Race and intelligence

The study of race and intelligence is the controversial study of how human intellectual capacities may vary among the different population groups commonly known as races. This study seeks to identify and explain the differences in manifestations of intelligence (e.g. IQ testing results), as well as the underlying causes of such variance.

Theories about the possibility of a relationship between race and intelligence have been the subject of speculation and debate since the 16th century. The contemporary debate focuses on the nature, causes, and importance, or lack of importance, of ethnic differences in intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability, and whether "race" is a meaningful biological construct with significance other than its correlation to membership of particular ethnic groups. Thus, the question of the relative roles of nature and nurture in causing individual and group differences in cognitive ability is seen as fundamental to understanding the debate.

The modern controversy surrounding intelligence and race focuses on the results of IQ studies conducted during the second half of the 20th century in the United States, Western Europe, and other industrialized nations.

Background information

Much of the research on intelligence currently cited is based on IQ testing in the United States. Modern theories and research on race and intelligence are often grounded in two controversial assumptions:

• that the social categories of race and ethnicity are concordant with genetic categories, such as biogeographic ancestry.
• that intelligence is quantitatively measurable (see psychometrics) by modern tests and is dominated by a unitary general cognitive ability.

While the g-based factor hierarchy is the most widely accepted current view of the structure of abilities, some theorists regard it as misleading. Moreover, a wide range of human abilities-including many that seem to have intellectual components are outside the domain of standard psychometric tests. Certain environmental factors, such as nutrition, are thought to moderate IQ in children, and other influences have been hypothesized, including education level, richness of the early home environment, the existence of caste-like minorities, socio-economic factors, culture, the effort gap, pidgin language barriers, quality of education, health, racism, lack of positive role-models, exposure to violence, the Flynn effect, sociobiological differences and stereotype threat. One focus of the scientific debate is whether group IQ differences also reflect a genetic component. Hereditarianism hypothesizes that a genetic contribution to intelligence could include genes linked to neuron structure or function, brain size or metabolism, or other physiological differences that could vary with biogeographic ancestry. There is also significant debate about exactly how environmental factors play their role in creating the gap and the interrelationships between these factors. Some researchers focus their attention on intervention techniques to close the gap.

Robert Sternberg writes that race intelligence research that focuses on a genetic cause for the gap is attempting to show that one group is inferior to another group. The conclusions of some researchers: that racial groups in the US vary in average IQ scores, and the hypothesis that a genetic component may be involved, have led to heated academic debates that have spilled over into the public sphere.

Observations about race and intelligence also have important applications for critics of the media portrayal of different races. Stereotypes in media such as books, music, film, and television can reinforce old racist ideas and may influence the perceived opportunities for success in academics for minority students.

History

Main article: Race and intelligence (history)

See also: Race (historical definitions)

In the 19th and 20th centuries research on race and intelligence has been used to argue that one race is superior to another, justifying poor outcomes and ill-treatment for the "inferior race". Some early opinions about the differences among races grew out of stereotypes about non-whites developed during the period of colonialism and slavery. Francisco Gil-White, author of Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on Black People Using Phony Science, and Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man, have both suggested that some modern research has similar motives.

The theory that there are differences in the brain sizes and brain structures that pertain to racial and ethnic groups was widely held and studied during the 19th century and early 20th century. Beginning in the 1930s, race difference research and hereditarianism — the belief that genetics are the primary cause of differences in intelligence among human groups — began to fall out of favor in psychology and anthropology after major internal debates. Anthropologists, such as Amanda Thompson, Franz Boas and Elazar Barkan suggested that "Scientific racism" had been used to perpetuate the idea of the intellectual inferiority of African Americans

Scientific racism

Main article: Scientific racism

Many studies that purport to be both science-based and attempt to influence public policy have been criticized for scientific racism; the most recent examples of are those of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein. Melvin Konner, in his book Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit Konner accused Murray and Hernstein of trying to make public policy based on speculations about race. He wrote that Rushton's application of a theory drawn from evolutionary biology to the difference between races had no academic legitimacy.

In the official statements of position endorsed by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, as reported in The New York Times, "A view widespread among many social scientists is that race is not a valid biological concept. However, biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a race structure in the human population; a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians."

Late 20th and early 21st century debate

The contemporary debate on race and intelligence can be traced to a controversial article by psychologist Arthur Jensen called "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Jensen concluded that it is"a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference" (p. 82) According to Jensen, heritability measures indicate that about 80 percent of the determinance of intelligence is due to genes and about 10 percent to environment. In direct response, Ashley Montagu, former chairman of the anthropology department at Princeton University wrote in his book, Race and IQ (p. 7) that "Professor Jensen makes much of his heritability measures, but the truth is that the so-called heritability coefficient is an especially undependable measure when applied to the human species, an application which has been criticized from its very inception by mathematical geneticists such as R.A. Fisher" and others.

