April 16, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:00
4059 Wrong About IQ? | Russell Warne and Stefan Molyneux
Study: "Human intelligence is an important construct in psychology, with far-reaching implications, providing insights into fields as diverse as neurology, international development, and sociology. Additionally, IQ scores can predict life outcomes in health, education, work, and socioeconomic status. Yet, students of psychology are often exposed to human intelligence only in limited ways. ... We found that 79.3% of textbooks contained inaccurate statements and 79.3% had logical fallacies in their sections about intelligence." Dr. Russell Warne is the Associate Professor of Psychology at Utah Valley University, the author of the book “Statistics for the Social Sciences: A General Linear Model Approach” and he recently published a research study titled "What do undergraduates learn about human intelligence? An analysis of introductory psychology textbooks."Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/russwarneStudy: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-07714-001Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Russell Warren. He is the Associate Professor of Psychology at Utah Valley University and author of the book Statistics for the Social Sciences, a General Linear Model Approach.
I believe that's a pop-up book.
And he recently published a research study entitled What Do Undergraduates Learn About Human Intelligence and Analysis of Introductory Psychology Textbooks?
And it's twitter.com forward slash Russ, R-U-S-S, Warren, W-A-R-N-E. Dr.
Warren, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thanks for chatting with me.
It's a great study, very, very interesting and readable, and we'll put a link to it below.
My particular interest is, I think, as somebody who's really drawn to empiricism, one of the things that psychology really gets right and is really empirical about and is really predictive and is fairly objective is the study of intelligence.
So to me, I would put that at the very center of the discipline and kind of go out from there.
That's my particular prejudice, perhaps.
And, of course, in talking to people who've taken their Intro to Psych courses, as I did, of course, many years ago, they really don't seem to follow where the science is, where the data is, with regards to human intelligence.
I wonder if you could just spend a few minutes, before we say what they got wrong, where is intelligence in the pantheon of psychology these days?
Well, as far as being based on empirical research, I would say we probably know more about intelligence, what it is, what causes it, its impact on people's everyday lives than probably any other psychological construct out there.
We definitely know more about intelligence than we do about, for example, schizophrenia or personality or depression.
And what surprises me as I teach a human intelligence class and as I do research in this is there's always new things popping up that intelligence correlates with.
Everything from income in adulthood to surviving until age 50 or not dying in a car accident.
All those things are more likely if you're smart.
Well, and it is one of these things that's so predictive about so many important issues.
I have had Dr. Kevin Beaver on talking about the relationship between IQ and criminal behavior.
And of course, as you point out, there's long-term unemployment, dementia, quality of life, success of marriage.
It is empirically measurable, not just through tests, but also through brain scans.
It is highly predictive.
Of very, very important things.
Now, that would seem to me to be something you'd kind of want to put front and center to say, hey, it's not a made-up discipline.
We've got real facts, real data, real medicine, real predictions.
Yay, us! But this is like the crazy uncle in the 19th century who's kept locked in the attic because he embarrasses everyone at a dinner party.
Yeah. I can't state it any better.
And I'm baffled, too.
And when I first came across work on human intelligence when I was an undergraduate, and then when I took a class related to it as a graduate student, It boggled my mind.
I thought, why isn't everyone talking about this?
It relates to every single branch of psychology and far outside of psychology, too.
No matter what type of psychologist you are, intelligence relates to something you do.
And if you're an educator, if you're a sociologist, if you're a parent, if you're a lawyer, intelligence relates to what you do.
Right. Now, I would also – well, here's a possibility.
We can get to some of the more politically correct landmines in a little bit.
But one possibility, of course, is that psychology has traditionally offered the capacity to change, the capacity to grow, the capacity to become wiser, the capacity to expand your self-knowledge.
Socrates, of course, first commandment, know thyself.
And so when people hear about IQ, they get very excited because they say, wow, it's really predictive.
Tell me more about what I can do to change it.
And the psychologist says, sorry, can't really do much.
We know how to study it.
It's like this rock bouncing down the hill.
I can tell you roughly where it's going to land, but I can't do anything to stop it.
And maybe it's some of the immutability of intelligence that has people recoil from hearing what they see as a kind of Inevitable success or inevitable failure of a wide variety of swaths of people who can't do a huge amount about it.
Yeah, it's really depressing that in industrialized countries, starting at roughly age seven, IQ does pretty much stabilize and your rank order in relation to your age peers doesn't change a whole lot, short of things like brain injuries and neurological illnesses.
No, I agree with you.
It does depress some people, but to me, I feel like that increases its explanatory power.
And one of the reasons it is so useful is because it's so stable.
On the other hand, for those people who want hope and optimism, the correlation between IQ and all these other things isn't one.
There's always room for personal improvement.
I was just teaching today in my human intelligence class about IQ and how Educational outcomes.
And I said that roughly 35% of the variance in educational outcomes is due to personal malleable variables like conscientiousness and motivation.
And there's still room for hope.
