> That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA).
This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. "Disparate impact" merely means that blacks score lower, not that the tests are biased.
> This is easy to do with IQ tests, just ask lots of questions that require good schooling and education (e.g. word questions).
The black-white gap is as large or larger on tasks that require very little education, e.g. "reverse digit span", which merely requires that you repeat a sequence of numbers in the reverse order from the direction you heard it.
> and has hence probably improved equality.
I've never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement.
When I think about that question, I think about questions that would be harder for me (white caucasian) than somebody from another "race" or culture. That is easy: for example imagine selecting some kind of image puzzles involving kanjii symbols, or telling apart chinese faces. They are just images, right, so no bias? But it will be much more easy to tell them apart for somebody with a chinese background than for me.
If such questions exists that are biased against me, it seems at least very plausible that other questions could be biased against other "races" and cultures.
Another example I read about is how different cultures see the drawing of a box (a 3d wireframe). Apparently in western cultures people would see it as a drawing of a 3d box, whereas some poor test takers in Africa just saw a 2d drawing. This was then interpreted as Africans being less intelligent, when really they were just as correct as the people who saw the 3d shape. It just wasn't such a common meme where they lived to draw 3d shapes like that.
If you have the time, I'd be curious to know your answers to the following (95% confidence intervals if you want):
1. how many seconds did it take you to think up this refutation of IQ tests?
2. how many psychologist/psychometrician man-years do you estimate go into developing any particular IQ test like the RAPM or BOMAT?
3. what probability do you give that psychometricians have not also thought of your objection?
4. conditional on their thinking of it, what probability do you give that they have done nothing to cope with it?
5. how many seconds would it take you in Google or Wikipedia to find the real answers to 3 & 4?
6. how many seconds did it take you to write your comment?
It was several years ago (15), but I actually took the time to read "the Bell Curve" and even to find some of the actual twin studies that tend to be cited in the discussions. Those I found rather underwhelming - for example the sample sizes tend to be low and not very comparable, and sometimes they are clearly exaggerated. For example one mentioned twins who gave their kids the same names and wore the same clothes even though they didn't know each other.
Over the years I have read a lot of articles on the subject - as did many others, I guess, it is a popular subject after all.
I'd say it took me more than a few seconds to come up with my example.
First of all, the thing with the 2d vs 3d drawing was an actual real world example that I read about. So clearly there are some psychologists/psychometrians who were wrong about the interpretation of their tests.
As for 5: if it only takes a few seconds to find those answers, why don't you do it and give the answers to us?
Edit: I just tried googling "RAPM cultural bias" and didn't get any useful results. You really should provide the links. Of course your tone makes it likely that discussing with you is probably a waste of time anyway :-/
> Of course your tone makes it likely that discussing with you is probably a waste of time anyway :-/
Not really. I ask these questions because I've noticed that astonishingly often, people online will write a definitive refutation of some scientific position or new study, which took them only a few seconds to think of and which is wrong; but why do they do this?
I can think of many possibilities, and I'm never sure what it is: do they think so poorly of the scientists conducting the study (anti-intellectualism)? do they think so highly of their own thoughts (Dunning-Krueger)? are they too stupid to realize any of this (low IQ)? are they too lazy to look up the answers in Wikipedia or Google Scholar? or is it a cynical ploy for getting upvoted comments where they count on their fellows not being knowledgeable enough to call them on it?
Hence, I ask questions to try to isolate what might be the issue and incidentally point out to the more reflective readers why comments like yours are fundamentally bad ideas.
Sometimes the spectacle is just horrifying; on a mailing list with a fairly high level of discussion of cutting-edge research on working memory and dual n-back, someone posted proudly about how they thought IQ tests were biased against Africans, and though I point out that this was obvious to him and me, even more obvious to psychometricians, he never once looked up how the tests might have been defended against or corrected for cultural biases, despite me sometimes explicitly naming the names he could punch into Google or Wikipedia.
What makes you so sure that the research around IQ is not flawed? Never mind that there are probably thousands of researchers with differing opinions.
I am still waiting for your refutations. But honestly, your initial assumption that every internet commenter is wrong will make it difficult for you to communicate or learn stuff.
Frankly, I fail to see how pointing out possible flaws in a theory can ever be "a bad idea". In my opinion to doubt everything should be the default stance of a scientist.
