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How to get good grades
Reading, Writing, and S*x: The Effect of Losing Virginity on Academic Performance:
Controlling for a wide set of individual- and family-level observables available in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates show that sexually active adolescents have grade point averages that are approximately 0.2 points lower than virgins. However, when information on the timing of intercourse decisions is exploited and individual fixed effects are included, the negative effect of sexual intercourse disappears for females, but persists for males. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that while there may be adverse academic spillovers from engaging in intercourse for some adolescents, previous studies' estimates are overstated due to unmeasured heterogeneity.
That is from economist Joseph J. Sabia. Robin Hanson, my source, wrote:
My interpretation: Teen boys who want sex out of teen girls have to spend a lot of time in sports, fights, clubs, signaling their attractiveness. Teen girls who want sex just have to say "yes", and the sex itself takes little time, especially given that teenage boys are the partners.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 27, 2007 at 04:23 PM in Education | Permalink
Comments
I thought the reference to "academic spillovers"
was especially well-chosen. Or at least vivid.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Apr 27, 2007 5:06:29 PM
This appears to be consistent with the finding that male high-school grades are inversely correlated with attractiveness.
Posted by: Ted at Apr 27, 2007 5:25:14 PM
This post is upmost disturbing to me. As a college student there is no
way or reason as to how a person could catagorize a student of getting
grades by whether or not they are a virgin. Getting graded relies on how
much effort a person is willing to put into their school. Although it is
true that the average college students does not try to much to get all A's
it is a fact that some people just dont have the drive to do their work.
Has ever occured to one that person could lazy just like half of the
people in the world. Those few that strive to excellent in college is a
great aspect to obtain. But it not right to say that there is a possible
chance they make good grades because they are a virgin or that they dont
have a social life.
Posted by: Jenna at Apr 27, 2007 5:42:17 PM
Jenna, your post is awesome.
Posted by: seabreeze at Apr 27, 2007 6:00:01 PM
'Getting graded relies on how much effort a person is willing to put into their school.'
Well, and their IQ. Does this paper control for IQ?
Posted by: adrian at Apr 27, 2007 6:06:39 PM
Girls feel that they did something wrong so they have to make up for it by doing something proper. They study to make up for the time they lost. Boys feel they did something right, so they can put less effort into other pursuits that might win them recognition. They relax and their GPA dips.
Posted by: agent00yak at Apr 27, 2007 6:23:31 PM
I would say that the same characteristics that make one likely to engage in sex make one likely to be lazy with respect to school work. The interesting question is just what are these characteristics?
Posted by: B.S. at Apr 27, 2007 6:59:04 PM
I still think they may be reversing cause and effect. Based on my personal experiences, I would have headlined the results as "higher grade point averages reduce your chance of getting laid"
Posted by: coyote at Apr 27, 2007 7:01:44 PM
The miracle is that teenage boys aren't completely overwhelmed by breasts and buttocks!
Posted by: ricpic at Apr 27, 2007 7:25:39 PM
yes ricpic, especially when you consider that for most of the day they are forced to sit still and pay attention, the antithesis of their evolutionary nature, which demands running and hunting. how do guys escape high school? i don't know how i did it.
Posted by: adrian at Apr 27, 2007 7:37:48 PM
"The miracle is that teenage boys aren't completely overwhelmed by breasts and buttocks!"
They're not? I surely wa. . wait a minute. . .
Really though, speaking from personal experience, having been one of the rowdier teens in school; passing up college scholarships - for art and athletics no less - for that self-destructive life style, it wasn't the individual pursuit of a thing or past time, but it was the general mindset of party now, pay later. (I'm speaking of myself and a very large crowd that I ran with.)
Thus, any behavior that takes or allows the teen's attention to center so intently on self-gratification by any means is going to result in certain negative outcomes. Or, more simply put, that much play means very little work.