No, not everyone will be able to master calculus, but you can compensate for For a 5, 10, 15, who knows, maybe more point deficit by working hard.
And so I don't see the high heritability or the other characteristics as being contradictory with what we know and what we want to be true about self-improvement.
And with the hope, I think, comes a certain amount of despair, frustration, and sometimes moral castigation.
So if you have one kid who's 6'7 and another kid who's five foot tall, and you think they can both do equally well at basketball, you're going to get kind of mad at the short kid for not succeeding as much as the tall kid.
And so I think if we have this idea that anyone can be anything, rather than equality of opportunity, there's this Kind of crazy equality of outcome fantasy that's there.
Because if we say, well, you can be as smart as you want and you can do anything that you want, the people who fail to achieve, it's kind of hard to avoid castigating them either overtly or covertly.
And that's very unfair.
If they simply lack the horsepower, if they lack the brainpower, we need to not, in a sense, forgive because there's nothing to forgive, but recognize the limitations so that we reserve our moral outrage for things that people actually have control over.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly.
If you start believing in the fantasy that everyone could master calculus, if they just work hard enough and have the right teacher, then when that doesn't happen, you have to start playing the blame game.
Well, it's someone's fault that my child didn't master calculus.
Is it the kid's fault for not studying?
Is the teacher bad?
Did the school not provide the right support or the right textbook?
But if you recognize that there are individual differences, that we don't always know what people's limits are, but that there are limits out there, then when people come up short, there's no desire to play the blame game.
The question then becomes, instead of who to blame, the question becomes, well, what do we do about the situation?
How can we still help people coming up short?
And where can we find a place for them?
Right. Well, and I think it's quite fascinating to think about, as you point out in the study.
I promise everyone we'll get to the content in a sec.
I just want to, you know, put the foundations out first.
It's fascinating in the study.
Which, as you say, and I'll give you a quote here, And that's important, of course. Because a lot of psychologists who become professionals at treating the general public, they're going to encounter some people who aren't at their intellectual level.
In fact, a lot of the people who are going to end up with psychological difficulties or challenges, recovering from trauma or so on, are going to be of lower intellectual ability.
And if people don't fully understand how immutable some of this stuff is, it's hard to imagine how they can be effective healers of the situation.
I have in my department, we're combined with a social work program here, and I love it when social work students take my human intelligence class, because I tell them, long-term unemployment, long-term medical problems, divorce, all these things that social workers help people move through.
drug addiction are more common in low IQ groups.
If you think everyone's as bright as you, you're going to get frustrated when they don't, they don't finish the tasks you gave them to do.
They don't do their therapy homework when they stumble or when they forget to show up at their job or, I said, but if you understand, okay, I'm dealing with someone who on average is going to be 10, 15, 20 points lower than me.
I need to make sure that my instructions are clear, they're unambiguous, and a reminder could help.
And I think my social work students are more effective because of that.
And it's true no matter what career fields my students go into.
Very few of us in the world Um, associate with a random sample of humanity.
We already know that, that in industrialized countries, at least there's assortative mating where, um, where sexual partners, IQ scores are about correlate about 0.4.
Well, there's also assortative friending where most people make friends at a similar intellectual level as them.
If you don't realize it, then you think that everyone's like you, even though nothing could be further from the truth.
Well, then, of course, the people who end up writing psych textbooks are all surrounded by brilliant people who, in a very real sense, can be just about anything they want to be.
And it's like we've taken that fantasy of very high ability and said, well, you know, I have a naturally gorgeous singing voice.
Anyone can end up singing at the Met.
And it's like, well, have you been to karaoke night?
It's really nice the way it plays out in the real world.
And there is a kind of solipsism, almost, I would say, a narcissism, in projecting one's own capacities onto the world as a whole.
And, I mean, I guess it gives some kind of relief and it allows you to avoid certain uncomfortable truths about stratification within society.
But I'm not sure that it really helps us understand the world as it stands.
I would agree.
And I feel like I'm dabbling in the territory that Charles Murray talks about in Coming Apart, where people are associating more and more and more, at least in the US, with other people like them, not just on IQ level, but in tastes of music and TV shows and religious behavior, etc., I'm always in favor of things that get people interacting with people not like them.
And sometimes that means a different culture.
Sometimes it means a different language.
Sometimes it means a different IQ level.
And I'm okay with that.
Well, that is a fascinating study that he's put out.
And one of the basic theses, as you know, is that the elites are kind of strip mining intelligence everywhere they can get their hands on it, from small towns to foreign countries, the third world, you know, invite over all of the high IQ people from the third world and then wonder why the third world doesn't seem to improve, huh? You know, it was bad enough to strip mine diamonds from Africa, but strip mining high IQ people from the third world, not a very good strategy for...
And so we're scooping up all of these high IQ people from everywhere we can lay our hands on.
And then, of course, people get shocked when the gap between rich and poor tends to widen.
And it's like, well, we're basically creating this fortification of academia and high finance and media and so on.