You mentioned RAPM, I looked it up and it says it was invented 1934 in an attempt to avoid cultural biases - therefore it uses more graphical elements than language. My examples show that even graphical elements can have a cultural bias. So while it is a nice attempt, you can not be sure RAPM succeeded, even if their intentions were good.
The 2d box vs 3d box thing is an actual event from the history of IQ research, where IQ testers apparently got it wrong. So these people are fallible, too. Finally, cultural bias is one of the standard mistakes people (Even if they are scientists) make.
Note that I didn't even claim the IQ tests are flawed. It bores me if people confuse my comments with stuff other people said.
You make an excellent point, but I think it may be dangerous to conflate race and culture. I suspect for instance that a person of Japanese heritage that grew up in the US and spoke only English might have almost as much trouble with the Kanji characters as I would.
Well in this case, the conflation of race and culture is virtually a requirement. As far as we know, you can't do much really to bias an aptitude test in terms of biology because there is little correlation between race and biology¹. On the other hand, culture and race are relatively tightly correlated, so if you want to bias an aptitude test with respect to race, the surest way to do it is to bias it with respect to culture.
A great example is Jim Crow era voting rules. Black people obviously are not biologically disinclined to be able to read, but in 1900, it was a simple fact of southern American culture that a white person of voting age was less likely to be able to read than a black person of voting age. A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test.
---
¹ This is unsurprising when you realize, for example, that the combined population we put in the single box of "black" is more genetically diverse than the combined population of all the races we put outside of that box. Even though populations of different specific geographical origins do often have characteristic biological traits, the social concept of "race" is not strongly correlated with geographical origin.
> A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test.
That wasn't the whole problem. The literacy tests were only administered to black voters in the first place because of a "grandfather clase"--anyone whose father and grandfather both had the right to vote had the right to vote automatically, and since the literacy tests were only implemented at the end of slavery, in practical terms they only applied to the black population. Naturally, since the test itself wouldn't disenfranchise whites (except for immigrants, but fuck them too) they were free to make it as difficult as possible.
I guess culture is the main point - if you live in China, you probably get better at telling apart Chinese faces. And vice versa - I can only guess that telling apart western faces might be hard for people from other cultures, too.
I should add that I live in Europe, I think in the US there is a higher mix of people from different backgrounds, so my example is perhaps not as convincing.
What I remember of my first-grad year in psychology (in Europe and I changed orientation after that year), anthropology course:
The picture shows a black person in a room and you're looking at it in such a way that you don't see any perspective lines (3D construct), only a flat surface for the Wall. A square is drawn on the wall and filled with a scenery. "White/Occidental" people think the square represents a window and "Black/African" people think it's a painting or a hanging frame. Because, when the study was conducted, in that particular part of africa where it was conducted, people didn't have windows in their house.
So, that's another example of that cultural bias but it demonstrates we don't need something "complex" to make it stand out.
PS:Sorry for this atrocious use of english, it has been a long day.
I think there was a study (do not know if it had agenda or was neutral) that indicated that most of the disparity was attributable to socio-economic status rather than culture.
That is to say that general knowledge spread btwn cultures (ethnicities) was less pronounced than non-culture based tests (such as abstract concepts). Again, I don't know how valid that conclusion was.
* Another example I read about is how different cultures see the drawing of a box (a 3d wireframe). Apparently in western cultures people would see it as a drawing of a 3d box, whereas some poor test takers in Africa just saw a 2d drawing. This was then interpreted as Africans being less intelligent, when really they were just as correct as the people who saw the 3d shape. It just wasn't such a common meme where they lived to draw 3d shapes like that.*
This is an excellent example of the way IQ tests can indeed succumb to cultural training effects. It's pretty clear that this is what's going on with the Flynn Effect, for instance, which is not a real increase in intelligence since not g-loaded:
It's also why Raven's matrices don't work as well as they used to (IMHO). I think my own childhood IQ score is 10-20 points too high, because I'd seen too many IQ-test-like problems.
So, certainly a problem with all IQ tests. But a minor problem, or an existential major one? If it was a major one, these tests would lose their predictive validity - which remains quite high.
This is a great summary you've written here and worth a second read. In deed there are confounding cultural factors built into standardized IQ testing. You wouldn't expect a white European student, even from another English-speaking country like the UK, to arrive at one of our school and test as highly as children born in the US. There will always be some exceptional cases, but in general environmental and cultural factors make IQ testing highly culture-specific.
What we need to ask ourselves here in the US is why some children get left behind culturally, or why some children live in disadvantaged environments, broken homes or single-parent households. Solving those problems would quickly close the IQ gap by giving more equal opportunity to all children.