In the 1980s William Shockley postulated, based on the research of Cyril Burt, that the higher rate of reproduction among African Americans in the United States was having what he termed a "dysgenic" effect (meaning an opposite of eugenics); especially as influenced by welfare subsidies (e.g., AFDC), which, he opined, unintentionally encouraged childbearing by what he called less productive mothers. Shockley proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. Press attention returned again to the issue of race and intelligence in 1994 with the publication of The Bell Curve, which included two chapters on the subject of racial difference in intelligence and related life outcomes. In response to The Bell Curve, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man in 1996. Among other things, he criticized the IQ test as a measure of intelligence, citing racial and social bias and systematic flaws in the testing process. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould dismissed "the I.Q. industry" as little more than an effort by men of European descent to maintain their prominence in the world. IQ and the Wealth of Nations is another controversial book by Dr. Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and Dr. Tatu Vanhanen, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland. The book claims that differences in national income, in the form of per capita gross domestic product, correlate with differences in average national IQ. The authors interpret this correlation as showing that IQ is one important factor contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has sought to fight racism. On several occasions he publicly debated Arthur Jensen and William Shockley arguing that environmental factors could explain the black-white IQ gap.

Race

Main article: Race (classification of human beings)

Race as biology

Some geneticists argue race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device, and even that genetic differences among groups are biologically meaningless, on the basis that more genetic variation exists within races than among them, and that racial traits overlap without discrete boundaries. Lewontin, for example argues that there is no biological basis for race on the basis of research indicating that more genetic variation exists within such races than between them. Template:AYref

Some critics of race may not consider this a problem for race and intelligence inquiries. Jared Diamond, who praises Cavalli-Sforza's genetics research over the decades for "demolishing scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races"(Template:AYref), also argues that if such relations exist then "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" due to that intelligence was likely selected for in hunter-gatherer New Guinea societies where the challenges were tribal warfare and food procurement, compared with high population density European civilizations where the major survival pressure was on genes for resisting epidemics Other geneticists, in contrast, argue that categories of self-identified race/ethnicity or biogeographic ancestry are both valid and useful, that these categories correspond with clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data, and that this correspondence implies that genetic factors might contribute to unexplained phenotypic variation between groups.

A survey taken in 1985, asked 1,200 scientists how many disagree with the following proposition: "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens." The responses were: biologists 16%, developmental psychologists 36%, physical anthropologists 41%, cultural anthropologists 53%. A survey of cultural and physical anthropologists done in 1999 found that the concept of race was rejected by 69% of physical anthropologists and 80% of cultural anthropologists.

Race as a social construct

Robert J. Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko, and Kenneth K. Kidd write that the overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis. Race, they write, fits into no known genetic pattern. Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. This concept of race serves a social rather than a biological purpose. Different types of parentage have, at various times and places, given rise to racial labeling (e.g., “Aryan race,” “German race,” and “Jewish race”). Hence race is a highly inconsistent concept. In contemporary North American society, Blacks and coloreds are considered to be one “race,” since any individual who possess any degree of nonwhiteness is automatically grouped in the Black category. (see: One drop rule) In other countries different racial groupings are often employed. In Beyond the Bell Curve: Toward a Model of Talent and Character Development Serge Madhere critiques hereditarian assumptions about ability, biology, and ecology. He argues that the measures of ability assessed on IQ tests are essentially measures of literacy, which is largely a socially constructed outcome. This proposition is validated using data from a large national sample of students and hierarchical regression techniques.

Intelligence

Main article: Intelligence

See also: Intelligence testing

Comparisons of the intelligences of people of different races have often been based on IQ tests. The nature of intelligence and whether or not it can be captured in a single number is a matter of debate.

IQ

Main article: intelligence quotient

All such tests are often called "intelligence tests," though the use of the term "intelligence" is itself controversial. A low but significant correlation was found in tests administered to two groups of kindergarten children in a study reported in 1991 School grades are the better predicator of later academic success than IQ and the relations may be lower for specific populations. In a sample of 127 students enrolled in a private day school located in a large metropolitan area, the correlations ranged from .11 to .22 with the median of .18.

"Many of the most widely used tests are not intended to measure intelligence itself but some closely related construct: scholastic aptitude, school achievement, specific abilities... . Scores on intelligence-related tests matter, and the stakes can be high," according to the task force appointed by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association. Such tests are argued to be good measures of the psychometric variable g (for general intelligence factor). While some psychologists regard g as the fundamental measure of intelligence, others emphasize the strengths and weaknesses present in each person's performance on different aspects of the tests.

Although the correlation is fair in some academic areas, the correlation between IQ tests and many real-world results is inconsistent. For example, the hereditary transmission of wealth via IQ is near zero. Some psychologists question the validity of IQ testing and say that aspects of intelligence is not reflected in IQ tests. Criticisms of the validity of IQ testing focuses on questions of test bias. Several conclusions about tests of cognitive ability are now largely accepted by intelligence researchers:

• IQ scores measure many, but not all of the qualities that people mean by intelligent or smart. (For example, IQ does not measure creativity, wisdom, or personality.)
• Especially in developing nations, there are many factors that may adversely affect IQ. See Health and intelligence.

Sternberg writes that conventional tests of intelligence can be useful, but only if they are carefully interpreted, taking into account factors such as cross-cultural issues.

