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Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend
to
Running Head: Suppressing Intelligence
Submitted:
Prepared for R. H. Wright & N. A. Cummings (Eds.), Destructive Trends in
Mental Health: The Well Intentioned Road to Hell.
Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help
Research on intelligence is a tale of good and evil—or so
the media would have us think. On one side we are presented mean-spirited pseudoscientists who are
greasing the slippery slope to
oppression and genocide with their elitist, racist
ideologies about human differences. On the other side are the earnest souls who would save us from those horrors by exposing the
non-scientific and immoral basis of the so-called
"science" of intelligence differences. Even when the science is
conceded to be accurate, it is often labeled dangerous and irresponsible (Block & Dworkin, 1974). If not
life-imperiling, it at least threatens the foundations of American democracy. In short, we must make the world safe from intelligence research.
Perhaps ironically, institutional psychology has itself been busy doing just
that for over thirty years. The media can keep repainting its libelous portrait
of intelligence research only with the complicity of intelligence's mother
field, psychology. Although intelligence tests are often cited as psychology's
biggest success, psychology often treats researchers who study the origins and
consequences of individual and group differences in general intelligence as its
biggest embarrassment—the troublesome child or mad uncle whom a socially
ambitious family would lock up or have disappear. In doing so, it has
undermined the integrity of psychological science, encouraged fiction-driven
social policies that continue to disappoint and ratchet up blame, and blinded
us to the daily risks and challenges faced by the less able among us.
A Case Study in Suppression: Arthur Jensen and the Silenced Majority
Psychology is not a single monolith, of course, but is a semi-organized social
system governed by regard and reputation, often dispensed (as well as coveted)
by official representatives such as journal editors, awards committees, and
association officers. It therefore seems emblematic that the American
Psychological Association (APA) has never given an award to Arthur R. Jensen,
the greatest contemporary scholar of intelligence and one of the 50 most
"eminent psychologists of the 20th century" (Detterman, 1998;
Dittman, 2002, p. 29). Neither has the newer but more scientifically-oriented
American Psychological Society (APS).
Fair, Formidable, Fearless—and Correct After All
Jensen personifies the dedicated empiricist who seeks scientific truths, not
popular acclaim. He would rather be right than seem right, which is personally
costly when the truth is unpopular. He incurred steep costs by publishing and
defending his 1969 Harvard
Educational Review article, "How much can we boost IQ and
scholastic achievement?" (Jensen, 1969), and he continues to incur costs
with his subsequent work. Recognizing that Jensen "will not receive the
honors his work merits from organizations like the American Psychological
Association," editor Douglas Detterman (1998) dedicated a special issue of
the journal Intelligence ("A
King Among Men") to honoring Jensen.
Peers wrote with the highest praise for the scientist and the man, and with
outrage at the abuse Jensen has suffered for maintaining his scientific
integrity. Despite repeatedly being abused by "thugs with pens" and
threatened physically, Jensen has "[f]or more than 40 years…unflinchingly
strived to make psychology an honest science" (Scarr, 1998, p. 227, 231).
"Indeed, few people now alive have had more impact on the field" of
human intelligence (Sternberg, 1998, p. 213). As a scholar, Jensen is
"formidable" (Deary & Crawford, 1998, p. 274),
"exceptional," "innovative," "prolific"
(Nettleback, 1998, pp. 233, 239), "inspirational" (Rushton, 1998, p.
218), and "the quintessential scientist" (Kaufman, 1998, p. 253). He
has "an ingenious ability to develop quantitative analyses that address
fundamental issues in highly original ways that advance our knowledge of
critical issues in the field" (Brody, 1998, p. 246); he does research of
"exceptional thoroughness and scientific rigor" (Vernon, 1998, p.
267) that is "intensive, detailed, exhaustive, fair-minded, temperate, and
courageous" (Bouchard, 1998, p. 283); and he "has continued to blaze
trails where others would not lead but many would later follow"
(Gottfredson, 1998, p. 291). One commentator had first become "so
thoroughly impressed by Jensen's empiricism, wisdom, and sense of
fairness" after reading Jensen's "brilliant, data-based, meticulous
critique" of the commentator's own work, one that had made him
"sweat" to see Jensen "so familiar with my work and…start his
attack with smoking guns" (Kaufman, 1998, p. 250).
Detterman (1998, p. 177) emphasized an "unusual" trait of Jensen's
"that [may be] impossible for Jensen's critics to understand," but
which has allowed him to prevail scientifically. It is not the "thick
skin" that many peers mentioned, but Jensen's "healthy agnosticism
about everything."
For years, his critics have
called him every name in the
book and have accused him of all kinds of biases and prejudices.
In fact, I have never known anybody with fewer prejudices. The biggest
prejudices scientists usually have are those in favor of their own
ideas….However, Jensen has no loyalty whatsoever to any theory or hypothesis even if they come from his own ideas. He would gladly
know the truth even if it proved him wrong. In fact, he would be excited to
know the truth.
Even into the late 1980s, Jensen assumed that only a small minority of experts
shared his conclusions about intelligence. A handful had agreed publicly with
the suddenly "notorious" Dr. Jensen, the inveterate Hans J. Eysenck
(e.g., Eysenck, 1971) being the most vocal among them. More expressed their
agreement only privately to him. Among the "closet Jensenists" in
psychology were luminaries who could have provided Jensen's conclusions strong
and credible public support but
instead asked him not to reveal their views. Beyond these small minorities,
Jensen generally heard only resounding silence or condemnation from fellow psychologists.
The results of a 1984 survey (Snyderman & Rothman, 1988) of experts on
intelligence and mental testing therefore surprised even Jensen. The experts'
modal response on every question that involved the "heretical"
conclusions from Jensen's 1969 article was the same as his (Jensen, 1998, p.
198). (The experts' mean response
overestimated test bias, however, because there is none against blacks or lower
social class individuals; Jensen, 1980; Neisser et al., 1996; Snyderman &
Rothman, 1988, p. 134; Wigdor & Garner, 1982). Here in abbreviated form are
the survey's major questions and the 600 experts' responses.
Q: What are the important
elements of intelligence?
A: "Near unanimity" (96-99%) for abstract thinking or reasoning,
problem solving
ability, and capacity to acquire knowledge (p. 56).
Q: Is intelligence best described
as a single general factor with subsidiaries or as separate faculties?
A: A general factor (58%, or 67% of those responding; p. 71).
Q: What heritability would you
estimate for IQ differences within the white population?
A: Average estimate of 57% (p. 95).
Q: What heritability would you
estimate for IQ differences within the black population?
A: Average estimate of 57% (p. 95).
Q: Are intelligence tests biased against blacks?
A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean
response of 2 (somewhat, p. 117).
Q: Are intelligence tests biased against lower social class individuals?
A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean
response of 2 (somewhat, p. 118).
Q: What is the source of average social class differences in IQ?
A: Both genetic and environmental (55%, or 65% of those responding; p. 126).
Q: What is the source of the average black-white difference in IQ?
A: Both genetic and environmental (45%, or 52% of those responding; p. 128).
The supposedly fringe scientist, Jensen, was actually in the mainstream because
the mainstream had silently come to him, where it remains today (Gottfredson,
1997a). Meanwhile, public opinion was still being pushed in the opposite
direction, creating an ever greater gulf between received opinion and
scientifically informed thought.
The Silent Majority
It is no mystery why so many experts in intelligence-related fields moved intellectually
in Jensen's direction. New research, often conducted by researchers eager to
prove him mistaken (e.g., Brody, 1992, p. ix.), kept supporting his
conclusions. But why was that migration silent, so seemingly secretive? And why
keep silent when the media promulgate clear falsehoods as scientific
truths—especially when, as Snyderman and Rothman (1988) demonstrated, the media
portray expert opinion on intelligence as the opposite of what it really is? Worst of all, why turn away,
or even throw a few stones oneself, when brethren scholars with whom one agrees are being
viciously attacked in the public square and even inside one's disciplinary
home?
Self-serving self-censorship. The ferocity of attacks on Jensen after
publication of his 1969 article signaled what could happen to anyone who
violated the new taboo against discussing the relation between intelligence and
genes or race. If any reminder were needed, it was soon provided when Harvard
psychologist Richard Herrnstein (1971) published an article in The Atlantic Monthly arguing that
social class inequalities are rooted partly in genetic differences in IQ (a
speculation since confirmed; Rowe, Vesterdal, & Rodgers, 1998). Herrnstein
did not mention race, but was immediately denounced as racist (Herrnstein,
1973).
In fact, one need not mention either
genes or race, but only take intelligence differences seriously, to be accused of racism.
Early in my career I reported
that bright boys who had attended
a school for dyslexics did not enter the usual high-level jobs (medicine, law,
science, and college teaching) but had nevertheless succeeded at a high level by
entering prestigious or
remunerative occupations that required above-average intelligence but
relatively little reading or
writing, specifically, top management
and sales positions. A colleague accused me in that seminar of
saying that "blacks can't make it because they are dumb." She taught
me that the taboo's boundaries are broad but uncertain and that enforcement begins on its far
outskirts.