And we're kind of behind these walled enclosures while not having, I think, enough sympathy for what we need to do to help people who are not like ourselves.
No, I agree. It's funny you mentioned the immigration point.
I had a student in my human intelligence class.
For their final project, they can write a paper about one of...
I have a list of over 100 topics they can choose from.
And the student here in the US, she was a diehard Bernie Sanders supporter, and she found herself able to argue for open borders or against open borders.
Based on the same data.
And she found herself shocked that she could make a good ethical argument that we should allow high IQ people to stay in their home countries and build up the institutions, the educational and scientific and cultural institutions of their home nations, instead of importing them here and building ours up too.
And yet she can make the exact reverse argument.
That showed her, wow, scientific facts are value-neutral, and what I do with them is very value-laden.
And so it's a very interesting topic to discuss because you always end up finding yourself in situations like that where the same information can...
Support multiple viewpoints.
Well, if you care about the individual, you want to give them access to a high IQ society.
If you care about the society they came from, the other argument could be made.
So it's one of these individualistic versus collectivistic arguments.
That's exactly how she saw it.
So let's talk about what's been going on in the textbooks.
And this to me, again, I'd just be completely honest about my frustration.
Which is that the science, I mean, as you know, what's going on in China in terms of intelligence research is like, it's like the race to the moon in the 60s, the amount of engineering and computational.
You got 4,000 people in one institution, they got 100 supercomputers sequencing genes to try and find genes for intelligence.
And I've had some researchers say that within half a decade of being able to pop It's not IQ 200 babies out of a test tube.
It's some science fiction stuff that's going on over there.
So at a time when, you know, psychology starting out with the Freudian stuff, which is very allegorical based and no scientific proofread, now we finally have the capacity to explore the physical substructure of intelligence at the same time as the tests are getting better and better.
Man, this should be, and it's becoming smaller and smaller.
The allocation of space in these textbooks.
So you point out here, this is a study from Griggs in 2014, analyzes textbook coverage, core syllabi, finding that discussions on intelligence were a smaller percentage of textbook space in the 21st century than the 1980s, dropping from 6% of textbook space to 4%.
And I just want to point out, not only is that a huge reduction, but what's there is not very accurate.
And that, to me, is deeply shocking, although we can get into the reasons why.
Yeah, and my student and I, we knew we'd find some errors because psychology is so broad.
It's impossible for one or two authors to be an expert in everything.
I have my hands full just trying to be an expert in intelligence plus methodology because I'm a quantitative psychologist.
I couldn't imagine writing an introductory textbook.
But we were surprised that so much of it that these authors were saying was so easily disprovable.
Almost 80% of the books had at least one factual error.
And we were extremely conservative with our standards because we didn't want to just say, oh, here's who disagrees with us.
Well, so what? Right.
And to still find, even after we were being very conservative, throwing out any supposed errors, if there was any ambiguity or any doubt, we still got 80% of books with an error.
So that was very disappointing, given how important the topic is.
Yeah, the basic go-to position seems to be just ask Dr.
Gottfriedsen and you're set.
If you haven't asked Dr.
Gottfriedsen, who's been on this show as a great researcher, then you're going to go off base.
And even, as you point out, organizational psychology textbooks...
Intelligence was discussed in an average of 3.89 paragraphs.
I'm just going to pause and wipe the tears of shock and horror from my face.
Despite the fact that intelligence is one of the most powerful predictors of job performance, especially in more complex jobs.
So in... Psychology has a huge amount to add to you can have an HR department or you can just have an IQ test.
You can have a whole battery of interviews or you can just have an IQ test.
And the IQ test, I think, does better than just about anything else if you can only take one metric.
And so in a place where they're talking about organizational psychology and how to get the best people to work, there's almost nothing on the one measure that works the best.
I know. When we discovered that article in our literature review, I thought, did the 35 years of Schmidt and Hunter's meta-analyses never happen?
Did I just dream one of the most important meta-analyses in the history of psychology up?
Because no one's talking about it.
Okay, explain that a little bit for the audience, please.
So Schmidt and Hunter, they did their first meta-analysis on the relationship between cognitive ability and job performance in the late 1970s.
It's literally one of the first meta-analyses ever published.
And then as new research came out, as their methods became more sophisticated, as meta-analysis developed, they updated it periodically off and on for about 30 years.
And it shows that among the single predictors that IQ is the best predictor of job performance and that the predictive ability increases as jobs get more complex.
So IQ is a terrible predictor of whether someone's going to be a good ditch digger.
It's an extremely good predictor of whether someone's going to be a good physician.
I mean, we're talking about hundreds of studies, thousands of studies with millions of people total and organizational psychology books or organizational behavior books just pretend it didn't exist even though it's probably the most impressive monument of work in the history of meta-analysis.
Funny how a book that could be conceived as aiming at the HR departments does not embrace data that might put the HR departments out of jobs.
That's just one possibility.
Now, some of the...
I want to... Talk a little bit about, I didn't realize that Linda Godforsen, Dr.
