This week I took the rare (for me) decision to block someone on social media. I normally do not like to block because I see free and open communication as encouraging good science. Blocking, generally, prevents people from being exposed to the full range of ideas and makes it easier to isolate people into ideological…
After my last post about the jingle fallacy, it is impossible to resist talking about the jangle fallacy. In short, the jangle fallacy occurs when a person treats two concepts as being different because there are different words for them. The jangle fallacy occurs because “. . . psychologists can name more things than they…
Should schools teach lessons on developing general creativity or general critical thinking? Maybe not. I came to this conclusion after reading a superbly written literature review on the effectiveness of cognitive training regimens (Sala & Gobet, 2019). These training programs take a variety of forms, including working memory training, music lessons, chess instruction, and brain…
Undark published an article on September 30, 2019, about the “thorny ethics” of collecting genetic data from the world’s indigenous populations. This is an important issue because genomic databases consist overwhelmingly of people of European ancestry. Results from these databases will not generalize well to non-European populations. In fact, the more distantly related a group…
I just finished reading Leila Zenderland’s (1998) biography of Henry H. Goddard, a pioneering psychologist in intelligence testing. It is the best biography of any of the early psychologists involved with the development of intelligence testing. Henry Herbert Goddard was a psychologist who, in the early 20th century, was America’s foremost expert on the identification…
Citations are a measure of the influence and impact of research. They are imperfect metric, but the advantage they have is that they are objective. If someone cites my article (even unfavorably), then they find it worth discussing. In academia, researchers are nearly obsessed with their citations. Google Scholar keeps track of them automatically, and…
This weekend, I was searching online governmental archives for historic photos to use in my upcoming book about intelligence. Here is a photo taken in 1917 or 1918 at Camp Meade, Maryland, that didn’t make the cut to be included in the section (4 paragraphs) about the Army Alpha and Army Beta. I had seen…
A few years ago, my colleagues Matthew T. McBee, Scott J. Peters, and Craig Waterman published what I think is one of the most important articles in the past 10 years in gifted education. In it, they examined the effect of using different rules to combine multiple scores into one dichotomous decision to admit or…