It is understandable that many people would keep far away from those amorphous
but stinging boundaries. Moreover, the further one goes into forbidden
territory, the more numerous and more severe the sanctions become—first the
looks of disapproval and occasional accusations of racism, then greater
difficulty getting promotions, funding, or papers published, and eventually
being shunned, persecuted, or fired. For many, experiencing the first mild
sanction is enough to cause them to envision the worst and reverse course. As
one chaired professor told me, just seeing how Jensen was mistreated was enough
to convince her, like others, to cease studying cognitive differences and
switch fields in the early 1970s.
Because individual and group differences in phenotypic intelligence have
substantial effects on so many social phenomena (e.g., Gordon, 1997; Lubinski
& Humphreys, 1997), intelligence is relevant to many fields of
psychological inquiry, among them education, child development, parenting,
health behavior, vocational development, career counseling, and personnel
selection. Avoiding the phenomenon therefore requires actively walling it off
in a great variety of fields. Common forms of self-censorship include
intentionally omitting relevant facts or findings from one's publications,
ignoring them in others', failing to draw obvious connections between
phenomena, not disputing clear but convenient falsehoods, and not performing
analyses that might produce the politically wrong answer, a deliberate act of
omission to which one leading social scientist later confessed (James Coleman,
1990-1991). Researchers may also refuse to share relevant data with other
scholars who are willing to perform the politically sensitive analyses they are
not, such as estimating the contribution of genetic differences to the mean
black-white IQ difference (Rowe, 1997).
Cordoning off data, analyses, and conclusions according to the strictures of political
correctness creates a safe distance
between oneself and controversial research and researchers, but it simultaneously isolates those individuals
and renders their research less credible to the scientifically uninformed. As
they become a discipline's untouchables, "prudence" compels some of
the discipline's informed members to distance
themselves from the disapproved
person or idea by casting aspersions on them, lest potential critics think that they, too, harbor
the proscribed thoughts. The best informed, who are often called upon for expert comment, cannot endorse clear
falsehoods without jeopardizing their own standing within the discipline, but they sometimes dispute minor
issues in a manner that the uninformed mistake for wholesale repudiation (Gottfredson, 1994a; Page, 1972).
Scientific societies also engage in various forms of self-censorship,
presumably to avoid tainting themselves by giving credence to the disapproved
person or idea. Although Jensen received honors before his 1969 publication
(Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowship at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences), he has received none since then from American
psychology for his remarkable scientific contributions. His only awards in more
than thirty years were two that came on the eve of his 80th birthday
in 2003: the Award for Distinguished Contributions in Individual Differences
from the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, a small
international society of academic psychologists, and the $----- award from the
-----, a ----- interested in ----- (note: Jensen's winning the award has not
been announced yet so I cannot reveal the name, maybe till August).
American psychological societies have even withdrawn lifetime achievement
awards from intelligence researchers, as did the APA in 1997 from the
92-year-old internationally eminent Raymond B. Cattell when, on the eve of the
award ceremony, detractors accused him of scientific racism (Laurance, 1997).
In like manner, various scientific and professional societies have invited
Jensen to address their members only to rescind their invitations when some
critic objected. Donald Campbell, while APA president in 1975, urged members at
the annual convention's membership meeting to do "plenty of hissing and
booing" at Jensen's invited address on test bias (Jensen, 1983, p. 308). (APA's
Board of Directors later forced
In fact, psychologists and their organizations often led the charge against
Jensen. One of APA's larger divisions (Division 9, Society for the
Psychological Study of Social Issues, SPSSI) immediately orchestrated a media
campaign to discredit many of the main points in Jensen's 1969 article (Jensen,
1972, pp. 31-37). Psychologists at various regional meetings that year also
organized calls to censure Jensen and expel him from the APA (Jensen, 1972, p.
39). SPSSI's president at the time, Martin Deutsch, soon announced that he had
found 53 errors in Jensen's article, "all unidirectional and all
anti-black," and that there must be "some other motive, not
scientific," behind them. He finally provided the list two years later
after APA's Committee on Ethical Standards
intervened, but there were no errors among the 53 items (Jensen, 1983, p. 307).
Psychologist Jerry Hirsch (Hunt, 1999, pp. 73-74) captured the tenor of the
time when he repeatedly wrote and spoke about Jensen having
"avowed goals" that were "as heinously barbaric as were Hitler's
and the anti-abolitionists." With psychologists themselves loudly attempting to extrude the
"heinous" Dr. Jensen from
the discipline, it is no wonder that most others watched in silent fear.
This may also help explain why professional associations have, with a few
exceptions (Jensen, 1983, p. 307), seemed deaf to requests for assistance from
members targeted for harassment for their research, a big upsurge coming when
some universities began in the 1980s acceding to demands that particular
faculty's intelligence research be suppressed (by banning requisite funding,
blocking promotions and merit pay, requiring that lectures be given by
videotape, instigating investigations for hate crimes, threatening dismissal,
and the like; Gottfredson, 1996c; Hunt, 1999; Kors & Silverglate, 1998;
Lynn, 2001; Rushton, 1994). While individual officers sometimes provide generous
personal support (ex-APA president Robert Perloff being one, in my case),
timely institutional action to protect the targeted members' academic rights
has been rare because it requires, at minimum, getting a majority vote on one
or more committees to take action that critics are likely to block or protest.
Censorship for the public good. There are inter- and intra-disciplinary
squabbles throughout the sciences, and academe is no less immune to petty
politics and back-biting than any other realm of life. But the social processes
that suppress unpopular intelligence research are extreme. They involve
repeatedly violating the most fundamental norms of science, and often common
decency as well. The daily personal slights can be humorous in hindsight, as
when colleagues stumble over themselves to avoid being physically near the
shunned colleague, but having former friends
violate the norms of civility and science to destroy one's career is not.
Otherwise decent people who behave indecently toward fellow scholars usually
justify it as a moral necessity—they are fighting evil, and proudly so.
Book and journal editors sometimes explicitly cite moral necessity to
legitimate their holding "controversial" intelligence research to
more numerous and onerous standards before judging it worthy of publication or
dissemination. For example, in explaining why he was rejecting a paper I
submitted to The Public Interest in 1986, editor Nathan Glazer stated
that, although finding it scientifically sound, there were social "considerations"
which "overweigh the claims of social science." (The manuscript
described the employment inequalities that black-white differences in general
intelligence will typically create under race-blind hiring.) He would later
write in The New Republic (Glazer, 1994, p. 16), in response to
publication of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), that:
"Our society, our polity, our elites, according to Herrnstein and Murray,
live with an untruth: that there is no good reason for this [racial] inequality,
and therefore society is at fault and we must try harder. I ask myself whether
the untruth is not better for American society than the truth….For this kind of
truth,…what good will come of it?"
Perhaps more common than editors explicitly rejecting manuscripts on solely
non-scientific grounds is their (and their reviewers') enforcing much stiffer
scientific standards for politically incorrect intelligence research. When
acknowledging their double standards, they usually justify the practice as
ethically required to prevent the research in question from causing harm,
though what that harm might be is never clear. Jensen's files are full of such
reviews. Consider, for example, the reason that Charles Kiesler, then editor of
the American Psychologist (and APA's Chief Executive Officer for many
years), gave Jensen for rejecting a paper he had submitted to that journal.
After acknowledging that the manuscript had "taken an inappropriate length
of time to make it through the review process," Kiesler stated that "My
own feeling as Editor is that since this area is so controversial and important
to our society, I should not accept any manuscript that is less than absolutely
impeccable." One problem, he suggested, was that "In this paper there
is a hanging implication that any differences that are demonstrated to exist
are genetic" (January 17, 1980, letter from Kiesler to Jensen). (The paper
had tested "Spearman's Hypothesis," which is that mean black-white
differences in mental test scores are larger on more g-loaded tests, suggesting that the racial difference lies
principally in g, the
general intelligence factor.)
The claim to be protecting the nation and its citizens from harm is sometimes
merely a self-serving pretext, but it is no wonder that it might often be
sincere. The media and strident critics of intelligence research have for
decades demonized researchers like Jensen and have forecast the most despicable
crimes against humanity should their conclusions prevail. The implication of
ABC's November 22, 1994, national newscast was surely not lost on viewers when,
while exposing the supposedly unsavory history of intelligence research behind The Bell Curve, news anchor Peter
Jennings followed photographs of Jensen and other supposed race scientists with
footage of Nazi soldiers and what appeared to be death camp doctors and
prisoners. His broadcast illustrates how taboos exercise control by triggering
revulsion, not thought. To question the tale's accuracy or argue the merits of
academic freedom would be tantamount to indicting oneself for sheltering the
evil that others would have us crush by any means possible.
