Scenes of fervorous debate were seen today as the infamous research cohort, lead by one Roland Magnusson, announced the findings of their most recent study – that individuals with Anime profile pictures have a higher IQ on average. The study, which commenced and has been ongoing since the early days of the internet, has received funding from multiple multinational think tanks, policy organizations and government ministries attempting to get any information that could help better identify, and employ, gifted individuals.
“It’s a little known fact that the majority of successful Mensa applicants, as well as Harvard graduates, have at least one social media or internet handle currently represented by some form of anime display picture,” Magnusson explained at the start of the announcement.
The study itself, conducted in a double-blind format, has had close to 10,000 participants from people all across the globe, varying in age range, gender and social socioeconomic status, utilizing both the Stanford–Binet and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale tests for scoring. Each group of participants were scored over roughly a 12 month period, having a control of both current and non-current anime profile users, and a test group that would swap to or from an anime picture at the 6 month point. The exhaustive study found that individuals who had been using an anime profile picture for at least a 3 month period had at minimum a 16.42 higher IQ score compared to that of non-users.
Some other interesting secondary results from the study indicated that individuals using pictures relating to certain fandoms, such as Steven Universe, Homestuck, or Undertale (referred to as “Tumblr-bait” in the study) had on average a 5.53% lower IQ scored compared to other participants and, even more shocking, individuals with Seiyuu/Idol pictures charted the lowest numbers across the board.
“This is a bit of hearsay on my end, but although these individuals have great recall for certain data points such as obscure particular information pertaining to the idol or seiyuu of their choice, they are notably deficient in areas such as perceptual reasoning, verbal comprehension, memory speed, and general rules of social interaction,” Magnusson postulated.
“I believe these users have some form of abnormality in their prefrontal cortex, but further research needs to be done for actual evidence,” Magnusson added while attempting frantically to change his phone’s wallpaper from Haruka Tomatsu without anyone noticing.