As I said, the confounding factors exist, but they seem relatively minor. Attempting to effectively homogenize the diverse human gene pool through education is anything but a new effort. If it was possible to educate the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo into the cognitive equivalent of Great Neck Jews, don't you think someone would have tried this already?
Imagine that the remedy proposed was not educational, but rather pharmaceutical. Someone's selling you a drug that purports to turn Pygmy populations (mean IQ 55 or so - but let's be generous and add 10 points for cultural bias) into Ashkenazi populations (mean IQ 115 or so).
You might ask: has this drug ever been tried before? Is there any evidence that it can work? And what happens if the Beastie Boys take it - do they become the world's leading physicists? These would all be very rational questions.
"If it was possible to educate the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo into the cognitive equivalent of Great Neck Jews, don't you think someone would have tried this already"
Who would try that? The benign, wise rulers of the Congo?
In the Belgian Congo last week massed tom-tom drummers practiced a welcome tattoo. Prosperous Negro shopkeepers climbed up wooden ladders and draped the Congolese flag (a golden star on a blue field) from lampposts and triumphal arches set up along Boulevard Albert I, the spanking concrete highway that bisects the capital city of Leopoldville. In far-off mission churches, encircled by the rain forest that stretches through Belgian territory from the Atlantic to the Mountains of the Moon, choirs of Bantu children rehearsed the Te Deum. African regiments drilled, jazz bands blared in...
If you have a Time subscription (yeah right), you can read the whole thing on line. Otherwise, suffice it to say that (a) the memory hole is a lot deeper than you think, and (b) it's physically possible to teach Bantu children (and perhaps even pygmies) the Te Deum. Not clear that it's a safe and effective method for turning them into the King Ad-Rock, however.
The most interesting, and certainly the most effective, attempt to convert a Stone Age population directly to a civilized lifestyle wasn't even in the 20th century. Or the 19th. Consider the Reductions of Paraguay:
That subsample size is too small - it's just noise.
Although I suppose the Asian adoptees available, as probably with all races, weren't exactly the pick of their gene pool. Blood runs true, you know - on average.
(Ironically, the perspectives on human heredity generally held in the premodern era are generally more accurate than those taught in modern schools today. The traditional ideas of "blood" were after all consistent with a broad cultural understanding of animal husbandry, and the mechanisms of heredity aren't any different in humans than in pigs.)
I think part of the problem has always been calling them IQ tests. If they predict X (say, success in some given profession), perhaps it can't be argued with. It just doesn't follow that it predicts "intelligence".
I guess if they claim to test intelligence, they try to limit people to some inherent trait. Like they could never become good at profession X, because their intelligence simply isn't sufficient. In reality there might be lots of other reasons why some people tend to do worse in profession X than others. They can still be predicted, but a prediction is not necessarily a final verdict.
> This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites.
I think you illustrate the danger of making assertions without being entirely informed - that is to say that what you state here is the beginning of the truth, but taken out of context. There was (and in many cases still is) a heavy cultural bias built into standardized IQ testing. Traditionally, most tests were developed and tested against middle-income, white children. Black children traditionally tested one standard deviation below their white counterparts, even when controlling for income, etc. However, many experts agree that this is due to cultural bias and environmental factors, agravated by the strong corelation between income and where you live geographically in the US, including resources (or lack thereof) in corresponding school districts. Example: children in troubled, inner-city schools would often have less access to rigourous IQ testing when compared to their urban, middle-class counterparts.
There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the roll that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment).
> I've never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement.
That's another subject and worth talking about. I'm simply stating that you should be very careful when talking about the black-white gap in IQ scores. There are too many factors at play to make a clear case for IQ differences between races.
> There was (and in many cases still is) a heavy cultural bias built into standardized IQ testing. Traditionally, most tests were developed and tested against middle-income, white children.
"It has been suggested that various aspects of the way tests are formulated and administered may put African Americans at a disadvantage. The language of testing is a standard form of English with which some Blacks may not be familiar; specific vocabulary items are often unfamiliar to Black children; the tests are often given by White examiners rather than by more familiar Black teachers; African Americans may not be motivated to work hard on tests that so clearly reflect White values; the time demands of some tests may be alien to Black culture. (Similar suggestions have been made in connection with the test performance of Hispanic Americans, e.g., Rodriguez, 1992.) Many of these suggestions are plausible, and such mechanisms may play a role in particular cases. Controlled studies have shown, however, that none of them contributes substantially to the Black/White differential under discussion here (Jensen, 1980; Reynolds & Brown, 1984; for a different view see Helms, 1992). Moreover, efforts to devise reliable and valid tests that would minimize disadvantages of this kind have been unsuccessful."
