134
votes
Accepted
Can you predict a number that is "randomly" chosen by a person better than chance?
Yes, humans are more predictable than random chance. It is known as the "Blue-Seven Phenomena", because when asked for a colour and a number from one to nine, these perform beyond expectation.
This ...
- 140k
112
votes
Does the US Armed Forces refuse to recruit anyone with an IQ less than 83?
Our sister site, Law StackExchange, has this same question: Is it truly illegal for the US army to hire someone with IQ less than 83?, with a high-quality accepted answer.
The answer is not a simple ...
- 140k
106
votes
Accepted
Do men feel threatened by intelligent women?
This is the study the article mentions.
Does the study have those conclusions?
Not really. The experimental results could equally be explained by a simpler conclusion, that people are less likely to ...
- 78.6k
100
votes
Accepted
Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle prank 12 men into fleeing their countries?
TL;DR: Rated (old) urban legend
Based on this website, this story dates from as far back as 1897, from a magazine called "The Strand". This appears in a section which looks like a ...
- 2,344
99
votes
Accepted
Is low emotional intelligence associated with right-wing and prejudiced attitudes?
The short answer
The study in question (Van Hiel et al. 2019) has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. It presents empirical support for the hypothesis that emotional abilities ...
- 9,539
94
votes
Accepted
Is the world record for staying in an anechoic chamber an hour or less?
Definitely not.
Here's a video of a science reporter, Veritasium, staying in an anaechoic chamber for one hour, in the dark. Not only they do so at the first attempt, but they come out of it ...
- 78.6k
71
votes
Is CEO the "profession" with the most psychopaths?
The table provided is directly copied from page 173 of The Wisdom of Psychopaths.
It explains the source is The Great British Psychopath Study, where self-selected people submit their own ...
- 140k
59
votes
Accepted
Can social isolation kill babies?
We cannot be sure exactly what happened 7 centuries ago; we only have the one account. However something akin to this experiment did occur, albeit without the controlled conditions. In Romania during ...
- 15.8k
56
votes
Accepted
Does vegetarian sweat smell better?
"Smell" is a sense that is said to be more directly tied to emotional processing in the brain than other senses. But all interpretations of sensory information is subject to subjectivity. And smell is ...
- 44k
56
votes
Accepted
Did the Ontario College of Psychologists demand that Jordan P Peterson attend 'communication retraining'?
Yes, they have required Jordan Peterson to attend training sessions.
The College has required Jordan Peterson to complete a SCERP.
In a decision released on November 22, 2022, the Inquiries, ...
- 17.3k
55
votes
Accepted
Did depressed people far more accurately estimate how many monsters they killed in a video game?
In addition to the two versions of the claim in the question, the claim is repeated here by Andrew Solomon. I could not find other instances of the claim online. The article seems to have been ...
- 14.1k
46
votes
Can you predict a number that is "randomly" chosen by a person better than chance?
Human beings are really bad at picking random numbers. The reason is that we are hard-wired to identify patterns in nature -- even to the extent of seeing patterns where none exist. But while this ...
- 885
40
votes
Does the US Armed Forces refuse to recruit anyone with an IQ less than 83?
This popular science article, generally backs up Peterson's claims.
All military recruits must take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for enlistment. The ASVAB is ...
- 12k
36
votes
Is the placebo effect getting stronger?
A recent study has suggested that effectiveness of placebo treatments increased over the years in the US, in patients suffering from neuropathic pain.
Increasing placebo responses over time in U.S. ...
- 526
36
votes
Is low emotional intelligence associated with right-wing and prejudiced attitudes?
Here are the relevant paragraphs from the intro to the paywalled paper justifying the first line of the abstract:
Over the years however, it has been acknowledged that right-wing
authoritarianism ...
- 57.1k
30
votes
Did an American kindergarten teach children the alphabet using corporate logos?
YES
That seems not only very plausible. There is very little reason to doubt.
The actual, concrete picture may be just illustrative, manipulated, misattributed or the exact kindergarten picture ...
- 44k
29
votes
Did Brené Brown claim her research showed that women are disappointed and disgusted by male vulnerability?
On the same site, in a different article, Horsmon provides more context to his claim:
The article continued the discussion Brene Brown started in her book, Daring Greatly, where she addresses male ...
- 140k
25
votes
Accepted
Are young liberal women more likely to have a mental health condition?
Not based on this evidence.
Your first source claims "A 2020 Pew Research study reveals that over half of white, liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point.&...
- 5,413
22
votes
Accepted
Are liberal/left-wing people more intelligent than conservative/right-wing people?
A lot of the discussion on this topic was provoked by a peer-reviewed study published in 2012. Quoting from the abstract:
We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive
ability ...
- 7,194
22
votes
Is CEO the "profession" with the most psychopaths?
There's an interesting recent paper by Spencer and Bryne (2016), which may shed some light on this, but also raises more questions. It seems that at least in a "typical" corporate structure, there is ...
- 57.1k
20
votes
Are men expressing homophobia more likely to be homosexual?
There is a study by Ryan et al about this topic. They also discuss the results of the study in this post at Rochester as well as this NYT article:
Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of ...
tim♦
- 51.4k
20
votes
Can social isolation kill babies?
Not directly related to your source(s), but see the article pit of despair on Wikipedia. Warning, the article and the experiment itself can be rather disturbing.
Harlow's first experiments involved ...
- 1,011
18
votes
Accepted
Did an American kindergarten teach children the alphabet using corporate logos?
Inconclusive. The first instance of the image being on the internet was an anonymous Reddit post from 27 September 2018 that offered no proof of it being legitimate.
The photo and Reddit link that @...
- 22.3k
16
votes
Does a female breast shape predict personality?
The article only mentions unnamed "German scientists" for its claim. The only person named by name is Karen Weatherby, and she is used to support a different claim (looking at breasts is healthy). ...
tim♦
- 51.4k
16
votes
Do Russians get depressed the same way Americans do?
As per Wikipedia's by-country list of depression in "Epidemiology of depression":
Rank Country DALY rate
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 United States 1,454.74
127 Russia ...
- 31.1k
16
votes
Can social isolation kill babies?
In addition to the other answers I would like to clarify that Salimbene indeed described an experiment in which the children died of social isolation. Here is the original excerpt1:
Secunda eius ...
- 373
15
votes
Is a woman who dresses sexually suggestively more likely to get raped?
The odd thing about this question—of whether women who dress in a more sexually provocative way are more likely to be raped or otherwise sexually abused—is that people's beliefs about it have been ...
- 437
15
votes
Accepted
Does the gorilla, Koko, have an IQ in the range 70-95?
Evidence:
The tests given to Koko the gorilla were Cattell Infant
Intelligence Scale, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Ravens Progressive Matrices and Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of ...
- 22.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible