Russell T. Warne, PhD - Psychologist, author, and educator

30/11/2025

We're so close to 1,000 YouTube subscribers to the RIOT IQ channel. Help us hit that number by visiting the link below and subscribing!

We educate the world on the science of human intelligence, IQ & cognitive ability by focusing on data, facts, and research 🧠 We are also building the world'...

28/11/2025

A new study on the accuracy of introductory psychology textbooks is the topic of a new article in "The Journal of General Psychology." The authors report that psychology textbooks contain less information than before. This is partially because the textbooks are getting more accurate but also because authors are dropping any mention of controversial topics (e.g., the Stanford Prison Experiment). But misinformation still persists about important topics.

Bonus: The authors have a brief explanation of the truth behind 11 myths or controversies in psychology. I've included them in the screenshots here.

Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00221309.2025.2587151

25/11/2025

Read a very brave untenured professor's open letter to Washington State University urging them to resist pressure from trans activists who want the university to stop offering continuing education in evidence-based gender medicine that is not ideological.

Excerpts:
"It is obvious that the activists driving the current harassment campaign did not review all of the course materials before demanding their removal."

"Activist movements often try to force their targets into making humiliating, false apologies to save their own skin, even at the cost of betraying friends, colleagues, and allies. This happened on a massive scale during the Cultural Revolution, and the psychological degradation techniques are well documented. The lies our harassers hope to extract will destroy our relationships and reputation, our public image and self-image. That is part of the intended punishment. They will work to make us, as a university, violate our own public promise to uphold academic freedom and institutional neutrality."

"But a public apology, no matter how abject and groveling, will never satisfy those whose goal is to silence dissent. After an apology will come demands that university employees be disciplined or fired for doing their jobs: pursuing truth, fostering inquiry, and facilitating dialogue."

Full letter available here:

A Washington State University pediatrician appeals to her administration to resist censorship and protect scientific integrity.

24/11/2025

The latest episode of the RIOT IQ podcast dropped!

In it, I talk with Thomas Coyle (University of Texas, San Antonio) about his research on personal strengths and weaknesses in cognition ("tilt"), using tests to predict academic success, and the new open access journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities.

Don't miss it:

If you want to test your own ability profile, you can take a free sample of the RIOT IQ test at www.riotiq.com. Today we talk about the ability that predicts...

23/11/2025

A Malaysian scholar cited "The Onion" as a factual source to support the claim that ancient Greece was "entirely fabricated" by historians. 🤦 Because the article also allegedly contains plagiarism and other problems, there are calls for it to be retracted.

Read more:

Sharifah Munirah Alatas says the article published in Universiti Malaya’s Jurnal Al-Tamaddun cited a piece by satirical website The Onion as factual evidence.

18/11/2025

Does cake cause herpes? Of course not! But in this provocative article, authors David Robert Grimes and James Heathers show that by using a simple data manipulation trick, it is almost always possible to get spurious (i.e., fake) results like a relationship between the herpes virus and blood glucose levels (see graphs).

The trick: dividing up a continuous variable into two artificial categories (a process called dichotomization) at arbitrary points. This technique, which is often found in health and psychological research, can greatly inflate the number of false positives in research.

Read the full article (with no paywall) here:
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-025-02712-0

17/11/2025

RIOT IQ has released a new podcast episode, and it's a great one! I talk with Yujing Lin (University College London) about her new article published in the journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities on the use of genetic data to predict IQ, educational outcomes, and even height and BMI. This is the state of the art in genomic prediction, and knowing this info is essential for understanding how biology informs psychology and education.

Watch here:

Can genes really predict intelligence?In this episode, we talk with Yujing Lin from King’s College London about her open-access study “Polygenic Score Predic...

16/11/2025

Based on recent survey data, there is evidence that fewer young people identify as "non-binary" or "transgender." Skeptical Magazine has a new article diving into the data behind this trend and why it's not linked to changing political attitudes, external pressure, or other explanations.

Read the article (no paywall) here:

Transgenderism is in rapid decline among young Americans, indicating it was a social contagion. A few weeks ago, I published results from six waves of the massive Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual survey of undergraduate students. The data were unequivocal: the share of s...

16/11/2025

Today, I hit 700 followers on this page!

Thank you to everyone who decided to follow me. I hope I can keep you interested in psychology, science integrity, and underappreciated research from the social sciences.

14/11/2025

The legal landscape surrounding IQ testing in employment is changing, which will make it easier for employers to use IQ for hiring and promoting. In this article that I wrote for "American Thinker," I explain how these changes happened. Short version: We can thank the Harvard anti-discrimination Supreme Court case, Trump's executive orders, and even A.I.

Read more:

Nearly 100 years ago, Ernest Hemingway wrote that a character went bankrupt “Gradually and then suddenly.” Likewise, the disparate impact doctrine in civil rights law is ending first gradually, and then suddenly. In civil ri...

13/11/2025

Another classic study from social psychology turns out to be a massive fraud.

"When Prophecy Fails" was a case study of a small New Age belief group (a "UFO cult") whose main leader prophesied that her followers would be rescued from catastrophic floods by space aliens. When the predicted floods and rescue did not occur, the group supposedly doubled-down on its beliefs and worked harder to spread them. The 1956 book about these events has been used as evidence for cognitive dissonance, the irrationality of faith, and even to explain the spread of early Christianity.

The problem: none of it is true. A new article examines contemporary documents and finds that the authors of "When Prophecy Fails" lied about the events they describe and the group's behavior. (The group actually disbanded after the failed prophecy, and the leader recanted her claims.) Moreover, the researchers withheld descriptions of their own unethical behavior, including manipulating group members and even interfering with a child welfare investigation!

The author's final conclusion is damning: "Every major claim of the book is false, and the researchers' notes leave no option but to conclude the misrepresentations were intentional."

Read the sordid details here:
https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.7004

12/11/2025

Feminist and culture-only theories predict that s*x differences in math, reading, and science should be smaller in more egalitarian countries. However, a new article from Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities shows that these predictions are wrong.

Key findings:
➡️In countries with more gender equality, the s*x differences in math, science, and reading are wider than in less equal countries. This is a phenomenon has been observed before and is known as the "gender equality paradox."
➡️Boys show consistent edges in math (0.33–0.71 SD) & science (0.19–0.39 SD) strengths; girls dominate reading (0.52–0.94 SD).
➡️For the most part, the same s*x differences are observed among high, average, and low achievers (2nd image).

Because it focuses on inter- and intraindividual differences, this article can shed light on how s*x differences develop. Gender egalitarianism seems to encourage adolescents of both s*xes to develop pre-existing strengths in reading and science even further (3rd image). This occurs, despite the fact that average achievement in all subjects tends to be higher in these countries. In a way, "the rich get richer" and "the poor get somewhat less poor."

Finally, high-achievers have the same intraindividual strengths and weaknesses that the rest of the population does: females generally having their greatest strength in reading and males in science and math. As a result, even though these females have high math and science achievement, it's still usually lower than their reading achievement. The authors theorize that this may be one reason why bright women choose non-STEM careers: they have other options (e.g., verbal careers) that draw on their greater strengths.

Read the full article (with no paywall) here:
https://icajournal.scholasticahq.com/article/146580-the-stem-conundrum-s*x-differences-in-intraindividual-academic-strengths-and-the-gender-equality-paradox-across-academic-achievement-levels