Kings of Men: Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of INTELLIGENCE (1998)
by DOUGLAS K. DETTERMAN
Case Western Reserve University
This special issue is dedicated -- to Arthur Jensen. It has become apparent that he is unlikely to receive the recognition his work merits. The issue begins with a statement by Jensen which discusses some of his work people are less familiar with. His bibliography is also reprinted. A number of persons selected for their diversity in outlook then comment on the work of Arthur Jensen and the impact it has had.
This special issue is devoted to Arthur Jensen. Several years ago it became apparent to me that Arthur Jensen would probably never receive the kind of recognition others with even lesser accomplishments have been given. He will not receive the honors his work merits from organizations like the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Science, or the National Association for the Advancement of Science, to name a few. The reasons for this lack of recognition are obvious. He has taken controversial and politically unpopular stands on issues that are important to the study of intelligence.
To attempt to rectify this situation, I contacted him and asked that he allow Intelligence to do a special issue in his honor. My plan was to have him write an introduction that would describe his career. This would be followed by commentary on his work by a wide assortment of researchers in the field. Not surprisingly, the one addition he requested was that a list of his publications be included. He has had a highly productive career and, I must say, I was not ful1y aware of the extent of his interests until I saw the list of publications.
The plan originally formulated has been carried out in this issue of Intelligence. In his personal statement, you will see that Jensen emphasizes work that may be less familiar to many readers but is no less important. The commentaries on Jensen's work are well worth reading. They tell you as much about the commentators as about Jensen. You will also see that even those who strongly disagree with Jensen have high respect for his intellectual integrity and what he has accomplished. Though this volume stands as a tribute to Arthur Jensen by his contemporaries, like all scientists, his ultimate recognition will be the degree of acceptance of the ideas he has developed.
What has Jensen accomplished in his career? By any measure, Arthur Jensen has made substantial contributions to the study of human intelligence. While opinion may differ about what his most important contributions have been, I have three that I think would rank high on anyone's list.
Genetics. It is hard to remember how dominant environmental thinking was just 30 years ago. Many thought that even mental retardation could be cured by purely environmental interventions. The genetics of intelligence were seldom discussed. Jensen's Harvard Educational Review article and subsequent publications on the genetics of intelligence had an enormous effect on the zeitgeist. It was no longer possible to ignore genetic influences when discussing intelligence. He paved the way for the many behavior geneticists who were to follow in his footsteps.
We have still not realized the full ramifications of this change. For example, not everyone yet fully appreciates that genetics will have to be taken into account when considering environmental variables. Much of the research that was done on the effect of so called environmental variables is worthless because those studies failed to partial out genetic influences and, so, are hopelessly confounded. Among the most discerning, there is a new appreciation for the methodologies that will have to be used to truly understand the environment. Year's from now we may realize that our appreciation of genetic influences was the first step over the threshold to a better understanding of the environment.
Cognition and the Brain. Jensen's early work on reaction time and intelligence focused interest on cognition and its relationship to brain processes and how cognition and brain processes relate to intelligence. A better appreciation of the cognition-brain-intelligence relationship is critical to ultimately understanding intelligence. Though Jensen was not the only one to appreciate this, his work was certainly pivotal. What seemed to impress people most was that such a simple task as choice reaction time correlated with intelligence.
While we are now in only the earliest phases of understanding the cognition-brain-intelligence relationship, there is no question that is where the field is heading. Techniques for studying this relationship like averaged evoked potentials, PET, and fMRI are increasingly being used and reported upon. The future is promising for these tools. But without an appreciation of the brain-cognition-intelligence relationship it is unlikely they would have
been used at all.
g. Without question, Jensen's most significant contribution has been to show the importance of general intelligence, or g. The idea introduced by Spearman, while still a graduate student in 1904, reached its highest pinnacle yet in Jensen's (1998) recent book, The g factor: The science of mental ability. Besides being beautifully written, I predict the book will be the foundation for research for decades to come. It is a summary, that nearly anyone can read, of the research that makes g such an important concept. No one can fully understand individual differences without an understanding of general intelligence and its implications.