And many people have, indeed, treated Jensen as vile and dangerous. For a long
time Jensen received death threats, needed body guards while on his campus or
others, had his home and office phones routed through the police station,
received his mail only after a bomb squad examined it, was physically
threatened or assaulted dozens of times by protesters disrupting his talks in
the United States and abroad, regularly found messages like "Jensen Must
Perish" and "Kill Jensen" scrawled across his office door, and
much more (Jensen, 1972, 1983, 1998). Psychologists Richard Herrnstein and Hans
Eysenck also had such experiences during the 1970s for defying right thinking
about intelligence—Eysenck, for example, being physically assaulted by
protesters during a public lecture at the London School of Economics
(Herrnstein, 1973; Rushton, 1994).
Critics have associated a belief in the hereditary basis of intelligence with
evil intent so frequently and for so long that merely mentioning "IQ"
is enough to trigger in many minds the words "pseudoscience,"
"racism," and "genocide." Even current APA president Robert
Sternberg keeps the malicious association alive by regularly ridiculing and
belittling empirically-minded intelligence researchers (e.g., comparing Jensen,
in a book meant to honor him, to a child who would not grow up; Sternberg,
2003), referring to their work as "quasi-science" ("Science and pseudoscience,"
1999, p. 27) that has "recreated a kind of night of the living dead"
(Sternberg, 1997, p. 55), and sprinkling his descriptions of it with mentions
of racism, slavery, and even Soviet tyranny (e.g., Sternberg, 2003; see also
Sternberg, 2000, Sternberg & Wagner, 1993).
But why should we assume that a belief in the heritability of many human
differences is dangerous and a belief in man's infinite malleability is not?
Critics have yet to explain. Why is the former belief always yoked to Hitler,
but the latter never to Stalin, who outlawed both intelligence tests and
genetic thinking? Stalin killed at least as many as did Hitler in his effort to
reshape the Soviet citizenry (Courtois, 1999). Why does it accord humans less
dignity to acknowledge and accommodate their biological differences than to
deny them or try to stamp them
out? Most important, why should
we wager our collective future on assuming it safer to deny than to face the implacable empirical
realities affecting our lives? Moral panics preclude such reflection.
Three Fictions and Their Cascading Damage to Psychology and Society
Critics move the study of intelligence out of the scientific realm into a moral
one where they set the rules (Nyborg, 2003). Scientists who flout their moral
strictures are judged scientifically misguided or corrupt and thus stripped
simultaneously of both scientific and moral authority. Those who flaunt
allegiance to these rules are held up as good scientists, in both senses of the
term. Most social scientists now take for granted the new etiquette on what
they must say and seem to believe.
Fiction-Driven Science and Failed Social Policy
Fear thinned the ranks of empirically-minded intelligence researchers when
Jensen came under attack in 1969. Since then, graduate students and young
academics in all related fields have been systematically socialized by both
mentors and media to avoid "sensitive" issues in intelligence
research. The new tacit knowledge, or street smarts, for career advancement in
academe includes all the forms of self-censorship described earlier. The walls
that authors erect to seal off unwanted facts and inferences about
intelligence, genes, and race are so frequent in scholarly publications today
that one tends to notice them only by their absence. An author's "connecting
the dots" stands out, either as a breath-catching breach of etiquette or
as a breath of fresh air, depending on one's perspective.
The unwanted facts are also kept at bay—"discredited"—by fictions
about the nature and origins of human differences. Three fictions have been especially important;
all are resolutely held (or at least professed) by most social scientists and
policy makers; all require them to defy rather than work with empirical
realities. One is the "egalitarian dogma" (Rushton, 1994) or
"egalitarian fiction" (Gottfredson, 1994a). The other two are
"family effects theory" and "passive learning theory"
(Rowe, 1997; cf. Scarr, 1997, on socialization theory). All were once plausible
hypotheses, but that was long ago. I describe them briefly in order to
illustrate later the cascading harm they cause.
Fiction 1: Egalitarian dogma. The egalitarian fiction is that
demographic groups do not differ meaningfully, on the average, in important
abilities and aptitudes. That is, whatever their current levels of performance,
all groups are equipotential—and not just in the future, but now. Recall that critics argue it
would be demeaning and demoralizing to claim otherwise. Let's focus on the
American black-white IQ difference because it is the fiction's key target. Data
from large national samples show that the black-white IQ gap is essentially the
same at age 3 as later in life, and at the end of the 20th century
as at the beginning (about 1.1 SDs; Gottfredson, 2003b). The gap has been
impervious to social change, affirmative action, secular rises in IQ (the
so-called Flynn effect), and endless educational interventions (which was one
point of Jensen's 1969 article). The lower average black IQ has no definitive
explanation yet, genetic or environmental,
but it is clearly exceedingly stubborn. It is not a chimera of test bias
(Neisser et al., 1996).
Tightly held and ferociously protected, the presumption of equipotentiality
directs all explanation of social inequalities toward mistreatment or inequalities
in the the social environment. The fiction also guides much social policy. For
example, a foundational assumption of much employment discrimination law and
policy is that there would be no racial differences in hiring and promotion but
for illegal racial discrimination by employers (Sharf, 1988). Unequal outcomes
now trigger the presumption of guilt, which employers must then disprove. As we
shall see, this leads to much mischief in personnel psychology by fueling
impossible demands. One man's
benevolent lie becomes another
man's impossible burden.
Fiction 2: Family effects theory. This false theory holds that
differences in cognitive competence and educational performance can be traced
to differences in family advantage. Most efforts to equalize educational
achievement therefore attempt to provide all students resources comparable to
those of middle-class families, ranging from type of instruction, advanced
placement courses, and educational funding to meals, role models, and
aspirations. Like the egalitarian fiction, family effects theory locks our
attention onto external influences, apparently presuming that most people are
just passive, hapless lumps of clay to be molded by circumstance. It is key in
propping up the egalitarian fiction, because it "explains" the group
differences in test scores.
Differences in cognitive ability can, in fact, be traced partly to differences
in environments, but not to those in family effects theory. Behavior
geneticists distinguish between two types of environmental influence: shared
and non-shared (also called between-family and within-family
effects). Shared influences are those that make siblings more alike.
Possible such influences would include parental income, education, childrearing
style, and the like, because they would impinge on all siblings in a household.
Non-shared influences are those that affect individuals one person at a time
and therefore make siblings less alike. Little is yet known about them,
but they might include illness, accidents, non-genetic influences on fetal
development, and the concatenation of unique experiences. To the great surprise
even of behavior geneticists, shared environmental effects on
intelligence (within the broad range of typical environments) wash away by late
adolescence. IQ differences can be traced to both genes (40%) and shared
environments (25%) in early childhood, but genetic effects increase in
importance with age (to 80% in adulthood) while shared effects dissipate
(Plomin, DeFries, McClearn,
& McGuffin, 2001). For example, adoptive siblings end up no more alike in
IQ or personality by adolescence than
are random strangers, and instead become similar to the biological relatives they have
never met.
Scholastic achievement depends primarily on cognitive ability so it, too,
is moderately highly heritable, with its heritability overlapping that for IQ.
Like IQ, academic performance increases in heritability with age, but unlike IQ
it continues to be shaped somewhat by shared influences (Plomin et al., 2001,
pp. 199-201). Equalizing shared environments may be a legitimate goal in and of
itself, but given the importance of intelligence to learning, it can do little
to narrow differences in educational achievement or any of education's
down-stream correlates, such as occupation and income level.
In fact, race and class differences in educational
achievement remain large and not much different today than they
were decades ago, despite decades of reform. Still guided by its fictions,
however, right thinking continues to accuse schools of failing their disadvantaged students and to demand that
they eradicate the achievement gaps forthwith.
Under the new No Child Left Behind Act, schools will be punished if they do
not.
Currently one of the biggest puzzles for family effects theory is that academic
achievement gaps do not narrow even in settings where all the supposedly
important environmental resources are present (Banchero & Little, 2002).
For example, its adherents are now arguing among themselves (Lee, 2002) about
the proper cultural explanation for the large black-white achievement gaps that
persist in the most socioeconomically advantaged, integrated, liberal, suburban
school districts in the United States, such as Shaker Heights, Ohio (Ogbu,
2003) and Berkeley, California (Noguera, 2001). Moreover, black-white test
score gaps (IQ, SAT, etc.) tend to be larger
at higher socioeconomic levels. This finding contradicts the
predictions of family effects theory. It is consistent with g-based theory, however, because
the latter predicts that black and white children of high-IQ parents will
regress part way from their parents' mean toward different population means, IQ
100 for whites and IQ 85 for blacks.
Fiction 3: Passive learning theory. This false presumption is that
intellectual ability is the sum total of exposures to opportunities to learn:
that is, the greater one's exposure to relevant information and good
instruction, the more one will know and the smarter one will be. It is a
species of environmental determinism and required, in turn, to prop up the
other fictions. By this theory, equalizing students' opportunities to learn
will equalize their learning.
The passive learning theory is false because some people "pick up
ideas" or "catch on" much quicker than others (they extract more
from each opportunity), and "fast" or "slow" learners
usually remain so throughout their educational careers and adult lives. When
students are free to learn at their own pace, the brightest students often
learn at least five times faster than the slowest. To a large extent, that is
what higher intelligence means. The
theory is also false because people are not merely passive learners, but seek
out information and select different opportunities to learn when given a
choice.
The great spread of intelligence levels among high school students predicts—and
we actually observe—that many students perform at least 2-4 grade levels above
or below their grade in any given core subject, whatever the instructional
regime. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) vividly
illustrates the very different learning curves among students: for example, the
90th percentile of 9-year-olds (~IQ 120) performs in reading, math,
and science at the level of the 25th percentile of 17-year-olds (~IQ
90) (
It is educational malpractice to assume that all students benefit equally from the same instruction.
One-size-fits-all instruction impedes learning
among those for whom the cognitive fit is poor. The instructional style that
most helps slow students (highly structured, concrete, step-by-step instruction
that leaves no gaps for students to fill in) impedes the learning of bright students, who profit
most from more abstract,
incomplete instruction that allows them to restructure information in unique
ways (Snow, 1996). Targeting instruction better to students' individual cognitive needs would likely
improve achievement among them all, but it would not cause the slow to catch up
with the fast. The fast would improve more than the slow, further widening the learning gap between them and seeming to make the "rich
richer." This is currently politically unacceptable.
Devolution of fiction-driven science. Fiction-driven policies have
fallen far short of expectation in all arenas of life where intelligence
affects performance. They will continue to do so. Rather than question the
fictions, however, social scientists have been revising their theories and
reallocating blame among external forces for stifling talent in some demographic
groups. For example, at the time Jensen wrote his 1969 article, policy analysts
still presumed that equalizing educational access and resources would equalize
learning and life chances for the disadvantaged. That policy and subsequent
ones having failed, theories of inequality have therefore evolved from
emphasizing the presumed material causes of social inequality to its psychic
ones, and the proffered cures now include providing equal regard as well as
equal funding. Neither public policy nor public science may yet consider the
well-documented role of intelligence. Clinging to its fictions, ideologically
correct social science increasingly resembles the decaying Ptolemaic theory of
the heavens (Gottfredson, 2003d).
Psychology's Ptolemaists seize every new straw of hope for explaining group
differences in success without recourse to ability differences, no matter how
improbable it is in light of the totality of relevant evidence (e.g.,
stereotype threat; Gottfredson, 2002b). So, too, do they lunge for every new
environmental nostrum for those presumably non-existent ability differences, no
matter how elusive or contrary to established evidence the purported cure may
be (e.g., the still-mysterious cause of the secular increases in IQ, or
"Flynn effect").
At the same time they devoutly keep intelligence a "neglected aspect"
in their work (Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997). A Common Destiny (Jaynes & Williams, 1989) provides a
highly visible example. It was the work of a National Research Council (NRC)
panel charged with cataloguing the nature and sources of black-white
differences in success and well-being. As Humphreys (1991) describes, however,
it failed even to mention IQ or ability differences or refer to work that did.
Other high-profile task force reports have mentioned intelligence research only
to summarily dismiss it as noxious (College Board, 1999).
The fictions about intelligence essentially deny that it exists, which
virtually no one really believes. Many people just want a more
"democratic" view of it. Not surprisingly, psychology's supply has
risen to meet public demand, and the new egalitarian perspectives on human
intelligence were instantly blessed by opinion makers. Chief among them are the
"multiple intelligence" theories by psychologists Howard Gardner
(1983, 1998) and Robert Sternberg (1997). The eager acceptance of their
theories by educators, psychologists, and others has occurred despite neither
of them providing credible evidence that their proposed intelligences actually
exist, that is, as independent abilities of comparable generality and practical
importance to g. Gardner
has rejected even measuring his eight intelligences, let alone demonstrating
that they predict anything (Hunt, 2001; Lubinski & Benbow, 1995).
Study-by-study dissections of Sternberg's multiple-intelligence research
program reveal no such evidence (Brody, 2003a, b; Gottfredson, 2003a, c). If
anything, they confirm that all three of his proposed intelligences are just
different flavors of g itself,
as probably are most of
Their empirically vacuous (Kline, 1991; Messick, 1992) "modern
understandings" of intelligence are now widely cited, however, as
additional scientific proof that the empirically-minded scientists of
intelligence are hopelessly, stubbornly mistaken—especially if they pay scant
attention to the new theories. Like the media, both Gardner and Sternberg
frequently ridicule the 100-year-old tradition of intelligence research and
pepper their discussions with allusions to its supposedly unsavory adherents
and undemocratic values (e.g., Gardner, 1998, p. 23; Sternberg, 2003). The new
theories thus advance on their political appeal, not on any scientific merits.
The popularity of the multiple-intelligence theories among psychology's
consumers may enhance institutional psychology's political standing in the
short-term, but its pursuit of political acceptability cultivates wish over
wisdom; cheap moralizing over hard work. It handicaps honest, "intensive,
exhaustive, fair-minded, temperate, and courageous" science while
advantaging academic opportunism.
Politicized Science, Usurped Rights
In claiming to protect the public from dangerous questions and answers, journal
editors and reviewers imply that their fellow citizens are apt to misuse the
information (become oppressors) or be psychologically crippled by it (be
victimized). They imply that democracy is best served by keeping its citizenry
ignorant of matters that they deem themselves more fit to decide. Researchers
likewise usurp the rights belonging to others when they skew their own work to
fit political pressures or predilections. Such usurpation may involve acts of
omission, as with self-censorship, or acts of commission, as when empiricists
misuse science to actively promote a particular political view. Wolf (1972)
describes how common the latter was during the 1960s on matters of race.
Two fairly recent examples from selection psychology show how even the most
senior leaders in psychology have sometimes practiced politics in the guise of
science. Both reflect the pressure that the egalitarian fiction puts on
employment practice. As noted before, the presumption in employment law today
is that employment inequality results from illegal discrimination until
employers prove otherwise. This puts enormous pressure on employers to do
whatever it takes to achieve racial balance in selection despite the typically
large average racial differences among applicants in requisite skills and
abilities and, eventually, job performance too.
Race-norming test scores. The first example of politics in scientific
garb is a National Research Council's recommendation (Hartigan & Wigdor,
1989) that the U. S. Department of Labor (DOL) race-norm its employment tests.
Race-norming guarantees racial balance—quota hiring— because it involves
ranking all applicants separately by race and then selecting the same
percentage of top scorers within each race. The NRC panel had confirmed that
DOL's test battery was unbiased and valid for predicting job performance, but
provided a convoluted statistical argument that race-norming was nonetheless
justified on scientific grounds.
It is not, and psychologists on the panel later admitted that. Specifically, it
represents a particular definition of fairness (not bias), and thus is a
"values" call, not a technical matter (Sackett & Wilk, 1994, pp.
931-936). One might want for political
reasons to grant bonus points for race on tests that are
psychometrically sound, as was the DOL's aptitude test battery, but
race-norming cannot be justified
on technical grounds because it always introduces
racial bias (favoring the lower-scoring races) and reduces predictive
validity (Blits & Gottfredson,
1990a; Gottfredson, 1994b).
Psychometrician Lloyd Humphreys
(1989, p. 14), always a straight talker, wrote in a letter to Science that
the NRC's high-profile recommendation was a value judgment "camouflaged by
rhetoric [and] statistical
legerdemain."
In this case, the attempted usurpation of rights was foiled when it was exposed
as a covert move for quota hiring (Blits & Gottfredson, 1990a, b;
Gottfredson, 1990). In 1991, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to outlaw
race-norming in employment after it learned that the Labor Department had
already been race-norming its employment tests for a decade and that the U. S.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had started threatening private
employers if they did not adopt the "scientifically-justified"
practice.
The racial preferences that race-norming entails are hardly trivial. What the
NRC report did not say was that blacks scoring at the 15th
percentile in skill level on DOL's test would have been judged equal to whites
and Asians scoring at the 50th percentile, and blacks at the 50th
percentile would be rated comparably skilled as whites and Asians at the 84th
(Blits & Gottfredson, 1990a). Seldom being apprised of such facts, most
people greatly underestimate how discrepant the pools of qualified applicants
are from which racial balance is supposed to emerge. Another illustration,
pertinent to the next example, is that about 75% of whites vs. only 28% of
blacks exceed the minimum IQ level (~IQ 91)—a ratio of 3 to 1—usually required
for minimally satisfactory performance in the skilled trades, fire and police
work, and mid-level clerical jobs such as bank teller (Gottfredson, 1986, pp.
400-401). The potential pools become increasingly racially lopsided for more
cognitively demanding jobs. Workers in professional jobs such as engineer,
lawyer, and physician typically need an IQ
of at least 114 to perform satisfactorily. About 23% of whites but only 1% of
blacks exceed this minimum.
Racially gerrymandering test content. Employers can hardly ignore
differences in mental competence, because the general mental ability factor, g, is the best single predictor of
performance in jobs and school, especially in the higher ranks of both (Schmidt
& Hunter, 1998). When used in a race-blind manner, valid and unbiased
selection procedures therefore virtually guarantee substantial disparate impact
in most circumstances, with the imbalance becoming more extreme in the higher
levels of education and work (Gottfredson, 1986; Sackett, Schmitt, Ellingson,
& Kabin, 2001; Schmidt, 1988). Developing tests that measure cognitive
skills more effectively tends only to worsen the proscribed disparate impact.
