"Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help", Gottfredson 2005
The results of a 1984 survey (Snyderman & Rothman, 1988) of experts on intelligence and mental testing therefore surprised even Jensen. The experts' modal response on every question that involved the "heretical" conclusions from Jensen's 1969 article was the same as his (Jensen, 1998, p. 198). (The experts' mean response overestimated test bias, however, because there is none against blacks or lower social class individuals; Jensen, 1980; Neisser et al., 1996; Snyderman & Rothman, 1988, p. 134; Wigdor & Garner, 1982). Here in abbreviated form are the survey's major questions and the 600 experts' responses.
Q: What are the important elements of intelligence?
A: "Near unanimity" (96-99%) for abstract thinking or reasoning, problem solving ability, and capacity to acquire knowledge (p. 56).
Q: Is intelligence best described as a single general factor with subsidiaries or as separate faculties?
A: A general factor (58%, or 67% of those responding; p. 71).
Q: What heritability would you estimate for IQ differences within the white population?
A: Average estimate of 57% (p. 95).
Q: What heritability would you estimate for IQ differences within the black population?
A: Average estimate of 57% (p. 95).
Q: Are intelligence tests biased against blacks?
A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean response of 2 (somewhat, p. 117).
Q: Are intelligence tests biased against lower social class individuals?
A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean response of 2 (somewhat, p. 118).
Q: What is the source of average social class differences in IQ?
A: Both genetic and environmental (55%, or 65% of those responding; p. 126).
Q: What is the source of the average black-white difference in IQ?
A: Both genetic and environmental (45%, or 52% of those responding; p. 128).
The supposedly fringe scientist, Jensen, was actually in the mainstream because the mainstream
had silently come to him, where it remains today (Gottfredson, 1997a). Meanwhile, public
opinion was still being pushed in the opposite direction, creating an ever greater gulf between
received opinion and scientifically informed thought.
...And why keep silent when the media promulgate clear falsehoods as scientific truths-especially when, as Snyderman and Rothman (1988) demonstrated, the media portray expert opinion on intelligence as the opposite of what it really is?
Early in my career I reported that bright boys who had attended a school for dyslexics did not enter the usual high-level jobs (medicine, law, science, and college teaching) but had nevertheless succeeded at a high level by entering prestigious or remunerative occupations that required above-average intelligence but relatively little reading or writing, specifically, top management and sales positions. A colleague accused me in that seminar of saying that "blacks can't make it because they are dumb."
The best informed, who are often called upon for expert comment, cannot endorse clear falsehoods without jeopardizing their own standing within the discipline, but they sometimes dispute minor issues in a manner that the uninformed mistake for wholesale repudiation (Gottfredson, 1994a; Page, 1972).
The implication of ABC's November 22, 1994, national newscast was surely not lost on viewers when, while exposing the supposedly unsavory history of intelligence research behind The Bell Curve, news anchor Peter Jennings followed photographs of Jensen and other supposed race scientists with footage of Nazi soldiers and what appeared to be death camp doctors and prisoners.
Critics have associated a belief in the hereditary basis of intelligence with evil intent so frequently and for so long that merely mentioning "IQ" is enough to trigger in many minds the words "pseudoscience," "racism," and "genocide." Even current APA president Robert Sternberg keeps the malicious association alive by regularly ridiculing and belittling empirically-minded intelligence researchers (e.g., comparing Jensen, in a book meant to honor him, to a child who would not grow up; Sternberg, 2003), referring to their work as "quasi-science" ("Science and pseudoscience," 1999, p. 27) that has "recreated a kind of night of the living dead" (Sternberg, 1997, p. 55), and sprinkling his descriptions of it with mentions of racism, slavery, and even Soviet tyranny (e.g., Sternberg, 2003; see also Sternberg, 2000, Sternberg & Wagner, 1993).
But why should we assume that a belief in the heritability of many human differences is dangerous and a belief in man's infinite malleability is not? Critics have yet to explain. Why is the former belief always yoked to Hitler, but the latter never to Stalin, who outlawed both intelligence tests and genetic thinking? Stalin killed at least as many as did Hitler in his effort to reshape the Soviet citizenry (Courtois, 1999).
Behavior geneticists distinguish between two types of environmental influence: shared and non-shared (also called between-family and within-family effects). Shared influences are those that make siblings more alike. Possible such influences would include parental income, education, child-rearing style, and the like, because they would impinge on all siblings in a household. Non-shared influences are those that affect individuals one person at a time and therefore make siblings less alike. Little is yet known about them, but they might include illness, accidents, non-genetic influences on fetal development, and the concatenation of unique experiences. To the great surprise even of behavior geneticists, shared environmental effects on intelligence (within the broad range of typical environments) wash away by late adolescence. IQ differences can be traced to both genes (40%) and shared environments (25%) in early childhood, but genetic effects increase in importance with age (to 80% in adulthood) while shared effects dissipate (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffin, 2001). For example, adoptive siblings end up no more alike in IQ or personality by adolescence than are random strangers, and instead become similar to the biological relatives they have never met.
