Oct. 18, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:11
3104 Does Poverty Impact Intelligence? | Eric Turkheimer and Stefan Molyneux
Does economic status have an impact on Intelligence? Dr. Eric Turkheimer discusses his research on how "Socioeconomic Status Modifies Heritability of IQ in Young Children," nature versus nurture, the genetics of personality and what can be done so that children reach their full potential. Socioeconomic Status Modifies Heritability of IQ in Young Childrenhttp://pss.sagepub.com/content/14/6/623.shortEric Turkheimer is currently a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is an Associate Editor of Behavior Genetics and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Developmental Psychology. In 2009, he was awarded the James Shields Award for excellence in twin research by the Behavior Genetics Association and the International Society for Twin Research. He is currently incoming President of the Behavior Genetics Association. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
We're very pleased to add to our ongoing discussion on race, ethnicity, and IQ gaps by bringing on Dr.
Eric Turkheimer, who is the professor and director of clinical training at the University of Virginia at the moment.
We've had some theoreticians on to try and explain ethnic Dr.
Turkheimer is very focused on the environmental explanations for ethnic IQ gaps, and I really wanted you to have the chance to hear his arguments to bring a more balanced view to this highly challenging issue.
Dr.
Turkheimer also focuses on twin studies a lot.
He's developed new statistical methodologies for analyzing the children of twins, and he is a very Well-respected, well-regarded in his field, and I really wanted you to have a chance to hear the case for the environmental causes for some ethnic differences in IQ. So, without any further ado, I'm very pleased to present my interview with Dr.
Eric Turkheimer.
So, I guess my first question, or really a comment, as a thoroughly confused and frustrated layperson is, Everybody just needs to get their act together.
I need to know what percentage is genetic.
I need it accurate to two decimal places, and it needs to be perfectly predictable across all genders and ethnic groups.
So I'm going to hope that at the end of this conversation, we'll have it all squared away.
There'll be no confusion, and there won't be any more of this.
I read this person, and they seem very convincing.
And then I read the next person, and they seem very convincing.
And my head spins around like a little kid in a poltergeist movie.
So that's the goal.
I'm sure we can achieve it.
I'm sorry?
You're talking to the wrong guy because I think my reputation is as someone who makes things more confusing rather than less.
But I'll do my best.
Okay.
So at the moment, where do you see things standing in the genetics versus environment?
We'll talk about personality in a moment, but just with regards to intelligence, whatever we can assume that is going to mean in this conversation.
Well, you know, if I can go back to what you just said about how there's so much disagreement about the data, I'm not sure I think that's true.
I think there's actually pretty broad agreement about the data, but there is disagreement about what the data mean.
I think there's, in fact, by now, pretty broadly, you could find people who disagree, but Pretty broadly, I think people know that identical twins are more similar on intelligence tests than fraternal twins are, and that in general, the more similar you are genetically, the more similar you are for IQ, if we can call it that.
And people have known that for a long time.
And I think where the Disagreement comes in is understanding what that means about IQ. And, well, I mean, I imagine that's what we're going to spend most of the hour talking about because I have my own interpretation of what that means,
whereas there are both people who think it means more, that there are genes for IQ and we should be looking around in the brain somewhere, burp, I don't really think that's very productive myself.
And there are people who think it means less because, I don't know, IQ tests aren't meaningful or whatever.
So I think the disagreement that you're finding is people still trying to arrange themselves understanding a fact that was discovered more than 50 years ago, which is identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins on IQ tests.
And that, of course, is not environmentally specific.
So if they're raised in different environments, some of that similarity still retains.
Is that fair?
Yes.
Well, I mean, I guess you're referring to my research about how it varies as a function of poverty.
And let's hold off on that, if you don't mind, for just a second, because I want to address, and this is another topic where I might disagree with some other people you've talked to.
You asked me, and I know you were partly kidding, about getting everything nailed down on exactly what the heritability of intelligence actually is.
Is it.4 or.5 or.7 or whatever?
I think one thing that's very important to me and even beyond the problems that are introduced by the interactions that I've reported with poverty is that I don't think it's a meaningful question to ask what is the heritability of intelligence.
The heritability of intelligence isn't anything.
It's the most standard thing that anybody says about this, that a heritability coefficient is population specific and depends on where and when you study it.
I take that position a little bit more literally, I think, than most people do.
You can make the heritability of intelligence equal to anything you want it to.
If you find a bunch of people, which actually you can't do this in people, but you could do it in rats or mice, find a bunch of inbred rats and mice who are all genetically equivalent, The heritability of ability, however you measured it in the rodents, would be zero.