From pp. 93-94 in "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" (1996),
Ulric Neisser, et al.
Report of a Task Force Established by the American Psychological Association
>There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the rol[e] that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment).
I may not be understanding your argument properly, but doesn't IQ _try_ to measure intellectual development? I understand cultural bias being problem and that makes sense --but this doesn't make sense to me. "The problem with measuring intelligence is it measures intelligence?" What difference does the lack of intellectual development have to do with whether it was genetic, educational, physiological, mental, etc?
Most IQ tests - at least ones I've seen - are highly trainable, both in general (you learn to think certain way) and in particular (you learn to solve specific type of test). So while tests aren't race-dependent and there's no reason to think they might be, they definitely can be culture-dependent and income (or, more precisely, education level and type) dependent. So while the test is an objective measure, it in an objective measure of test performance, which may not be strongly correlated with the actual work performance. Remember those "move the mount Fuji" interview questions which were so in fashion some years ago?
I'm not saying banning them completely the right answer here, but putting too much faith into these tests can be dangerous too.
I've taken a bunch of IQ tests over the years with some wildly different scores. I score pretty well. I'm also very sceptical of their general utility.
The between the lowest and highest score I ever received on an IQ test is 45 points. That really doesn't sound like an objective measure of anything much (The lowest was when I was stressed, running on no sleep, the test was sprung on me with no warning and had US cultural aspects when I'm from the UK - things like talking about quarters and dimes. The highest was when I had practiced math & logic problems to win a bet that I couldn't add ten points to my IQ :-)
I find the idea of anybody using an IQ test as a factor in employment laughable. As far as I'm concerned any company using an IQ test is hanging a big red sign on the front of their organisation that says "we don't understand what kind of employees we want".
Such tests can play the same role as the famous FizzBuzz test - to quickly filter out obviously unfit candidates without spending much resources. But this is usually fit for very big companies that hire a lot of people, sometimes without proven experience, and have somehow to reduce costs of that.
> They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites.
Now, now now. You've forgotten Political Logic.
Political Premise: There are no significant differences in intelligence between blacks and whites.
Empirical Premise: Blacks score lower than whites on IQ tests.
Conclusion: IQ tests are biased.
The first rule of Political Logic is to never question the political premise!
Oh, look: an appeal-to-emotion on "political logic" consisting of ignoring eight hundred years of the racist "political premise" (extending to present day) that whites are superior to blacks, followed by straw man, followed by false premise.
Ignoring? Not at all. I'm just pointing out that the notion of racial differences is so taboo in contemporary academic culture that it's impossible to honestly discuss the question. To honestly address the question, you have to be open to the possibility of any answer, which frankly we aren't. If certain racial differences don't exist, that's fine, but if they did exist, no one would say so anyway. So we can't take the claim that racial differences don't exist at face value, because that's the only palatable conclusion open on the question.
The taboo is a completely understandable and largely inevitable reaction against the open and largely fallacious racist claims of academics in the recent past, but it's still a taboo that inhibits honest inquiry. Perhaps in another 50-100 years.
> Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites.
This says nothing about whether an IQ test is biased when used for other purposes than predicting future achievement (such as a job interview), and a supposedly-but-not-actually-objective test is a very dangerous thing; there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past.
You're really doing Professor Hawks a disservice by imagining him as some kind of foul right-wing agitator. He's actually bending over backward to be fair.
Here's how a slightly more partisan biologist (Peter Frost) responds to the same material:
When I joined Motorola, I had to fill in some kind of aptitude test that obviously came from the states. This was in Sweden but I'm an Englishman; pity the Swedes.
The English wasn't English English and it frequently used words that sounded like American sitcoms and which, in the context of a test where one answer is write and another wrong, I was quite unsure of the distinctions between.
This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. "Disparate impact" merely means that blacks score lower, not that the tests are biased.
> This is easy to do with IQ tests, just ask lots of questions that require good schooling and education (e.g. word questions).
The black-white gap is as large or larger on tasks that require very little education, e.g. "reverse digit span", which merely requires that you repeat a sequence of numbers in the reverse order from the direction you heard it.
> and has hence probably improved equality.
I've never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement.