Twins Assessing Their Own and Parental Intelligence: Examining the Raters’ Agreement and the Effect of Raters’ and Targets’ Gender

Abstract

The goal of this study was to explore the raters’ agreement and the effect of raters’ and targets’ gender on self- and parental intelligence assessments in the sample of Croatian twins. Twins were asked to assess their own and their parents’ overall intelligence, as well as specific abilities from the Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Data was analysed to explore: i) twins’ agreement in parental assessments and behavioural genetic analysis of the overall intelligence estimates; ii) gender differences in self- assessments; and iii) raters’ and targets’ gender effects on parental assessments. The twins’ mean correlation in their assessments of overall parental intelligence was .60. The differences between monozygotic and dizygotic twin correlations were nonsignificant for all of the estimated abilities, and model fitting analysis indicates that hypothesis about genetic effect on parental assessment of intelligence should be rejected. The hypotheses about males’ higher self-assessments for overall intelligence and for the masculine types of abilities - logical-mathematical, body-kinesthetic and spatial abilities - were confirmed. For the feminine types of abilities - verbal/linguistic, inter- and intra- personal intelligences - there were no significant gender effects. Both target and rater effect were found for the parental estimates of intelligence. Fathers were estimated higher on overall intelligence, logical-mathematical, body-kinesthetic and spatial abilities, while mothers were estimated higher on interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. The effect of the raters’ gender was found for overall intelligence as well as for inter- and intra- personal intelligences, where males gave higher estimates of parental intelligences than females.

Keywords

• self-assessed intelligence
• other-assessed intelligence
• gardner’s multiple intelligences
• twin study
• gender