Currently one of the biggest puzzles for family effects theory is that academic achievement gaps do not narrow even in settings where all the supposedly important environmental resources are present (Banchero & Little, 2002). For example, its adherents are now arguing among themselves (Lee, 2002) about the proper cultural explanation for the large black-white achievement gaps that persist in the most socioeconomically advantaged, integrated, liberal, suburban school districts in the United States, such as Shaker Heights, Ohio (Ogbu, 2003) and Berkeley, California (Noguera, 2001). Moreover, black-white test score gaps (IQ, SAT, etc.) tend to be larger at higher socioeconomic levels. This finding contradicts the predictions of family effects theory. It is consistent with g-based theory, however, because the latter predicts that black and white children of high-IQ parents will regress part way from their parents' mean toward different population means, IQ 100 for whites and IQ 85 for blacks.
The fictions about intelligence essentially deny that it exists, which virtually no one really believes. Many people just want a more "democratic" view of it. Not surprisingly, psychology's supply has risen to meet public demand, and the new egalitarian perspectives on human intelligence were instantly blessed by opinion makers. Chief among them are the "multiple intelligence" theories by psychologists Howard Gardner (1983, 1998) and Robert Sternberg (1997). The eager acceptance of their theories by educators, psychologists, and others has occurred despite neither of them providing credible evidence that their proposed intelligences actually exist, that is, as independent abilities of comparable generality and practical importance to g. Gardner has rejected even measuring his eight intelligences, let alone demonstrating that they predict anything (Hunt, 2001; Lubinski & Benbow, 1995). Study-by-study dissections of Sternberg's multiple-intelligence research program reveal no such evidence (Brody, 2003a, b; Gottfredson, 2003a, c). If anything, they confirm that all three of his proposed intelligences are just different flavors of g itself, as probably are most of Gardner's too (Carroll, 1993, p. 641).
In 1991, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to outlaw race-norming in employment after it learned that the Labor Department had already been race-norming its employment tests for a decade and that the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had started threatening private employers if they did not adopt the "scientifically-justified" practice.
The racial preferences that race-norming entails are hardly trivial. What the NRC report did not say was that blacks scoring at the 15th percentile in skill level on DOL's test would have been judged equal to whites and Asians scoring at the 50th percentile, and blacks at the 50th percentile would be rated comparably skilled as whites and Asians at the 84th (Blits & Gottfredson, 1990a). Seldom being apprised of such facts, most people greatly underestimate how discrepant the pools of qualified applicants are from which racial balance is supposed to emerge. Another illustration, pertinent to the next example, is that about 75% of whites vs. only 28% of blacks exceed the minimum IQ level (~IQ 91)-a ratio of 3 to 1-usually required for minimally satisfactory performance in the skilled trades, fire and police work, and mid-level clerical jobs such as bank teller (Gottfredson, 1986, pp. 400-401). The potential pools become increasingly racially lopsided for more cognitively demanding jobs. Workers in professional jobs such as engineer, lawyer, and physician typically need an IQ of at least 114 to perform satisfactorily. About 23% of whites but only 1% of blacks exceed this minimum....Developing tests that measure cognitive skills more effectively tends only to worsen the proscribed disparate impact. Adding relevant non-cognitive predictors to the mix does little to reduce the racial imbalance (Schmitt, Rogers, Chan, Sheppard, & Jennings, 1997).
The police selection test developed in 1994 for Nassau County, NY, represents one such "technical advance." The 10 members of a joint Nassau County-U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) team had set out to develop a police selection test with less disparate impact (more racially balanced results). The county had not been able to satisfy the DOJ's employment discrimination unit in several tries under its various consent decrees since 1977. (Recall the 3 to 1 ratio given above for the proportion of whites vs. blacks exceeding the ability level below which performance in police work tends to be unsatisfactory.) Seven of the team's eight psychologists constituted a Who's Who of APA's large Division 14 (Industrial and Organizational Psychology), four of them having previously served as its president. Several years and millions of dollars later, this high-powered team claimed to have succeeded in developing a test that virtually eliminated disparate impact while simultaneously improving selection validity. Water could run up-hill, after all. Once again, leading psychologists found a seemingly scientific solution to an intractable political-legal dilemma. DOJ immediately began pressing other police jurisdictions nationwide to replace their more "discriminatory" tests with the new selection battery.
A close look at the several-volume technical report for the Nassau test battery revealed that the team had succeeded in reducing disparate impact by, in effect, gerrymandering the test to assess only traits on which the races differed little or not at all (Gottfredson, 1996a, b). The joint Nassau-DOJ team had administered its nearly day-long, 25-part experimental battery to all 25,000 applicants, but settled on the battery's final composition only after examining the scores it yielded for different races. The experimental battery was then apparently stripped of virtually all parts demanding cognitive ability. The only parts actually used to rank applicants were eight non-cognitive personality scales (all commercial products owned by members of the team) and being able to read above the 1st percentile of currently employed police officers (near illiteracy). Selection for cognitive competence had been reduced to little more than the toss of a coin, despite the team's own careful job analysis having shown that "reasoning, judgment, and inferential thinking" were the most critical skills for good police work.
