It's way more likely that there is something else (maybe many other things!) that explain the correlation.
It's one of those sexy findings that is probably bullshit.
It's also a study with a low number of participants, and none of the political factors are statistically significant for men and statistically significant for women. Surprised it was published tbh, although I guess it's better to publish inconclusive results to interesting hypotheses than encourage p-hacking...
It took so long to turn my life around that I never even noticed the shift. It's so obvious in hindsight jesus.
Yeah and also one that gets highly upvoted on the sites of people who think a certain way. Social media really has contributed to clickbait confirmation bias brainrot.
"Toxoplasma gondii, the parasitic protozoon of cats, infects about one-third of the human population in both developed and developing countries (Tenter et al., 2000)."
Edit: here's that paper from Tenter et al. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3109627/#__ffn_...
As a consequence, no two tests produce the same results in all cases, even when carried out in the same laboratory [45–54]. In addition, prevalence rates vary over time and with the age of the individuals included in the study [55–68].
The strongest thing they were willing to say is that it's higher in Latin America and west Africa, and lower in colder climates. Here's a direct link to Table 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3109627/table/T...
- Cats only get toxoplasmosis from prey, and it only sticks around in the cat for a few weeks, so if you have an indoor-only cat that never goes outside and you don't have any pests, you're probably fine
- Even if your cat does go outside, the parasite doesn't become infectious until 1 to 5 days after it is shed in a cat’s feces, so if you're cleaning the litter box daily, you're probably fine as well
> Infected women scored higher in tribalism and lower in cultural liberalism
> This study showed Toxoplasma-infected and Toxoplasma-free participants of our cross-sectional study differed in three of four factors of PI34, scoring higher in Tribalism and lower in Cultural liberalism and Anti-Authoritarianism.
- Is the author referring to the infected or to the free group here?
> The stress-coping hypothesis suggests that many toxoplasmosis-associated changes, e.g., higher extroversion in infected women and lower in men, or lower suspiciousness of infected women and higher in suspiciousness of infected men (all in comparison to non-infected peers) can be interpreted as gender-dependent stress coping reaction.
- Using “among infected men/women” in place of “of” would add a lot of clarity here.
I believe I’ll stop reading the article.
I considered the possibility and discarded it, given that the word choices so strongly resemble poorly-spoken native English speakers whom I have personally known. But I could have confirmed by looking.
Regardless of the effects it may or may not have on the brain, the paper mentions that "the differences might be side-effects of long-term mild inflammatory reaction", and for general health reasons I'd certainly prefer not to have permanent long-term mild inflammation.
Martin Shkreli (pharma bro, however it's spelled) got into a lot of hot water for buying up a toxoplasmosa treatment and jacking the price by 100x.
Also did they control for age, relationship status and number of cats owned? Multiple cats owned is sometimes caused by loneliness in my experience so the causality may be easy to mix up.
The only reason they didn't die on the streets was because we're under lockdown at the moment. So instead dying on the streets, they died indoors.
One could assume that other long term pain that causes stress could see the same results in behaviours and the associated sex differences.
s/study/internet poll/g
