So what’s your finger length ratio? Does it bear out the findings of this study reported in the Daily Mail?
Pupils with longer ring fingers are said to be more likely to excel in numeracy while those with shorter ring fingers tend to be more adept at literacy.
Scientists believe the trends can be explained by the levels of testosterone and oestrogen that children are exposed to in the womb. The sex hormones are thought to govern brain development as well as finger length.
There’s more detailed analysis at LiveScience via Yahoo! with links to other finger length studies.
How to determine the ratio? Take the length of the index finger and divide it by the length of the ring finger. If the ratio was less than 1, that student tended to score better on numeracy tests than on literacy tests; if the ratio was greater than 1, the opposite was true. Fingers of equal length [a ratio of 1] suggests little difference between one’s abilities in math and language.
Let’s have a highly scientific poll!
tigtog (R) handed
Left Hand:
I=67mm R=66mm Ratio 1.0152 rounds to 1
Right Hand:
I=69mm R=68mm Ratio 1.0147 rounds to 1
Seems about right – fairly equal, slight bias to literacy. What about the rest of you – conforming norms or outlying freaks?
72/80 = 0.9 on the nose. Explains the stats flair, but not the writing or lawyering…
Nope, I’m a freak. My ring fingers (both hands) are heaps longer than my index finger, and I’m a textual being. Actually I’m moderately numerate, but that’s acquired (by long and painful exposure) rather than innate.
In a bid to work on which was my index finger I found this
.
I am 77mm (index) 700 (ring), so 10% more numerate than literate. This concords strongly wif my skils.
The missing image
Funnily enough barney, both my index and ring fingers are 79mm, so i can confirm that the image you attached reflects reality
Like to help out here, tigtog, but as a kid I goofed-off while feeding my pet crocodiles.
I don’t want to be a spoilsport but this sort of ’science’ drives me crazy. It’s bullshit, a waste of money and time. What is the point of apparently demonstrating that skills are biologically determined? Usually it’s to show that certain sorts of people are inherently superior.
The supposed influence of the sex hormones on brain development has been debunked by many scientists but it’s not “sexy” so doesn’t get headlines.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this research basically purports to show that males are inherently better at numeracy than literacy and better at numeracy than females. That numeracy is a testosterone-derived attribute.
(So how come the western literary canon is dominated by men?)
Longer index finger. Bad with money. Not sure about the correlation though. Nothing about nostril size to finger width ratios in that study?
My understanding of the broad brush of this reserarch – gained over dinner each night from my D.Phil candidate partner, so don’t put the house on it! – shows that hormonal differences can indeed have real effects on the brain, but as far as differences between the sexes go, across the vast majority of measures there’s much greater variability within each sex than between them. Visualise it as a venn diagram of two strongly overlapping circles – and for some measures, one circle of plotted variability inside the other. So simplistic inferences like “Wo/men are better at…” are indeed usually nonsense. At best, you will have people at one extreme of the range for their sex falling outside the normal or extreme range for the other. The higher prevalence of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) amongst males are arguably one example of what can happen in an ‘extremely male’ brain. But the difference between the average or median for males and females is often small in comparison to the total range of observed abilities/skills/levels/task completion.
Now, where’s that ruler?
agreed that research along these lines tends to be fairly useless.
(are parents of kids with longer ring fingers – ie lack of literacy – going to send them to more reading classes?)
which is why the most you can do with this stuff is to do the measurement and have a laugh!
i’ve got a ratio a fair bit under 1, and as a maths/physics kid I guess that means i fit the norm. (although, of course just don’t mentioned my arts degree too!)
m
I=88mm R=78mm therefore 1.3 ratio. Did high level maths and English at school – doesn’t follow.
Like Mister Z says — crap pseudo-science.
I once (when I was in charge of calculating bonuses at a Major Bank) did a distribution of some thousands of staff, the bonus they got, and their star signs.
Definite correlation shown. HI average to Lo average was about 25%. IIRC it was Leos who did best and Virgos worst.
