Race and intelligence
Sketch-4race-transparent.png
Race and intelligence refers to the controversy surrounding the findings of many studies that racial groups show differences in average intelligence quotient (IQ) test scores, and differences in other variables that correlate with IQ scores, such as school achievement, reaction time, or brain size.
These results have sparked public debates concerning not only the reliability of the studies and the motives of their authors, but also the validity and fairness of intelligence tests and racial categorization in general. The primary focus of the scholarly debate is the question of whether group differences in average intelligence are caused only by environmental factors (such as nutrition, the richness of the early home environment, and other social, cultural or economic factors) or whether there is also a genetic component that follows racial classifications.
Because it appears that intelligence is of great practical significance in modern society, some scholars claim that elucidating the source and meaning of the gap in measured IQs is a pressing social concern.
| Contents |
Background information
Racial distinctions are most often made on the basis of skin color, facial features, ancestry, and national origin. Some scientists argue that common racial classifications are not meaningful, often on the basis of research indicating that more genetic variation exists within such races than between them. To define terms, racial labels most commonly used in the United States relate to genetic ancestry (Tang et al., 2005). People labeled Blacks have most of their ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Whites from Europe, and East Asians from countries on the western side of the Pacific Rim. Hispanics, more often called an ethnic group rather than a race, form a genetically diverse group that includes many recent Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants to the United States having mixed Native American, African, and European ancestry. See the articles Race and Race (U.S. Census) for further discussion.
Attempts to measure intelligence most commonly employ IQ tests. In turn, IQ tests are generally geared to measure the psychometric variable g. Some question the validity of all IQ testing or claim that there are aspects of intelligence not reflected in IQ tests. See the articles Intelligence, IQ, and g theory for further discussion on the validity of these tests.
Some researchers have argued that race and intelligence research is fundamentally flawed. Stephen Jay Gould expressed this view in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man. Tate & Audette (2001) argue that issues of "race" and "intelligence" are pseudo-questions because both concepts are arbitrary social constructions. Similarly, in a 2005 review paper Sternberg and colleagues question the basis of race and intelligence researchAmerican Psychological Association, and "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", a statement signed by 52 intelligence researchers meant to outline "conclusions regarded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence".
The debates described in the following article assume that IQ tests measure some interesting aspect of intelligence, and that some interesting information may be gained by studying racial group differences. For a critique of these assumptions, please see the previously mentioned articles.
The scholarly debate about race and intelligence involves both the relatively less controversial experimental results that indicate that average IQ test scores vary among racial groups, and the relatively more controversial interpretation of these IQ score differences. In general, interpretations of the "IQ gap" can be divided into two categories:
- "culture-only" interpretations that posit environmental causes (e.g., socioeconomic inequality or minority culture membership) that differentially affect racial groups; and
- "partly-genetic" interpretations that posit an IQ gap between racial groups caused by approximately the same matrix of genetic and environmental forces that cause IQ differences among individuals of the same race.
History
Francis_Galton_1850s.jpg
The scientific debate on the contribution of nature versus nurture to individual and group differences in intelligence can be traced to at least the mid-19th century (Degler, 1991; Loehlin, Lindzey, & Spuhler, 1975). The writings of Sir Francis Galton, elaborating on the work of his cousin Charles Darwin, spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly heredity and eugenics.
The fact that there are differences in the brain sizes and brain structures of different racial and ethnic groups was well known and widely studied during the 19th century and early 20th century (Bean, 1906; Broca, 1873; Mall, 1909; Morton, 1839; Pearl, 1934; Vint, 1934).
Average ethnic and racial group differences in IQ were first found with the widespread use of standardized mental tests in World War I.
Beginning in the 1930s, hereditarianism — the belief that genetics contribute to differences in intelligence among humans — began to fall out of favor, in part due to the advocacy of Franz Boas, who in his 1938 edition of The Mind of Primitive Man wrote
...there is nothing at all that could be interpreted as suggesting any material difference in the mental capacity of the bulk of the Negro population as compared with the bulk of the white population (Boas, 1938).