If you get a bunch of rodents who are all raised in identical cages with identical environments, the heritability would be one, because all the variability would be genetic.
Those things are harder to do in But it remains true that the heritability of anything depends on how genes and environment happen to be varying at the time, and those things change.
I just don't regard the whole discussion of is the heritability of intelligence 0.8 or 0.6 or 0.4 or 0.3.
I just don't think that's an interesting discussion.
It's not zero and it's not one.
Those are two things that we know and there are implications of the fact that it isn't zero or one.
And there are I don't know that there's anybody who'd want to act like it's one, but there still are people out there who want to act like it's zero, and the fact that it isn't makes them wrong about certain things.
But beyond that, I don't think it matters.
And then, well, maybe I'll let you squeeze a question in here before I rant on.
Well, it's just more of a comment.
I mean, the approach that I've taken in this show is that I think that From a theoretical standpoint, the question is very interesting.
From a practical standpoint, I think it's best to approach as if it's zero because there's so much that we can do to improve the quality of children's lives.
That I wouldn't want us to hesitate or feel bound by some upper limit.
I think we should act as if it's zero, work as much as humanly possible to improve the quality of children's upbringing, education, love, nurturing, stimulation, and so on.
And maybe if there's something left over after that multi-generational project, then we can get back to the genetics.
It's sort of like if you don't think you can run a race, you won't run as fast.
You know, the fastest runners run with someone who's pacing them.
I think if we take the assumption at the moment that it's zero, I think that stimulates a huge amount of social activity to improve the quality of children's upbringing.
Maybe we'll find out after a while, and it could be a long while, maybe we'll find out that there is some limit.
But I think we're a long way from there because there's so much that can be done to improve children's existence.
I basically agree with you.
I don't think we have to assume that the heritability is zero to justify those efforts to change and increase intelligence environmentally.
I haven't watched all of your interviews on this, so always feel free to stop me if I'm repeating something that somebody else has talked about.
One of the most basic things about the heritability of anything is that heritability doesn't constrain malleability.
So something can be very, very heritable and still be environmentally manipulable.
Oh, so like height, like if you don't get enough food, you may end up stunted, and so you won't reach your full potential.
If we studied height now, it has a heritability of 0.9 or so, but...
Between the period before World War II and now, the height of Japanese people has increased by six inches on average.
And that's not a genetic change.
It's an environmental change.
And Or another standard example is the single gene genetic disorder, phenylketonuria, which prevents people from being able to digest phenylalanine, which is common in foods.
And if they do, it poisons them and leads to mental retardation and eventually death.
It's as straightforward a genetic disorder as there is.
The treatment for it is 100%.
You don't do gene therapy.
The treatment for it is you avoid foods that have phenylalanine in them.
And if you do, you avoid the consequences.
So it's something that is an absolutely heritable genetic thing for which the treatment is environmental.
So I think the two things, the question of are the IQs of parents and children related to each other for, in part, genetic reasons.
The answer to that can be yes, and then you can ask a separate question.
Your question, is intelligence malleable, and are there things that we can do to improve anybody's IQ, regardless of What their genetic background may or may not be, and the answer to that question is yes.
And those two questions can be studied and theorized about separately.
One doesn't necessarily constrain the other.
Right, right, okay.
Now, the work that you did, I think it's one of your most widely cited articles, I think over 700 citations, the work that you did in 03 regarding the higher degree, if I understand this right, the higher degree to which Um, genetics plays a role in the final IQs of children from higher socioeconomic status or middle class kids or whatever.
And the degree to which environment seems to dominate for lower class or lower socioeconomic status kids.
I kind of get it and I kind of don't.
And so if you could just help sort of break that out for the audience and I've got a sort of follow up question or two as to why that might be the case.
Background on it first.
Uh, One characteristic of twin studies, particularly twin studies that were conducted more than 20 years ago, is that they systematically excluded poor people.
The reason for that was there were, and to some extent still are, two kinds of twin studies.
There were mostly American twin studies, which were volunteer-based.
People would go to twin fairs or something, where twin families come and say, oh, would you like to be in our study or whatever.
And any kind of volunteer-based study like that, many more, it's very helpful.
Very poor people have other things to do than participate in research studies.
And So the early American twin studies all didn't have any poor people in them.
The other major kind of twin study, classically, is conducted in Europe, mostly in Scandinavia, where they keep big population registers of everybody in the country in a way that we couldn't much do in this country because people don't like big national databases tracking people like that here.
So they don't systematically exclude people, but you don't have poverty in the same way in Sweden and Denmark as you do here.
So anyway, poor people had traditionally been excluded.