Multiple intelligences

Main article: Theory of multiple intelligences

Psychologist Howard Gardner says there are multiple forms of intelligence, which he calls multiple intelligences not often captured by the usual IQ tests. Multiple Intelligences can include the following: linguistic; logical-mathematical; spatial; bodily-kinesthetic; musical; naturalistic; interpersonal and intrapersonal. This raises the possibility that it may not be possible to construct a single meaningful ordering on intelligence.

Another theory is the Triarchic theory of intelligence which was formulated by Robert J. Sternberg. According to this theory the three components of intelligence are analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence. According to Sternberg, only analytic intelligence is measured by standardized IQ tests.

Environment

Steve Sailer has stated that,

"a bad environment can hurt IQ and can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans’ white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research. (Thus African-Americans white genes probably couldn't account for more than 3 points of the gap between African-Americans and Africans.) This suggests that the harshness of life in Africa might be cutting ten points or more off African IQ scores."[5]

Research

Main article: Race and intelligence (Research)

Test data

Main article: Race and intelligence (test data)

The gaps found between the average intelligences of races or ethnicities varies depending on methods used for racial grouping, the method and setting used to test intelligence, the health and economic situation of the test takers, the interplay between the culture of the person taking the test and the culture of those who made the test, and the period in history when the test was performed.

Depending on the way intelligence is measured a variety of gaps may be found between different racial and ethnic groups. Some groups that perform well on one task may do poorly on others. For example, Moroccan and North American individuals were asked in a study by Richard K. Wagner to remember patterns of Oriental rugs and pictures of everyday objects, such as a rooster and a fish. Moroccans, who have long experience in the rug trade, seemed to remember rug patterns better than the North American individuals. Likewise, in 1979 Robert Serpell had Zambian and English children perform a number of tasks. He found that English children did better on a drawing task, but that Zambian children did better on a wire-shaping task.

Attempted world-wide compilations by Herrnstein and Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, Richard Lynn and Rushton of average IQ by race generally place Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians at the top, followed by Whites, Arabs and Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans and Australian Aboriginals.

The IQ scores vary greatly among different nations for the same group. Blacks in Africa score much lower than Blacks in the US. However contrary to indications from the IQ and the Wealth of Nations study, the majority of blacks enrolled in Ivy League Universities in the US are either from Africa or the Caribbean. The chairperson of the sociology department at Harvard University stated: "Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race." This is seen as evidence that racial prejudice combined with the status of being a minority that has been excluded from society does have a significant effect on academic achievement. However, according to the African-American economist Thomas Sowell racism and the legacy of slavery do not stand up under scrutiny of historical facts as explanations to the IQ disparity between Blacks and Whites. He argues that "redneck" black culture is the reason for the low IQ and poor academic performance of black Americans. Gaps are seen in other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, including university admission exams such as the SAT and GRE as well as employment tests for corporate settings and the military (Roth et al. 2001).

Another researcher Philippe Rushton found African university students averaged an IQ of 84. In some studies, by other researchers, they have scored lower (IQ = 77). In still others of our studies, highly-selected engineering students who took math and science courses in high school scored higher (IQ = 103). Rushton also points out that immigrants regardless of race outperform native populations and adds that in theory Africans would revert back to their normal IQ in future generations if kept in the harsh African environment and cultural setting.

Facial recognition ability has also shown differences by race. Richard Ferraro writes that facial recognition is an example of a neuropsychological measure that can be used to assess cognitive abilities that are salient within African-American culture. In the US Blacks' performance is significantly better than that of whites', and blacks are better at recognizing faces of whites than whites are at recognizing blacks. A 1991 study found that white subjects performed significantly more poorly on trials involving African American faces than on trials involving White faces, whereas no such difference was obtained among African American subjects. One possibility is that expertise in perceiving faces of particular races is associated with increased ability to extract information about the spatial relationships between different features. Further research using perceptual tasks could shed light on the specific cognitive processes involved in the other-race effect.

Explanations

Main article: Race and intelligence (Explanations)

Min-Hsiung Huang and Robert M. Hauser found that, controlling for social background, the Black-White test score gap narrowed significantly over the period from 1974 to 1998. For Whites, however, improvement in social background across time does not raise test scores correspondingly.

File:TBC-BW-IQ-SES-withDiff.png

This chart based on data analysis by Herrnstein and Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, was used to present the idea that the test score gap between blacks and whites had not changed when adjusted for economic status. (1994) p. 288

The height of this "ordinary genetically varied corn" is 100% heritable, but the difference between the groups is totally environmental.

The consensus among intelligence researchers is that IQ differences between individuals of the same race reflects functionally and socially significant differences in the intelligence. There is still substantial debate about the influence of various environmental factors on IQ test score differences between races and ethnic groups in a given country, and whether or not genetics may also play a role.

