Reply To: Personality and Living the Truths of Hemispheric Lateralization

  • Charles Rykken

    Member
    February 1, 2023 at 9:26 pm

    That’s an ongoing work in progress for me. Lately I have been looking at GRE tilt where percentile wise there is a big difference in quant vs verbal scores. I put together a folder on Dropbox that has some interesting contents. For me, the graphic display of the differences in the R code file make downloading R Studio Desktop https://support–rstudio-com.netlify.app/products/rstudio/download/ can make it easy to see. You need know nothing about R programming to do this. The dropbox file is at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/lh1si7qb27nqy23p2teqc/h?dl=0&rlkey=9kkjme5u5jv6dqmiar8ymmolc To your specific question and why this GRE stuff is relevant is from my experience professionally, The STEM majors focus their studies on “Inanimate objects”. The arts and humanities people study real live humans(history being a slight exception). Intuition needs a base of knowledge function well. Inanimate objects do not interact with the experimenter(entanglement being an interesting exception) and from my professional experience as a scientific programmer from 1971 to 1989, STEM people are usually not very well read in literature. Aldous Huxley claimed the novel as the highest art form as the novelist is creating an entire world not just a painting or a poem. As far as my own GRE scores, I am at the 73 percentile for quant scores within math and physics which majors have the highest quant scores among all the STEM majors. My verbal score puts me at the 91st percentile among philosophy majors who have the highest verbal scores among the arts and humanities. If you line up all of the STEM and all of the arts and humanities majors ordered by average verbal scores, you will find the highest verbal scores on the STEM majors(interestingly math and physics) being almost the same as the major with the lowest verbal score among the arts and humanities. That would be anthropology. So thinking of GRE tilt, I am nearly a statistical outlier for being very verbal among all people who take the GRE. Philosophy has the highest average verbal score among all GRE test takers. A few philosophy departments are proud to crow about that. I believe that you can identify through conversation just how high a person is to openness to experience but Dan Kahan from Yale University points to science curiosity as a marker for willingness to change beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KFtQV7SiII&t=45s