. I'll bet that there are some startling differences there. But in my experience, this is a lot more of a regional thing. A smart guy in Kansas or Wyoming is a lot more likely to hunt than a dumb guy in New York City. And hey, HS, are we to conclude from you high-level Palin analysis that Teddy Roosevelt was below average in intelligence as well?
ReplyDeleteIt seems part of Ellis Island worship -- honoring that golden age when your ancestors were crammed into ramshackle Lower East Side tenements, did good honest work, and would go to a baseball game to unwind. I find the sport heart-stoppingly boring.
ReplyDeleteYou know this is an ethnic thing, right? Jewish people are obsessed with this part of history for some reason. I don't see the Italians or Irish reminiscing about this.
Interesting you've got the athleticism bump at 7-8 and then it tails off...nerd cliff at work?
I hunt, fish, and have an I.Q. in the top 0.1% of the human population (the last time it was measured). I am a left-wing champion of gun rights, and there are others who are a lot like me. Asserting that a 10-question vocabulary test is the same as an IQ test is a total crock, so the conclusions made on this blog cannot be made considering the design of the instrument used to measure "intelligence." (Yes, this fisher and hunter aced graduate statistics.) Verbal prowess for 10 words does not make an idiot or a genius. I would advise that the author of this blog spend time on manipulating data sets that are able to do more than cause divisiveness among the American people. Also, why do all these graphs have a spike around 6 or 7 questions right? This is perhaps more interesting than the rest of the doggerel on this blog.
ReplyDeleteSmart people avoid prole activities if only to fit in with other smart people.
ReplyDeleteWrong. Smart people avoid prole activities because they tend to associate with non-proles. However, there are prole-born smart people (130+ IQ) who work prole jobs and have only prole friends because their life circumstances did not prepare them to best leverage their intelligence. Those people will often find themselves at so-called prole sporting events for social reasons. Participation in prole activities is much better correlated with culture than with intelligence. Whether smart proles enjoy them or not is another matter. However, those same smart people can often find something to like in a seemingly mundane sport such as Auto Racing that other less insightful persons would not notice. Any diversion can be a welcome relief in assisting to occupy one's mind away from excessive thought.
It's worth noting that Sarah Palin's favorite hobby, hunting, is generally not enjoyed by people of above average intelligence.
This is not an intelligent statement. Again, you are likely conflating what you think you know about where the junction of socioeconomic status, culture, and intelligence meets with reality. Hunting tends to be a cultural activity that is dispossessed of any relation to economic status or intelligence. To illustrate, persons from rural Virginia of any intelligence are more likely to hunt than persons born in New York City. There are millions of truly average and, by my IQ standard for intelligent, borderline retarded people in NYC. They don't hunt. Second, do you eat meet? If yes, do you not see the moral consistency that comes with learning to harvest your meat yourself? Such a perceived correlation, as well as perception of higher morality itself, is likely the providence of the intelligent.
Sports are for morons.
ReplyDeleteI am Anonymous 2, and my opinion is this: To relate the love and participation in any sport as a direct correlation to I.Q. is bound to false pretention. Questions: Are we to say that Peyton Manning has a low I.Q.? There are others in pro football that obviously are not the brightest star in the sky by any stretch. What about Nick Saban from Alabama? What about Jack Nicklaus? Yes, he played a upper scale sport, but he is also an avid fisherman. What about Dick Cheney? Love him or hate him as a politician, he is smart enough to have been the CEO of Halliburton and VP of the Unites States, and he loves bird hunting. What about all of the judges, lawyers, engineers....etc. who bird hunt and also fish? What about the engineer who has a masters degree or higher who loves auto racing and the engineering of the cars? So placing people in an I.Q. range based on the sports they enjoy or participate in as an individual "marker" is very misleading, although I do believe there are some sporting activities that are "associated" with people of lower I.Q. The fan base as a whole in some sports and events could be seen as more of a "blue-collar" fan base and others as having a "white-collar" fan base overall, hence a perception that "blue-collar" is less intelligent than "white-collar". The "blue-collar" sports would be something like Nascar racing, bass fishing, and deer hunting, and "white-collar" sports would be tennis, golf and squash. A guy who makes his living as a mechanic probably isn't going to go to the tennis court after work, but would probably be on his way to the deer stand, and the same could probably be said for a doctor only opposite, as he would probably be on his way to the tennis court or golf course after work, rather than to the deer stand. So, there could possibly be a slight trend with regard to this exercise in that sense, but only because something is perceived to be a certain way doesn't necessarily mean that it is. The entire sports spectrum from traditional "blue-collar" sports to the traditional "white-collar" sports are enjoyed by people of many different I.Q's. The one aspect as mentioned by other comments on this blog that I agree is the single most important and deciding factor with relation to the "stereotypes" that can be broken down into sports interest and participation is......culture...and not I.Q.
ReplyDeleteThere is a wide difference between Nascar which is percieved as redneck and lower class, and top echelon series such as Formula 1 which is the pinnacle of automotive engeineering and employs top minds. Yes people who simply like to see cars race one another can enjoy both, but Formula 1 offers far more to the intellectually curious than Nascar and to lump them both as "auto racing" is much too simple.
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