Do smarter people walk faster?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Familial Transmission of Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction Is Much Higher Than Shown in Typical Single-Method Studies. René Mõttus and colleagues examine parent-offspring and sibling correlations in personality traits and life satisfaction. When combining self-ratings and ratings by an independent rater, they find that such correlations are about a third higher than is typically reported. They also find higher heritabilities.

Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment. Tobias Edwards and colleagues examine the association between polygenic scores for intelligence and several measures of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. They find that polygenic scores are positively associated with all these measures. This provides evidence that intelligence has a causal impact on political beliefs. 

Effects of genotypic and phenotypic IQ on several measures of political beliefs, under different specifications.

Does Catching Covid Lower Your IQ? Noah Carl critiques a recent study that found individuals with severe Covid infections had substantially lower cognitive ability. He notes that asymptomatic individuals had marginally higher cognitive ability, and the results are consistent with self-selection. People with higher cognitive ability tend to work in professions that had lower exposure to Covid; they also tend to be healthier.