We identified a data set that was actually collected in the United States back in the 60s and 70s called the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, which wasn't a twin study.
It was a very large study of pregnant mothers, the birth of their children, and then they followed the kids through age seven.
50,000 kids married to about 35,000 mothers.
They oversampled for poor mothers.
And in the normal course of events, three or four hundred pairs of twins were born.
And so we identified data from those twins.
They'd given them IQ tests as the kids were growing up, especially at age seven, and did a twin analysis based on those twins.
At about the same time, other people had developed new statistical models.
And so the traditional twin study leads to a set of percentages that I'm sure you've discussed as you've been discussing this.
60% of the differences look genetic and 20% of the differences look like family environment, etc., etc.
A typical study predicted one set of percentages.
These new computer and statistical methods allowed us to Basically compute that percentage for each family and ask how do these percentages change as you move from very poor families through lower middle class families up into middle class and wealthier families, though there weren't many in this particular study.
And what we found was exactly what you described, that if you look at the poorest families, the differences among children in population The importance of genes went up and up and up.
The two lines, the genes and family environment, crossed in the middle class somewhere, and by the time you got to the best of families, differences looked almost entirely genetic.
So to analogize that, again, correct me if I go astray, I always like to dumb it down as if I'm four and a half years old.
But so to analogize that, going back to the height example, if you have poor families who have chronic malnutrition, we would expect the variance in height to be largely environmental because they didn't have the kind of nutrition that would give the full extension of height potential.
That would happen genetically.
Among richer families, the variation would be more genetic because the limiting factor of not enough food would not be present.
Is that a rough way to analogize it?
Yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't limit it to food.
I think there are a lot of things.
And if I had to guess, I would say, and this is a bit of a guess, good schools are really an important thing.
But like I say, that's a bit of a guess from reading between the lines.
But yes, things like that, you know.
So the triple, the sort of three legs of the stool of outcome, as far as I understand it, is, you know, first genetics, and the second is the shared environment, which is the family, and then the third is the non-shared environment, which as far as I understand it is kind of everything outside the family.
Did you find that the family or the shared environment or the non-shared environment had a greater predictor in terms of IQ? Well, both.
I mean, the non-shared environment always accounts for some of the differences because, like you say, it's everything that's left over, including what we call measurement error, just somebody having a bad day or the IQ test not working very well.
So that's never going to go away.
In our study, it was very much a trade-off between genetics and shared family environment.
The non-shared environment was pretty flat across socioeconomic status.
The differences among, say, shared environment and non-shared environment are not something I would necessarily want to bet the farm on because in sample sizes of the kind we had, it's pretty hard to tell them apart.
So that particular study looked very much like families.
and I think most of the studies since then that have reproduced the finding at all, which isn't 100% of them, have looked the same way.
In fact, the largest study that was ever conducted of this kind in England suggested that the effect was More in family effects going down than it was in genetic effects going up.
The genetic effects were relatively flat.
It was there.
It just looked all like a family effect, you know, a family environmental effect.
And I certainly appreciate your point about schools.
And another couple of things popped up into my head, and I don't know whether that's Thank you.
Thank you.
which I think by definition would have fewer resources available to parents.
So that may be one thing.
And the other thing is that I wonder the degree to which, and this is sort of a stereotype, so forgive me if it goes amiss, but I sort of look at middle class families.
They're reading their books on parenting and how to negotiate with your kids and they like timeouts and so on.
Whereas the lower socioeconomic status parents might rely more on corporal discipline and punishment and so on.
And that may have an effect.
Some of these studies that I've done with, I've reviewed and had experts on, Elizabeth Gershaw in particular, Have talked about the degree to which corporal punishment seems to have a negative effect on IQ potential.
So I'm just wondering the degree to which maybe single moms not having enough resources and maybe the degree to which harried and parents without resources may resort more to corporal punishment, whether that may have an influence on eventual IQ. I both don't want to get beyond my own data.
It's lovely over here in the world of speculation.
Don't be afraid.
We'll put the cap here, Senator.
We don't have a whole lot of detail about what was going on in these families.
We know how much money they have, basically, and how much education the parents have.
And I think it's the nature of the beast that these kind of environmental effects are very divided up among a million different...
I don't think we're going to find the special sauce that, ah, it's nutrition or it's reading to your kids.
I think it's the small effects of all these things combined together into this big thing that we call poverty.
And what the word poverty means is being impoverished in a million small ways.
And my own suspicion is that that in the long run is what's going to make the difference.
The other thing is that, and I think this is more database, that.
This is an effect that happens much more in severely deprived environments than it does in modestly deprived environments.