Jensen has been the major champion of the concept of g over the last two decades. He has shown that of all individual differences so far demonstrated, g is the most powerful both as a scientific construct and in the prediction of every day performance. He has crystallized methods for studying g and applied those methods. His work on g alone is sufficient for a distinguished scientific career.
Why has Arthur Jensen accomplished what he has accomplished? It seems reasonable to ask why he has accomplished so much if for no other reason than to understand scientific achievement. I think there are a number of personal characteristics that were important in his success. I have had the chance to observe him closely over the last 25 years and these conclusions are based on those observations.
Smart. Jensen comes up with more good ideas than anyone I have known. In the course of reviewing for Intelligence, I have seen countless times when he has suggested ideas for studies to people that have been successfully carried out. He receives no credit for this and, in most cases, is never acknowledged for his contribution. I once asked him why he didn't carry out some of these good ideas himself. He told me he had more things than he could possibly do and the important thing was to see the work done to advance the field.
His published work is testament to his clear and insightful thinking. The work is always understandable and usually makes a fundamental point. There may be people who publish more, but I am sure there are very few whose publications reflect as many good ideas as Jensen's do.
Tenacity Developed from a Love of His Work. Jensen sticks to an idea when he knows he is right. There are few people who have a firmer sense of what is right and what is wrong and who are willing to follow their own instincts about what is right. His tenacity is propelled by a real enjoyment of the work he does. If you talk to him about intelligence, it is hard not to become excited yourself because of the enthusiasm he shows. It is clear he really loves the pursuit of answers in this field for their own sake.
Agnosticism and Open Mindedness. In his own statement in this issue, he admits to a healthy agnosticism about everything. This is particularly true about intelligence. He has no investment about how a question comes out, he simply wants it answered correctly. For years, his critics have called him every name in the book and have accused him of all kinds of biases and prejudices. In fact, I have never known anybody with fewer prejudices. The biggest prejudices scientists usually have are those in favor of their own ideas. Such prejudices are very hard to avoid and the notion of the "objective" scientist is, for most of us, a goal we fail to achieve. However, Jensen has no loyalty whatsoever to any theory or hypothesis even if they come from his own ideas. He would gladly know the truth even if it proved him wrong. In fact, he would be excited to know the truth.
His agnosticism is one of the characteristics that it took me longest to identify. I think that is because it is such an unusual one and not typical of most others I have known. When I first met him personally, I wondered what his biases and prejudices really were and tried to identify them for many years. My effort was wasted. I finally came to the conclusion that he just doesn't have any. I think this may be a point that is impossible for his critics to understand. On the other hand, it is the very reason he has stood up so well against his critics. He has invested himself in pursuit of the truth, not any particular set of ideas.
Thick Skin. I doubt that there have been few people in the history of science who have suffered more criticism than Jensen. There are other examples, of course, including Galileo, Darwin and others. But I doubt if any of them had to have police guards or were regularly threatened with acts of physical violence. I have heard all sorts of rumors about Jensen. One of the most interesting was that he conspired with the Nixon Whitehouse to kill Headstart. I asked him about this and he had a recollection of someone asking him about his research but there was no conspiracy. What is ludicrous about this rumor is that Headstart spending increased dramatically during the Nixon administration (Caruso, Taylor, & Detterman, 1988). There have been many other rumors and gossip, but the ones I have been able to check out have all been false.
Besides vociferous attacks from organized opposition, Jensen has also had to suffer the indignity of seeing his research and writing systematically misrepresented in the popular press. Many of the articles that I have read in the popular press have made me wonder how much of Jensen's work the author had actually read. I am sure that this misrepresentation would be the most difficult part for me to withstand. However, in the years I have known him, I have never heard him complain about this treatment or express any sentiment of unfairness. I always wondered why. It was not long ago that I figured it out. Because he has no commitment to any particular outcome, Jensen finds it amusing, and perhaps humorous, that people become so exorcised about ideas, ideas that could be right or wrong. Instead of applying their intellect to finding out if these ideas hold water, they express their emotions against the message bearer. The saddest part of the whole thing is that the criticisms that have been directed against Jensen have led to little, if anything, of lasting scientific value. Viewed in this way, the effort expended in futile activity is rather ironically humorous.
