(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

[solri.livejournal.com]

I like "relatulist"!