When you mention the single mother who doesn't have as much time to read to her kids, I'm not sure that that's what we're talking about.
The parents who are Where things are so disorderly that they don't have any time to spend with their kids.
I think that's where the real difference lies.
And the other side of this, of course, is that it suggests that among those of us who are lucky enough to raise our children in Pretty good surroundings.
A lot of the things that we spend a lot of time worrying about, hanging the nice mobiles over our kids' cribs, maybe don't really make all that much difference.
I mean, at least if what you're talking about is their IQ scores, and there are other reasons to do things like that, but I think among pretty good environments, those things do not have direct effects on IQ scores.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it's what they call the first world problems, you know, like, it's not like I have to worry about getting enough to eat.
It's that my taxes can be kind of onerous, which, of course, may seem like a big deal until you run out of stuff to eat.
So I can certainly appreciate that.
Now, some of your work has...
You didn't mention race in your original formulation, if I remember correctly, but some people, of course, have taken that and said, you know, the great challenge, I think, of intelligence's ethnic differences, which, again, we've talked about on this show before, that was originally, I think, a little bit more than a standard deviation between whites and blacks has now narrowed, fortunately, of course, since the 70s, but that if poverty and environment...
The environment of poverty combines to produce IQ challenges that this may have some explanatory power as to the black-white IQ gap.
I was just wondering where you stand on that challenge.
Well, I'm a very, very strong believer that racial differences as observed in this country nowadays are environmental in origin.
As my friend Richard Nisbet, who would be a great person for you to interview, said, you know, I'm not an agnostic on this topic.
I'm an atheist.
And I mean, that's also a very big topic that would take a long time to explore the whole thing.
But yes, I mean, if we know anything, as I sort of said at the beginning, completely aside from the genetic data and the fact that Within, quote, races, I'm not a big believer in the whole concept of race, but within skin color differences in the United States...
It's certainly the case that IQ scores run in families for in part genetic reasons.
But nevertheless, we know that intelligence is malleable environmentally.
We know it.
That is unquestionably true.
And we know unquestionably that African-American people raise their children in circumstances that are much more difficult than Caucasian families, so-called.
That has an effect.
Now, is that effect somewhat hard to quantify?
Yes, it is.
It's not easy to For a lot of reasons.
To say, well, here's the study that just shows that if you ended racism in this country, the IQ difference would go away in two years.
Those are not easy data to obtain.
And as a result of that, that other hypothesis is always out there.
And it's hard to make that other hypothesis go away.
You mean the hypothesis that there are potentially genetic differences in brain size, brain potential, brain complexity, white matter, and so on?
And it's not something I subscribe to because this is the last...
To me, it would require a smoking gun, a video, a guy standing over the body for that case to be made because it is such a contentious case that we never would want to leap over and get there ahead of the data.
I should watch Dr.
Murray's interview.
I don't know if he tried to make the case.
One thing that's happened in the genetics of IQ literature in the last 10 years is that people have looked really hard to find particular genes that might explain a big chunk of I think we're absolutely certain about this now, is broken up into the tiny effects of thousands of genes.
To me, it's very hard to see How that kind of genetic architecture, those kind of tiny individual genetic effects, could produce a group difference of the kind we're talking about.
Because you'd have to have genetic differences on thousands of genes somehow all coming together.
So I think that hypothesis has gotten a lot less likely as we've gotten better biological understanding of the way genetics works.
Yeah, I mean, as far as I understand it, even something like height is the interaction of hundreds, if not thousands, of genes.
And I would assume, I'm no biologist, but I would assume that the spine is a little bit less complicated than the human brain, which seems about the most complicated thing in existence.
So the idea that there's going to be any clearly identifiable smoking gun with regards to genetic influences on IQ, let's just say, to put it as charitably as possible, it doesn't exactly seem imminent.
So I think that we can do as much as possible to remediate circumstances.
and cast that aside until better data is available and the other thing is in in biological time or I mean and then even more so in evolutionary time the amount of time since black people were slaves in this country is an instant it's a fraction of an instant and you know the expectation that What's supposed to happen is that,
what was it, 400 years ago, we were pulling people under murderous circumstances against their will out of Africa, putting them in slavery in this country for 200 years, then 100 years of Jim Crow after that, followed by 50 years or whatever it is since the Civil Rights Act, which has hardly made things perfect.
That by now that important index of psychological functioning is supposed to be perfect, it's nuts to me.
Well, of course, but the counter to that, which I simply put forward as a devil's advocate position, but the counter to that is to say that there are black populations or African populations that can be studied and can be tested from an IQ standpoint that have not experienced direct European or Islamic enslavement.