One of the incidents that typifies many of Jensen's personal characteristics occurred when he came to Case Western Reserve University to give a colloquium. The talk was open to the university community and drew a large crowd. Among those in the crowd were several members of the local Communist Party. They had come to hear him talk about race and intelligence but, instead, he had just begun his reaction time research and was talking about that. During his presentation they listened attentively and politely, as is the custom of all Midwesterners, even members of the Communist Party. At the end of the presentation, there was time for questions and they asked a few pointed ones showing that they had studied up for Jensen's appearance. (In fact, they had probably read more of Jensen than most in the audience.)
After the talk ended, there was a reception in the lobby. As he was drinking his wine and eating his cheese, Jensen slowly made his way around the room working toward the Communist Party members who were bunched in a corner. He was probably drawn to them because it was clear that they were among the best informed about his work even though they had philosophical differences. Maybe it was the philosophical differences' that attracted Jensen to them. I will never be sure. They began asking him questions about intelligence which he enthusiastically answered. The conversation went on for some time. The rest of the audience drifted away and the caterers began cleaning up. Jensen carried on enthusiastically and, at least in my opinion, his opponents were loosing badly. Looking for a way out, the Communist Party members slowly began backing towards the door. But Jensen was just getting started and for every step backward they took toward the door, he took one forward both figuratively and literally. Feeling a bit sorry for them by this time, I told Dr. Jensen that we had to leave for dinner. Taking the opportunity, the representatives of the Communist Party bolted for the door and began walking east on Euclid Avenue. You could see that Jensen was disappointed to loose his sparring partners. He quickly asked which way we were going to dinner. I said we first had to return to my office which was east on Euclid. Quickly, he proceeded me out the door and caught up to his victims. The discussion proceeded down Euclid Avenue until our ways had to part. I think this encounter was the highlight of Jensen's visit.
Solitude. Finally, I think one thing that Jensen has enjoyed as a result of his notoriety is a kind of solitude in which to think, work, and write. Even those who become moderately successful in this business are asked to do many things they don't really want to do and that don't contribute to their scientific accomplishment. Because many have regarded him as a social outcast, he has been spared many of these nearly meaningless activities that he would have had to carry out if he had been in the good graces of those in power. Add to this a wife who Jensen acknowledges has left him totally free to pursue his research and you have what seems to me a nearly ideal circumstance for a scientific career. My one concern in doing this issue is that we could ruin all of that by giving him the recognition he deserves. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
The following quote is one of my favorite from Galton. It describes general intelligence and those who possess it in high quantity. Galton never knew Jensen but I am sure that he had men like him in mind when he wrote this:
"People lay too much stress on apparent specialties, thinking over rashly that because a man is devoted to some pursuit he could not possibly have succeeded in anything else. They might just as well say that because a youth had fallen desperately in love with a brunette, he could not possibly have fallen in love with a blonde. He may or may not have more natural liking for the former type of beauty than the latter, but it is as probable as not that the affair was mainly or wholly due to a general amourousness of disposition. It is just the same with special pursuits. A gifted man is often capricious and fickle before he selects his occupation, but when it has been chosen he devotes himself to it with a truly passionate ardour. After a man of genius has selected his hobby, and so adapted himself to it as to seem unfitted for any other occupation in life and to be possessed of but one special aptitude, I often notice, with admiration, how well he bears himself when circumstances suddenly thrust him into a strange position. He will display an insight into new conditions, and a power of dealing with them, with which even his most intimate friends were unprepared to accredit him. Many a presumptuous fool has mistaken indifference and neglect for incapacity; and in trying to throw a man of genius on ground where he was unprepared for attack, has himself received a most severe and unexpected fall. I am sure that no one who has had the privilege of mixing in the society of the abler men of any great capital, or who is acquainted with the biographies of the heroes of history, can doubt the existence of grand human animals, of natures pre-eminently noble, of individuals born to be kings of men. (Galton, 1869, pp. 24-25)"
I think if you read this issue cover to cover, you will find that no matter what your opinions are on the issues, no matter who is right or wrong, Arthur Jensen is a man to be respected not only for what he has accomplished but for who he is. Thank you, Professor Jensen.