The new police test was made to appear more valid than the county's previous ones by, among other things, omitting key results required by legal and professional guidelines, transforming the data in ways that artificially reduced the apparent validity of the cognitive subtests relative to the non-cognitive ones, and making a series of statistical errors that more than doubled the final battery's apparent predictive validity (from .14 to .35). When exposed, the test created a scandal in Division 14 ("The Great Debate of 1997" in Hakel, 1997, p. 116), partly because other leading selection psychologists expected its use would produce less effective policing and degrade public safety (Schmidt, 1996).
Even the most objective, most carefully vetted procedures for identifying talent are instantly pronounced guilty of bias or "exclusion" when they yield disparate impact in hiring, college admissions, placement in gifted education, and the like. Indeed, the very notions of objectivity and merit are now under attack by influential intellectual elites (Farber & Sherry, 1997). When faithful and fair application of the law yields disparate impact in arrest or incarceration rates, American jurisprudence must be considered inherently racist (see arguments in Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995). When earnest, socially liberal teachers fail to narrow the stubborn achievement gaps between races and classes, they must be unconsciously discriminatory and require diversity training. Because American institutions still routinely and almost everywhere fail to yield the desired racial balance, the Americans who created and supposedly control those institutions-majority Americans-must be judged deeply, unconsciously, inveterately racist and to have created a society where appearances to the contrary are just a smokescreen to hide their built-in privileges. Under the equipotentiality fiction, there can be no other legitimate explanation, and any attempt at one serves only to evade responsibility.
Fewer but still many social scientists hold to a fourth false credo-that intelligence has little or no functional utility, at least outside schools. Moreover, they often add that the advantages and disadvantages of high or low IQ are mostly "socially constructed" to serve the interests of the privileged. This view was articulated in an influential article published soon after Jensen's 1969 article by economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1972/1973). They argued that higher IQ does not have any functional utility, even within schools, and that IQ tests are simply a tool created by the upper classes to maintain and justify their privileges. They dismissed talk of "objectivity" and "merit" as just smoke blown to obscure this fact. Psychologist Robert Sternberg implies much the same when he suggests that the g factor dimension of intellectual differences is an artifact of Western schooling (Sternberg et al., 2000, p. 9) and that using cognitive tests such as the SAT to sort people is akin to the way slavery and religious prejudice were once used to keep disfavored groups down (Sternberg, 2003).
However, when critics argue that IQ differences have little or no functional meaning beyond that which cultures or their elites arbitrarily attach to them for selfish purposes, they simultaneously turn attention away from the very real problems that lower intelligence creates for less able persons. As Herrnstein and Murray (1994) note, the critics generally have little contact with the downtrodden they would protect. These bright opinion makers may be living comfortably with their fictions and benevolent lies, but lower-IQ individuals must live daily with the consequences of their weaker learning and reasoning skills. Their distant protectors would seem to be the limousine liberals of intelligence.
I focus below on everyday tasks that higher-IQ individuals consider so simple that they do not realize how such tasks might create obstacles to the well-being of others less cognitively blessed.
Functional literacy and daily self-maintenance. Citizens of literate societies take for granted that they are routinely called upon to read instructions, fill out forms, determine best buys, decipher bus schedules, and otherwise read and write to cope with the myriad details of everyday life. But such tasks are difficult for many people. The problem is seldom that they cannot read or write the words, but usually that they are unable to carry out the mental operations the task calls for-to compare two items, grasp an abstract concept, provide comprehensible and accurate information about themselves, follow a set of instructions, and so on. This is what it means to have poor "functional literacy." Functional literacy has been a major public policy concern, as illustrated by the U.S. Department of Education's various efforts to gauge its level in different segments of the American population. Tests of functional literacy essentially mimic individually-administered intelligence tests, except that all their items come from everyday life, such as calculating a tip (see extended discussion in Gottfredson, 1997b). As on intelligence tests, differences in item difficulty rest on the items' cognitive complexity (their abstractness, amount of distracting irrelevant information, and degree of inference required), not on their readability per se or the level of education test takers have completed. Literacy researchers have concluded, with some surprise, that functional literacy represents a general capacity to learn, reason, and solve problems-a veritable description of g.
The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS; Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) groups literacy scores into five levels. Individuals scoring in Level 1 have an 80% chance of successfully performing tasks similar in difficulty to locating an expiration date on a driver's license and totaling a bank deposit slip. They are not routinely able to perform Level 2 tasks, such as determining the price difference between two show tickets or filling in background information on an application for a social security card. Level 3 difficulty includes writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill and using a flight schedule to plan travel. Level 4 tasks include restating an argument made in a lengthy news article and calculating the money needed to raise a child based on information in a news article. Only at Level 5 are individuals routinely able to perform mental tasks as complex as summarizing two ways that lawyers challenge prospective jurors (based on a passage discussing such practices) and, with a calculator, determining the total cost of carpet to cover a room.
