(NAME-MCE) What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.

[Bill Howe]

<http://www.newyorker.com/>
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true#editorsnote

*What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race.*
by Malcolm Gladwell<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Malcolm%20Gladwell%22>
December
17, 2007

If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn
effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?





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
0.3points 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
WISCIV—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. ♦




-- 
Bill Howe

Travel to China - June 1-14, 2008 - Teachers & Health Care Professionals -
http://www.billhowe.org/China2008.htm

Web - http://www.billhowe.org
Blog - Travel - http://billhowe.org/BillBlog/
Blog - Multicultural Education - http://billhowe.org/MCE/

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands;
we have no right to assume otherwise.
If we do not falter in our duty now,
we may be able, handful that we are,
to end the racial nightmare,
and achieve our country,
and change the history of the world.

James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"