Acknowledgements: Parts of this work were supported by Grants No. HD07176 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Office of Mental Retardation.
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Intensive, Detailed, Exhaustive by THOMAS J. BOUCHARD, JR., University of Minnesota
Arthur Jensen's bibliography is characterized as breathtaking and his scientific work as intensive, detailed, exhaustive, fair-minded, temperate, and courageous. Specific articles and books are targeted as must reading. I argue that Jensen's characterization of the influence of the Berkeley psychology department in the 1940's reflects his own intellectual biases rather than those of the department. Jensen's work is praised as an extension of the British Biological-Theoretical Tradition which attempts to integrate psychological, biological, social genetic, sociological, and cultural processes in a coherent theoretical framework. A new definition of Jensenism. based on the Jansenist heresy, is provided.
Upon reading both Arthur Jensen's bibliography and his new book, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, in the same week only one word comes to mind-"breathtaking". Reading his bibliography is as much a delight as reading his books and papers, truly an intellectual feast. As a fellow Galtonian I will point out a few facts the casual reader might miss if they did not count items and have not read much of Jensen's work; a) he is the first author on 357 of the 384 items, b) he is the sole author of 319 of the 384 items, c) he has four citation classics, d) he has published nearly 10 items a year (including books) since 1962, e) there is no indication that he is slowing down, and f) the quality is not only superb, it is getting better! One disconcerting feature of the bibliography is the paucity of items that have been reprinted. I was stunned, for example, to see the classic 1977 article, "Cumulative deficit in IQ of blacks in the rural South", reprinted only once. It is still the definitive paper on the topic. I suspect that the reason so few papers have been reprinted is the same one that has resulted in his not having been given the numerous honors other scientists of his stature have already received. He has dared to study and speak straight forwardly about important issues that most other social scientists only whisper about -- race and class differences in IQ, lack of bias in intelligence testing, the biological basis of general intelligence, genetic influences on intelligence, and fallacious research methods in developmental psychology. This point can be nicely illustrated by comparing the way Jensen was treated when he visited the University of Minnesota in 1976 and the way Todd Risely was treated on a recent visit. Jensen had been invited to speak on his new work dealing with test bias by the Institute of Child Development (ICD). I had been asked by Scarr, the invitee, to sit in the front row of the auditorium with her because she had heard that he might be attacked. Attacked he was. He was overwhelmed on stage by some extremely hostile members of the audience. She, I, and the police in attendance had to escort him out to safety. He was able to make a presentation to a small audience at ICD later in the day. What the University community was not allowed to hear was a synopsis of work that has now become the definitive statement on test bias, work which has completely reversed professional opinion on this issue. Almost everything which has followed is derivative. In 1997, Risley was invited to the University of Minnesota by the Institute of Child Development where he expounded on his findings reported in the book, "Meaningful differences in the every day experiences of young American children" (Hart & Risley, 1995). Hart and Risley reported on a long-term within-family correlational study in which they show a high correlation between parental language diversity and children's IQ. This work was cited by President Clinton during the 1997 White House Conference on Children (UPI, 1997). In his work Jensen has repeatedly emphasized the behavior genetic dictum that correlations between parental behavior and child behavior computed on biological relatives reared together are completely uninterpretable. This fundamental methodological flaw, repeatedly committed by many psychologists, is a simple variation on the argument that "correlation does not mean causation". For reasons, that I cannot fathom, warnings about this elementary flaw have still not been incorporated into many introductory statistics and methodology textbooks (an exception is Ellis (1994)). One has to ask about the viability of a science that allows the consistent repetition of a serious methodological flaw pointed out and solved by Galton (by the use of the adoption design) over 150 years ago. It is not as if no one noticed Galton's admonitions. The problem was discussed in great detail by Burks (1928a, 1928b, 1938). In recent years it has been written about in great detail by Meehl (1970, 1971, 1978), Scarr (198 1, 1992, 1997, 1978) and in other guises by Plomin (1994).
WHAT EVERY PSYCHOLOGIST SHOULD READ
Upon examining his bibliography I am embarrassed at the number of Jensen's publications that I have not read. That will not, however, keep me from making some recommendation to readers who are much less familiar with his work. From the early work read, "The Stroop Color-Word Test: A review" (Jensen & Rohwer, 1966). The 1969 Harvard Educational Review (HER) article, "How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?", (Jensen, 1969) is still a gem as are the replies to critics. Some critics have argued this article is a citation classic because it is often cited solely for purposed of refutation. I have no doubt that many who cite it for the purpose of refutation have not read it. I recommend it, however, because it is a true classic. Better yet read his book Genetics and Education (Jensen, 1972) in its entirety as it contains the HER article and numerous other superb papers. Jensen, of course, makes a few mistakes now and then as Kamin (1975) points out in his review of this book. The history of one the mistakes is fascinating. Jensen reprinted a graph that included a data point, for dizygotic twins reared apart -- a sample of IQ kin data that did not exist at the time. According to Kamin this kind of error reflects the bias of those who take a genetic position. Locurto (1991), however, informs us that the graph came from an article by Heber, Dever, and Conroy (1968). The senior author of that paper was in fact a well known environmentalist (see pages 63-66 in Locorto's book for a discussion of Heber).
If you are somewhat interested in behavior genetics and don't know much beyond high school genetics, and would like a primer in quantitative genetics read, "Genetic and behavioral effects of nonrandom mating" (Jensen, 1978). If you want to know something about psychometrics and the issue of bias in mental testing the definitive work is still "Bias in mental testing" (Jensen, 1980a). If you are short on time the Behavior and Brain Science summary of "Bias in mental testing" (Jensen, 1980b) will give you a very good overview of the bias issue. If, like me, you have wondered about Stephen J. Gould's veracity and competence in the mental ability domain you must read Jensen's review of "The missmeasure of man". The title of the review is "The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons" (Jensen, 1982) and it is among Jensen's very best book reviews. I would recommend it be followed up with Phil Rushton's review of the revised edition of the same book (Rushton, 1997). If you still need more criticism of Gould read Dennett's (1995) assessment of Gould. Alas as I write these words I find that S. J. Gould has been elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The only solace I can garner from this event is that the AAAS once elected Margaret Mead as its president (Freeman, 1983; Freeman, 1991; Freeman, 1992). Mistakes will be made, but some seem more egregious than others.
While doing my simple counts of Jensen's work it occurred to me that Jensen would have analyzed "the data" differently. He would have argued that it is imperative to remove redundancy and artifacts, he would have grouped the papers by type, by source of publication, by decade. etc., and he would have thrown much more light on the topic. To use the title of one of his book reviews it would have been "Intensive, detailed, exhaustive". Indeed these three terms capture much of the flavor of Jensen's writings. I should also add fair-minded, temperate, and courageous. For someone who has been attacked so vituperatively, both in public and in the published literature, I continue to be astounded at the lack of anger and hostility in his replies and the astuteness with which he dissects the arguments of his critics. To use a psychoanalytic metaphor, I am inclined to believe that he sublimates anger and hostility into mental energy -- see his astute discussion of the construct of mental energy in Jensen (1997).
I suspect if you asked other Galtonians what they would recommend as "must reading" the list would be somewhat different from mine. There is so much excellent material to chose from that if only a few lists were combined the final list would virtually exhaust his bibliography.
Jensen's writings are virtual tutorials on how to write science and how to deal with controversy -- stick to the available evidence, put all the evidence in it's full context, carefully explain the methods, their rationale and the assumptions, acknowledge the lack of evidence when it does not exist and avoid ad hominem arguments. In other words stick to the evidence and be intensive, detailed and exhaustive.