Although these tasks might seem to represent only the inconsequential minutiae of everyday life, they sample the large universe of mostly untutored tasks that modern life demands of adults. Consistently failing them is not just a daily inconvenience, but a compounding problem. Likening functional literacy to money-it always helps to have more-, literacy researchers point out that rates of socioeconomic distress and pathology (unemployment, adult poverty, etc.) rise steadily at successively lower levels of functional literacy (as is the pattern for IQ too; Gottfredson, 2002a)...Such disadvantage is common, too, because 40% of the adult white population and 80% of the adult black population cannot routinely perform above Level 2. Fully 14% and 40%, respectively, cannot routinely perform even above Level 1 (Kirsch et al., 1993, pp. 119121). To claim that lower-ability citizens will only be victimized by the public knowing that differences in intelligence are real, stubborn, and important is to ignore the practical hurdles they face.
Health literacy, IQ, and health self-care. The challenges in self-care for lower-IQ individuals are especially striking in health matters, where the consequences of poor performance are tallied in excess morbidity and mortality. Health psychologists have ignored the role of competence in health behavior, focusing instead on volition. Patient "non-compliance" is indeed a huge problem in medicine, but health literacy researchers, unlike health psychologists, have concluded that it is more a matter of patients not understanding what is required of them than being unwilling to implement it (reviews in Gottfredson, 2002a, in press).
...For example, 26% of outpatients in several large urban hospitals could not determine from an appointment slip when the next visit was scheduled and 42% could not understand instructions for taking medicine on an empty stomach. Among those with "inadequate" literacy, the failure rates on these two tasks were 40% and 65%, respectively. Substantial percentages of this low-literacy group were unable to report, when given prescription labels containing the necessary information, how to take the medication four times a day (24%), how many times the prescription could be refilled (42%), or how many pills of the prescription should be taken (70%). Taking medications improperly can be as harmful as not taking them at all, and the pharmacy profession has estimated that about half of all prescriptions are taken incorrectly. As in other performance domains, training and motivation do not erase the disadvantages of lower comprehension abilities. For instance, many patients who are under treatment for insulin-dependent diabetes do not understand the most elemental facts for maintaining daily control of their disease. In one study, about half of those with "inadequate" literacy did not know the signs of very low or very high blood sugar, both of which require expeditious correction, and 60% did not know the corrective actions to take. Like hypertension and many other chronic illnesses, diabetes requires continual self-monitoring and frequent judgments by patients to keep their physiological processes within safe limits during the day. Persistently high blood sugar levels can lead to blindness, heart disease, limb amputation, and much more. For persons in general, low functional literacy has been linked to number and severity of illnesses, worse self-rated health, far higher medical costs, and (prospectively) more frequent hospitalization. These relations are not eliminated by controlling for education, socioeconomic resources, access to health care, demographic characteristics, and other such variables.
Because health literacy is a rough surrogate for g, it produces results consistent with research on IQ and health. To take several examples, intelligence at time of diagnosis correlates .36 with diabetes knowledge measured one year later (Taylor, Frier, Gold, & Deary, in press). IQ measured at age 11 predicts longevity, incidence of cancer, and functional independence in old age, and these relations remain robust after controlling for deprived living conditions (Deary, Whiteman, Starr, & Whalley, in press). Another prospective epidemiological study found that the motor vehicle death rate for men of IQ 80-85 was triple and for men of IQ 85-100 it was double the rate for men of IQ 100-115 (O'Toole, 1990). Youthful IQ was the best predictor of all-cause mortality by age 40 in this large national sample of Australian Army veterans, and IQ's predictive value remained significant after controlling for all 56 demographic, health, and other attributes measured (O'Toole & Stankov, 1992). As in education, equal resources do not produce equal outcomes in health. Like educational inequalities, health inequalities increase when health resources become equally available to all, such as happened to the British government's dismay after it instituted free national health care. Health improves overall, but least for less educated and lower income persons. They seek more but not necessarily appropriate care when cost is no barrier; adhere less often to treatment regimens; learn and understand less about how to protect their health; seek less preventive care, even when free; and less often practice the healthy behaviors so important for preventing or slowing the progression of chronic diseases, the major killers and disablers in developed nations.
...Infusing more knowledge into the public sphere about health risks (smoking) and new diagnostic options (Pap smears) results in already-informed persons learning the most and more often acting on the new information. This may explain why an SES-mortality gradient favoring educated women developed for cervical cancer after Pap smears became available.
...After it became clear that health inequalities could not be explained by inequalities in material resources and access to health care, it became fashionable in health epidemiology to blame class and race differences in health on the psychic damage done by social inequality. We are now to believe that social inequality per se is literally a killer (Wilkinson, 1996). Physicians, like teachers, are increasingly being accused of racism and given sensitivity training when they fail to produce racial parity in outcomes (Satel, 2000). Mindful of ideologically correct thought, health literacy researchers who mention intelligence do so only to reject out of hand the notion that literacy might reflect intelligence, because any such notion would be racist and demeaning.
In the meantime, inadequate learning and reasoning abilities put many people at risk of taking medications in health-damaging ways, not grasping the merits of preventive precautions against chronic disease and accidents, and failing to properly implement potentially more effective but complex new treatment regimens for heart disease, hypertension, and other killers.
To intentionally ignore differences in mental competence is unconscionable. It is social science malpractice against the very people whom the "untruth" is supposedly meant to protect.