Godforsen, had put together this whole logical fallacy.
Because of course, where IQ is mentioned, there is some overselling and some underselling.
There's overselling of its possibilities and underselling of its accuracy, particularly across groups.
So what were the major fallacies that you found in the textbooks from people who started talking about IQ? One of the most common fallacies was what Gottfridson calls the marble collection fallacy.
And people who believe in this say, oh, intelligence is just whatever mental tasks I happen to group together and put on my test.
And so if you create an IQ test with ten tasks on it, and I create an IQ test with eight tasks, and they're not the exact same set of tasks, Then people who believe in this fallacy say, well, you can't agree on what intelligence is.
You don't know what it is.
What you call intelligence and what I call intelligence are completely different things.
And we're talking apples and oranges.
And that's just not true.
Every set of cognitive tasks that require some sort of mental work, reasoning, decision-making...
They all correlate with each other, some better than others, but they all have this piece of shared variance, which is about 45 to 50% of the variance among scores.
And that's what intelligence is.
It's that shared ability that helps you do a wide variety of cognitive tasks.
And regardless of the collection that you use to measure it, you're still going to measure it.
There's something, this is the G factor, that there's something underlying every cognitive task.
And it also bothers me, I can't remember which fallacy this is, Dr.
Warren, but it is when they were talking about, well, you know, it's upper white, middle, I always use white, even though Asians, East Asians score higher IQs.
It's always black versus white.
It's always this race-baiting stuff, when of course it is East Asians score higher S2S can actually use.
But They say, well, you need to have this vocabulary.
And if you haven't been exposed to this vocabulary, but to me, it's like, well, if you like to read, which is a sign of intelligence, you're just going to absorb this vocabulary anyway.
I mean, I grew up poor. A lot of the kids in my neighborhood seem to have a great game of put a bucket on your head and run into a wall while I was picking up books to read, right?
So it is just one of these.
It's not like, well, you never got exposed mysteriously to all of this language.
language.
It's like if you are hungry for it, particularly in the age of the internet, though I, of course, just went to the public library, you're just going to be thirsty for books and you're just going to expand your vocabulary based upon that, which is, again, another mark of intelligence.
Yes, I agree.
And, you know, there's people who say, oh, well, the test must be prima facie bias against ethnic minorities or different linguistic groups.
And that's not entirely untrue.
They take a trite truism and turn it into a profound insight.
It is true that you can't give a test in English to someone who does not speak English.
That's a trite fact.
No one disputes that.
But there are a wide variety of tests that are either easily translatable.
I think of digit span, which just requires numbers, being able to say numbers.
And in particular, if you say them backwards, that's more G loaded, right?
So can somebody repeat eight numbers backwards?
That's not culturally specific. Yeah, and even then, there are tests that have nonverbal versions of digit span where you have a set of blocks in front of someone and you touch them in a certain order and they have to repeat the pattern, repeat it backwards.
And then we also have other tests that use universal human, cultural universals like up, down, down.
Baby, adult, these are concepts that exist in every culture in the world, and you can create intelligence test items based on them that work all over the world.
And so when people say, just outright, oh, well, intelligence tests are biased against non-white groups, they're biased against non-middle-class groups, it's an oversimplification.
It takes that trite truism and tries to pretend that it means much more than it does.
Well, and of course, if they're so biased against non-whites, then why do the East Asians score higher on IQ tests?
I mean, that's one of these basic things.
Which is something that my undergraduates point out every semester.
Yeah, it's like, I mean, if it's some sort of white supremacy thing, why on earth would whites design a test where you end up in the middle?
Like, that's not a very good kind of, I want to get to the top of the mountain, so I'm going to stop right at base camp and just stay there.
Yeah. And just let all the Chinese and Japanese and Korean and East European Jewish people pass me up.
Well, and there's this thing, too, where you can see, and there's lots of examples of this, and I just want to caution people about don't take online IQ tests very seriously.
I mean, they're not the end of the world, but it needs to be administered by a professional.
There's a variety of tests. It needs to be scored.
Like, it's a big deal. And don't just say, well, I went through this 20-minute test online.
I know my IQ. You kind of don't.
But There are, of course, the pattern recognition, you know, this shape follows this shape, and it starts to look like some Jungian Mandela centerfolds or whatever, and it can be tough to manipulate.
But again, it's measuring something quite substantial that's going on in your brain.
Oh yes. Yes.
And it's not just this made up score.
It's not this fiction. It's not something that was created just so that the test creators can have some data.
The fact that IQ tests correlate with so many things that they were never intended to correlate with.
I think of things like brain size, white matter, connectivity.
You mentioned before EEG with brain waves or certain patterns that are correlated with intelligence.
No one is purposely forcing the test to do this.
There must be something real if it correlates with these biological substrates in the brain.
Right. And that is where, if it's predictive and it's describing things that are occurring in the brain, to toss it out.
And also, reaction time is correlated to G as well.
And I'm sorry, I cannot think of a conceivable way in which reaction time is culturally specific.