Adding relevant non-cognitive predictors to the mix does little to reduce the
racial imbalance (Schmitt, Rogers, Chan, Sheppard, & Jennings, 1997).
The egalitarian fiction requires psychologists to defy this reality in order to
perform the impossible ("psychomagic"), or at least seem to. Many
selection professionals had preferred race-norming because it harms
productivity less than other methods of filling racial quotas. After the
practice was banned, a movement developed among selection psychologists to
"improve" selection procedures by, in effect, making them less reliable and less valid (Gottfredson, 1994b,
2002b). Proponents of the new techniques (e.g., test score banding) created the
aura of improvement with adventitious labeling: for example, modern,
innovative, sophisticated, nontraditional, broader, and more equitable; not
giving undue weight to small differences, assessing the whole person, and
having higher authenticity or "fidelity" (face validity).
The police selection test developed in 1994 for
A close look at the several-volume technical report for the
The new police test was made to appear more valid than the county's previous
ones by, among other things, omitting key results required by legal and
professional guidelines, transforming the data in ways that artificially
reduced the apparent validity of the cognitive subtests relative to the
non-cognitive ones, and making a series of statistical errors that more than
doubled the final battery's apparent predictive validity (from .14 to .35).
When exposed, the test created a scandal in Division 14 ("The Great Debate
of 1997" in Hakel, 1997, p. 116), partly because other leading selection
psychologists expected its use would produce less effective policing and
degrade public safety (Schmidt, 1996).
Caustic Science: Constructing and Curing the Incorrigibly Racist Society.
The would-be censors of "sensitive" intelligence research assert that the nation will be healthier
by remaining ignorant of
selected realities. They suggest that the truth, especially on racial
differences in cognitive ability (genetic or not), can only do harm and that their untruths only do good. But
again, why should we think so? Intelligence researchers are willing to agree
that disseminating information more widely may hold some risks, which is why
they discuss how to minimize them (Loehlin, 1992). In contrast, the censors
have yet to consider whether the collective fraud they nurture might also do
harm. We have just seen one example where it could threaten public safety. I
focus below on a more insidious, self-perpetuating damage to the body politic.
All populations exhibit a wide and enduring dispersion in general intelligence.
All develop social institutions that adjust to this dispersion in some manner.
The ways a society organizes and reorganizes itself to accommodate its
substrate of human talents are among the "third-order" effects of g that Gordon (1997) enumerates
and the "cascading effects" that Lubinski and Humphreys (1997)
describe. Fictions about intelligence likewise have societal-level effects when
they require us to deny and defy empirical realities that persistently intrude
themselves into a nation's life.
The dogma of equipotentiality dictates that explanations of racial inequalities
lie in mistreatment and disadvantage. No explanation may "blame the
victim" or challenge the fictions undergirding ideologically correct
thinking today. But failure begets blame and blame seeks a target. Because
overt discrimination is rare today, the persistent, pervasive, and seemingly
inexplicable failure of fiction-driven policies for achieving racial parity in
all life outcomes is taken to reflect the presence of an even worse culprit—one
that not only creates inequality everywhere, despite all countermeasures, but
also remains invisible. The evil on which right thinkers have settled is covert
racism. Psychologists and others now tell us that racial animus is unconscious
and has become "institutionalized" throughout American life. That we
cannot directly see the racism and may even deny it only shows how deeply woven
it is into the fabric of our minds and institutions. No self-defense, no
exoneration is possible, in the face of social inequality. Only group parity,
we are told, can tell us when the hidden evil has been exorcised. We have
already seen one of the earliest policies for rooting out invisible racism—
making racial imbalance in employment prima facie evidence of illegal
discrimination—but curative enthusiasms have moved far beyond that. Even the
most objective, most carefully vetted procedures for identifying talent are
instantly pronounced guilty of bias or "exclusion" when they yield
disparate impact in hiring, college admissions, placement in gifted education,
and the like. Indeed, the very notions of objectivity and merit are now under
attack by influential intellectual elites (Farber & Sherry, 1997). When
faithful and fair application of the law yields disparate impact in arrest or
incarceration rates, American jurisprudence must be considered inherently
racist (see arguments in Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995). When
earnest, socially liberal teachers fail to narrow the stubborn achievement gaps
between races and classes, they must be unconsciously discriminatory and
require diversity training. Because American institutions still routinely and
almost everywhere fail to yield the desired racial balance, the Americans who
created and supposedly control those institutions—majority Americans—must be
judged deeply, unconsciously, inveterately racist and to have created a society
where appearances to the contrary are just a smokescreen to hide their built-in
privileges. Under the equipotentiality fiction, there can be no other
legitimate explanation, and any attempt at one serves only to evade
responsibility.
The major culprit is actually the g-loadedness
of modern life. Intelligence is not just an academic ability, because virtually
all life's arenas require continual learning, reasoning, and problem solving of
some sort. The advantages of higher g
sometimes differ greatly from one arena to another, but they
increase whenever situations and tasks are unfamiliar, ambiguous,
unpredictable, changing, unscripted, unsupervised, untutored, multi-faceted, or
otherwise complex—that is, when they call for learning and judgment. Moreover,
the practical advantages of higher g,
both large and small, are pervasive and compound over time and life
spheres (see reviews in Gottfredson, 1997b, 2002a).
The current war against social and economic inequality is therefore
substantially a futile and fratricidal war against the manifestations of g itself. If such signs are
interpreted as evidence of the oppression of some by others, then we shall
never lack for fresh evidence. Moreover, the seeming oppression will be greater
wherever g has greater
functional value, such as in the higher levels of education and work. Groups
that succeed at higher levels will, by virtue of that success, be presumed
guilty of practicing, condoning, or benefiting from oppression. The guilty will
be all the more contemptible should they refuse to confess and atone for their
transgressions. In order to protect lower-scoring minorities and less able
individuals from being victimized by the truth, we now must convict all others
of grievous sins. The nation must cure itself by turning its institutions
inside out, its principles upside down.
Harming the Less Intelligent: Living Daily with Reality
Fewer but still many social scientists hold to a fourth false credo—that intelligence has little or no functional utility, at least outside schools.
Moreover, they often add that the advantages
and disadvantages of
high or low IQ are mostly "socially constructed" to serve the
interests of the privileged. This view was articulated in an influential
article published soon after
Jensen's 1969 article by
economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1972/1973). They argued that higher IQ does not have any functional utility, even within schools, and that IQ tests are simply a tool created by the upper classes to
maintain and justify their privileges.
They dismissed talk of "objectivity" and "merit"
as just smoke blown to obscure this fact. Psychologist Robert Sternberg implies much the same
when he suggests that the g factor
dimension of intellectual differences is an artifact of Western
schooling (Sternberg et al., 2000, p. 9) and that using cognitive tests such as
the SAT to sort people is akin to the way slavery and religious prejudice were
once used to keep disfavored groups down (Sternberg, 2003).
However, when critics argue that IQ differences have little or no functional meaning
beyond that which cultures or their elites arbitrarily attach to
them for selfish purposes, they simultaneously
turn attention away from
the very real problems that
lower intelligence creates for less able persons. As Herrnstein and
I focus below on everyday tasks
that higher-IQ individuals consider so simple that they do not realize how such
tasks might create obstacles to the well-being of others less cognitively
blessed.
Functional literacy and daily self-maintenance. Citizens of literate
societies take for granted that they are routinely called upon to read
instructions, fill out forms, determine best buys, decipher bus schedules, and
otherwise read and write to cope with the myriad details of everyday life. But
such tasks are difficult for many people. The problem is seldom that they
cannot read or write the words, but usually that they are unable to carry out
the mental operations the task calls for—to compare two items, grasp an
abstract concept, provide comprehensible and accurate information about
themselves, follow a set of instructions, and so on. This is what it means to
have poor "functional literacy."
Functional literacy has been a major public policy concern, as illustrated by
the U.S. Department of Education's various efforts to gauge its level in
different segments of the American population. Tests of functional literacy
essentially mimic individually-administered intelligence tests, except that all
their items come from everyday life, such as calculating a tip (see extended
discussion in Gottfredson, 1997b). As on intelligence tests, differences in
item difficulty rest on the items' cognitive complexity (their abstractness,
amount of distracting irrelevant information, and degree of inference
required), not on their readability per se or the level of education test
takers have completed. Literacy researchers have concluded, with some surprise,
that functional literacy represents a general capacity to learn, reason, and
solve problems—a veritable description of g.
The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS; Kirsch, Jungeblut,
Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) groups literacy scores into five levels.
