A strange result. When I hear "spatial abilities depend on nurture", I expect something like "our society teaches boys to be good at sports and video games and other things that require spatial reasoning, so they have more practice."
This suggests it's a function of social status, which raises the question of why social status increases spatial reasoning skills. The authors admit education only makes up a third of the difference (and if education was the only issue, we would expect language skills to suffer in the same way, but the "popular wisdom" is that women usually test for better language skills). Homeownership is another weird one - why should owning a home give you better spatial skills (if we assume that the homeowner and their spouse both navigate the rooms of the house the same amount and so on).
The only explanation I can think of is stereotype threat, but again that makes the whole "women are better at language skills" thing weird if we can't explain where the stereotypes came from originally. Now I want to know whether the stereotype that men are better at spatial and women better at language skills evolved multiple times in multiple societies, or whether it's just a function of Westerners introducing it everywhere they went.
Anecdotally, I've had several female friends attribute it to stereotype threat.
"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.