Test bias

While the existence of average IQ test score differences has been a matter of accepted fact for decades, a great deal of controversy exists among scholars over the question of whether these score differences reflected real differences in cognitive ability. Some claim that there is no evidence for test bias since IQ tests are equally good predictors of IQ-related factors (such as school performance) for U.S. Blacks and Whites. The performance differences persist in tests and testing situations in which care has been taken to eliminate bias. It has also been suggested that IQ tests are formulated in such a way as to disadvantage minorities. Controlled studies have shown that test construction does not substantially contribute to the IQ gap. Still, a 2007 study at Case Western Reserve University found that cultural differences in the provision of information account for racial differences in IQ. The study also found that test problems, similar to some problems found on conventional IQ tests, were only solvable on the basis of specific previous knowledge. Such specific knowledge based questions showed evidence of test bias since the performance on non-specific knowledge based questions did not always correlate with the performance on the knowledge based question. Arguing that IQ tests are often wrongly described as measuring "innate" rather than developed ability, Template:AYref write that this "labeling bias" causes people to inappropriately attribute the Black-White gap to "innate" differences. They argue that non-cultural environmental factors cause gaps measured by the tests, rather than innate difference based on genetics, and that to use these tests as a measure of innate difference is misleading and improper.

Increases in IQ scores over time

William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn write that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. This graph shows the gains for various tests.

The secular, international increase in test scores, commonly called the Flynn effect, is seen by Flynn and others as reason to expect the eventual convergence of average black and white IQ scores. Flynn argues that the average IQ scores in several countries have increased about 3 points per decade during the 20th century, which he and others attribute predominantly to environmental causes. This means, given the same test, the mean black American performance today could be higher than the mean white American performance in 1920, though the gains causing this appear to have occurred predominantly in the lower half of the IQ distribution. If changes in environment can cause changes in IQ over time, they argue, then contemporary differences between groups could also be due to an unknown environmental factor. On the supposition that the effect started earlier for whites, because their social and economical conditions began to improve earlier than did those of blacks, they anticipate that the IQ gap among races might change in the future or is even now changing. An added complication to this hypothesis is the question of whether the secular IQ gains can be predominantly a real change in cognitive ability. Flynn's face-value answer to this question is "No", and other researchers have found reason to concur. Template:AYref wrote that "the gains cannot be explained solely by increases at the level of the latent variables (common factors), which IQ tests purport to measure".

Racism and discrimination

Researchers such as Jack Demaine find racial categorizations problematic in educational settings. Racial categorizations, Jack Demaine writes, may have adverse impacts on the education of minorities. Similarly, Alastair Bonnett, Bruce Carrington state:

The collection of ethnic and racial statistics has become common in a growing number of institutional settings. Yet contemporary approaches to race and ethnicity suggest that the very process of compelling people to assign themselves to one of a small number of racial or ethnic 'boxes' is, at best, essentialist and, at worst, racist.

Stereotype threat

Main article: Stereotype threat

An experiment on college students in 1995 showed the impact of Stereotype threat by asking students to fill out a form before taking the test indicating their race. The scores in this graph have been adjusted by SAT.

Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear may in turn lead to an impairment of performance (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2005). Stereotype threat has been documented by the social psychologists Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson, Irwin Katz, and Steven Spencer, who have conducted several studies on this topic.

"When capable black college students fail to perform as well as their white counterparts, the explanation often has less to do with preparation or ability than with the threat of stereotypes about their capacity to succeed."
- Claude M. Steele, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1999
Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students

Steele and Aronson write that making race salient when taking a test of cognitive ability negatively affected high-ability African American students. Steele writes that the stigma of being African American is still relevant, as it has an effect on the educational outcomes of African Americans. Stereotypes such as: Asian-Americans excelling in mathematics or African-Americans always testing poorly can be extremely harmful. Stereotype threats can seriously alter academic achievement and motivation.

In a paper prepared for an APA convention, Steele writes: "Thus the predicament of 'stereotype vulnerability': The group members then know that anything about them or anything they do that fits the stereotype can be taken as confirming it as self-characteristic, in the eyes of others, and perhaps even in their own eyes. This vulnerability amounts to a jeopardy of double devaluation: once for whatever bad thing the stereotype-fitting behavior or feature would say about anyone, and again for its confirmation of the bad things alleged in the stereotype."

Steele and Aronson are not first to test stereotype threat. During the 1960s Irwin Katz, psychologist, suggested that stereotype threat could also influence performance on IQ tests. Katz found that Blacks were able to score better an IQ subtest if the test was presented as a test of eye-hand coordination. Blacks also scored higher on an IQ test when they believe the test will be compared to that of other blacks. Katz concluded that his subjects were thoroughly aware of the judgment of intellectual inferiority held by many white Americans. With little expectation of overruling this judgment, their motivation was low, and so were their scores. Paul Sackett, a psychologist agrees that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon and that it is is a potentially important contributor to the racial achievement gap. He cautions however, that these findings may be widely misinterpreted to mean that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates the entire Black-White performance gap, and encourages researchers to continue their study of this and other phenomena.