A DIGRESSION ON BERKELEY AND WHO INFLUENCES WHOM
I found Jensen's description of how, in the psychology department at Berkeley in the 1940's, genetic influences on individual differences were neglected somewhat misleading. His description should have been tempered by the recognition that Tolman in a very early paper titled, "The inheritance of maze-learning ability rats" (1924) took a clear position on the importance of genetic factors as they influence behavior. Gerald McClearn (1962) provides a concise history of this period at Berkeley. Tolman strongly encouraged Tryon to study genetic influence on behavior and they collaborated to develop a self-recording maze to collect data from the selectively bred animals (Tolman, Tryon, & Jeffress, 1929). Tryon published at least 12 papers on individual differences and genetic influences on learning ability in rats between 1929 and 1941. The first, in 1929, was titled "The genetics of learning ability in rats". This research program resulted in the famous Tryon maze-bright and maze-dull rat strains. Heron (1935) replicated the Tryon work at Minnesota shortly thereafter. Most psychologists are not aware of the fact that Heron published, with Skinner, (Heron & Skinner, 1940), a paper comparing the rate of bar pressing in the maze-bright and maze-dull rats (the "brights" had a higher rate!). My point here is that the idea of genetic influences on behavior was alive and well at Berkeley when Jensen was there. For some reason it did not "infect" him. I am sad to report that much the same thing happened to me. I entered Berkeley as a sophomore in 1963 and also received an education strongly biased in the direction of experimental (environmental) psychology. As a graduate student in the same department, however, I recall Tryon's spellbinding introductory psychology lectures -- I was a teaching assistant in the course -- that incorporated behavior genetic findings. Tryon anticipated Jensen's work and the arguments of "The Bell Curve" (segregation of cognitive classes in American society) by many years. My collagues at Minnesota tell me that Patterson did also, a claim supported by calls from his students in the 40's asking me what the fuss about "The Bell Curve" was all about, "Wasn't it old news?". The importance of the ideas Tryon was talking about simply did not fully register in my mind. I did not relate them to my own interests in personality and social psychology. Gerald McClearn was also on the Berkeley faculty, teaching Behavior Genetics at this time (he went on to Colorado to found the Institute for Behavioral Genetics), but unfortunately we did not have any contact. Fortunately, Harrison Gough -- my advisor -- required me to read the first textbook in behavior genetics (Fuller & Thompson, 1960) for my special exams and this gave some sense of the field. I also recall Frank Barron presenting, in a very positive manner, the classic meta-analysis of the IQ literature by Erlenmeyer-Kimling and Jarvik (1963) updated in 1981 by Bouchard and McGue (1981) -- to an Institute of Personality Assessment and Research seminar. No one seemed to have been aware of the importance of this paper. Nor did they take it seriously, as IQ was out of style in those days. The intrepid Barron, however, had already carried out an early twin study of creativity (Barron & Parisi, 1976). The importance of work in behavior genetics remained only on the periphery of my consciousness until the appearance of Jensen's 1969 HER paper. I had taught a course on Human Intelligence at the University of California Santa Barbara using the textbook by Hunt (1961). Even though I had only a rudimentary knowledge of behavior genetics I had found the book very unsatisfactory in its treatment of genetic influences. Jensen's monograph exploded on the scene like a bombshell and I immediately wrote and asked him for a copy. The 1969 monograph and Jensen's subsequent writing have changed the field of behavior genetics and individual differences in fundamental ways. I report this long anecdote about the Berkeley psychology department because I believe we really do not know why or how people are influenced by the environmental context in which they find themselves. Why, for example, did Jensen become enamored with Hull's theory instead of Tolman's which explicitly recognized the role of heredity and individual differences? Jensen, of course agrees with me on this point. As he succinctly puts it, "It always amazed to see psychologists offering glib explanations of some immensely complicated behavioral individual incident when psychological science has not even provided explanations for comparatively simple phenomenon ."