And do not experience colonization and so on and there are some people of course you say that you'll still find significant deficits although you have of course put out something I think relatively recently pointing out that if you train even sub-saharan blacks on IQ tests you can get significant scores score improvements.
That's not my finding but it's true.
So the argument is that If you can train people to improve IQ, then the great question of G, you know, and I want to sort of touch on this briefly because, of course, Murray is a big fan of G and Flynn and yourself, I think, are significant critics of G. G being the general intelligence, the idea that there's an underlying architecture of the brain that may include faster processing, better reaction times, more brain mass or whatever.
There's an underlying intelligence that drives success in a variety of intelligence tests.
And I think you say that this is not a fruitful area of exploration, to put it as nicely as possible.
Is that a fair characterization?
Well, I mean, I don't think I'm absolutely against the concept of G.
I mean, on one level, G is just a statistical observation.
Mental tests of any kind are positively correlated with each other on average.
If you do better on one test, you're going to do better on other tests.
And that's incontrovertible.
I mean, that's simply a fact.
The question about G is why?
Why does that happen?
And, you know, the classical G... Charles Murray and people before him, kind of Arthur Jensen, kind of...
Explanation is that those things must go together because there's some unified thing going on in the brain and ultimately in the genes that make it go together.
And that is what I don't think is true.
There are a lot of other reasons that have been very well spelled out recently by people like Jim Flynn.
Environmental reasons why all these abilities might wind up going together that have to do with the fact that if you're Good at one mental ability, you're going to get exposed to environments that make you better at all mental abilities.
If you're good at one thing, you're going to get a job with other smart people around who are going to challenge you in other ways and get put in the classroom with the better teacher that's going to make you better at all things.
There are very detailed statistical models worked out of how all that works.
I just find there's a Right, okay.
I'm going to give you a sort of brief scenario or argument that I've heard about.
And again, pure devil's advocate position.
And if you could give me the counter.
Again, really give the audience the counter because I vacillate like crazy on this stuff because the data is so complex and I have other things to do.
But anyway, so I think this came out of a Canadian psychologist.
I think his name was Rushton.
And he put forward an argument that said, I don't know, 50 or 100,000 years ago, the race is split.
And there was particular challenges that occurred to Europeans and to Asians, particularly cold climates, difficult farming and so on, that he says could possibly have selected for a greater forethought, a better deferral of gratification, perhaps even greater intelligence.
And that he says that there has been ample time for the brains to go along different evolutionary paths to whatever small degree.
And he puts forward that as a, I don't know if he ever proved it for certain, I don't think you even could, but he put forward that as a hypothesis.
And I'm wondering if you could provide the counter claim to that position.
I'm sure you've heard of it here and there.
Yes, of course I have.
And I mean, I should say I'm not an evolutionary biologist.
And some aspects of how a story like that would work get a little bit beyond my expertise.
And I'll just say that.
But first of all, 50,000 years, as long as it seems, is very fast for an evolutionary process of that kind to take place.
A. B, I think my main response to that is...
It's a nice story.
But it's completely after the fact.
So you observe that there are IQ differences among groups, which of course there are.
And there is an evolutionary, well not even an evolutionary history, a...
Ancestral history of mankind leading back out of Africa that's reasonably well established.
You could say, well, yeah, of course, the former explains the latter, but it's what they call in evolutionary biology or psychology a just-so story.
It's a justification made up after the fact that I don't know that I've ever made this particular argument out loud, but there are group differences.
Group differences are commonplace among abilities.
They're not a rarity.
This is going to sound like I'm being facetious, but I'm really not.
Almost all great table tennis players are Asian.
Almost all, until very recently, great chess players are Russian.
Almost all great American Little League teams come from California and Texas.
You could tell the same story there about how Asian people developed the quick hands that are necessary to play table tennis.
But what would it mean if you told that story?
You know, it Anyway, I'm going on and on, but I don't see any evidence.
It's a nice story.
You can tell it, but it doesn't prove anything.
All we know is these differences exist now, A, and B, intelligence test scores are malleable if we try.
Right.
Now, to move into the realm of parenting, which is a big focus.
I'm a stay-at-home dad, and I've had so many parenting experts on here.
I'm willing to take the hits because people don't like the parenting videos as much, probably because they're not parents yet, a pretty young audience.
But it's okay.
We'll lay the groundwork in for when they do become parents.
But as a researcher in this area, what can parents do, in your opinion, to...
You know, help to mold their children to be as, I don't know, I don't want to say intelligent because that sounds like intelligence is always a virtue and there's, you know, evil geniuses outside of Batman films that can do the world great harm, but to be wise, to have common sense, to be considerate.