The results of a 1984 survey (Snyderman & Rothman, 1988) of experts on intelligence and mental testing therefore surprised even Jensen. The experts' modal response on every question that involved the "heretical" conclusions from Jensen's 1969 article was the same as his (Jensen, 1998, p. 198). (The experts' mean response overestimated test bias, however, because there is none against blacks or lower social class individuals; Jensen, 1980; Neisser et al., 1996; Snyderman & Rothman, 1988, p. 134; Wigdor & Garner, 1982). Here in abbreviated form are the survey's major questions and the 600 experts' responses.
Q: What are the important elements of intelligence?
A: "Near unanimity" (96-99%) for abstract thinking or reasoning, problem solving ability, and capacity to acquire knowledge (p. 56).
Q: Is intelligence best described as a single general factor with subsidiaries or as separate faculties?
A: A general factor (58%, or 67% of those responding; p. 71).
Q: What heritability would you estimate for IQ differences within the white population?
A: Average estimate of 57% (p. 95).
Q: What heritability would you estimate for IQ differences within the black population?
A: Average estimate of 57% (p. 95).
Q: Are intelligence tests biased against blacks?
A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean response of 2 (somewhat, p. 117).
Q: Are intelligence tests biased against lower social class individuals?
A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean response of 2 (somewhat, p. 118).
Q: What is the source of average social class differences in IQ?
A: Both genetic and environmental (55%, or 65% of those responding; p. 126).
Q: What is the source of the average black-white difference in IQ?
A: Both genetic and environmental (45%, or 52% of those responding; p. 128).
The supposedly fringe scientist, Jensen, was actually in the mainstream because the mainstream
had silently come to him, where it remains today (Gottfredson, 1997a). Meanwhile, public
opinion was still being pushed in the opposite direction, creating an ever greater gulf between
received opinion and scientifically informed thought.
...And why keep silent when the media promulgate clear falsehoods as scientific truths-especially when, as Snyderman and Rothman (1988) demonstrated, the media portray expert opinion on intelligence as the opposite of what it really is?
Early in my career I reported that bright boys who had attended a school for dyslexics did not enter the usual high-level jobs (medicine, law, science, and college teaching) but had nevertheless succeeded at a high level by entering prestigious or remunerative occupations that required above-average intelligence but relatively little reading or writing, specifically, top management and sales positions. A colleague accused me in that seminar of saying that "blacks can't make it because they are dumb."
The best informed, who are often called upon for expert comment, cannot endorse clear falsehoods without jeopardizing their own standing within the discipline, but they sometimes dispute minor issues in a manner that the uninformed mistake for wholesale repudiation (Gottfredson, 1994a; Page, 1972).
The implication of ABC's November 22, 1994, national newscast was surely not lost on viewers when, while exposing the supposedly unsavory history of intelligence research behind The Bell Curve, news anchor Peter Jennings followed photographs of Jensen and other supposed race scientists with footage of Nazi soldiers and what appeared to be death camp doctors and prisoners.
Critics have associated a belief in the hereditary basis of intelligence with evil intent so frequently and for so long that merely mentioning "IQ" is enough to trigger in many minds the words "pseudoscience," "racism," and "genocide." Even current APA president Robert Sternberg keeps the malicious association alive by regularly ridiculing and belittling empirically-minded intelligence researchers (e.g., comparing Jensen, in a book meant to honor him, to a child who would not grow up; Sternberg, 2003), referring to their work as "quasi-science" ("Science and pseudoscience," 1999, p. 27) that has "recreated a kind of night of the living dead" (Sternberg, 1997, p. 55), and sprinkling his descriptions of it with mentions of racism, slavery, and even Soviet tyranny (e.g., Sternberg, 2003; see also Sternberg, 2000, Sternberg & Wagner, 1993).
But why should we assume that a belief in the heritability of many human differences is dangerous and a belief in man's infinite malleability is not? Critics have yet to explain. Why is the former belief always yoked to Hitler, but the latter never to Stalin, who outlawed both intelligence tests and genetic thinking? Stalin killed at least as many as did Hitler in his effort to reshape the Soviet citizenry (Courtois, 1999).
Behavior geneticists distinguish between two types of environmental influence: shared and non-shared (also called between-family and within-family effects). Shared influences are those that make siblings more alike. Possible such influences would include parental income, education, child-rearing style, and the like, because they would impinge on all siblings in a household. Non-shared influences are those that affect individuals one person at a time and therefore make siblings less alike. Little is yet known about them, but they might include illness, accidents, non-genetic influences on fetal development, and the concatenation of unique experiences. To the great surprise even of behavior geneticists, shared environmental effects on intelligence (within the broad range of typical environments) wash away by late adolescence. IQ differences can be traced to both genes (40%) and shared environments (25%) in early childhood, but genetic effects increase in importance with age (to 80% in adulthood) while shared effects dissipate (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffin, 2001). For example, adoptive siblings end up no more alike in IQ or personality by adolescence than are random strangers, and instead become similar to the biological relatives they have never met.