Physiological responses to racism

See also: Race and health

Stereotype threat can result in physiological responses that can be measured objectively. For example, a study by Blascovich J, Spencer SJ, Quinn D and Steele C. reported that African Americans under stereotype threat exhibited larger increases in arterial blood pressure during an academic test, and performed more poorly on difficult test items. Some researchers feel this may explain the higher death rates from hypertension related disorders among African Americans. A study by Toni Schmader and Michael Johns reported that stereotype threat can effectively reduce working memory capacity, another factor in poor test performance. Stereotype threat may undermine intellectual performance by triggering a disruptive mental load. Jean-Claude Croizet, Gérard Després, Marie-Eve Gauzins, Pascal Huguet, Jacques-Philippe Leyens and Alain Méot reported increased heart rates for test subjects operating under stereotype threat.

Quality of education

Some researches have written that studies that find test performance gaps between races even after adjusting for education level, such as the analysis found in The Bell Curve, fail to adjust for the quality of education. Not all high school graduates or college graduates have received the same quality of education. A 2006 study reported that that years of education is an inadequate measure of the educational experience among multicultural elders, and that adjusting for quality of education greatly reduced the overall effect of racial differences on the tests. A 2004 study reported that quality of education and cultural experience influence how older African Americans approach neuropsychological tasks and concluded that adjustment for these variables may improve specificity of neuropsychological measures. Yet another study reported that, although significant differences were observed between the ethnic groups when matched for years of education, equating for literacy level eliminated all performance differences between African Americans and Whites on both cancellation tasks which assess visual scanning.(Like reaction time tests cancellation task tests are sometimes regarded as "culture free" tests of intelligence.) Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin wrote in their 2006 book that unequal distributions of inexperienced teachers and of racial concentrations in schools can explain all of the increased achievement gap between grades 3 and 8.

A 2004 study in South Africa found highly significant effects for both level and quality of education within the black African first language groups taking the Wechsler IQ tests. Scores black African first language groups with advantaged education were comparable with the US standardization, whereas scores for black African first language participants with disadvantaged education were significantly lower than this. The study cautioned that faulty conclusions may be drawn about the effects of ethnicity and the potential for neuropsychological misdiagnosis.

Racial discrimination in education

Roslyn Arlin Mickelson writes that racial discrimination in education arises from actions of institutions or individual state actors, their attitudes and ideologies, or processes that systematically treat students from different racial/ethnic groups disparately or inequitably. Despite advancement in education reform efforts, to this day African American students continue to experience inequities within the educational system. Hala Elhoweris , Kagendo Mutua, Negmeldin Alsheikh and Pauline Holloway conducted a study of the effect of students' ethnicity on teachers' educational decision making. The results of this study indicated that the student's ethnicity did make a difference in the teachers' referral decisions for gifted and talented educational programs.Recently, a number of scholars have examined the issue of disproportionate representation of minority students in special education programs

Teachers' perceptions of a students cultural background may effect school achievement. African American students with African American cultural backgrounds, for example, have been found to benefit from culturally responsive teaching. In a 2003 study researchers found that teachers perceived students with African American culture-related movement styles as lower in achievement, higher in aggression, and more likely to need special education services than students with standard movement styles irrespective of race or other academic indicators.

Ellis Cose writes that low expectations may have a negative impact on the achievement of minorities. He writes that black people did not need to read The Bell Curve to be aware of the low expectations held for them by the majority culture. He recalls examples of low expectations from his teachers in school who regarded his use of AAVE as "laziness" and teachers who did not feel it was important to purchase new text books because they did not expect the students to be able to read anything complex. He contrasts these low expectations with the high expectations philosophy of Xavier University where, using the ideas Whimbey articulated in his book Intelligence can be Taught teachers created a program called SOAR. SOAR raised the performance of black students and lead Xavier to become the university that sends the greatest number of black students to medical school in the United States. The SOAR program produced gains equivalent to 120 points on an SAT test. Cose writes that "..we must treat people, whatever their color, as if they have unlimited intellectual capacity."

Caste

This table illustrates how social status or caste position is related to test scores and school success in nations around the world. Source: Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Vos

Group Differences Around the World

	Status or Caste Position		Test Scores, School Success
Country	High	Low	High	Low
United States	Whites	Blacks	Whites	Blacks
	Whites	Latinos	Whites	Latinos
	Whites	American Indians	Whites	American Indians
Great Britain	Great Britain	Irish, Scottish	English	Irish, Scottish
Northern Ireland	Protestants	Catholics	Protestants	Catholics
Australia	Whites	Aborigines	Whites	Aborigines
New Zealand	Whites	Maoris	Whites	Maoris
South Africa	English	Afrikaaners	English	Afrikaaners
Belgium	French	Flemish	French	Flemish
Israel	Jews	Arabs	Jews	Arabs
	Western Jews	Eastern Jews	Western Jews	Eastern Jews
India	Nontribals	Tribal people	Nontribals	Tribal people
	Brahmin	Harijan	Brahmin	Harijan
	High caste	Low caste	High caste	Low caste
Czechoslovakia	Slovaks	Gypsies	Slovaks	Gypsies
Japan	Non-Burakumin	Burakumin	Non-Burakumin	Burakumin
	Japanese Origin	Korean Origin	Japanese Origin	Korean Origin
South Korea	Koreans	Southeast Asians	Koreans	Southeast Asians

These results, just like the inferior test scores of Eastern and Southern Europeans immigrants in the United States 75 years ago, may represent a social division that leads to the gaps in test scores, rather than a pre-established and "natural" hierarchy of "races." In other words, these divisions, are closely aligned with local "social constructs" of race, the outcomes for ethnic groups are, in the opinion of these authors, a result of the social structure rather than confirmation of its validity.

