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Notes -
Neither I nor the person who did the study were making a claim about the SAT, we were considering a setting where people fill out surveys for pay on the internet.
I didn't say effort was the determining factor, I said that it mattered, with natural variation in effort covering maybe slightly less than 10% of the variance (so if you go from slacking to max effort, maybe that gets you a bit more than a standard deviation of score).
Much of individual preferences are heritable too, but yes I agree that group-level differences are much less "noisy" than individual-level differences.
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