Tag "IQ"

Children from families with high professional and educational status are twice as likely to enter a prestigious university as their peers from low-resource families, HSE University researchers have found. The ‘privileged’ adolescents benefit from strong family attitudes towards a good education, parental investment in their studies and the high academic performance associated with it. At the same time, even when they have good grades, students from poorly educated families do not even try to get into prestigious universities.

The year 2019 ended with an important event: Russia approved its first national standards for artificial intelligence. Starting in September 2020, AI-based smart systems will need to comply with these new regulations. It is far more difficult, however, to regulate people's attitudes towards such systems. People tend to fear and idolise AI, but should they really? Henry Penikas, Assistant Professor of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, discusses why they probably shouldn't and how algorithms can be fooled.

Why does greater trust in society increase GDP? How can you measure inequality? Before whom is the government to blame? Who earns more? Learn the answers to these questions in this summary of last year's IQ.HSE articles and research by HSE University scholars.

Researchers from HSE University, Skoltech and the University of Toronto analyzed data from 190 fMRI studies and found out that food, sex and money implicate similar brain regions whereas different types of reward favor the left and right hemispheres differently. The paper is to be published in Brain Imaging and Behavior. 

More than 500 large families in three Russian federal districts were surveyed to explore reasons why couples choose to have many children. Five main patterns were identified, driven by values (partner trust and religious beliefs), socioeconomic circumstances (income and education), and availability of support from extended family and friends.

Neurolinguists from HSE University have confirmed experimentally that for people with aphasia, it is easier to retrieve verbs describing situations with several participants (such as ‘someone is doing something’), although such verbs give rise to more grammar difficulties. The results of the study have been published in Aphasiology.

Only a few Russian companies regularly introduce innovation in products and services. The reason why many others fail to do so may have something to do with how they treat their employees’ innovative ideas, according to HSE sociologists.

In 2017, 30% of Russian families with children under three and almost 20% of families with children under 18 were living below the poverty line. Incidentally, financial hardships experienced during childhood do not leave one unaffected. A study by an HSE psychologist shows that poverty experienced in childhood reduces self-esteem and self-assurance even in adults who later achieve financial success.

Psychology researchers from HSE University have trialed the reliability of a student engagement scale on 537 Russian primary school students. The findings indicated that the emotional component contributes the most to school engagement. The paper has been published in PLOS ONE journal.

HSE researches have shown that the 2010 happiness level of citizens from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and other Arab countries could provide a much more accurate forecast of the Arab Spring events than purely economic indices, such as GDP per capita and unemployment rate.