Health

Main article: Health and intelligence

Main article: Race and health

Regarding the IQ gaps in the U.S., numerous explanations beside genetics have been proposed. Joel Wiesen lists more than a hundred. Increased rates of low birth weight babies and lower rates of breastfeeding in Blacks as compared to Whites are some factors of many that have been proposed to affect the IQ gap. The Flynn effect is often cited as evidence that average IQ scores have changed greatly and rapidly, for reasons poorly understood, noting that average IQ in the US may have been below 75 before the start of this effect, and thus some argue that the IQ gap between races could change in the future or is changing, especially if the effect started earlier for Whites.

Genetics

See also The genome and intelligence

A few of the notable proponents of the partly genetic hypothesis are Raymond B. Cattell, Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck.

Rushton and Jensen examined 10 categories of research evidence from around the world to contrast "a hereditarian model" (50% genetic-50% cultural) and a culture-only model (0% genetic-100% cultural). In the article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" published in the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law they cite the following evidence to support the hereditarian model:

Some scholars have proposed that in order to make a racial hypothesis about intelligence the genes for intelligence need to be identified along with their frequencies in the various populations. However recent studies attempting to find regions in the genome relating to intelligence have had little success. A recent study used several hundred people in two groups, one with a very high IQ, average 160, and a control group with an average IQ of 102. By the fifth step the study could not find a single gene that was related to intelligence. Critics of these studies say the failure to find a specific gene associated with intelligence is indicative of the complex nature of intelligence. They contend that intelligence is probably under the influence of several genes. Some estimate that as much as 40% of the genome may contribute to intelligence.

Recently scientists at the University of Chicago identified two genes, microcephalin and ASPM. Mutations in these genes are associated with brain size abnormality, microcephaly. The normal variants are found at high frequencies in Asian and European populations but they are not found among Sub-Saharan Africans. The scientists stated that microcephalin may have arisen some 37,000 years ago coinciding with upper paleolithic transitions in Europe. They also stated that a variant of APSM arose about 5,800 years ago roughly correlating with the development of written language, spread of agriculture and development of cities. They thus believe these two genes conferred some cognitive abilities upon Asians and Europeans.

Other scholars have criticized the University of Chicago scientists because they made claims about these genes without undertaking any direct experimentation to test their hypothesis on increased intelligence and brain size. Subsequently when these experiments were done, no relationship was found between these genes and intelligence or brain size. Critics of these studies also say that as long as social and environmental disparities between the races exist it will be impossible to scientifically test whether there are any genetic differences in IQ between the various populations. They propose that if the historical effects of poverty and social bigotry were eliminated and differences in IQ between the races still persisted then there might be some utility in such research.

Theories on the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews

See also: Ashkenazi intelligence

A link between disease mutations specific to the Ashkenazi Jews and high IQ scores has been suggested by scientists at the University of Utah, who cite evidence that sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells and that mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in some Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons. The researchers predict that these disease mutations will enhance IQ in heterozygotes. This prediction is based on evidence that selection pressure has increased the frequency of the disease mutations in the reproductively isolated Ashkenazi population in medieval times. The hypothesis has not yet been empirically tested.

Ashkenazi Jews have been reported to score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115.

According to Richard Lynn the most accurate reading of the IQ of Jews in Britain is 110. Lynn proposes that the overrepresentation of Jews as Nobel Prize Winners and as Fellows of the Royal Society can be partly explained by the higher average Jewish IQ because comparatively small differences in average intelligence can become very large differences in the very high I.Q ranges. Notable Jewish intellectuals include Einstein, Freud and Marx. Jews are over-represented among Nobel prize-winners by a factor of 8.0 in Britain and 12.3 in the United States.

Interpretations

Main article: Race and intelligence (interpretations)

Given the observed differences in IQ scores between certain groups, a great deal of debate revolves around the significance of these observations. Various interpretations of test data lead to a multitude of conflicting conclusions as to which specific explanations the data support.

Some people have attributed differential economic growth between nations to differences in the intelligence of their populations. One example is Richard Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. The book is sharply criticized in the peer-reviewed paper The Impact of National IQ on Income and Growth. Another peer-reviewed paper, Intelligence, Human Capital, and Economic Growth: An Extreme-Bounds Analysis, finds a strong connection between intelligence and economic growth. It has been argued that East Asian nations underachieve compared to IQ scores.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel instead argues that historical differences in economic and technological development for different areas can be explained by differences in geography (which affects factors like population density and spread of new technology) and differences in available crops and domesticatable animals. However,psychologist John Philippe Rushton suggests these environmental differences may operate in part by selecting for higher levels of IQ There is no evidence to suggest that such selective forces occur in regards to IQ. Consensus at the American Psychological Association is that a partly genetic hypothesis is as of now, inadequate in explaining differences in IQ among population groups.