Currently one of the biggest puzzles for family effects theory is that academic achievement gaps do not narrow even in settings where all the supposedly important environmental resources are present (Banchero & Little, 2002). For example, its adherents are now arguing among themselves (Lee, 2002) about the proper cultural explanation for the large black-white achievement gaps that persist in the most socioeconomically advantaged, integrated, liberal, suburban school districts in the United States, such as Shaker Heights, Ohio (Ogbu, 2003) and Berkeley, California (Noguera, 2001). Moreover, black-white test score gaps (IQ, SAT, etc.) tend to be larger at higher socioeconomic levels. This finding contradicts the predictions of family effects theory. It is consistent with g-based theory, however, because the latter predicts that black and white children of high-IQ parents will regress part way from their parents' mean toward different population means, IQ 100 for whites and IQ 85 for blacks.
The fictions about intelligence essentially deny that it exists, which virtually no one really believes. Many people just want a more "democratic" view of it. Not surprisingly, psychology's supply has risen to meet public demand, and the new egalitarian perspectives on human intelligence were instantly blessed by opinion makers. Chief among them are the "multiple intelligence" theories by psychologists Howard Gardner (1983, 1998) and Robert Sternberg (1997). The eager acceptance of their theories by educators, psychologists, and others has occurred despite neither of them providing credible evidence that their proposed intelligences actually exist, that is, as independent abilities of comparable generality and practical importance to g. Gardner has rejected even measuring his eight intelligences, let alone demonstrating that they predict anything (Hunt, 2001; Lubinski & Benbow, 1995). Study-by-study dissections of Sternberg's multiple-intelligence research program reveal no such evidence (Brody, 2003a, b; Gottfredson, 2003a, c). If anything, they confirm that all three of his proposed intelligences are just different flavors of g itself, as probably are most of Gardner's too (Carroll, 1993, p. 641).
In 1991, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to outlaw race-norming in employment after it learned that the Labor Department had already been race-norming its employment tests for a decade and that the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had started threatening private employers if they did not adopt the "scientifically-justified" practice.
The racial preferences that race-norming entails are hardly trivial. What the NRC report did not say was that blacks scoring at the 15th percentile in skill level on DOL's test would have been judged equal to whites and Asians scoring at the 50th percentile, and blacks at the 50th percentile would be rated comparably skilled as whites and Asians at the 84th (Blits & Gottfredson, 1990a). Seldom being apprised of such facts, most people greatly underestimate how discrepant the pools of qualified applicants are from which racial balance is supposed to emerge. Another illustration, pertinent to the next example, is that about 75% of whites vs. only 28% of blacks exceed the minimum IQ level (~IQ 91)-a ratio of 3 to 1-usually required for minimally satisfactory performance in the skilled trades, fire and police work, and mid-level clerical jobs such as bank teller (Gottfredson, 1986, pp. 400-401). The potential pools become increasingly racially lopsided for more cognitively demanding jobs. Workers in professional jobs such as engineer, lawyer, and physician typically need an IQ of at least 114 to perform satisfactorily. About 23% of whites but only 1% of blacks exceed this minimum....Developing tests that measure cognitive skills more effectively tends only to worsen the proscribed disparate impact. Adding relevant non-cognitive predictors to the mix does little to reduce the racial imbalance (Schmitt, Rogers, Chan, Sheppard, & Jennings, 1997).
The police selection test developed in 1994 for Nassau County, NY, represents one such "technical advance." The 10 members of a joint Nassau County-U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) team had set out to develop a police selection test with less disparate impact (more racially balanced results). The county had not been able to satisfy the DOJ's employment discrimination unit in several tries under its various consent decrees since 1977. (Recall the 3 to 1 ratio given above for the proportion of whites vs. blacks exceeding the ability level below which performance in police work tends to be unsatisfactory.) Seven of the team's eight psychologists constituted a Who's Who of APA's large Division 14 (Industrial and Organizational Psychology), four of them having previously served as its president. Several years and millions of dollars later, this high-powered team claimed to have succeeded in developing a test that virtually eliminated disparate impact while simultaneously improving selection validity. Water could run up-hill, after all. Once again, leading psychologists found a seemingly scientific solution to an intractable political-legal dilemma. DOJ immediately began pressing other police jurisdictions nationwide to replace their more "discriminatory" tests with the new selection battery.
A close look at the several-volume technical report for the Nassau test battery revealed that the team had succeeded in reducing disparate impact by, in effect, gerrymandering the test to assess only traits on which the races differed little or not at all (Gottfredson, 1996a, b). The joint Nassau-DOJ team had administered its nearly day-long, 25-part experimental battery to all 25,000 applicants, but settled on the battery's final composition only after examining the scores it yielded for different races. The experimental battery was then apparently stripped of virtually all parts demanding cognitive ability. The only parts actually used to rank applicants were eight non-cognitive personality scales (all commercial products owned by members of the team) and being able to read above the 1st percentile of currently employed police officers (near illiteracy). Selection for cognitive competence had been reduced to little more than the toss of a coin, despite the team's own careful job analysis having shown that "reasoning, judgment, and inferential thinking" were the most critical skills for good police work.
