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Science Forum Index » Anthropology Forum » What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race
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| Jorge Cruz Rodriguez |
 Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 6:36 pm |
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What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race
by Malcolm Gladwell
December 17, 2007
<http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/
2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell>
One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social
scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand,
received a large package in the mail. It was from a
colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of
I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-
year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found
something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from
the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took
the same tests in the nineteen-fifties-and not just
slightly better, much better.
Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected
intelligence-test results from Europe, from North
America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until
he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case,
the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the
world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or
three points per decade, for as far back as the tests
had been administered. For some reason, human beings
seemed to be getting smarter.
Flynn has been writing about the implications of his
findings-now known as the Flynn effect-for almost
twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of
plainly stated statistical observations, in support of
deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in
support of his original observation is now so
overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory
to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of
the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-
thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that
his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his
grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120-more than a standard
deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction,
the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100,
would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82-
seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from
high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn
effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of
1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that
a century ago the United States was populated largely by
people who today would be considered mentally retarded.
For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there
have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the
early years of the past century, established the idea
that intelligence could be measured along a single,
linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to
coin the word "moron." "The people who are doing the
drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places," he
wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the
nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California
children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently
predicted that they would sit at the top of every
profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen
argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to
boost the academic performance of minority children,
were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily
genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles
Murray, in "The Bell Curve," notoriously proposed that
Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a
"high-tech" version of an Indian reservation, "while the
rest of America tries to go about its business." To the
I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute:
first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and
identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our
thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable-that
is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious
to environmental influences.
This is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA,
meant when he told an English newspaper recently that he
was "inherently gloomy" about the prospects for Africa.
From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact
that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests
suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability. In the
controversy that followed, Watson was defended by the
journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for
the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work
of J. Philippe Rushton-a psychologist who specializes in
comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid
brain with the length of the Negroid penis-Saletan took
the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion.
To erase the difference between blacks and whites,
Saletan wrote, would probably require vigorous
interbreeding between the races, or some kind of
corrective genetic engineering aimed at upgrading
African stock. "Economic and cultural theories have
failed to explain most of the pattern," Saletan
declared, claiming to have been "soaking [his] head in
each side's computations and arguments." One argument
that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was
Flynn's, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox
upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism
rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure
can jump so much in a generation, it can't be all that
immutable and it doesn't look all that innate.
The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought
to create a "crisis of confidence," Flynn writes in
"What Is Intelligence?" (Cambridge; $22), his latest
attempt to puzzle through the implications of his
discovery. "How could such huge gains be intelligence
gains? Either the children of today were far brighter
than their parents or, at least in some circumstances,
I.Q. tests were not good measures of intelligence."
The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues,
is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests,
the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for
Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of
which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points
out that scores in some of the categories-those
measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the
ability to do basic arithmetic-have risen only modestly
over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the
category known as "similarities," where you get
questions such as "In what way are `dogs' and `rabbits'
alike?" Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of
I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are
both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have
said that "you use dogs to hunt rabbits."
"If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not
natural to detach abstractions and logic and the
hypothetical from their concrete referents," Flynn
writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly
intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q.
tests because they did not participate in the twentieth
century's great cognitive revolution, in which we
learned to sort experience according to a new set of
abstract categories. In Flynn's phrase, we have now had
to put on "scientific spectacles," which enable us to
make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To
say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between
1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the
Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects,
much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in
1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how
smart we are as how modern we are.
This is a critical distinction. When the children of
Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the
early part of the past century, for example, they
recorded median scores in the high seventies and low
eighties, a full standard deviation below their American
and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did
as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As
you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the
time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of
the inadvisability of letting so many second-class
immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor
that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods.
Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the
supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of
certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from
the discussion. "Did their genes begin to mutate
somewhere in the 1930s?" the psychologists Seymour
Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the
Italian experience. "Or is it possible that somewhere in
the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of
Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the
Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation
into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?"
The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once
gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version
of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of
food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the
tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To
the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose
functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife
together because a knife is used to cut a potato. "A
wise man could only do such-and-such," they explained.
Finally, the researchers asked, "How would a fool do
it?" The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into
the "right" categories. It can be argued that
taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement-
that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to
advance, technologically and scientifically, if they
started to see the world that way. But to label them
less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their
performance on that test, is merely to state that they
have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if
I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or
discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the
fuss about?
When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play
Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of
those people who insist that the standard categories of
animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a
fourth category: "abstract." Abstract could mean
something like "whatever it was that was going through
my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles
back." That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult,
but it wasn't: it merely required that we ask a slightly
different set of questions and grasp a slightly
different set of conventions, and, after two or three
rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone's
mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston
Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the trip on
which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an
abstraction, "the Unknown Soldier"-which allowed him
legitimately and gleefully to answer "I have no idea" to
almost every question. There were four of us playing. We
gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father
was teaching his three sons how to put on scientific
spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped up
all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let's be clear about
what this means. There's a world of difference between
an I.Q. advantage that's genetic and one that depends on
extended car time with Graham Gladwell.
Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many
others in the I.Q. debates, he resists grand
philosophizing. He comes back again and again to the
fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil
tests-and making sense of those scores, he tells us, is
a messy and complicated business that requires something
closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a
philosopher.
For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize
that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value
attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an
I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or
"normed" so that the test-takers in the fiftieth
percentile-those exactly at the median-are assigned a
score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the
only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is
periodically to make the tests more difficult-to
"renorm" them. The original WISC was normed in the late
nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early
nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time
in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed
again a few years ago, as the WISC IV-with each version
just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion
that anyone "has" an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is
meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when
he took it, since there's a substantial difference
between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130
on the much easier WISC.
This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to
diagnose people as mentally retarded, with a score of 70
generally taken to be the cutoff. You can imagine how
the Flynn effect plays havoc with that system. In the
nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the
WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But
since kids-even kids with disabilities-score a little
higher every year, the number of children whose scores
fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the
eighties. Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced,
and suddenly the percentage of kids labelled retarded
went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya, Matthew
Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state
had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of
Americans labelled mentally retarded should have
doubled.
That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental
disability is one of the most stigmatizing of all
educational and occupational classifications-and yet,
apparently, the chances of being burdened with that
label are in no small degree a function of the point, in
the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to
sit for his evaluation. "As far as I can determine, no
clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the
relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental
retardation became more lenient over time," Flynn wrote,
in a 2000 paper. "Yet no one drew the obvious moral
about psychologists in the field: They simply were not
making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion
for mental retardation."
Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of
whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a
possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q.
fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the
Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European
descent, for example, prompted the British
psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct
an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the
Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting
practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The
fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to
be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the
existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians
at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and
blacks at the bottom.
Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn's
accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn's data, and
realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was
comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a
representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese
estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban
sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not
at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to
the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be
based on a 1975 study in San Francisco's Chinatown using
something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test.
But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-
fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it
would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-
American scores were reassessed using up-to-date
intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97
verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly
lower I.Q.s than white Americans.
The Asian-American success story had suddenly been
turned on its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn
said, that they had succeeded not because of their
higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians were
overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis,
Flynn then worked out just how great that
overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone
who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and
technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among
Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-
American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as
much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.
There should be no great mystery about Asian
achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication
to higher education, and belonging to a culture that
stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more
observation. The children of that first successful wave
of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were
higher than everyone else's-coming in somewhere around
103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of
the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the
professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American
parents have evidently made sure that their own children
wore scientific spectacles. "Chinese Americans are an
ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high
I.Q. rather than the reverse," Flynn concludes,
reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship
between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and
effects. "It is not easy to view the history of their
achievements without emotion," he writes. That is
exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract
number is to trivialize it.
Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles
Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute.
Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America.
During the twenty-five years after the Second World War,
that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white
Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn
effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster.
Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that
trend stalled-and the question was why.
Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each
representing different statistical formulations of the
I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial
difference would narrow in the future. "By the nineteen-
seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the
environment that you were going to get," he said. That
gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent
difference between the races. "Starting in the nineteen-
seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher
proportion of black kids being born to really dumb
mothers," he said. When the debate's moderator, Jane
Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed
that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray
seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks
could ever make further progress was inconceivable.
Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he
pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that
the tests we have for measuring the cognitive
functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show
the races to be almost the same. By age four, the
average black I.Q. is 95.4-only four and a half points
behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges:
from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-
tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at
83.4.
That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the
usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was
exactly what you would expect, given the disparate
cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter
as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be
raised in single-parent homes than are white children-
and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex
than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade
students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which
means that "kids who want to be above average don't have
to aim as high." There were possibly adverse differences
between black teen-age culture and white teen-age
culture, and an enormous number of young black men are
in jail-which is hardly the kind of environment in which
someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.
Flynn then talked about what we've learned from studies
of adoption and mixed-race children-and that evidence
didn't fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate,
it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race
child's mother or father who is black. But it does:
children with a white mother and a black father have an
eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black
mother and a white father. And it shouldn't make much of
a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But,
again, it does: the children fathered by black American
G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German
mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white
American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in
that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness,
as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their
Germanness-of their being brought up in a different
culture, under different circumstances. "The mind is
much more like a muscle than we've ever realized," Flynn
said. "It needs to get cognitive exercise. It's not some
piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark." The
lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was
the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago:
I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person's mind
but the quality of the world that person lives in. |
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