A hoax correlation study: IQ scores and browser choice (amended 8th August 2011)

One of the news aggregators that I visit is Mashable, and recently they published the results of a false correlative study of browser use and IQ score, which supposedly used data from 100,000 users (and was run by a Canadian company).  Here's the link to the Mashable article.

Supposed correlation results from the published hoax:

The fictitious study's conclusion was that "“individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.” 

Since I blogged about it well before the false nature of the hoax was published, I've decided to keep an amended version up (thanks to Caesar for the comment). My own anecdotal impression had been that on corporate hardware, vestiges of IE6 uses was attributable to bigger bureaucratic organizations, who actually do exhibit tendencies to resist change. Another variable that has historically influenced rates of browser use of course, is factory settings. Microsoft's IE certainly enjoyed years of being the out-of-the-box default in the PC market.

I personally divide my time these days on my company-sanctioned flavour of Firefox, Opera and Chrome. And since my post about my audience and their browser use, I've been wondering why blogger counts SimplePie as a browser (it's an RSS reader) while Google Analytics doesn't.

Browser	None	[reverse sort direction]	Visits	Browser contribution to total:
1.	Firefox		135	39.94%
2.	Safari		121	35.80%
3.	Chrome		48	14.20%
4.	Internet Explorer		17	5.03%
5.	Mozilla		10	2.96%
6.	Opera		5	1.48%
7.	BlackBerry9630		1	0.30%
8.	BlackBerry9700		1	0.30%