The new police test was made to appear more valid than the county's previous ones by, among other things, omitting key results required by legal and professional guidelines, transforming the data in ways that artificially reduced the apparent validity of the cognitive subtests relative to the non-cognitive ones, and making a series of statistical errors that more than doubled the final battery's apparent predictive validity (from .14 to .35). When exposed, the test created a scandal in Division 14 ("The Great Debate of 1997" in Hakel, 1997, p. 116), partly because other leading selection psychologists expected its use would produce less effective policing and degrade public safety (Schmidt, 1996).
Even the most objective, most carefully vetted procedures for identifying talent are instantly pronounced guilty of bias or "exclusion" when they yield disparate impact in hiring, college admissions, placement in gifted education, and the like. Indeed, the very notions of objectivity and merit are now under attack by influential intellectual elites (Farber & Sherry, 1997). When faithful and fair application of the law yields disparate impact in arrest or incarceration rates, American jurisprudence must be considered inherently racist (see arguments in Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995). When earnest, socially liberal teachers fail to narrow the stubborn achievement gaps between races and classes, they must be unconsciously discriminatory and require diversity training. Because American institutions still routinely and almost everywhere fail to yield the desired racial balance, the Americans who created and supposedly control those institutions-majority Americans-must be judged deeply, unconsciously, inveterately racist and to have created a society where appearances to the contrary are just a smokescreen to hide their built-in privileges. Under the equipotentiality fiction, there can be no other legitimate explanation, and any attempt at one serves only to evade responsibility.
Fewer but still many social scientists hold to a fourth false credo-that intelligence has little or no functional utility, at least outside schools. Moreover, they often add that the advantages and disadvantages of high or low IQ are mostly "socially constructed" to serve the interests of the privileged. This view was articulated in an influential article published soon after Jensen's 1969 article by economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1972/1973). They argued that higher IQ does not have any functional utility, even within schools, and that IQ tests are simply a tool created by the upper classes to maintain and justify their privileges. They dismissed talk of "objectivity" and "merit" as just smoke blown to obscure this fact. Psychologist Robert Sternberg implies much the same when he suggests that the g factor dimension of intellectual differences is an artifact of Western schooling (Sternberg et al., 2000, p. 9) and that using cognitive tests such as the SAT to sort people is akin to the way slavery and religious prejudice were once used to keep disfavored groups down (Sternberg, 2003).
However, when critics argue that IQ differences have little or no functional meaning beyond that which cultures or their elites arbitrarily attach to them for selfish purposes, they simultaneously turn attention away from the very real problems that lower intelligence creates for less able persons. As Herrnstein and Murray (1994) note, the critics generally have little contact with the downtrodden they would protect. These bright opinion makers may be living comfortably with their fictions and benevolent lies, but lower-IQ individuals must live daily with the consequences of their weaker learning and reasoning skills. Their distant protectors would seem to be the limousine liberals of intelligence.
I focus below on everyday tasks that higher-IQ individuals consider so simple that they do not realize how such tasks might create obstacles to the well-being of others less cognitively blessed.
Functional literacy and daily self-maintenance. Citizens of literate societies take for granted that they are routinely called upon to read instructions, fill out forms, determine best buys, decipher bus schedules, and otherwise read and write to cope with the myriad details of everyday life. But such tasks are difficult for many people. The problem is seldom that they cannot read or write the words, but usually that they are unable to carry out the mental operations the task calls for-to compare two items, grasp an abstract concept, provide comprehensible and accurate information about themselves, follow a set of instructions, and so on. This is what it means to have poor "functional literacy." Functional literacy has been a major public policy concern, as illustrated by the U.S. Department of Education's various efforts to gauge its level in different segments of the American population. Tests of functional literacy essentially mimic individually-administered intelligence tests, except that all their items come from everyday life, such as calculating a tip (see extended discussion in Gottfredson, 1997b). As on intelligence tests, differences in item difficulty rest on the items' cognitive complexity (their abstractness, amount of distracting irrelevant information, and degree of inference required), not on their readability per se or the level of education test takers have completed. Literacy researchers have concluded, with some surprise, that functional literacy represents a general capacity to learn, reason, and solve problems-a veritable description of g.
The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS; Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) groups literacy scores into five levels. Individuals scoring in Level 1 have an 80% chance of successfully performing tasks similar in difficulty to locating an expiration date on a driver's license and totaling a bank deposit slip. They are not routinely able to perform Level 2 tasks, such as determining the price difference between two show tickets or filling in background information on an application for a social security card. Level 3 difficulty includes writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill and using a flight schedule to plan travel. Level 4 tasks include restating an argument made in a lengthy news article and calculating the money needed to raise a child based on information in a news article. Only at Level 5 are individuals routinely able to perform mental tasks as complex as summarizing two ways that lawyers challenge prospective jurors (based on a passage discussing such practices) and, with a calculator, determining the total cost of carpet to cover a room.