You know, catch the ball! You know, you got it.
You know, you strike like a cobra, and I just...
There's just no way that it can all be arbitrary, but it is, of course, a way of helping people over the emotional difficulty of the fact that G-loaded tests produce, on aggregate, different results among different groups, ethnicities, a little bit between males and females, and people like the idea that we can tweak the environment and have this all become...
The same, so that we can get the kind of equality that we want, not just equality of opportunity, but more equality of outcome between groups.
So it is a very, and I love, I mean, I felt this temptation as I'm sure everyone has, can I find that magic button that is going to switch everyone into being able to do the same thing?
On these tests, different groups, different races, different genders, and so on.
It is such a thirsty thing that society desperately wants that it is understandable, though, and not think particularly honorable to try and find a way to achieve it.
Yeah, and I think not just group differences, but individual differences.
People want to equalize things, not just across groups, but across individuals.
I would love to live in a world where that's possible, and I think there are possibilities Of reducing gaps among people, but the research shows that intelligence is so highly genetic and it has to be at least partially biological that I'm skeptical about whether we can ever eliminate individual differences completely.
Well, without tinkering with the base code.
If you want to rewrite the operating system, you can do quite a lot, but that's challenging for people to think of conceptually.
And let's talk about the limitations of raising IQ, because I seem to have gone through a whole series of like, hey, play Mozart, you know, all of the nonsense that's gone on about this stuff, or we've got Head Start, so we can close the sort of East Asian and black gap in performance and achievement and so on.
This has been, to me, a massive waste of resources, has promoted a lot of division within society, and has not allowed us to focus—and I'll toss a couple of ideas about ways in which this could be closed later on—but it has been, to me, really frustrating, because psychologists, even in these textbooks, dangle out, well, we know how to raise IQ. In individuals in high-quality environments.
So if we give the inner-city kids a new baseball diamond, a computer lab, and an Olympic swimming pool, they'll all turn into geniuses and, what, $100 billion plus on Head Start for very short gains that fade very quickly.
So what is the carrot that they're dangling out with IQ and environment?
Well, the most common example we saw was this implication of what you said, that, oh, psychologists know how to raise IQ in people who Already have high-quality environments.
No one questions the fact that we know how to lower IQ in some ways.
Just start introducing lead to a child's environment.
You'll get an IQ drop there.
Subject someone to repeated brain injuries or have their oxygen supply in their brain cut off.
Okay, we know how to lower IQ. Iodine deficiency.
In the United States, even among low-income individuals in the United States, a lot of those things are extremely rare.
The Centers for Disease Control's goal is to eliminate blood lead levels that are 10 micrograms per deciliter or higher.
And in the last data that I have, I think it's from about 2015, Literally 99.5% of children in the US have a blood lead level below that.
And so we've reached pretty much the gains in the US of the IQ increases we can get from fixing lead poisoning.
And for a lot of other things with malnutrition or iodine deficiency, we've pretty much reached the limits of those gains, even among the poor, at least in the US. Now, in other countries, we still have gains that we can make.
If you really want to make the world smarter, donate to a charity that provides iodine to children in deficient countries like Bangladesh or Ethiopia.
But a lot of these textbook authors were saying that things like educational television or Head Start or in infancy, an unsaturated fat enriched diet can increase intelligence later.
And unfortunately, any IQ gains for these people who already live in an industrialized country are fleeting.
And within a couple of years, the gains are completely wiped out.
That is, I just want to say, unbelievably frustrating.
It's sort of like, hey, we know how to make people taller, and you gain six inches in height, and then you just kind of shrink like an elderly Greek woman.
Like, just turn into a little, like, you compress down like a sagging xylophone or something, or accordion.
And that, to me, is really, because the initial gains give you great enthusiasm for, yay, it's going to work, and we're going to close these gaps, and, you know, rescue communities that are challenged in an increasingly complex society, and it's like...
And then, so how does that mean they become good at taking tests?
I mean, why do the scores go up and then decline in your view?
Well, for things like compensatory education, like Head Start or Universal Preschool, they probably do go up because of cognitive stimulation and because in some of these programs, they actually do.
teach kids the skills that IQ tests then later use.
And occasionally, sometimes you see them use practice problems from IQ tests as exercises and stuff.
Now, those are some of the extreme ones.
But I think some of it is just the fact that once people in an experimental group are released into the environment, the cognitive stimulation goes away.
And before long, they're Their age peers in the control group catch up with them.
And intelligence isn't the only thing like this.
John Protzko pointed out to me that this often happens, for example, when you're trying to lose weight.
Yeah, when you're exercising and eating right every day, your weight goes down and you're thinner and you're feeling good.
And then when you get off the diet, your weight starts going back up again.
You have fade out. And so fade out might just be a part of being human.
Right. It's sort of like when my daughter was little, she was not great at sharing.
And I would have this temptation, I'll give you a piece of candy if you share.
And it's like, no, that's a terrible way of incenting someone.