In terms of malleability, what have you found in your research that can really help parents plan to bring up the best people that they can imagine?
Well, you know, I don't know that my research necessarily speaks to that.
A complicated thing that my research suggests is that, in fact, that there aren't going to be systematic answers to that question.
That if you do X, your kids will do better in school.
Because if that were true, There would be bigger family environmental effects on IQ than there actually are because families who did those things would produce smarter kids and that would produce family environmental effects.
And one of the mysteries of behavior genetics is that those effects don't happen.
And I've written about how I think what that means is that The effects of engaging in behavior X, reading for an hour a day to your children, the effects of that depend on you,
they depend on the child, they depend on the context in which it all happens, and it's very hard to find the systematic effect that reading for an hour a day For an hour every night to your kid is going to produce an increase of three or four IQ points.
It just doesn't work that way.
I think what my research shows is A, and it's sort of obvious, avoid extremity.
When you were talking about corporal punishment before, we've actually done a twin study of corporal punishment.
parents who were twins, not the kids.
I won't go on about it, but we found identical twins, one of whom spanked their kids and the other one didn't, and then compared the children of those two identical twins.
We had three different kinds of pun There were people who didn't punish their kids at all, people who, what we called controlled spankers, who did decide to spank their children, but did it in controlled ways.
And then there were kids, families, it's hard to believe that people actually admit to this, who would describe actually beating their kids.
And, you know, they take out a belt or whatever.
And we found...
If one twin was a beater and the other twin wasn't, that had a really negative effect on kids, not on their IQ so much, but on their mental health.
But there weren't systematic differences between the controlled spankers and the people who didn't spank at all.
Once again, it was the extreme environments that were really making a difference.
Do you mind if I ask how old your kids are?
Oh, my daughter is going to be turning seven in a month or two.
I've just finished raising three teenagers, and that's very challenging.
And once again, it's very difficult to say, do X and get good outcome Y. And I'm not...
I hope nobody minds.
I think I'm talking more from personal experience here than I am from psychology data.
But, you know, I found the...
Because I think what you do depends on the context in which you do it, That what's really important is being sensitive to the context that your kids provide.
And so kids are different genetically.
And it's obvious that siblings are different genetically.
And that means you have to treat them differently in order to get out of them.
And it's very hard to systematize how you do that.
But I've found that you just always have to, that if you have this fixed idea in your head that all kids have to do X, and families work better all the time if you do X. That it leads to trouble.
That it always...
What I decide to do here depends on who my kid is, who I am, and what's going on now.
Alright, that's the end of it.
My advice on parenting.
No, no, it's good because that actually leads to one of the later topics that I wanted to get into, which is the degree to which personality itself...
And again, we're speaking in such broad abstractions and really getting...
It's like nailing Jell-O a wall to know exactly what that is.
But personality itself seems to have, dare I say, a genetic component.
And, you know, they say that anybody who believes that environment molds everything, just have your second child and you'll change your mind, right?
But where does the research point to at the moment when it comes to, you know, introvert, extrovert, the non-moral aspects of personality?
Where does that sit in terms of potential hereditary, or not hereditary, but genetics at the moment?
It's all heritable, every bit of it.
No matter what aspect of personality you decide to measure, it's all about equally heritable.
It's very hard to say this is more heritable than that.
The heritability coefficients for personality traits tend to come out a little lower than they do for intelligence, for whatever that's worth.
That's probably mostly because...
Personality is a little harder to measure than intelligence is.
Personality tests are not as reliable as intelligence tests are.
But I think an interesting counterpoint to that.
I normally think of personality as being kind of a more complex human thing than intelligence is.
And so therefore, it's not very surprising that maybe the heritabilities are a little lower.
But I would say the malleability of personality is less than the malleability of intelligence.
So we generally find small effects for families on intelligence, at least when children are young.
They tend to go away when the kids grow up.
But if you study seven-year-olds, you can find actual family effects on intelligence.
You can't find them for extroversion.
They are zero.
There's nothing there.
If you let the statistical model do what it wants, it'll make them negative.
It'll say there's less than zero effect.
Think about it.
To me, once you think about it, it makes sense that people know that And that's why the largest public institution that we maintain, the school system, is dedicated to changing the abilities of people environmentally.
But I have, among my three children, I'm thinking of two of them, and one is quite extroverted and one is quite introverted.
And there's no system to make...
Introverted people more extroverted, like a school system.
I think the reason for that is that we know better.
Putting an introverted kid in a program to make them more extroverted just makes them miserable.
Now, you could think there's psychotherapy, maybe, that we use to change our personality, but that's a very slow, fraught, and difficult process, and it's not exactly what we're talking about anyway.
