Monday, November 25, 2013

Perceptions of Locus of Women's Academic Performance

While doing internet-based research, I stumbled on this curious article:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/2/prweb349458.htm

Basically, respondents provided photos and self-reports to WhatsMyImage.com. Then perfect strangers made guesses about certain aspects of their lives, such as academic performance, sexual experience and others.

Women and men were perceived to be about as smart. An interesting finding, however, was a statistically significant correlation between female bra size and perceived GPA. On average, these strangers guessed that "A-cup" students earned GPAs that were about 0.1 points higher than "B-cup" or "C-cup" students, and 0.3 points higher than those with "D-cup" students.  That's almost a third of a letter grade!

Some cautions in interpretation should be exercised here:

1. These data are correlative, and do not necessarily imply a causal linkage.
2. If there happens to be a causal linkage, in what direction does it go? Does being dumb give you bigger breasts in turn, or do bigger breasts make you less smart?

3. Could the phenomenon of many women getting breast augmentation surgery provide "noise" contanimating the results? Specifically, could those who chose to have breast enhancement surgery are also more likely to be poorer students because their interests are elsewhere?

4. Obviously, and very importantly, this result is based on peoples' opinions affected by limited data that they were provided in WhatsMyImage.com. The problem with human perceptions is that they are not always accurate. Indeed, these may reflect inaccurate stereotypes and there may not be any relationship between bra size and Grade Point Average.

5.  However, we may be able to mention an advantage to having small breasts besides wearing a bra being optional and not having to worry about loss of perkiness: people tend to think you're smarter!

4 comments:

Big Sky Heidi said...

Well, I got a boob job and also majored in physics as an undergrad. Minored in math.

Bilbo said...

It has been my observation that there is no particular correlation between breast size and intelligence, except insofar as men tend to lose - on average - 75 points of IQ when talking with a woman with large breasts.

eViL pOp TaRt said...

I think this post may have been over the top. I'm sorry if I offended any of my dear readers!

Hell Hound said...

I always say, F*** them if they can't take a joke.