But still meaningless play with numbers. Amused my colleagues though.
Umm, which side do you measure? If I measure the palm side from the base crease line both are the same length, but if I measure from the back of the hand along the finger centre line from a point where the finger is separate to the one next to it I get a 5mm difference, but if I measure from the other side of the finger from the back of the hand…
Stuff it I give up, I’m an intelligent dumb smartarse, whose a gay heterosexual, who is financially well off but is bad with money, is anti-social with quite a lot of close friends and an active social life, and worst of all a liberal conservative. Never knew this finger measuring could tell so much about me.
LOL at the anti-scientists here – “we shouldn’t look at these things because we mightn’t like what we find”. In fact the effects of testosterone on the foetal brain (and the convenient marker for it in later life – ring/index finger ratio) is likely to be anything but a useless field of inquiry. I’d suspect the literacy/numeracy correlation might exist but be a loose one – too many other things matter to these skills.
Which brings us to what mister z said, which was spot on. Statistical variation in all sorts of innate cognitive abilities between almost any categorical group of humans you care to name (men, women, blacks, whites, Chinese, Brits, etc) might exist, but it is utterly swamped by the variation within such groups. That means the between-group variations in ability predict virtually nothing about any given individual within the group, and therefore have no policy implications.
Somebody should tell Jack Strocchi that!
Knowledge of the existence of a slight statistical variation b/w randomly selected, centrally-tended members of diverse groups will give you an edge when you have to make a decision under conditions of general uncertainty. This has policy implications alright, no pun intended!
More generally, although most human groups have characteristics that overlap other groups it is still the case that the deviant tails of one distribution will fall-short or over-shoot the normal bell of another. So most randomly selected members of different groups will be fairly similar in most characteristics. But the elite of one and the dregs of another will vary massively.
It is important to know what is going on at the extremes since these kind of individuals can have a powerful effect. eg we would like to know what kind of population produces more “jewels in the crown”. And what kind produces more “spanners in the works”.
Step 1: Wind-up.
Step 2: Point.
(Repeat till no longer sport)
“…That means the between-group variations in ability predict virtually nothing about any given individual within the group, and therefore have no policy implications.”
But ‘policy’ (at least as opposed to law) is hard to make with respect to individuals, whereas, for good or ill, it is frequently made with respect to groups. Not saying that group assumptions are necessarily a wise thing for making policy; just saying, Careful with that ‘therefore,’ Eugene.
And of course, this whole finger business smells silly. Did you know that if your hand is bigger than your face, then, oh, I forget what it’s supposed to predict…
Point taken, AGNGG – I should have said “should have no policy implications”.
But Jack S would apparently disagree with this, too. And I think he’s wrong, on sorta Bayesian grounds. If I’m making education policy for small children in a particular group, which group I know (how? in fact it’s really hard to establish differences in group innate abilities partly because they’re so small) has slightly more innate ability at maths than the average, what is gained by treating them all as maths geniuses? We can get far, far better information by individual assessment in the same manner we would for other groups, because the prior probabilities for each member of the group are hardly affected by their membership of the group. And that goes for the individuals who are outliers too – the priors may be stronger, but so will the information provided by the individual assessment.
Not to mention that even where group membership does tell us a lot about those prior probabilities, statistical discrimination can be shown to be individually optimal but very much socially sub-optimal. Try googling “segregation models”.
dd, I think the policy implications Jack has in mind principally relate to immigration. Which says it all really…
Ring fingers slightly longer… but waaay more literate than numerate. But maybe that’s just because I got bored with maths. I was in advanced maths until yr10 but chose the lowest class in 11 and 12 as soon as I had a choice in the matter. In the meantime I did 4 units of english, modern history, religion, and had to drop out of physics at the end of yr 11 because the math was killing me. This finger theory is a bit iffy if you ask me.
Perhaps if you tied a string around the finger you’d get string theory and then you’d be good at physics?
/bad joke