(no subject)

[robinturner]

An article in the New Yorker about James Flynn's studies of changing IQ scores confirms a lot of what I'd always suspected about intelligence and also gave me some new things to think about. I'd always assumed, for example, that the higher IQ scores and better academic performance of Asian-Americans were the result of growing up in a culture that values learning; what I didn't know was that the original figures were skewed: the study that caused the fuss about high Asian IQs was carried out in 1975 using a test normed in the 1950s. Since IQs rose in the intervening years, the kids were getting inflated scores. It turns out, then, that Chinese and Japanese kids didn't have higher IQs; they did better simply because they worked harder.

At the other end of the phrenological scale, Flynn has some interesting observations on Black IQs. I don't think the average IQ of any racial group has great political significance, but it's amusing to find that all the fuss about low Black IQs was based on bad science.

Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances.

The most interesting part of the article, though, is the discussion of what it is that IQs actually measure. If they measure some kind of general brain function, then the fact that IQs are rising at around 0.3 points per year is weird. If, on the other hand, they are more a test of modern, scientific thinking, as Flynn suggests, then there's nothing to be surprised about.

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories.

Comments

[grrrlishgrin.livejournal.com]

That was really interesting, thank you for posting. It's something that pops up in my mind a lot and I haven't had the time to read into a bit more.

I like that last part a lot. Reminds me of the beginning of Foucault's Order of Things.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?”

Heh. This reminds me of my frustration with supermarkets. Why don't they sell can openers next to, you know, cans??? (Some do.)

Great post.

[solri.livejournal.com]

An excellent point. If I ever get bored with academia, I could hire myself out as a consulting cognitive linguist and get paid a load of dosh for saying things like "Functional types!"

[vret.livejournal.com]

I didn't catch much of it, but James Flynn was on Start the Week on Monday (Podcast here). I heard something about there being definite improvements in certain types of abstract thinking since the 19th Century. If you were arguing with a Victorian gentleman about the treatment of women or Africans, say, and suggested that he consider how he would feel in their place, he would likely retort that the idea of him as a woman or an African was ridiculous and insulting. There would still be a range of responses now, but the idea of putting yourself in someone else's place to consider how they experience something would not be rejected out of hand.

I may have misheard. Perhaps I should listen to the podcast later.

[solri.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. Some years back, when I was researching a paper on teaching critical thinking, I came across the idea that empathy, far from being the woolly touchy-feely hippie thing it is often seen as, is actually a key ingredient in developing reasoning skills.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, since it involves cross-domain cognitive mapping, i.e., like in Fauconnier & Turner. I recently read an interesting paper on types of empathy and correlations between them, which I plan to post about later in the week.

[solri.livejournal.com]

You're into conceptual blending? I want to have your babies.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

That'll be a nice change; pregnancy really wipes me out.

I started with wanting to understand how the metaphors commonly used in environmental literature actually work, that is, in the brain, and after reading Lakoff & Johnson I moved on to Fauconnier & Turner. (There's also a book just by Fauconnier on the topic that I haven't read yet but looks worthwhile.) I came up with an integrative model, but I haven't officially done anything with it yet. This year I've been trying to learn about dimensions of imaginativeness, which I think will be closely related.

[solri.livejournal.com]

By the way, the only reason that paper of mine got published was because someone got me mixed up with Mark Turner. I've also been mistaken for Robin Lakoff.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

*laugh*

I got the department store Christmas season job where I met my husband when the personnel manager saw in my résumé that I'd helped organize a Model United Nations conference and concluded that I'd been a model.

[solri.livejournal.com]

That's priceless!

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I'm not clear on how being a model would better qualify one for ringing up toy purchases than being one of the main people in charge of organizing a conference for hundreds of people. I think she was just dazzled by the "glamour."

[bram.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of my thoughts on the Wisconsin card sorting test and the grue/bleen paradox.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I like "relatulist"!