I had to kind of bite my tongue to not do it.
It's like if you pay your kid 50 bucks a piano lesson to go learn piano, look how enthusiastic they are.
But it can't last once that incentive is withdrawn if they don't have the native desire.
Yeah.
And so I don't think Fade Out is unique to intelligence interventions, but it sure is a place where we notice it a lot and we really get frustrated because we do get very enthusiastic about gains.
And then when, for example, in Head Start, I think of the Department of Health and Human Services randomized control study, all gains from Head Start had wiped out by the third grade.
And this country spends hundreds of millions of dollars on Head Start every year for transitory gains.
Oh, don't even get me started on the opportunity costs of those money and those resources, because what else could be done to help would be almost beyond belief.
And so where does it stand now?
Because there's a little tantalizing thing in here for those of us, I guess, since I read the bell curve in the 90s, those of us have been tracking ethnic IQ differences today.
I've heard that it's not, that it's, you know, the more G-loaded tests are not really responding that much.
Where does it stand at the moment in the great closure that everybody wants to try and achieve?
That's one of the big unsettled controversies, I believe, among experts in intelligence research.
There are some who say, we've gone from a 15 point gap between white and black Americans to a 10 point gap.
There's other people who say, nope, it's still 15 points.
I'm agnostic about the issue but I have noticed in my research since I'm an educational psychologist that in academic achievement tests that measure a defined curriculum, the gaps tend to be lower.
And they tend to be narrower.
But in abstract reasoning tests that you find on a Wechsler test or Stanford-Binet or the Ravens progressive matrices, those gaps seem to be wider.
And so I think that- Wait, sort of not wider than they were in the past, but wider than the more specific.
Oh, excuse me. Yes, yes, yes.
Thanks for clarifying that.
They're about the same as they were in the past, but wider than what we see on educational tests.
And so I've done a study where I examined the racial and ethnic groups on advanced placement tests here in the United States, which are for high school students taking an introductory college-level class through their high school.
And the more G-loaded tests have wider...
Score gaps between different racial and ethnic groups and the less G-loaded ones have narrower gaps.
And so, and those are educational tests, but I want to say that at most one or two out of over 30 tests had a full 15 IQ point gap between groups because they're educational tests.
Some of them had much, much smaller gaps.
And so I think that the tests you use I'm not convinced that it's still 15 points, but I'm not convinced that it's only 10 points.
Right. Sorry. No, no, listen, I mean, this is where the limits are of where the science is right now.
Now, as you point out in some of these textbooks, they come up with the, I don't know, let me not prejudice the witness here, so I'll put it in a more neutral term than it appeared in my head.
Which is, they say, well, race is a social construct.
Race is a made-up thing, and, you know, what happens with skin color and hair type and so on has no relationship to anything.
It's just same person, different coat of paint kind of thing.
And that, to me, is a challenging thing.
Hypothesis to make. And from what I understand, which is not, of course, at an expert level of sort of biology and genetics, it has some challenges.
Where do you stand with the question of the social construct?
And of course, the reason why it's so important, just for the listeners, is that if race is a social construct, then the discrepancies are due to environment and prejudice and the stereotype fallacy, which we can get to.
So where are you in your understanding of Race, genetics, and social constructs.
No, like you, I'm not an expert in genetics.
I did get my bachelor's in psychology and my doctorate in educational psychology.
And so I'm sort of self-taught with genetics.
So anything I say, I'm borrowing from other people who are much more brilliant than I am on this issue.
But if you see racial groups as separate, discrete categories that are basically nominal variables, then no, I don't believe in that.
Just the existence of people who have multiracial heritage, the fact that there are some groups that don't fall cleanly into one major racial classification.
Okay, I don't believe in discrete separate groups that you can perfectly classify everyone into.
That's a red herring, though.
To say that race doesn't exist and then use that definition of race, well, that's a straw man to disprove that.
What I tell my undergraduates is that racial groups are like gigantic extended families.
Biologists sometimes use the term breeding populations, but for psychology students who care about people, they like the label extended families more.
And the idea is that people who are descended from Europeans are members of this gigantic extended European family.
It's millions upon millions of people.
And people who are descended from Africans are in this big extended family.
And I say, you know what, from time to time, Some of these families have mixed a little bit.
There are some people today who are descended from multiple families.
But just like your immediate family, or just like your extended family of your cousins and your grandparents, you are more similar to people inside your family.
And so I tell them, you know, think of these as fuzzy groups, fuzzy families with these boundaries that aren't really clear.
Where the people within them are a little bit more genetically similar to the art of people outside.
And that, I feel, is a way that my undergrads grasp it without oversimplifying the issue or without denying a construct that does have real genetic meaning.
Yeah, I mean, to me, the idea that our most expensive organ, the brain, would be immune from biological pressures, from environmental pressures seems, well, I don't know, extraordinary theses require extraordinary proof, and I've yet to see that manifest.
