Mitt Romney is the
President of white male America.
-- Maureen
Dowd, New York Times Columnist
Amid the
post-Presidential election head shaking, while analysts are slicing
the electorate into statistical racial, ethnic and economic slivers
to try to determine why Americans voted the way they did . . . I
noted the passing of a man who incited a major and discomfiting
political debate over the real differences between racial and ethnic
groups.
Arthur
Jensen died just a few days before the 2012 Presidential election at
the age of 89. He was the University of California, Berkeley,
psychology professor best known for his efforts to prove that the
average member of some ethnic groups come into the world equipped
with less “general intelligence” than the members of other ethnic
groups, including whites.
In his book, Straight Talk about
Mental Tests he enumerated
two of his tenets:
(1) In human
populations there is a well-recognized trait that can be called
general mental ability or intelligence, in which differences among
persons can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy by appropriate
tests (often called IQ tests);
(2) Observed
differences among persons in this trait are largely attributable to
genetic inheritance.
He
did not include in the enumeration another of his conclusions, but
neither did he back away from it: Because the average IQ scores of
some minority groups – including African Americans and Hispanics –
are measurably lower than whites and Asians, most members of those
ethnic groups are born with less mental ability than whites and
Asians.
In 1980,
I spent an uncomfortable 15 minutes on live television interviewing
Professor Jensen after the publication of his most ambitious book,
Bias in Mental Testing. In
the book, Jensen phrased his conclusions carefully and
narrowly, wrapping them in 786 of pages of statistical analysis and
complex calculations that were virtually incomprehensible to the
average reader. But a good portion of the popular press and some
groups with questionable agendas grabbed hold of Jensen's conclusions
and ran with them. Period. Too bad. Deal with it minority people,
you can't fight science.
Jensen's
argument was seductive in its mathematical complexity. There is no
debate about his statement that African-Americans and Hispanics
consistently have lower average scores on certain sections of
standardized tests than other groups, including people with Northern
European and Asian ancestors. But he set off fireworks by
resurrecting a theory and terminology created by psychologist Charles
Spearman in 1905, concluding that the statistical clusters of test
scores within ethnic groups are an accurate measure of the group's
hereditary mental capacity.
In our
televised interview, Jensen spent much time emphasizing the dangers
of reading too much into his conclusions. Unfortunately, too much
time was spent parsing words, and I'm afraid the interview generated
very little heat or light. But on paper, though the mathematics
strewn throughout his book is intimidating, Jensen's conclusions are
comfortably simple and intuitive.
The
outcome of an IQ test is straightforward – a single number that is
meant to represent a person's innate mental capacity. It's a number
that can and has been used to compare one person's mental worth to
others. The best schools, the best opportunities are often made
available to those with the highest numbers.
The
use of numbers to quantify
intelligence is hardly
new. Even before the
development of standardized tests, intelligence researchers devised
formulas that ranked
innate mental capacity based
on the physical size of the
brain. Looking at those
numbers, researchers
deduced that women could
never be expected to function
at the same intellectual
level
as men.
In
1903, statistical researcher
Léonce Manouvrier described
the effect those
numbers had on the debate
about women's
place
in society:“Women displayed
their talents and their diplomas. They also invoked philosophical
authorities. But they were opposed by numbers. . . . These
numbers fell upon poor women like a sledge hammer . . .
Theologians had once asked if
women had a soul. Several centuries later some
scientists were ready to refuse them
a human intelligence.”
In first
four decades of the 20th century, American developers of
“I.Q.” tests had an overt political agenda. Their test results
were used in a successful campaign to get the U.S. Congress to
tighten immigration quotas to keep the country's gene pool from being
polluted by ethnic and racial groups with a hereditary lack of
intelligence. Among those excluded because of their limited
intelligence, as demonstrated by I.Q. tests, were Jews and Asians.
That policy had tragic implications for many Jews seeking refuge from
the Holocaust during World War II. There is bitter irony in the fact
that Jews and Asians are among the groups with the highest average
“general intelligence” scores on today's standardized tests.
Until I
began preparing for the interview with Professor Jensen, I had never
given serious thought to the question Jensen's research and writings
brought to the forefront: Can we rely on modern intelligence tests to
tell us something useful about a group of people? Professor Jensen,
in claiming the thing standardized tests measure to be innate
“general intelligence” implies the answer is yes.
But can
it be used at a group level to predict performance or success in
school, work, or life in general?
In a
report sponsored by the Ralph Nader's organization, author Allan
Nairn produced data showing that
the results
of standardized Scholastic
Aptitude Tests (the “SAT”)
had a higher correlation with the household
income of a test-taker's
parents than with future
academic success. In
fact, parental
income turned out to be a
better predictor of how well an individual will
do on standardized tests than
ethnicity.
In a 2009 paper entitled, “Reflections on a Century of College
Admission Tests*,” former University of California President
Richard Atkinson and Saul Geiser of UC-Berkley's Center for Studies
in Higher Education concluded simply, “High-school
grades are the best indicator of student readiness for college, and
standardized tests are useful
primarily as a supplement to the high school record.”
Still, psychologists and social scientists are uncomfortable dealing
with criteria where they can't control all of the variables. Some
schools have higher standards than others, some schools offer more
activities, and some teachers pack their grade books with A's, others
with C's and D's.
In theory, a person making hiring or college admission decisions
based on standardized test scores should be bias-free because the
decision-maker's mind is uncluttered with biases about whether the
owner of an individual score is black, white, Asian or Latino; rich
or poor, short or tall, attractive or homely. The flaw in that
theory is, the test itself seems to have a good general idea about
which groups a test-taker belongs to.
In their paper Atkinson and Geiser cited a study of admission
applications for the University of California that found when UC
applicants were ranked by SAT scores, only half as many Latino,
African-American and American Indian students appeared in the top
third of the applicant pool as when the same students were arranged
by high school grades. Whatever their other virtues, standardized
tests appear to put some racial and ethnic groups at a competitive
disadvantage not supported by other criteria.
In The Mismeasure of Man, Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould
observed that, historically, efforts to rank intelligence by group
“invariably find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups – races,
classes, or sexes-- are innately inferior and deserve their status.”
If Jensen had called his statistical clusters something like
“ethnic\racial testing differential” his work would likely have
been largely ignored outside of the testing community because it
would have been considered a characteristic of the test. But calling
it “general intelligence” assigns the characteristic to an
entire, identifiable group of people, providing a reason to regard
that group as qualitatively different from the norm.
Leaping back to the subject of electoral politics, remember the 47
percent of all Americans who were characterized as “takers”?
Pundits have spent much of their post-Presidential election energy
defining individual ethnic groups by how they voted. Certainly,
common attitudes within an ethnic group is a valid thing to study,
but I would suggest that we not allow ourselves to become distracted
from looking at the most obvious characteristic that defined the
largest group of voters in the 2012 general election: They favored a
politically moderate President and rejected candidates who were on
the extreme fringe of the political spectrum.
As analysts and statisticians sort individuals into narrower and
narrower groups, I like to keep in mind one characteristic we all
share. When things go wrong and it's fight or flight time, we
instinctively divide the people around us into just two groups: Us
and them.
This year, Republican strategist Karl Rove discovered how costly it
can be to use the wrong criteria to define us.