Although these tasks might seem to represent only the inconsequential minutiae of everyday life, they sample the large universe of mostly untutored tasks that modern life demands of adults. Consistently failing them is not just a daily inconvenience, but a compounding problem. Likening functional literacy to money-it always helps to have more-, literacy researchers point out that rates of socioeconomic distress and pathology (unemployment, adult poverty, etc.) rise steadily at successively lower levels of functional literacy (as is the pattern for IQ too; Gottfredson, 2002a)...Such disadvantage is common, too, because 40% of the adult white population and 80% of the adult black population cannot routinely perform above Level 2. Fully 14% and 40%, respectively, cannot routinely perform even above Level 1 (Kirsch et al., 1993, pp. 119121). To claim that lower-ability citizens will only be victimized by the public knowing that differences in intelligence are real, stubborn, and important is to ignore the practical hurdles they face.
Health literacy, IQ, and health self-care. The challenges in self-care for lower-IQ individuals are especially striking in health matters, where the consequences of poor performance are tallied in excess morbidity and mortality. Health psychologists have ignored the role of competence in health behavior, focusing instead on volition. Patient "non-compliance" is indeed a huge problem in medicine, but health literacy researchers, unlike health psychologists, have concluded that it is more a matter of patients not understanding what is required of them than being unwilling to implement it (reviews in Gottfredson, 2002a, in press).
...For example, 26% of outpatients in several large urban hospitals could not determine from an appointment slip when the next visit was scheduled and 42% could not understand instructions for taking medicine on an empty stomach. Among those with "inadequate" literacy, the failure rates on these two tasks were 40% and 65%, respectively. Substantial percentages of this low-literacy group were unable to report, when given prescription labels containing the necessary information, how to take the medication four times a day (24%), how many times the prescription could be refilled (42%), or how many pills of the prescription should be taken (70%). Taking medications improperly can be as harmful as not taking them at all, and the pharmacy profession has estimated that about half of all prescriptions are taken incorrectly. As in other performance domains, training and motivation do not erase the disadvantages of lower comprehension abilities. For instance, many patients who are under treatment for insulin-dependent diabetes do not understand the most elemental facts for maintaining daily control of their disease. In one study, about half of those with "inadequate" literacy did not know the signs of very low or very high blood sugar, both of which require expeditious correction, and 60% did not know the corrective actions to take. Like hypertension and many other chronic illnesses, diabetes requires continual self-monitoring and frequent judgments by patients to keep their physiological processes within safe limits during the day. Persistently high blood sugar levels can lead to blindness, heart disease, limb amputation, and much more. For persons in general, low functional literacy has been linked to number and severity of illnesses, worse self-rated health, far higher medical costs, and (prospectively) more frequent hospitalization. These relations are not eliminated by controlling for education, socioeconomic resources, access to health care, demographic characteristics, and other such variables.
Because health literacy is a rough surrogate for g, it produces results consistent with research on IQ and health. To take several examples, intelligence at time of diagnosis correlates .36 with diabetes knowledge measured one year later (Taylor, Frier, Gold, & Deary, in press). IQ measured at age 11 predicts longevity, incidence of cancer, and functional independence in old age, and these relations remain robust after controlling for deprived living conditions (Deary, Whiteman, Starr, & Whalley, in press). Another prospective epidemiological study found that the motor vehicle death rate for men of IQ 80-85 was triple and for men of IQ 85-100 it was double the rate for men of IQ 100-115 (O'Toole, 1990). Youthful IQ was the best predictor of all-cause mortality by age 40 in this large national sample of Australian Army veterans, and IQ's predictive value remained significant after controlling for all 56 demographic, health, and other attributes measured (O'Toole & Stankov, 1992). As in education, equal resources do not produce equal outcomes in health. Like educational inequalities, health inequalities increase when health resources become equally available to all, such as happened to the British government's dismay after it instituted free national health care. Health improves overall, but least for less educated and lower income persons. They seek more but not necessarily appropriate care when cost is no barrier; adhere less often to treatment regimens; learn and understand less about how to protect their health; seek less preventive care, even when free; and less often practice the healthy behaviors so important for preventing or slowing the progression of chronic diseases, the major killers and disablers in developed nations.
...Infusing more knowledge into the public sphere about health risks (smoking) and new diagnostic options (Pap smears) results in already-informed persons learning the most and more often acting on the new information. This may explain why an SES-mortality gradient favoring educated women developed for cervical cancer after Pap smears became available.
...After it became clear that health inequalities could not be explained by inequalities in material resources and access to health care, it became fashionable in health epidemiology to blame class and race differences in health on the psychic damage done by social inequality. We are now to believe that social inequality per se is literally a killer (Wilkinson, 1996). Physicians, like teachers, are increasingly being accused of racism and given sensitivity training when they fail to produce racial parity in outcomes (Satel, 2000). Mindful of ideologically correct thought, health literacy researchers who mention intelligence do so only to reject out of hand the notion that literacy might reflect intelligence, because any such notion would be racist and demeaning.
In the meantime, inadequate learning and reasoning abilities put many people at risk of taking medications in health-damaging ways, not grasping the merits of preventive precautions against chronic disease and accidents, and failing to properly implement potentially more effective but complex new treatment regimens for heart disease, hypertension, and other killers.
To intentionally ignore differences in mental competence is unconscionable. It is social science malpractice against the very people whom the "untruth" is supposedly meant to protect.