London - As a dinner party host it's nice to see your guests feel at ease.
But while the smiles and chat might be there, there's a good chance that inside themselves women are fighting a mental battle with others around the table.
A study shows that when they are put among a peer group of similar intelligence for a sustained period of time they begin to feel intimidated – and their IQ levels actually drop.
Researchers conducted a series of tests on groups of men and women with similar high IQ ratings. In the first set of tasks, the subjects were given basic puzzles to solve.
Then they were each told how well the others in the group had performed before being given another series of similar tests.
Once they knew the others were good at the tasks, the performance and IQ of both sexes dropped, but women's more significantly.
Scans showed the part of the brain dealing with emotion increased in activity while that associated with problem solving decreased.
The researchers, at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in the U.S., say the results suggest companies should develop strategies to get the most out of staff who may be 'susceptible to social pressures' in small groups.
‘You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,’ said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the institute, who led the study.
He explained that when volunteers in a group were told how the others performed, it lowered their problem-solving abilities.
He said: ‘We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ.
‘Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.’
What’s more, a pattern emerged along gender lines.
The women and men both had the same baseline IQ scores, but more women fell into the lower performing group.
Lead author Kenneth Kishida added: ‘Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning.
‘And, through neuroimaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.’
Co-author Steven Quartz, a professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Caltech, said: ‘The idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.’
The research appears in the January 23, 2012 issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. - Daily Mail