Which again, just an amateur guy in a studio, so everyone, you know, take everything I'm saying, of course, with a grain of salt.
So, socioeconomic status is another one of these things that it's almost like this stuff is designed to throw people off.
Because, of course, people say, well, the kids of rich parents, they do really well in school.
And it must be because the rich parents have all of these resources and these computers and these books and stimulating conversation.
And they don't let them watch cartoons, whatever it is, right?
And no Candy Crush for the kids.
So, it is... Very tempting to go down that path.
And it's almost like a Marxist path to say, well, the rich stay rich because they can provide the resources to their children, the poor stay poor because they lack the resources.
And of course, the whole point of the welfare state was supposed to fix that, which it really hasn't done.
In fact, I think it's hardened and widened a lot of these gaps for reasons we can perhaps talk about another time.
What is the big temptation, the path deep into the woods where you get lost about following socioeconomic status as the explanation, sole explanation for high-performing kids?
Well, to be fair, it's not a bad hypothesis.
We have research going back a hundred years showing that there is a correlation both in children and adults between socioeconomic status and IQ scores.
And even in adults, there is a slight but positive correlation between childhood socioeconomic status and adult IQ. And so it's not like these people are just making these things up or pulling them out of thin air.
But what most people don't realize is an insight that Carl Pearson had in 1903, that a lot of variables that look environmental are actually genetically caused.
Unless you're adopted by non-biological relatives, no one...
Plucks you out of your environment and puts you into a new socioeconomic status.
And then if you are adopted, by the time you grow up, then your adult earning power and your socioeconomic status as an adult is very much driven by you.
And so people think that socioeconomic status is this magical variable that operates independently and you're either born with it or you're not.
And the reality is that If you're raised by biological relatives, then the genes that make them smarter and more likely to own books or watch public television or earn a lot of money or stay in school, those genes are creating your socioeconomic environment.
And then those genes are being passed on to the child too.
And so ironically, the child's genes are causing the socioeconomic status that their parents are creating even before the child's born.
And the only exception is people who are adopted by non-biological relatives.
But by the time they reach adulthood, their socioeconomic status is very much driven by things like IQ and personality traits, which are partially genetic.
And so I think people who think, oh, socioeconomic status, socioeconomic status, that's the big key to why we see the correlation between SES and IQ are ignoring the fact that except for adopted children who are still living at home, your socioeconomic status is partially genetic and it doesn't your socioeconomic status is partially genetic and it doesn't just originate in the environment.
And most environmental variables for most people are at least partially genetic.
Well, and of course, everybody's aware of the kids of rich parents who don't do well and the kids of very poor parents who magically managed to burrow their way up through all of this stuff and achieve great goals and great things.
And that, of course, goes against the entire environmental explanation.
And of course, there are ways of teasing it out.
Particularly, of course, the very rare but still statistically relevant twins raised apart studies where, of course, you know, people who are basically identical from a genetic standpoint, not counting the complexity of epigenetics, but people who are genetically identical raised in very different environments.
And my understanding of the studies are that if you want to figure out the IQ of the kid, With a very significant degree of accuracy, just look at the biological parents.
That if you have low IQ kids adopted into high IQ families, the low IQ kids will tend to be lower.
And vice versa, if you have high IQ kids adopted into low IQ families, the kids will tend to, you know, it doesn't, you know, it's height, you know, so to speak, right?
Again, you know how to shorten people by giving them less food and all of that.
But to make them taller, well, you just end up getting wider if you get more food.
And so there's ways that, and this has been going on for, An encouraging, if you like, facts, a depressing, if you like, the spread of facts amount of time that this stuff has been teased out to the point where the most recent data that I've seen is by the time you're 18, 80% of your IQ is genetic.
80 plus percent! I don't know if anyone's gone how far up the 80s, but that's quite a lot.
And again, that does give us room for hope, but not for grandiosity.
Yeah, I agree.
Heritability is not 100%, and we have more wiggle room in being able to raise IQ in children, although once they hit adulthood we often see fade out.
The heritability results do sometimes hide the fact that in adoption studies we do sometimes see a mean increase Between adopted siblings who are adopted into high SCS environments and their biological siblings who aren't.
But that doesn't change the fact that the correlation stays higher between the adopted child's IQ and their biological parents than it is with their adopted parents.
And so it's complex.
It's... There's still a lot we don't know.
We know a lot of the broad principles, but it's the narrow, exact numbers.
Here's exactly how much hope you're allowed to have that we don't have.
But I was just surprised at how many of these textbooks were there even getting the broad principle wrong.
Oh, sorry to interrupt.
Let's jump into this as the last point.
I really, really appreciate your time.
But, oh, again, to express a little personal frustration, it's like, well, IQ doesn't give us the result we want.
So you know what we're going to do?
We're going to bend over and pull in another entire set of intelligence metrics out of some place where the sun don't shine.
And we're going to put EQ out there.
We're going to put multiple intelligences.