Prejudice and IQ

A university study in the US was carried out in order to determine whether a relationship existed between prejudice and IQ. Students were given an IQ test and a test that measures racial prejudice. The study found that students who scored lower on IQ tests were more prejudiced.

Media portrayal

Media portrayal of race and intelligence in various mediums, such as films, books, and newspapers, characterize people of various races to be more or less intelligent. Critics of contemporary media have highlighted portrayals of minorities as less intelligent (or in the case of Asians, on occasion more intelligent) in films and movies.

Patricia J. Williams, writer for The Nation, said this of Jar Jar Binks, a character from the 2002 Star Wars film: "...intentionally or not, Jar Jar's pratfalls and high jinks borrow heavily from the genre of minstrelsy. Despite the amphibian get-up, his relentless, panicky, manchild-like idiocy is imported directly from the days of Amos 'N' Andy." Many aspects of Jar Jar's character are believed to be highly reminiscent of the archetypes portrayed in blackface minstrelsy.

According to Robert M. Entman an Andrew Rojecki, authors of the The Black Image in the White Mind, in television and film Black characters are less likely to be the "the intellectual drivers of its problem solving." Entman and Rojeki assert that media images of Blacks may have profound effects on the perceptions by both Blacks and Whites about black intellectual potential.

Contemporary sports commentators have questioned whether blacks are intelligent enough to hold "strategic" positions or coach games such as football. In another example, a study of the portrayal of race, ethnicity and nationality in televised sporting events by journalist Derrick Jackson in 1989 showed that blacks were more likely than Whites to be described in demeaning intellectual terms. Political activist and one-time presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson said in 1985 that the news media portray blacks as less intelligent than we are. Film director Spike Lee explains that these images have negative impacts. "In my neighborhood, we looked up to athletes, guys who got the ladies, and intelligent people," said Lee. "[Now] If you're intelligent, you're called a white guy or girl."

Even so-called positive images of Black people can lead to stereotypes about intelligence. In Darwin's Athletes: how sport has damaged Black America and preserved the myth of race, John Hoberman writes that the prominence of African-American athletes encourages a de-emphasis on academic achievement in black communities. In a 1997 study on racial stereotypes in sports, participants were shown a photograph of a white or a black basketball player. They then listened to a recorded radio broadcast of a basketball game. White photographs were rated as exhibiting significantly more intelligence in the way they played the game, even though the radio broadcast and target player represented by the photograph were the same throughout the trial. Several other authors have said that sports coverage that highlights 'natural black athleticism' has the effect of suggesting white superiority in other areas, such as intelligence.

Controversies

Main article: Race and intelligence (Controversies)

Utility of research

Main article: Race and intelligence (Utility of research)

Theories of race and intelligence have been challenged on grounds of their utility. Critics want to know what purpose such research could serve and why it has been an intense an area of focus for a few researchers. Some defend the research, saying it has egalitarian aims or that it is pure science, others say that the true motivation for the research is the same as that of the eugenics movement and other forms of scientific racism. Even supporters of intelligence research have described such research as analogous to "working with dynamite" or "dangerous play" in sports.

As to whether research in this area is desirable, John C. Loehlin wrote in 1992, "Research on racial differences in intelligence is desirable if the research is appropriately motivated, honestly done, and adequately communicated." [emphasis original] Defenders of the research suggest that both scientific curiosity and a desire to draw benefits from the research are appropriate motivations. Researchers such as Richard Lynn have suggested that conclusions from the research can help make political decisions, such as the type of educational opportunities and expectations of achievement policy makers should have for people of different races. Charles Murray, a conservative political pundit at the American Enterprise Institute has used their conclusions to criticize social programs based on racial equality that fail, he claims, to recognize the realities of racial differences.

In a book review J. Philippe Rushton called Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's book IQ And Global Inequality which links GDP with the racial composition of nations as "the most important contribution to economic understanding since Adam Smith".

Sociologist and demographer Reanne Frank says that some race and intelligence research has been abused "The most malignant are the "true believers," who subscribe to the typological distinctions that imply hierarchical rankings of worth across different races. Although this group remains small, the members' work is often widely publicized and well known (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Rushton 1991)"

Potential for bias

Main article: Race and intelligence (Potential for bias)

Proponents of genetic explanations of race/IQ correlation have often been criticized both of scientific misconduct and of their intimate links with groups that have historic ties to Nazis and eugenics of the early 19th century, such as the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund has been characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Beverly Daniel Tatum writes that dominant cultures often set the parameters by which minority cultures will be judged. Minority groups are labeled as substandard in significant ways, for example blacks have historically been characterized as less intelligent than whites. Tatum suggests that the ability to set these parameters is a form of white privilege. Proponents of genetic explanations of race/IQ correlation have in turn accused their critics of suppressing scientific debate in the name of political correctness. They claim harassment and interference with both their work and funding.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that IQ tests measuring general intelligence are crossculturally valid. There is little or no evidence of population-specific cultural effects apart from the obvious example of language bias. For example, Robert Sternberg et al. found that the IQ of 12- to 15-year-old Kenyans predicted school grades at about the same level as they do in the West. IQ also predicted university performance equally well in African and non-African engineering students in South Africa in a 2004 study. Salgado et al. (2003) demonstrated the international generalizability of general mental ability across 10 member countries of the European Community and differences in a nation’s culture, religion, language, socioeconomic level or employment legislation did not affect the predictive validity of IQ tests.