I can see the look on your face.
Well, no, just because it struck me that psychotherapy is used to remove significant impediments to happiness and success, and therefore we would have to categorize personality traits as dysfunctional in some manner in order to have them cured by psychotherapy.
Would that be a reasonable approach?
Yes, I guess.
I mean, I think some people do go into psychotherapy even if they don't have anything horribly the matter with them.
And I think that's a good thing that people do that.
And I think you could look at that as people just wanting to change their personality, that they're very introverted and they'd like to be a little more extroverted, even though there's nothing particularly pathological about them.
But...
But I'm actually a clinical psychologist and trained in psychotherapy, and it ain't an easy thing to do.
You know, it's hard, slow work to change anybody's personality.
Oh, Amanda, I did it for years, and it's one of the greatest investments, I believe, that anyone can make in their own happiness and success.
But yes, it is a lot of work and can be quite expensive, but it was certainly better.
One of the best investments I've ever made.
But sorry, go ahead.
Deciding you're going to sign up for a math course.
And learn calculus and make yourself smarter, which is hard work in its own way, but it's very doable.
You sign up to learn a skill, you work hard, and you do it.
You learn the skill.
You learn to speak Spanish or learn about the Civil War or whatever, and you get smarter.
I'm simplifying what it means to be smart, but I actually think things like that make you smarter.
Anyway, what we're talking about is the genetics of personality, and It's interesting.
Personality, I've already said I don't really like to compare heritability coefficients, but if anything, it's a little less heritable than intelligence, but I think it's also a little bit less malleable.
And both of those things can be true at the same time.
Right, right.
And I think knowing that really helps you...
I hope helps people, not just parents, but everyone, to accept the wide diversity of personality types in the world.
We all like to think that we're the best and everyone else who doesn't have our characteristics is somehow deficient.
At least that was my temptation for quite some time.
But the reality is, of course, you and I probably wouldn't be able to have this conversation if all technology needed to be invented by extroverts.
Because the extroverts are not usually hunched over a computer screen for...
Yeah, I think that's another difference between intelligence and personality.
And I have...
Some completely non-genetic personality work I do that's relevant to this.
Intelligence is by and large a unidirectional thing.
In general, it's better to be more smart than less smart.
Low intelligence is bad and high intelligence is good without putting too fine a point on it.
I think exactly what personality is are differences among people that don't come with a good and bad pole.
You have Well, extroverts on one end and introverts on the other end, and nature doesn't provide us with some optimum level in between, that it's natural for people to differ between those poles, and where you see the pathology is at either extreme end.
That if people who are very, very extroverted start to develop problems and people who are very, very introverted, mostly because they're not flexible and they can't adapt to changing situation around them.
And so I'm basically agreeing with you that what makes personality personality is that it doesn't come with a good or bad dimension.
It's to me beautiful just how many problems or challenges or questions in the world go back 2,500 years ago to the Aristotelian mean, you know, ride the middle of the bell curve and generally everything will be fairly good.
Okay, so let me give you the last big question that I'd like to ask.
I've been dying to ask you since we booked the interview.
I think we would all, of course, love to close group differences in IQ. I think that would be a fantastic thing.
And the question I think that is frustrating for a lot of people, myself included, is it seems like we put a huge amount of resources, particularly in the West, and I could argue particularly in America, Into attempting to close group differences or ethnic differences in IQ or intelligence abilities.
I'm thinking in particular of like the, what is it, a decade or so or more of the Head Start program where $100 billion plus has been poured into attempting to equalize differences in IQ scores.
And my understanding is that there was a short-term bump, you know, like, hey, we're flying because we hit a speed bump and then As you pointed out earlier, the IQs tended to settle back into more predictable patterns later on.
If you had, you know, ultimate ring of political power or you could, you know, we give you the genie in the bottle that lets you have your three wishes, do you think that individually I think, you know, we can make a difference, we can encourage people to do things which are advantageous to their kids and not lash out at them.
Kids are a lot easier to break than they are to make.
But do you think that there's anything at a societal level, or perhaps even at a political level, that if you had, you know, the genie of power, that you would click your heels three times and say, I would like to implement the following X to help deal with these issues?
That's not an easy question.
I saved the best for last.
I'm a great believer in...
And in particular, in public schools.
And in particular, in equal access to quality public schools.
They're not the answer.
You know, at the end of the day, kids go home to their families, and it's hard to do anything about that in the short run.
But...
I think it is a measurable difference between this country and Europe.
That in Europe, by and large, there is equal access to quality public education.
And in this country, we have the opposite.