Individuals scoring in Level 1 have an 80% chance of successfully performing
tasks similar in difficulty to locating an expiration date on a driver's
license and totaling a bank deposit slip. They are not routinely able to
perform Level 2 tasks, such as determining the price difference between two show
tickets or filling in background information on an application for a social
security card. Level 3 difficulty includes writing a brief letter explaining an
error in a credit card bill and using a flight schedule to plan travel. Level 4
tasks include restating an argument made in a lengthy news article and
calculating the money needed to raise a child based on information in a news
article. Only at Level 5 are individuals routinely able to perform mental tasks
as complex as summarizing two ways that lawyers challenge prospective jurors
(based on a passage discussing such practices) and, with a calculator,
determining the total cost of carpet to cover a room.
Although these tasks might seem to represent only the inconsequential minutiae
of everyday life, they sample the large universe of mostly untutored tasks that
modern life demands of adults. Consistently failing them is not just a daily
inconvenience, but a compounding problem. Likening functional literacy to
money—it always helps to have more—, literacy researchers point out that rates
of socioeconomic distress and pathology (unemployment, adult poverty, etc.)
rise steadily at successively lower levels of functional literacy (as is the
pattern for IQ too; Gottfredson, 2002a). Weaker learning, reasoning, and
problem solving ability translates into poorer life chances. The cumulative
disadvantage can be large, because individuals at literacy Levels 1 or 2
"are not likely to be able to perform the range of complex literacy tasks
that the National Education Goals Panel considers important for competing
successfully in a global economy and exercising fully the rights and
responsibilities of citizenship" (Baldwin et al., 1995, p. 16). Such
disadvantage is common, too, because 40% of the adult white population and 80%
of the adult black population cannot routinely perform above Level 2. Fully 14%
and 40%, respectively, cannot routinely perform even above Level 1 (Kirsch et
al., 1993, pp. 119-121). To claim that lower-ability citizens will only be
victimized by the public knowing that differences in intelligence are real,
stubborn, and important is to ignore the practical hurdles they face.
Health literacy, IQ, and health self-care. The challenges
in self-care for lower-IQ individuals are especially striking in health matters, where the consequences of poor
performance are tallied in
excess morbidity and mortality. Health psychologists have ignored the role of
competence in health behavior, focusing instead on volition. Patient
"non-compliance" is indeed a huge problem in medicine, but health
literacy researchers, unlike health psychologists, have concluded that it is
more a matter of patients not
understanding what is required
of them than being unwilling to
implement it (reviews in Gottfredson,
2002a, in press).
Health literacy is functional literacy in health-related tasks, such as
determining from a prescription label how many pills to take. Health scientists
have concluded that it, too, represents a general ability to learn, reason, and
solve problems (for extended discussion and citations see Gottfredson, 2002a,
in press). Accordingly, as in other domains of literacy, comprehension is not
improved by providing health information in oral rather than written form. Also
comparable is the fact that distressing proportions of the population are
unable to perform the simplest tasks that usually require little or no
instruction.
For example, 26% of outpatients in several large urban hospitals could not
determine from an appointment slip when the next visit was scheduled and 42%
could not understand instructions for taking medicine on an empty stomach.
Among those with "inadequate"
literacy, the failure rates on these two tasks were 40% and 65%,
respectively. Substantial percentages of this low-literacy group were unable to
report, when given prescription labels containing the necessary information,
how to take the medication four times a day (24%), how many times the
prescription could be refilled (42%),
or how many pills of the prescription should be taken (70%). Taking medications
improperly can be as harmful as not taking them at all, and the pharmacy
profession has estimated that about half of all prescriptions are taken
incorrectly.
As in other performance domains, training and motivation do not erase the
disadvantages of lower comprehension abilities. For instance, many patients who
are under treatment for insulin-dependent diabetes do not understand the most
elemental facts for maintaining daily control of their disease. In one study,
about half of those with "inadequate"
literacy did not know the signs of very low or very high blood sugar,
both of which require expeditious correction, and 60% did not know the
corrective actions to take. Like hypertension and many other chronic illnesses,
diabetes requires continual self-monitoring and frequent judgments by patients
to keep their physiological processes within safe limits during the day.
Persistently high blood sugar levels can lead to blindness, heart disease, limb
amputation, and much more. For persons in general, low functional literacy has
been linked to number and severity of illnesses, worse self-rated health, far
higher medical costs, and (prospectively) more frequent hospitalization. These
relations are not eliminated by controlling for education, socioeconomic resources,
access to health care, demographic characteristics, and other such variables.
Because health literacy is a rough surrogate for g, it produces results consistent with research on IQ and
health. To take several examples, intelligence at time of diagnosis correlates
.36 with diabetes knowledge measured one year later (
As in education, equal resources do not produce equal outcomes in health. Like
educational inequalities, health inequalities increase when health resources become equally available to
all, such as happened to the British government's dismay after it instituted
free national health care. Health improves overall, but least for less educated
and lower income persons. They seek more but not necessarily appropriate care
when cost is no barrier; adhere less often to treatment regimens; learn and
understand less about how to protect their health; seek less preventive care,
even when free; and less often practice the healthy behaviors so important for
preventing or slowing the progression of chronic diseases, the major killers
and disablers in developed nations. Good health depends as much today on
preventing as on ameliorating illness, injury, and disability. Preventing
chronic disease is arguably no less cognitive a process than preventing
accidents, the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, behind
cancer, heart disease, and stroke. As described elsewhere (Gottfredson, in
press), preventing both illness and accidents requires anticipating the
unexpected and "driving defensively," in a well-informed way, through
life.
Their cognitive demands are
comparable—remain vigilant for
hazards and recognize them when present; remove
or evade them in a timely manner; contain incidents to prevent damage or limit
it if begun; and modify behavior and environments to
prevent reoccurrence. Health workers can
diagnose and treat incubating problems, such as
high blood pressure or diabetes, but only when people seek preventive screening
and follow treatment regimens. Many do not. Perhaps a third of all prescriptions are taken in a manner that jeopardizes the patient's health. Non-adherence to prescribed treatment regimens doubles the
relative risk of death among heart
patients. For better or worse,
we are largely our own primary health care providers. (Gottfredson & Deary, in press)
Family effects theory and passive learning theory work no better in health
matters than in education. Just as equal access to health care tends to
increase class differences in health, greater access to health information
results in larger knowledge gaps between groups. Infusing more knowledge into
the public sphere about health risks (smoking) and new diagnostic options (Pap
smears) results in already-informed persons learning the most and more often
acting on the new information. This may explain why an SES-mortality gradient
favoring educated women developed for cervical cancer after Pap smears became
available. Lower-IQ individuals extract less benefit from the same resources than
do brighter individuals. Providing them equal resources does not change that. Hospitals are now making an
effort to render information
more cognitively accessible to patients, if only to avoid lawsuits from aggrieved patients who had not understood what they were consenting
to. Both curative and preventive care might be more
effective were health care providers to recognize and accommodate
better the great diversity in
cognitive competence among patients. There is much of practical value they
could learn from the vast [physical and logical]
network of knowledge about g.
Unfortunately, the health sciences and medicine are also in the grip
of right thinking about human diversity. After it became clear that health
inequalities could not be explained by inequalities in material resources and
access to health care, it became fashionable in health epidemiology to blame
class and race differences in health on the psychic damage done by social
inequality. We are now to believe that social inequality per se is
literally a killer (Wilkinson, 1996). Physicians, like teachers, are
increasingly being accused of racism and given sensitivity training when they
fail to produce racial parity in outcomes (Satel, 2000). Mindful of
ideologically correct thought, health literacy researchers who mention
intelligence do so only to reject out of hand the notion that literacy might
reflect intelligence, because any such notion would be racist and demeaning.
In the meantime, inadequate learning and reasoning abilities put many people at
risk of taking medications in health-damaging ways, not grasping the merits of
preventive precautions against chronic disease and accidents, and failing to
properly implement potentially more effective but complex new treatment
regimens for heart disease, hypertension, and other killers. To intentionally ignore
differences in mental competence is unconscionable. It is social science
malpractice against the very people whom the "untruth" is supposedly
meant to protect.
References
SEE ORIGINAL PDF FILE
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What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis Is True?
Linda S. Gottfredson
University of Delaware
Newark,
Submitted:
Abstract
Rushton and Jensen (in press) review ten bodies of evidence to support their
argument that the long-standing, worldwide Black-White average differences in
cognitive ability are more plausibly explained by their
"hereditarian" (50% genetic causation) theory than by
"culture-only" (0% genetic causation) theory. This commentary
evaluates the relevance of their evidence, the overall strength of their case,
the implications they draw for public policy, and the suggestion by some
scholars that the nation is best served by telling benevolent lies about race
and intelligence.
What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis Is True?
Rushton and Jensen (in press) review the last thirty years of evidence on an
important but spurned question: "Is the average Black-White difference in phenotypic
intelligence partly genetic in origin?" Much relevant
scientific evidence has accumulated since Jensen first asked the question in
1969, but openly addressing it still seems as politically unacceptable today as
it was then. Taking the question seriously raises the possibility that the
answer might be "yes," which for some people is unthinkable. It is
therefore no surprise that such research and researchers are often evaluated
first against moral criteria and only secondarily, if at all, against
scientific ones. My commentary will therefore examine the Rushton-Jensen paper
against both the scientific and moral criteria typically applied to such work.
