What's in a tilt? The differential effects of verbal and mathematical abilities on educational and economic success

Ability tilt, the difference between two cognitive abilities (e.g., mathematical and verbal ability), has received considerable attention in the cognitive ability literature as a predictor of various outcomes (e.g., success in STEM). This concept was criticized recently by Sorjonen et al. (2022, 2023) who showed that the predictive power of tilt is spurious, in that it is due to differences in the correlations between the outcome and the tilt's components. In the current paper we suggest that despite this criticism, tilt can still be a useful concept if it is kept in mind that it represents the differential effects of its components. Although in many of the cases that were studied in the literature this differential effect is rather trivial – it is due to the similarities/dissimilarities of these components and the outcome – in other cases it may be of interest. We demonstrate this by studying the effect of tilt, as well as the effect of its interaction with general cognitive ability on educational and economic success.