We're going to create these massive flowcharts As you point out, Gardner, there's a quote here, Gardner never explained how to measure these intelligences, nor has he embarked on any sort of systematic research program to gather data to test his theory.
And I am a little concerned, given how credible G-loaded tests are, IQ tests are in prediction of outcomes and even biological substrata, If there's all of this other stuff that's talked out, oh, IQ doesn't give us the results we want for hope and egalitarianism between groups, so we're going to have this other set of tests.
And they were put forward front and center without a lot of pullback or pushback on the lack of empirical support.
Oh, definitely. And having gotten my PhD in the College of Education, it's amazing how much people, especially in the educational establishment, I've been shocked by The lengths that people will go to not talk about intelligence, especially in the education system.
I think that's one of the reasons why Gardner's theory is so popular with teachers, that it does give them hope, and they think, well, if a kid's not smart one way, they might be smart in another.
I tell my students that there's more evidence that elves exist than there is for Gardner's multiple intelligences theory.
And I'm sure it would even mismeasure the IQ of elves.
But a little dig there for no particular purpose.
I will get that quote into a peer-reviewed journal sometime.
If I can get a cartoon in a journal, I can get that quote in a journal one day.
You need to bury it with the first letter in each paragraph so that the very astute people will get it.
But no, it is that...
Humans naturally have...
Humans naturally have a tendency to believe that things supporting what they want to be true as being stronger than things that contradict their beliefs.
This is why you get religious fundamentalism.
This is why you get scientists and politicians who will cling to a theory or a policy long after it's served its use.
That old quote, that science progresses along a line of graves.
Yeah, yeah, or one funeral at a time, yeah.
And so I think that, for example, in the education system, you have to want to believe you can make a difference to be a teacher.
You have to believe that teaching in the environment matters.
Otherwise, what on earth are we doing here in a classroom?
And so I believe that that's why there's been a lot of ignoring of G-theory just because people have mistakenly believed that intelligence means that we can't do anything or we can't improve or we can't teach and nothing could be further from the truth.
I think it's a lot of wishful thinking that people create theories that have little evidence.
And Gardner is the worst offender in that respect.
At least some of the other theorists have done empirical research.
Gardner's original book, Frames of Mind, was published the year I was born.
Okay? I think by the time a book's over 30 years old, that time's up.
You have to either present some data by now or we're allowed to ignore your theory.
I think 30 years, the statute of limitations is up.
We're done, okay? I don't want to hear about Gardner's theory anymore.
Right. Well, and my particular thought as well is that if we accept limitations in IQ, we can start to explore the best way to educate people without assuming we can raise their IQ. And to me, it's like if there's some super strong guy in the village who can like rip out trees with his bare hands, and the fantasy is, because just genetically like Jean Valjean kind of strength, right?
Then, if we think everyone can be like him, we're not going to invent machinery to do it.
Because, oh, everyone's just going to work out and everyone's going to have the same ability.
And once we recognize that this guy is a freak, like he's just like a weirdly muscled freak, and other people are never going to be able to do what he does, then we can start saying, okay, well, what's the machinery we need?
You know, not everyone is going to be able to lift up those pallets, so let's invent a forklift.
And to me, the forklift is critical thinking, reason and evidence, philosophy.
It's not like a society that's trying to understand the world that doesn't have the scientific method isn't going to gain any real traction.
The society which does is going to gain enormous traction, as we've seen just over the last couple of hundred years.
People forget science is only a couple of hundred years old in its modern functional form.
And so if we accept these limitations, we can really begin to explore mental constructs that can give the intelligence that people have as much leverage as humanly possible rather than imagining there's some magic potion that turns everybody into the He-Man master of the universe.
And that to me would be the unlocking of human potential that right now is sealed up in a kind of fantasy.
The ironic thing is we have invented these technologies that can improve people's intellectual performance and to sometimes even reduce some of those inequalities.
What do you think a calculator is?
What do you think spell check is?
What do you think a spreadsheet is?
These are things that have reduced the need for tedious or difficult mental procedures.
And make things better and easier for everyone.
And to pretend that we all have to be able to do integral calculus in our head In order for the world to be fair is ridiculous.
No. We can invent computer programs to do these things, or heaven forbid we hire someone who can do calculus so that you don't have to.
And so it's ironic that we're so obsessed in Western culture with equalizing things when we don't have to be equal to reap the benefits of the things that some people can do and other people can't.
Yeah, let Mathematica do the work while you tread the high halls of conceptual thought.
Well, thank you so much.
Of course, this conversation's been great for me.
I think the listeners will love it.
I wanted to remind people that if this is your taste, you know, this is not book four of Fifty Shades of Grey.
It's called Statistics for the Social Sciences, a General Linear Model Approach.
And the research study is called What Do Undergraduates Learn About Human Intelligence and Analysis?
of introductory psychology textbooks.
We'll put the link to both of those below.
The Twitter handle is twitter.com forward slash Russ Warren.
That's W-A-R-N-E. Really, really appreciate the conversation.
Thanks for your time, and I hope we can do it again.