The Hereditarian Hypothesis: What Is It?
The authors' "hereditarian hypothesis" is that Black-White
differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g)
are "substantially" genetic in origin, which they quantify as 50%
genetic and 50% environmental. They specify 50% genetic because they
hypothesize that "race differences are simply aggregated individual
differences" and because researchers commonly summarize within-group IQ
heritability as 50%. Rushton and Jensen do not attempt to prove conclusively a
genetic component, but to show that their hypothesis is more plausible than the
"culture-only hypothesis" long favored by social scientists, which
entails 0% genetic and 100% environmental causation.
Scientific Foundations of the Hereditarian Hypothesis: How Sound?
The hereditarian hypothesis becomes scientifically plausible only after five
evidentiary prerequisites have been met: IQ differences among same-race individuals
represent (a) real, (b) functionally important, and (c) substantially genetic
differences in general intelligence (the g factor), and mean IQ
differences between the races likewise reflect (d) real and (e)
functionally important differences on the same g factor. A century of
research strongly supports all five. It has provided a vast, interlocking network
of evidence that g is the backbone of all broad mental abilities in all
age, race, sex, and national groups studied to date; that higher levels of g
confer practical advantages in many realms of life; that within-group variability
in phenotypic g has strong genetic roots and many physiological
correlates in the brain; and that between-group differences in g are
large and pervasive enough to have broad social significance (e.g., see the
journal Intelligence: Brody, 1992; Deary, 2000; Gottfredson, 1997;
Lubinski, 2004).
This is hardly the picture of intelligence research that the media and many
social scientists paint (e.g., Fish, 2002). Both often suggest that the entire
arena of measurement of mental abilities, psychometrics, is fundamentally
flawed and morally suspect. As Snyderman and Rothman (1988) demonstrated almost
two decades ago, however, media portrayals of accepted wisdom on intelligence
tend to be the opposite of what experts have actually concluded (e.g.,
Carroll, 1997). Thus, despite public lore to the contrary, there is already a
deep and vast nomological network of evidence that can be called g theory.
The Authors' Ten Bodies of Evidence: How Pertinent? How Complete?
The most general difference between g theory and culture-only theory is
that the former sees both individual and group differences in g as
embedded substantially in biology, while the other theory looks only to
culture, at least when it involves race.
Contrasting predictions. First, although both theories predict
ubiquitous race differences in observed abilities, g theory predicts
that the gaps between any two particular races will be similar over time and
place regardless of cultural circumstances (unless frequency of interbreeding
changes markedly). Culture-only theory predicts that the gaps will expand or
contract depending on similarity in cultural environments, regardless of
genetic heritage. The uniformity of the IQ gaps between African Blacks,
American Blacks, Whites, and East Asians over time and place (Rushton and Jensen's
Section 3) and the parallel ordering of race differences on simple
reaction/inspection time tests in the United States and elsewhere (Section 4)
are both consistent with g theory. Contradicting culture-only theory,
the IQ gaps fail to shift in tandem with cultural variation. Both theories can
explain the Black-White IQ gaps seen in studies of transracial adoption (7) and
racial admixture (8). However, the above-average mean IQ of even severely
malnourished East Asian infants adopted into White-European homes is more
consistent with those infants having a genetic than a cultural advantage over
their White-European peers.
Second, unlike culture-only theory, g theory predicts that IQ
differences will correlate with variation in "hard-wired" aspects of
brain structure and function. Therefore, only g theory can account for
the nexus of correlations among the following outcomes: the g loadedness
of IQ and reaction time tests (their ability to measure g); the tests'
heritability and susceptibility to inbreeding depression; Black-White-East
Asian mean differences in performance on them; and the correlations of various
physiological traits (brain size, brain evoked potentials, brain pH levels, and
brain glucose metabolism) with IQ and reaction time (Sections 4 and 6).
Third, the two theories predict different degrees of change in
individuals' IQs when their socioeducational environments change substantially:
g theory predicts little or no lasting change but culture-only theory
predicts relative responsiveness. Jensen's 1969 conclusion about the failure of
socioeducational interventions to raise low IQs substantially and permanently
still stands (Section 12). Natural variation in environments likewise fails to
alter the common developmental processes by which abilities are assembled in
different races. This commonality in cognitive architecture is indicated, for
instance, by cross-race identity of g factors and input-output
achievement covariance matrices (Section 5). This commonality also contradicts
predictions that different cultures create different intelligences.
Additional evidence. The authors do not discuss one body of evidence
that many social scientists believe undermines the hereditarian hypothesis: a
narrowing of Black-White (B-W) gaps in standardized reading achievement on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which critics see as a
narrowing (if not the irrelevance) of the IQ gap (e.g., chapters in Jencks
& Phillips, 1998). Recent analyses (Gottfredson, 2003) show the critics to
be mistaken.
First, nationally representative data on racial-ethnic IQ differences during
the 20th century provide no evidence that the IQ gap has narrowed.
Standardized effect sizes were 1.0 + 0.2 for both children and adults and for
all ages and decades, averaging 1.02 across 20 samples.
Second, B-W achievement gaps in the 1971-1999 NAEP Trend Series were no larger
or smaller than g theory would predict. The maximum expected is 1.20 SD
(the size of the B-W g gap itself) and the minimum is .80 + .04 SD (1.20
multiplied by the IQ-achievement correlations in core subjects). NAEP gaps
narrowed from 1.07 SD in the 1970s to .89 in the 1990s when averaged over all
three subjects and ages. Degree of narrowing stalled by the mid 1980s and
differed by subject: .25% in reading (1.06-.79), 20% in math (1.07-.87), and
15% in science (1.22-1.04). As of 1999, all gaps for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old
students were still near or above the minimum expected (reading—80, .73, .73;
math—82, .93, 1.06; science— .97, 1.06, 1.07).
The Totality of Available Evidence: How Compelling?
Which theory explains the totality of evidence more consistently and
coherently?
Replication. The following major facts from Sections 3-6 and 10-12 have
been replicated many times, and all with independent sources of data. All are
consistent with hereditarian theory but contradict culture-only theory.
—worldwide Black-White-East Asian differences in IQ (Section 3), reaction time
(Section 4), and brain size, with Whites having the intermediate scores (Section
6);
—an inverse correlation between the foregoing race differences in brain
attributes and Black-White-East Asian differences in body maturation (Section
6);
—small (.2) and moderate (.4) correlations of IQ, respectively, with skull size
and in vivo brain volume (Section 6);
—a moderately high correlation (usually .6-.7) of different IQ subtests' g loadings,
not only with the magnitude of Black-White-East Asian mean differences on those
subtests (Section 6), but also with measures of those subtests' rootedness in
biological and genetic processes (e.g., heritability; Section 4);
—the rising heritability of IQ with age (within races) and the virtual
disappearance by adolescence of any shared environmental effects on IQ (e.g.,
parental income, education, childrearing practices; Section 5);
—worldwide Black-White-East Asian mean differences in a large suite of
biological variables (e.g., twinning, gestation time, sex ratio at birth) and
social variables (e.g., law abidingness, marital stability), with the three
races always in the same rank order (Section 10);
—a genetic divergence (quantitative, not qualitative) of world population
(i.e., racial) groups during evolution (Section 11);
—and evidence contradicting the culture-only theory's prediction that group
differences in cognitive ability should, in essence, track group differences in
identifiable cultural practices and socioeconomic advantage (Section 12).
The threads of supporting evidence in Sections 5 (race-common mental
architecture) and 9 (regression to the mean) tend to be less well replicated.
The most direct individual tests of genetic vs. environmental effects on mental
ability—transracial adoption (7), racial admixture (8), and behavior genetic
modeling of mean group differences (5)—have either been uncommon or fraught
with ambiguity. They clearly need to be replicated, as the authors suggest.
Being the most direct tests of the hereditarian hypothesis, however, they are
also the most politically sensitive to conduct and thus the least likely to be
replicated. The more anomalous findings either require replication (e.g.,
training helped narrow Black African-White gaps on the Raven Matrices in some
South African samples) or constitute a paradox for both theories (the
Flynn Effect).
Consilience. The g-based hereditarian theory connects g-related
phenomena at the genetic, physiological, psychometric, and socioeconomic levels
to form a coherent pattern that yields novel predictions subsequently
confirmed; it is consilient. In contrast, culture-only theory has become
increasingly tattered over time, patched over by disconnected ad hoc
speculation.
The g-based hereditarian theory. Beginning at the psychometric level, g
theory has successfully predicted not only when Black-White IQ differences
will remain the same in magnitude, but also when they will differ markedly.
First the predicted uniformity: Black-White differences are essentially the
same in the West (about 1 SD) across decade, age, and country, and they are not
substantially or permanently changed by interventions intended to do so (the
point of Jensen's 1969 article). This uniformity of gaps extends to three-way
comparisons among Blacks, Whites, and East Asians, with East Asians outscoring
whites. Additionally, there is growing evidence for a four-way contrast, with a
1-SD IQ difference—85 vs. 70—always favoring Western Blacks (who average around
20% White admixture) over Black Africans. Regarding differences in gaps for a
given race, g theory successfully predicts that gaps are successively
larger on more g-loaded tests and among children in higher social
classes (where there is more regression to the mean). The gaps thus contract
and expand according to shifts in— not culture—but the cognitive demands of the
tasks and individuals' genetic relatedness.