The hereditarian position was greatly weakened by Boas finding that cranial vault size had increased significantly in the U.S. from one generation to the next, because racial differences in such characteristics had been among the strongest arguments for a genetic role.
Eugenics was later adopted by the Nazi party as a justification for the systematic elimination of "parasitic" races such as Jews and Gypsies. (Note that the Ashkenazi Jewish population has significantly higher average IQ scores than other Whites.)
Due to the association of hereditarianism with Nazi Germany, after the conclusion of World War II until the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, it became largely taboo to suggest that there were racial or ethnic differences in measures of intellectual or academic ability and even more taboo to suggest that they might involve a genetic component. (Garrett, 1961; Lynn, 2001, pp. xlv-liv).
In 1961, the psychologist Henry Garrett coined the term equalitarian dogma to describe the then politically fashionable view that there were no race differences in intelligence, or if there were, they were purely the result of environmental factors. Those who questioned these views often put their careers at risk (Lynn, 2001, pp. 67-69).
The contemporary scholarly debate on race and intelligence may be traced to Arthur Jensen's 1969 publication in the Harvard Educational Review of "How Much Can We Boost IQ and School Achievement?" In this paper Jensen concluded that:
(a) IQ tests measure socially relevant general ability; (b) individual differences in IQ have a high heritability, at least for the White populations of the United States and Europe; (c) compensatory educational programs have proved generally ineffective in raising the IQs or school achievement of individuals or groups; (d) because social mobility is linked to ability, social class differences in IQ probably have an appreciable genetic component; and tentatively, but most controversially, (e) the mean Black-White group difference in IQ probably has some genetic component (from Rushton & Jensen, 2005).
Reports on Jensen's article appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times Magazine. Press attention returned to the issue of race and intelligence in 1994 with the publication of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), which included two chapters on the subject of racial difference in intelligence and related life outcomes. In response to The Bell Curve, Stephen Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man, criticising many aspect of IQ research. Some IQ researchers have been accused of misrepresenting the available data, especially when trying to associate the results with various other claimed differences in personality and physical characteristics.
In 2005, the scholarly debate continues on the question of "whether the cause of group differences in average IQ is purely social, economic, and cultural or whether genetic factors are also involved" (Rushton & Jensen, 2005).
Moral criticism
A political motivation is frequently ascribed to researchers who work on questions of race and intelligence. Many have been described as racists. For example, Psychologist Jerry Hirsch has claimed that Arthur Jensen has "avowed goals" that were "as heinously barbaric as were Hitler's and the anti-abolitionists" (Hunt, 1999). In turn, some researchers have questioned the political motivations of their critics, some of whom have been forced to apologize, but more often the ad hominum criticisms are allowed (Gottfredson, 2005).
Another common criticism of race and intelligence research is that society would be better off not knowing if races differ in IQ, regardless of whether the cause were genetic or not. For example, Glazer (1994, p. 16) asked of race and intelligence research in The Bell Curve, "what good will come of it?" He adds:
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.
More recently, Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg asked whether race and intelligence researchers Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton show "good taste" in their choice of research topics. Further, he questioned, "What good is research of the kind done by Rushton and Jensen supposed to achieve?" (Sternberg, 2005). Harvard University microbiologist Bernard Davis (1978) criticized this position as the "moralistic fallacy", implying it was the converse of the naturalistic fallacy. Some researchers in the field of race and intelligence argue that suppressing race and intelligence research is actually more harmful. For example, Gottfredson (2005) argues against the suggestion of a benevolent untruth:
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, manmade, 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.
Race in the United States
- see also Race
The political, social and cultural structure of the United States is still explicitly conscious of race; legal equality of Whites and Blacks did not fully materialize until the 20th century. The national and state governments of the United States employ race in the census, law enforcement, and innumerable other ways. Many minority races have political organizations to represent their interests. Racial discrimination is illegal in many areas of public and private life, including employment.
