<story><title>Study finds negative association between empathizing and calculation ability</title><url>http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23011</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>Curious to see no mention (in the paper or comments here) of previous neuro-imaging experiments that showed that brain networks associated with empathy and those associated with logical thought are antagonists, and it does not appear to be possible to have both active at the same time:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.case.edu&amp;#x2F;think&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;empathy_represses_analytic_thought_and_vice_versa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.case.edu&amp;#x2F;think&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;empathy_represses_anal...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a long pop-science suspicion of this, dating back to Jungian psychology (where Thinking vs. Feeling was considered a primitive dichotomy).  It&amp;#x27;s enshrined in many of our stereotypes about socially awkward nerds, and also in the structure of the tech industry (which has separate departments for sales vs. engineering, and common wisdom that you need a hustler &amp;amp; a hacker for startups).&lt;p&gt;This seems much more likely, as an explanation, than ideas that poor math performance may be transmitted socially, although of course it&amp;#x27;d need to be rigorously tested in an experiment to be proven.</text></comment>
<story><title>Study finds negative association between empathizing and calculation ability</title><url>http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23011</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobolus</author><text>Looks to me mostly like a cluster of kids with very high “calculation skills” and relatively low “empathizing quotient” is skewing their result. If you remove that group, the remaining data looks pretty uncorrelated at a glance:
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;srep23011&amp;#x2F;figures&amp;#x2F;1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;srep23011&amp;#x2F;figures&amp;#x2F;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“Math Fluency is a measure of speeded application of arithmetic procedures. Problems included a mix of addition, subtraction, and multiplication with operands up to 10. Children were given 3 minutes to complete as many as possible. We computed a Calculation Skills composite measure, which combines the Calculation and Math Fluency subtests, in order to have a single measure capturing arithmetic ability.&lt;p&gt;“The primary guardian of each child completed the Combined Empathy Quotient-Child (EQ-C) and Systemizing Quotient-Child (SQ-C). The questionnaire was designed to be parent-report in order to avoid variance associated with children’s reading and comprehension abilities.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternative summary: “Out of 112 children, among the bottom 105 children when ranked by arithmetic calculation speed, there’s no statistically significant correlation between arithmetic calculation speed and parental assessment of child empathy. The parents of the top 7 performers by arithmetic calculation speed uniformly think their kids have below-average empathy.”</text></comment>