MEMBERSHIP IN THE LONDON SCHOOL
Now that I have castigated others for the sin of assuming they know how we have been influenced by our environment I will proceed to commit the same sin. One consistent feature of Jensen's research career is his love of theoretical models with elemental parts and clear quantitative implications. These feature characterize Hullian learning theory, the serial position effect, the verbal learning (experimental) tradition he found himself in at the Human Learning Center in Berkeley, the Level I-Level II theory of group differences, and quantitative behavior genetic theory. This pattern of intellectual interests early on led him to become a member of the The London School. I prefer to call the London School the British Biological-Theoretical Tradition because, a) the latter term puts the origins of the group in a large context (Darwin and Galton came well before the University of London which is the London referred to in the term London School), b) it describes the approach of the group and, c) it provides a nice contrast with what I call the French Clinical-Therapeutic Tradition. The British Biological-Theoretical Tradition has been attacked on a variety of grounds (reductionistic, anti-egalitarian, racist, cold and heartless, etc.) but the most vehement arguments have been against its biological orientation. Consider the following quote, "The interpretation of IQ data has always taken place, as it must, in a social and political context, and the validity of the data cannot be fully assessed without reference to that context. That is in general true of social science, and no amount of biology-worship by behavior geneticists can transfer IQ testing from the social to the biological sciences (Kamin, 1974, p. 2)." Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin (1984) have extended this argument to all behavioral traits including psychopathology. These critics have cut to the heart of the matter. The goal of British Biological-Theoretical Tradition has indeed been, since the time of Galton, to integrate psychology, biology, and genetics (Bouchard, 1996). "The g Factor: The science of mental ability" is a direct descendant of Galton 's book "Hereditary Genius" and Spearman's book "The abilities of man" (1927). It is a brilliant work. It pushes the goal of British Biological-Theoretical Tradition a giant step forward. I challenge the reader to examine Jensen's magnum opus and decide for him or herself if it has crossed the threshold from the social to the biological sciences. It is worth noting that E.O. Wilson's recent book, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge" (Wilson, 1998), defends a very similar but even broader research program.
While reading "The g Factor" I was struck by Jensen's detailed knowledge of the lives of many of the important historical figures in the IQ story. His bibliography explains why he is so knowledgeable. In 1984 he wrote bibliographic entries for the Encyclopedia of Psychology on Galton, Pearson, Spearman, and Thurstone and in 1994 he wrote bibliographic entries for Galton, Spearman, and Eysenck for the Encyclopedia of Intelligence. More recommended reading.
"JENSENISM"
Jensen reported in his commentary in this issue the definition of "Jensenism", taken from current dictionaries, in order to try to free himself from its grip. I don't think this is possible, consequently, I thought it might be worth preparing a proper and more comprehensive definition that praises Jensen. My definition is anticipatory and includes the effect of his magnum opus, "The g Factor". My definition mimics the definition of an older heresy -- Jansensim (See encyclopedia Britanica 15th Ed., Micropaedia, p. 515)
Jensenism: A scientific movement of unorthodox tendencies (heresy) that appeared chiefly in the United States in the late 1960's. The movement was scientific (religious) in origin, arising out of the theoretical (theological) problem of reconciling the empirical observation of massive and important individual differences if intelligence as well as a large and persistent black-white difference in intelligence (lack of divine grace) with the belief that all men are created equal (human freedom). Jensenism exalts the influence of the genes (grace) made available by mother nature (Christ the Redeemer). According to the doctrine, genes are capable of explaining most of the differences; and it puts forth the scientific (Augustinian) arguments regarding the necessity of genes for any explanation of the differences, the infallible efficacy of genes, and demonstrates the absolutely arbitrary character of environmental explanations. Consistent with this pessimistic view of man's nature and freedom are its rigoristic views on scientific method and quantification.
The publication of the manifesto of Jensenism, "The g Factor", after attempts to censor it, aroused violent controversy. The work was accused, chiefly by Psychologists (Jesuits), of divesting freewill of all reality and of rejecting the universality of the redemption by environmental means. Nevertheless, the Jensenist interpretation of the empirical evidence spread. It was defended by many disciples and it attracted many influential converts.