Average intelligence gaps among races
The modern controversy surrounding intelligence and race focuses on the results of IQ studies conducted during the second half of the 20th century, mainly in the United States and some other industrialized nations. IQ studies outside these nations are few and small. It is uncertain what the average IQ or subgroup IQ tests scores would be with more complete studies in the developing world. IQ test scores in the developing world may be affected by factors less important in the developed world such as nutritional deficiencies. Most of the remainder of this article refers to studies attempting to explain race differences in IQ test scores in the US, and does not refer to the world as a whole.
IQ gap in the US
IQ-4races-rotate-highres.png
In almost every testing situation where tests were administered and evaluated correctly, a difference of approximately one standard deviation was observed in the US between the mean IQ score of Blacks and Whites. In the United States, the mean IQ score among Blacks is approximately 85 and the mean IQ score among Whites is approximately 100; the mean IQ score of Hispanics is usually reported to be between the mean Black and White scores (Herrnstein and Murray report a mean "Latino" IQ of 89 in The Bell Curve). The mean score for people of East Asian and Jewish descent is usually higher than the mean score of Whites, but the extent of that difference is not precisely known. However, several studies place the median IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (who make up the overwhelming majority of American Jews) at approximately one standard deviation above the mean for other Whites, with the primary Jewish advantage in verbal reasoning and the East Asian advantage primarily in spatial reasoning. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray report mean IQ scores for East Asians and Jewish Americans of 106 and 113, respectively.
Similar 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).
Is the gap closing?
Richard Nisbett and others have argued that the Black-White gap on various ability tests has narrowed from the 1970s to the 1990s (Grissmer, 1994; Grissmer, Flanagan, & Williamson, 1998; Grissmer, Williamson, Kirby, & Berends, 1998; Hedges & Nowell, 1998; Nisbett, 1995, 1998, 2005). These tests include the Equality of Educational Opportunity (EEO) survey, the National Longitudinal Study, the High School and Beyond survey, the National Education Longitudinal Study, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress program (NAEP). The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found that although the Black-White gap on the SAT declined from 1976-1988, it has been increasing since 1988. On the other hand, some studies find that the gap has been decreasing for the most of the 20th century and that this trend continued during the nineties.g have not narrowed. In support of this claim, he presents evidence that, while there have been gains in measures of acquired competency such as scholastic achievement, these improvements do not indicate gains in g. Jensen also argues that Black-White differences in g seen in measures of reaction time have not narrowed. A meta-analysis by Roth et al. (2001) found a mean Black-White score difference of 1.1 standard deviations (6,246,729 samples; ranging from 0.38 to 1.46 depending on the g loading of the test). As to whether the IQ gap is narrowing, they speculated that any reduction was "either small, potentially a function of sampling error ... or nonexistent for highly g loaded" tests (Roth et al. 2001). Gottfredson (2005) agreed that the Black-White gap observed in the National Assessment of Educational Progress test has narrowed from 1.07 to 0.89 standard deviations. However, she then argues that reduction stopped by the mid-1980s and is compatible with stable group differences in g.
A large (21,260 children) and probably the most recent (1998) study found that the Black-White gap for young children in reading and math scores was much smaller than in earlier studies, and that all of the remaining difference could be explained by a few environmental factors.Flynn effect started earlier for Whites but has now stopped, while continuing for Blacks. Reading and math scores are correlated with, but not substitutable for, IQ, so these findings alone may not indicate convergence in the IQ gap. Still, the correlation of IQ with grades is highest in elementary school (0.6 to 0.7; Jensen 1998), so convergence in scores may, in fact, indicate that the IQ gap is narrowing.
IQ gaps in other nations
Attempted compilations of average IQ by race generally place Ashkenazi Jews at the top, followed by East Asians, Whites, other Asians, Arabs and Blacks. See IQ and the Wealth of Nations for an attempted compilation of average IQ for different nations and a discussion of associated measurement problems.