So, I think one could find a great number of activities that would correspond to lower academic performance. Some having more effect than others. Sex is of course the most natural, and so has the widest appeal, and presumably the least detrimental effect as compared to other "illicit" behaviors.
Or maybe not, I didn't do very well in high school, so I could be wrong.
Posted by: Ray G at Apr 27, 2007 7:44:57 PM
Robin's apparent belief that teenage girls spend less time than boys on signalling and on making themselves attractive is a bit of a stretch, to say the least.
A more likely hypothesis is that people have different discount rates, some emphasizing college, career, and studying for future gains, and others emphasizing sex, parties, and other risk taking behavior for fun right now. IMHO there are good arguments either that discount rates depend on genetics or that they are determined by culture and family.
Posted by: DK at Apr 27, 2007 8:40:33 PM
This smells like a correlation/causation problem to me.
There seems to be a higher variance for males than females for education and/or IQ, but to piss off Steve Sailer I'll just use education as a proxy for both.
So, starting with the hypothesis that there are both more males with naturally high grades and more males with naturally lower grades, one could reasonably guess that the "brain"'s would specialize in their comparitive advantage, namely academic work. Those on the left side of the curve would thus by default tend to be overrepresented in sports. Practice makes perfect, so this tends to be positively reinforcing for both groups, and they also tend to spend less time in the other pursuit.
Thus, boys with brains spend more time studying and paying attention in class, while those with less brains due the opposite. Similarly those with less brains spend more time studying sports, and practicing sports, both at school and at home or on the playground, while the brighter boys don't practice as much,and thus don't develop those skills as much.
Furthermore, school sports is to a large degree team sports, although there are individual sports like track, swimming, and tennis. Thus the ones with less brains wind up with more opportunities to make friends and quasi-friends. With more friends and quasi-friends they go to more parties, they meet more girls, and they lose their virginity earlier. The smarter boys may well also socialize in free moments in class as well, and this is also self reinforcing, and they also lose their virginity later at the margin as well as a result.
The girls on the other hand with less intellectual variance aren't over or under represented in sports as a result, nor in paying attention in class to academic matters. The ones that get asked out on dates or asked to parties tend to be the better looking ones, subjectively defined, and thus their virginity isn't correlated with brains or lack thereof.
To test which way cause and effect goes, i.e. whether or not the greater male variance is nature or nurture, or both thanks to feedback, one might need to isolate a large enough sample of smart male jocks and see where they fit in the hypotheses, and also correlate their relative academic performance results over time with those of the brainy non-athletes and the less brainy athletes. If they fit in as equally brainy when young but less brainy compared to the non-athlete brains and also progressively more brainy than the less brainy athletes when older, then it is feedback cycles at work involving both nature and nurture. If they correlate with only one or the other, then it is nature or nurture.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Apr 27, 2007 8:44:54 PM
I am going to cite this paper as my excuse for my bad grades. :)
Posted by: Jacqueline at Apr 27, 2007 8:55:00 PM
I think Robin has it backwards: when I was a teenager sex lasted forever, now it's always pretty fast.
Posted by: Pearl Yonick at Apr 27, 2007 8:56:40 PM
The following is from my response at Gene Expression (I originally composed it as a comment for this post, but the spam filter rejected me for length and links):
"Last December I passed a paper along to Razib showing that high-school age adolescents with higher IQs and extremely low IQs were less likely to have had first intercourse than those with average to below average intelligence. . .
In fact, a more detailed study from 2000 is devoted strictly to this topic, and finds the same thing: Smart Teens Don't Have Sex (or Kiss Much Either). . .
Depending on the specific age and gender, an adolescent with an IQ of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females. But higher IQ had a similar relationship across the entire range of romantic/sexual interactions, decreasing the odds that teens had ever kissed or even held hands with a member of the opposite sex at each age.
While these authors leave off at grade 12th, it would seem plausible to expect that this relationship extends beyond high school. To explore this, plenty of interesting facts come from a 2001 campus sex survey by the joint MIT/Wellesley college magazine Counterpoint (PDF). Looking within and between colleges, IQ appears to delay sexual activity on into young adulthood.