The Bell Curve has often been argued to embellish the view that IQ is inheritable. (Nature argument.) However, recent studies have argued that IQ itself is in fact malleable due to conditions of nuture.

Policy implications

See also: Intelligence and public policy

Public policy implications of IQ and race research are one of the greatest sources of controversy surrounding this issue. Regardless of the source of the gap, most educators agree that it must be addressed. They often advocate equitable funding for education.

Some proponents of a genetic interpretation of the IQ gap, such as Template:A(Y)ref and Template:A(Y)ref, have sometimes argued that their interpretation does not in itself demand any particular policy response: while a conservative/libertarian commentator may feel the results justify, for example, reductions in affirmative action, a liberal commentator may argue from a Rawlsian point of view (that genetic advantages are undeserved and unjust) for substantial affirmative action. Since all races have representatives at all levels of the IQ curve, this means any policy based on low IQ affects members of all races.

While not specifically race-related, policies focused on geographical regions or nations may have disproportionate influences on certain racial groups and on cognitive development. Differences in health care, nutrition, regulation of environmental toxins, and geographic distribution of diseases and control strategies between the developing world and developed nations have all been subjects of policies or policy recommendations (see Health and intelligence).

Melvin Konner, professor of anthropology and associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory University, called Bell Curve a "deliberate assault on efforts to improve the school performance of African-Americans". "This book presented strong evidence that genes play a role in intelligence but linked it to the unsupported claim that genes explain the small but consistent black-white difference in IQ. The juxtaposition of good argument with a bad one seemed politically motivated, and persuasive refutations soon appeared. Actually, African-Americans have excelled in virtually every enriched environment they have been placed in, most of which they were previously barred from, and this in only the first decade or two of improved but still not equal opportunity. It is likely that the real curves for the two races will one day be superimposable on each other, but this may require decades of change and different environments for different people. Claims about genetic potential are meaningless except in light of this requirement."

Finally, Gregory Stock, writes that germinal choice technology may one day be able to select or change directly alleles found to influence intelligence or racially identifying traits (such as skin color; see gene SLC24A5), making them susceptible to biotechnological intervention.

End material

See also

• Brain to body mass ratio
• Evolution of human intelligence
• Hominid intelligence
• Height and intelligence
• Neuroscience and intelligence
• Sex and intelligence

References

Main article: Race and intelligence (References)

External links

Collective Statements

• APA Task Force Examines the Knowns and Unknowns of Intelligence
• Statement on "Race" and Intelligence. American Anthropological Association. Adopted December 1994.
• Mainstream Science on Intelligence. Intelligence, v24 n1 p. 13-23 Jan-Feb 1997

Review Papers

• James Flynn and Charles Murray debate - news summary
• June 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2.
  • Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability J. Philippe Rushton & Arthur R. Jensen
  • There Are No Public-Policy Implications Robert J. Sternberg
  • What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? Linda S. Gottfredson
  • Heredity, Environment, and Race Differences in IQ Richard E. Nisbett
  • The Cultural Malleability of Intelligence and Its Impact on the Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy Lisa Suzuki & Joshua Aronson
  • Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic Fallacy J. Philippe Rushton & Arthur R. Jensen
• Race, Genetics and IQ Richard E. Nisbett (PDF)
• The Inequality Taboo Charles Murray archived version
• The Black-White Test Score Gap (1998) online (page-image) version of ISBN 0-8157-4609-1

Others

• Crippled by Their Culture - Race doesn't hold back America's black rednecks. Nor does racism by Thomas Sowell
• Race and IQ: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 by Thomas Sowell
• The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on IQ and race
• (Skeptic Magazine): Two book reviews, by Paul R. Gross and Alondra Oubre, of Sarich’s and Miele’s book, Race: The Reality of Human Differences
• Criticism on source material of Bell Curve book
• Poverty and Brain Development in Early Childhood 1999 report
• Miscellaneous articles by Richard Lynn et al.
• Are IQ Tests Biased?
• Scholars Provide an Overview of Explanations for Black-White Test Score Gap
• School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps
• A review of the field (Jan. 2006) Kohn, Marek, "This racist undercurrent in the tide of genetic research: As taboos fall away, there's a danger that denial of racial difference will be replaced with uncritical acceptance," The Guardian.
• The Lessons of the Ashkenazim: Groups and Genes, Steven Pinker, June 2006, The New Republic.
• Are all races equally intelligent? -- Or: When is knowledge knowledge? by John J. Ray
• Black-White Gap in IQ Scores Closing, Study Finds
• Breaking Free of Nehruby Sanjeev Sabhlok : Chapter 2, section 6 of this book proposes a model of IQ determination which is strongly impacted by the level of freedom (and dignity)