AptiQuant Browser/IQ Study Was Likely a Hoax 185
A steady stream of people have submitted notes this morning saying that the story we (and the entire internet, and even NPR's Marketplace) mentioned recently talking about browser platform correlating with IQ looks like a hoax. Of course, if you read the Slashdot discussion, you probably would have known this already, but now everyone knows. The company responsible for the survey, AptiQuant, looks to not be real.
Already did this study a long time ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in 1997/1998 when I ran a fan website. For a period of time I had shamefully turned away IE users for a time because of a website incompatibility from the site and received angry e-mails. Then, about 6 months later, I turned away Netscape users with the same reasoning. What I found is that the e-mail from IE users tended to be much shorter and use simpler words with more mistakes in grammar. Its one of things that I did, but alas never published. I still have all the e-mails though. My thoughts about it at the time were that people who choose to use IE at the time don't really think about their choices much and just go with what is given to them.