By the age of 19, 80% of US males and 75% of women have lost their virginity, and 87% of college students have had sex. But this number appears to be much lower at elite (i.e. more intelligent) colleges. According to the article, only 56% of Princeton undergraduates have had intercourse. At Harvard 59% of the undergraduates are non-virgins, and at MIT, only a slight majority, 51%, have had intercourse. Further, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex."
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Apr 27, 2007 9:10:35 PM
Jason Malloy,
That looks like an undertapped market for women freaking out because they are worried about getting married due to looks or being a social outcast of some sort. Namely, go to MIT or another brainy grad school and get up her nerve and ask the nerdiest ones out.
Alternatively she could ask them to tutor her, and then aggressively make it obvious she is available and likes him, with the aggressiveness getting more pogressive as time goes by without a date.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Apr 27, 2007 9:29:01 PM
Well, I certainly like the good grades. I've managed to pull a 3.86 over three semesters of college without breaking a sweat.
On the other hand, I'm quite lonely.
Posted by: Robert at Apr 27, 2007 11:36:14 PM
Charles Murray tarred and feathered himself with the common sense revelation that behavior was more important than IQ, but, as common sense would have it, there was more "good" behavior - or at least discretion - among those with higher IQ.
Now just recently, people are talking about how discipline is the key ingredient to success. Nothing new of course, but it just seems more palpable than behavior I suppose.
Posted by: Ray G at Apr 28, 2007 12:47:10 AM
"Well, I certainly like the good grades. I've managed to pull a 3.86 over three semesters of college without breaking a sweat.
On the other hand, I'm quite lonely"
I would assume, then, that the first hand is keeping you company?
Posted by: Walter Sear at Apr 28, 2007 1:05:32 AM
<< Depending on the specific age and gender, an adolescent with an IQ of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females. But higher IQ had a similar relationship across the entire range of romantic/sexual interactions, decreasing the odds that teens had ever kissed or even held hands with a member of the opposite sex at each age. >>
This seems very reasonable empirically, and makes me feel a lot smarter right now, but there is no way this makes theoretical sense. What model would explain this? dumb kids would have a hard time pretending to be smart, but the smart kids shouldn't have any problem acting dumb if that would get them laid.
The only rational explanation i can think of is that smart kids realize they should focus on more important things, while dumb kids are too short-sighted. But this is bullsh*t. everybody nows that the ultimate goal in life is having sex, as much as humanly possible. at least for guys. i mean, that's why we buy sports cars, build bridges and fly to the moon: to impress girls - at least according to jerry seinfeld.
The only argument i would buy is that more intelligence implies more self-awareness, which implies more self-consciousness, which implies less sex. but this defies rationality big time: it means the smarter you are, the stupider you are.
Posted by: Myself at Apr 28, 2007 4:15:54 AM
The only argument i would buy is that more intelligence implies more self-awareness, which implies more self-consciousness, which implies less sex. but this defies rationality big time: it means the smarter you are, the stupider you are.
There's more than one kind of smart. Or more precisely, I think the idea that IQ and self-consciousness are linked is entirely plausible. IQ probably doesn't measure social skills all that well.
Posted by: mitch at Apr 28, 2007 6:02:43 AM
myself - that would be the thesis of 'idiocracy', smart people are too stupid to realize they should be having babies.
Posted by: adrian at Apr 28, 2007 6:05:05 AM
This study misses a major point: it is not merely having sex that matters. Blow jobs are more likely to help grade levels than plain old screwing.
Posted by: david still at Apr 28, 2007 9:27:47 AM
"Paper #1240520242 that finds a correlation and makes up a nice little story why it would be a causal effect, when the chance that a 3rd omitted factor drives the correlations is...like...99%."
Posted by: Mike at Apr 28, 2007 9:28:33 AM