And it's a problem that's getting worse.
That the schools where we should be spending the most money per pupil, where the kids need it the most, are the ones where the least money per pupil is spent.
And all the There's so much political trend in this country towards, I'm no expert on education, but charter schools and all of those things, which to me involve taking money away from the places where it's needed in the schools that poor people go to and putting it in other places.
You said if I was king of the universe, That's what I would do.
I would spend money on schools that poor kids go to.
And if I can put in a personal plug, my oldest daughter is a public school teacher in an impoverished school, and neither she nor the school is adequately rewarded for it.
And so these kids who are the most needy get the least resources, and that to me is insanity.
Sorry, I wasn't sure if you were just about to continue.
Don't let me break your floor.
That's good.
What do you think went wrong with the...
I know we're talking real theory here, but I can already hear people saying, yes, but they spent huge amounts of money on Head Starts, and it...
Achieved less than nothing because then we were $100 billion poor as a society.
What do you think they did wrong in Head Start that more spending would solve?
I don't think we did.
On the grand scale of things that American taxpayers spend money on, I don't think we spent huge amounts of money on Head Start.
We spent a pittance on Head Start.
And...
Head Start is a good thing, but it's a special program that some kids get to go to a couple of hours per day.
The data on Head Start suggests exactly what you said, that the kids do well as long as they're there in the program, but as soon as they go back to their crummy schools and inadequate family environments, things go south again.
That's my cat.
And I just saw an interesting op-ed in the New York Times by a guy named David Kirp, K-I-R-P, who I've spoken to a couple times.
He'd be a great interview for you if you feel like looking him up.
He's a...
A universal preschool education expert written a couple of books about it.
He was talking about how there was just new data showing they have a big mandatory preschool program going on in Tennessee, which, unfortunately, they've done some studies of it recently that showed that it didn't have much of an effect.
But he shows it's because they barely spent any money on it and it turned into a kind of half-hearted child care program for an hour a day.
And that the places in the country where they put serious resources into preschool education, it's worked and produced real benefits.
So I guess my answer to the Head Start question is the history of Head Start suggests that we shouldn't spend less money on it.
We should spend more money on it.
All right.
And just to close off, what can we look forward to from you in the near future?
What is currently tucked under your wing of academic opportunity that you're going to be releasing onto the world?
Well, I mean, two things.
We're always looking for new places to study that poverty by IQ interaction that we were talking about.
We have access now to a very interesting study, a famous twin study conducted 20-30 years ago called the Louisville Twin Study where...
Well, we're just producing the results now, and it's very complicated.
And I'm not going to say, Eureka, that same interaction is everywhere.
It's in some places, but it's not in others.
But it's just a very, very interesting study, because there were both black and white kids and poor kids.
And these were the most intensively studied children for...
Intensively studied twins for IQ in history.
They were given basically 15 different IQ tests as they grew up before they were 15 years old.
And there are all kinds of questions about development you can only ask with multiple, multiple testings.
And they lost their funding suddenly in around 2000, and the whole last half of the study has never been analyzed.
So that's very exciting.
And we have to get more funding, but these people are all middle-aged now.
And we hope to try, if we can get the money, to find him again.
And there are all sorts of things you can do, asking about the effects of early childhood deprivation on what happens to people later.
So that's an exciting project.
But to some extent, it's happening now, and more will happen later.
Yeah, you should get a Kickstarter going.
I'd chip into that.
I'd love to know more about twins and outcomes and IQ and stuff.
Sorry, you were going to say it?
Oh, well, no, I can probably leave it there.
I could describe other projects, but that's what I'm particularly excited about right now.
All right.
Well, we'll put links to your blog and links to your work and so on on this show.
I really, really appreciate you taking the time and torturing me with the wonderful weather behind you as I huddle in the increasingly frigid Canadian hellscape of winter.
But, sorry, are you going to say?
Where are you?
Oh, I'm just outside of Toronto, Canada.
So the leaves are turning and we're all beginning to grow our layer of winter blubber to make it through the seal months.
And when is the interview going to be posted?
Oh, we'll post it in the next couple of days.
So we'll provide links and everything to all that.
Okay, great.
I enjoyed talking to you.
You're a good interviewer.
Well, I appreciate that.
And, you know, thanks for all the work that you're doing to further confuse us because certainty in this area can be, I think, quite dangerous to people.
And everyone, Dr.
Eric Turkhammer, please look him up and read his stuff.
It's really, really important to get a handle on as best you can.
And this is, I think, one of the great challenging questions of our time, the degree to which we can move forward the human condition and reduce group disparities, I think, is one of the great boons that we can get out of this kind of work.