Next, this systematic patterning of Black-White-East Asian differences in
performance can be traced downward from complex IQ tests, to quite elementary
cognitive tasks, then to biological processes. So far, the three-way race
pattern for IQ/g differences has been replicated with
reaction/inspection time and brain size, both of which are highly heritable and
correlated with g, as well as with a large collection of purely physical
attributes (e.g., twinning). g is highly heritable within races and also
has replicated metabolic, electrical, and structural correlates in the brain,
most of them also known to be heritable (these studies are mostly with Whites).
Although Rushton and Jensen do not discuss the fact, the nexus of results for g
also extends outward into the social realm. For instance, the g factor
(indeed, the entire hierarchical structure of mental abilities; Gottfredson,
2003) is the same in all races at all ages yet studied. The most g-loaded
tests predict school and job performance best, and they predict performance
equally well for Blacks and Whites in both the
The culture-only theory. One might be able to interpret many of the
individual threads of evidence differently, but it is not clear how
culture-only theory could coherently reinterpret the entire interconnected web
of evidence. In fact, culture-only theory is notable for retreating from its
previous failed explanations into ever-less plausible ones. For example, an
early claim, plausible at the time, was that Blacks' mental abilities are
underestimated because mental tests are biased against them. Research
disconfirmed that claim decades ago. Although some culture-only theorists have
never relinquished that belief, others began to press more vigorously the claim
that any confirmed cognitive deficits among Blacks result from Blacks having
suffered more than Whites from deleterious, IQ-depressing cultural conditions.
However, no such factors have been identified in genetically-sensitive
research. Virtually all social science claims that parental rearing and
socioeconomic resources influence IQ rest on studies that confound genetic and
non-genetic influences (Scarr, 1997). In fact, behavior genetic research
suggests that relatively little, if any, of the Western Black-White difference
in mature IQ could be owing to the shared family factors that the
culture-only theory has long presumed important (e.g., poverty, parents'
education). In studies that include a broad range of family environments in
Western nations, variation in such shared family factors does not create
permanent within-race differences in IQ. This does not rule out the possibility
that extraordinarily deleterious shared family environments permanently depress
IQ, but relatively few children of any race in the West experience such
extremes. As the studies of malnourished East Asian adoptees illustrate,
extreme deprivation of the sort that humans have always had to contend with
(e.g., starvation, infectious disease) seldom permanently impairs cognitive
ability to any substantial degree once conditions are rectified.
The failure of socioeconomic resources and parenting behavior to have the
influence long claimed for them led culture-only theorists to begin stressing
more subtle and more race-specific psychological factors as the root cause of
group differences in cognitive performance. Examples include racism-depressed
motivation, racial stress, race-based performance anxiety ("stereotype
threat"), and low self-esteem. All are generally posited to result in some
manner from White racism and to disadvantage Blacks at all socioeconomic
levels. However, there is no evidence that any of the factors causes either
short- or long-term declines in actual cognitive ability. Not all of them
(e.g., self-esteem) are lower for Blacks, and none can begin to explain the
large array of relevant non-psychological facts, including why the races also
differ in brain size and speed (in milliseconds) of performing exceedingly
simple cognitive tasks, such as recognizing which of several buttons on a console
has been illuminated (a reaction time task). Because the American Black-White
IQ gap has not narrowed since it was first measured in the early 1900s, the
psychic injury must also be just as deleterious now as it was during that
earlier, more hostile era for Blacks. This seems implausible. Thus, while the
proposed psychic insults may temporarily mend some rips in the culture-only
theory, they would seem to hold even less promise than the failed socioeconomic
ones for explaining the longstanding, worldwide pattern of racial IQ
differences and their links to the biological correlates of g. The
newly-popular assertion that races "don't exist" is a straw man (no
one believes that racial groups are biologically distinct entities), which does
nothing to nullify the evidence it would have us ignore.
In summary, Rushton and Jensen have presented a compelling case that their
50-50 hereditarian hypothesis is more plausible than the culture-only
hypothesis. In fact, the evidence is so consistent and so quantitatively uniform
that the truth may lie closer to 70-80% genetic, which is the within-race
heritability for adults in the West. The case for culture-only theory is so
weak by comparison—so "degenerated" —that the burden of proof now
shifts to its proponents to identify and replicate even one substantial,
demonstrably non-genetic influence on the Black-White mean difference in
g. Any such demonstration must be with genetically sensitive research
because most "environments" are partly genetic in origin (different
genotypes create and evoke different environments for themselves and their
children; Scarr, 1997).
The Authors' Policy Recommendations: Are They Warranted?
The authors make no recommendations for specific policies, and correctly argue
that the hereditarian hypothesis implies none in particular. For example, proof
that the Black-White IQ gap is partly genetic could, depending on one's goals,
be used to justify banning all racial preferences in employment and college
admissions or, from a Rawlsian perspective (that genetic advantages are
undeserved and unfair), require substantial and permanent racial preferences.
As Rushton and Jensen suggest, g theory can predict fairly accurately
how large the racial disparities in achievement will be in different settings,
depending on their demands for g and the IQ distributions of the groups
involved. It can also provide the menu of tradeoffs between racial parity and
aggregate levels of performance under different scenarios for selecting
individuals into those settings, and also predict the likely pattern of effects
and side effects, by race, of different interventions in education and training
(e.g., Sackett, Schmitt, Ellingson, & Kabin, 2001). In short, g theory
can detail the challenge before us, and the likely costs and benefits of opting
for different goals or means of achieving them.
Currently, racial parity in outcomes is often treated as the ultimate standard
for fairness and lack of parity as a measure of White racism. For instance,
disparate impact in hiring is prima facie evidence of illegal
discrimination in the
The authors themselves acknowledge that open discussion of genotypic ability
differences between the races might harm race relations. Their most vocal
critics predict far worse. Widespread acceptance of the hereditarian hypothesis
would, they say, put us on the slippery slope to racial oppression or genocide.
They do not explain how this would happen, but usually imply that because the
Nazis were hereditarians, hereditarians must be Nazis at heart. But we can no
more presume this than that IQ-environmentalists are Communists because the
Communists were IQ-environmentalists. One might note, in addition, that regimes
with environmentalist ideologies (Stalin and Pol Pot) exterminated as many of
their citizens as did the Nazis, and virtually all the victim groups of
genocide in the 20th century had relatively high average
levels of achievement (e.g., German Jews, educated Cambodians, Russian Kulaks,
Armenians in Turkey, Ibos in Nigeria). The critics' predictions of mass moral
madness, like their frequent demonization of scientists who report unwelcome
racial differences, seem mostly an attempt to stifle reasoned discussion.
But might society be better off not knowing that races differ in g, whether
genetic or not? As Glazer (1994, p. 16) asks, "For this kind of
truth,…what good will come of it?" Summing up his argument against candor,
he states (p. 16): "Our society, our polity, our elites, according to
Herrnstein and Murray, live with an untruth: that there is no good reason for
this [racial] inequality, and therefore society is at fault and we must try
harder. I ask myself whether the untruth is not better for American society
than the truth."
But we must also ask "What harm might the untruth cause?" Should we
really presume that denying the existence of average racial differences in g
has only benefits and the truth only costs? Lying about the enduring
Black-White difference in phenotypic g would seem to be both futile and
harmful in the long run. It is futile because the truth—and attempts to
suppress it—will become increasingly obvious to the average person. Phenotypic
differences in cognitive ability have relentless real-world effects that are
neither ameliorated nor hidden by claims to the contrary. They also have more obvious
effects in more cognitively demanding settings, such as high-level jobs and
educational programs, and when entry standards differ by race.
Lying about race differences in achievement is harmful because it foments
mutual recrimination. Because the untruth insists that differences cannot be
natural, they must be artificial, man-made, manufactured. Someone must
be at fault. Someone must be refusing to do the right thing. It
therefore sustains unwarranted, divisive, and ever-escalating mutual
accusations of moral culpability, such as Whites are racist and Blacks are
lazy.
Does the Hereditarian Hypothesis Leave Us Without Hope?
Given what we know about g's nature and practical importance,
Black-White genetic differences in g render the goal of full parity in
either IQ or achievement unrealistic. This does not rule out the possibility of
reducing the disparities, especially in achievement, nor does it provide
any reason to "give up" on anyone or conclude that some people
"can't learn." In fact, rather than seeking racial parity in all
outcomes, we might do better by helping lower-IQ individuals of all races. The
weaker learning and problem solving abilities of people in the lower part of
the IQ distribution make their daily lives much more difficult and hazardous.
We might especially target individuals below IQ 80 for special support,
intellectual as well as material. This is the cognitive ability ("trainability")
level below which federal law prohibits induction into the American military
and below which no civilian jobs in the
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