The IQ scores vary greatly among different nations for the same group. Blacks in Africa score much lower than Blacks in the US. The Black-White gap is smaller in the UK than in the U.S.hybrid vigor" (heterosis) manifested by offspring of cross-ethnic matings. Nagoshi and Johnson (1986) found that children of Japanese-Caucasian cross-ethnic matings scored .26 SD higher on several cognitive tests than those from within-ethnic matings. The increase in scores tended to be higher on cognitive tests that were more g-loaded, suggesting that hybrid vigor improves g. Mingroni (2004) has argued that heterosis may be partially responsible for the Flynn effect.
School achievement gap
Measures of school achievement correlate fairly well with IQ, especially in younger children. The National Assessment of Educational Progress in the United States, find that by 12th grade Black students are performing on average only as well as White and Asian students in 8th grade. Hispanic students do only slightly better than Blacks. Closing this achievement gap is one of the aims of the No Child Left Behind act. Examining the achievement gap, Ogbu (2003) attributes the gap to academic disengagement of Black students and parents. Similarly, Thernstrom & Thernstrom (2003) cite environmental causes. The school achievement gap can potentially be explained by many environmental factors that do not affect IQ tests to a similar degree, like bias in those giving grades or constructing tests.
Attempts to redress the acheivement gap in the U.S. include Head Start and related early intervention programs. However, neither Head Start nor more intensive programs have been able to produce lasting gains in IQ or school achievement (Jensen, 1998). However, the gains continued as long as the program continued. Lack of sufficient funding is often cited as a reason for the failure of Head Start programs to have lasting impact.
Reaction time
In 1991, Richard Lynn tested 1,468 9-year old children consisting of Blacks from South Africa, East Asians from Hong Kong and Japan, and Whites from Britain and Ireland. The content of the tests involved flipping a switch after one or more lights came on. Lynn found that the decision times (the time taken to make a decision about what to do) had a low correlation with IQ data on Raven's Progressive Matrices tests also administered during the same study, and that movement times (the time taken to execute the decision) did not show any correlation. He found that the Asians had the fastest decision times, followed by the Whites, and then by the Blacks. He also determined that the Black children had movement times that were substantially faster than those of Whites and Asians on certain tests.Craniometry, Neuroscience and intelligence
Modern studies using MRI imaging shows a weak to moderate correlation between brain size and IQ (Harvey, Persaud, Ron, Baker, & Murray, 1994) and have shown that brain size correlates with IQ by a factor of approximately .40 among adults (McDaniel, 2005). In 1991, Willerman et al. used data from 40 White American university students and reported a correlation coefficient of .35. Other studies done on samples of Caucasians show similar results, with Andreasen et al (1993) determining a correlation of .38, while Raz et al (1993) obtained a figure of .43 and Wickett et al. (1994) obtained a figure of .40. The correlation between brain size and IQ seems to hold for comparisons between and within families (Gignac et al. 2003; Jensen 1994; Jensen & Johnson 1994). However, one study found no within family correlation (Schoenemann et al. 2000). A study on twins (Thompson et al. 2001) showed that frontal gray matter volume was correlated with g and highly heritable. A related study has reported that the correlation between brain size (reported to have a heritability of 0.85) and g is 0.4, and that correlation is mediated entirely by genetic factors (Posthuma et al 2002). Note that none of the MRI studies have studied racial differences.
Group differences in average IQ tend to mirror group differences in brain size. Numerous historical and modern studies, using skull and head measurements, weighing of brains at autopsy, and more recently, magnetic resonance imaging report racial differences. These studies are usually accompanied by a great deal of controversy.
The American Psychological Association's Task Force Report on Intelligence reports that with respect to "racial differences in the mean measured sizes of skulls and brains (with East Asians having the largest, followed by Whites and then Blacks)...there is indeed a small overall trend" (Neisser, 1997, p. 80).
Cranial vault size and shape have changed greatly during the last 150 years in the US. These changes must occur by early childhood because of the early development of the vault. The explanation for these changes may be related to the Flynn effect.Race and intelligence (Culture-only or partially-genetic explanation)
