Books
None of the Above
What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race.
By Malcolm Gladwell
THE NEW YORKER
Monday, December 17, 2007
Correction Appended
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell#editorsnote
[Caption] 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 0.3 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.?
CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, "None of the
Above," Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and
Charles Murray, in their 1994 book "The Bell Curve,"
proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be "sequestered in a
‘high-tech' version of an Indian reservation." In fact,
Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such
"custodialism" and recommended that steps be taken to avert
it. We regret the error.
Related Link
Audio: Malcolm Gladwell on race and I.Q.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/17/071217on_audio_gladwell
Keywords
I.Q.s; Race; Flynn, James; "What Is Intelligence?"
(Cambridge; $22); Flynn effect; Intelligence; Racism
More at:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell
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