Illiterate people’s thinking probably remains grounded in their everyday experience. When these people take a test that solely measures abstract thinking, they perform poorly. This does not make them stupid. Instead, it shows the disconnect between their natural mode of thought and the unfamiliar test content.
It is clear that there has not been a massive increase in Irish IQ during the 20th or 21st centuries.
It is clear that the pre-war views of intelligence and race were not guided blindly by racism.
[NOTE: After publishing this post, I was informed (first by Avraham Eisenberg and later by Emil Kirkegaard) that some the following information was incorrect. For the sake of transparency, I am leaving the incorrect text posted but crossed out so that people can see my original error and understand that I no longer stand by…
Given the impressive level of her empirical accomplishments, it should not be surprising that her theoretical accomplishments are also worth remembering.
Nobody questions the existence of the Flynn effect, which is the tendency for average IQ scores in a population to increase over time. The effect has been found in every country where data exist (Flynn, 1987), and the phenomenon has now been studied for over 30 years.
The most important name in intelligence research in the second half of the 20th century is educational psychologist Arthur Jensen (1923-2012). From the late 1960s until his death, Jensen was the world’s foremost intelligence researcher who singlehandedly made methodological and scientific breakthroughs that greatly advanced intelligence research. I never got to meet Arthur Jensen, but…
One of the most highly cited articles in intelligence research is a 1996 report commissioned by the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs to provide an authoritative statement on the science of intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996). What many people do not know, though, is that this was not the first time APA’s Board…
One popular topic in psychology when discussing test performance is the idea of stereotype threat. First proposed by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson in 1995, the stereotype threat is phenomenon where a person who belongs to a stereotyped demographic group performs in accordance with the stereotype after being reminded of it. Usually this is suggested…
Update: This post has been translated into French. Cet article a été traduit en français. The latest book that I have finished reading is James Flynn’s (1980) Race, IQ and Jensen. This is the earliest work by Flynn that I have ever read, and I can see in it seeds of his later thought. The…