The establishment, in the pages of the New York Times (Papacy), struck out against Jensenism with the publication of a devastating review of "The g Factor" (the Bull of Cum Occasione) which among other things condemned the five propositions of Jensenism on the relationship between black-white differences in IQ and genes.
Jensensim is a complex movement, based more on a commitment to scientific method (a certain mentality and spirituality) than on specific doctrines. It is an attempt, in line with that of the Reformers, to reform psychology (the Church) in the spirit of early science (Christianity). It opposed what, in its view, was a compromising approach to true scientific method (Christian theology) and practice but was rejected by psychology (the Church) as an exaggerated and unorthodox position.
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Costs and Benefits of Defying the Crowd in Science by ROBERT J. STERNBERG, Yale University
Scientists, mirroring the societies in which they live, have devised numerous ways of rewarding conformity and punishing defiance. Some of the mechanisms are reviewed. Scientists who defy the crowd can gain extrinsic reinforcement, but often from sources that promote irresponsibility on the part of these scientists. For the most part, Arthur Jensen has spent his career in defiance of the scientific crowd. Some of this work has made an outstanding contribution to the science of intelligence: other work, I believe, has been regressive. What kind of system might appropriately reward that work which has made a contribution?
On November 27, 1997, the day of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, my wife and I were in New York City. We had no interest in the Thanksgiving Day parade and were walking down Seventh Avenue when we started encountering noticeable pedestrian traffic walking in the opposed (northward) direction. The farther we walked, the heavier the opposing pedestrian traffic became, and the more visibly annoyed people became that we were walking in the opposite direction. Eventually, we reached a density of human traffic such as we had never seen before. The choice of whether to walk in the direction opposed to everyone else was taken away from us: Police waved us over onto a side street to head toward the east. We could either join the crowd or leave it altogether. We were forbidden to oppose it.
Throughout much of history and much of the world even today, people have had the same choice with respect to their ideas. They have had the option either to join the crowd or, if they are lucky, to leave it, but not to oppose it. Through secret police, inquisitions, kangaroo courts, and even summary execution, people who have chosen either not to be part of the parade or at least to be fellow-travelers with it have been subjected to punishment. Of course, people in the United States like to believe that it is different there. After all, many of those living in the U.S. believe it to be a "free country."
On the one hand, the freedoms enjoyed by residents of the U.S. are substantial. For example, people can criticize the government or even sue its chief executive, both without being imprisoned or otherwise totally silenced. At the same time, the society has been able to function without a formal government-sponsored "thought police" in part because the members of the society have themselves taken on aspects of the role of a thought police, obviating the need for a formal squadron. The society has devised many ways to punish nonconformers, as any child in a schoolyard has observed. Of course, at other times in the country's history -- most notoriously but not only during the McCarthy era -- nonconformers in the U.S. have not been so lucky. Those who have defied the crowd have been vilified or even perished. Scientists are not much different from other people. Scientists, too, have developed a number of ways to ensure that their numbers follow the crowd.
ENFORCING CONFORMITY TO THE CROWD AMONG SCIENTISTS
Thought policing is not limited to politics. It occurs in science as well. Many individuals enter science because they believe it is a calling that encourages free thinking and independent thought. Many of these same individuals soon discover that their idealism bears little contact with reality. As Kuhn (1970) and others have observed, scientists are no more independent-minded or free-thinking than anyone else. If anything, they cherish conformity more than the rest.
Scientists enforce conformity in a number of ways, both formal and informal.
1.Training. For the most part, students learn through their preprofessional training what the current paradigms are and what kinds of work are rewarded and what kinds are not. They are encouraged to do kinds of work that will be rewarded. To a large extent, training is considered "good" to the extent that it teaches students where the rewards are.
2.Publications. Many people who have submitted articles to journals have discovered that the refereeing process is an excellent way to ensure conformity under the banner of quality control. Of course, it is difficult to get articles accepted if they are totally pedestrian; but there is almost always some journal that will take an article, no matter how pedestrian it may be. More difficult is to get articles accepted if they go against the accepted wisdom, as John Garcia discovered in his studies of conditioning and as many others have discovered in their own work. Thus, many people find that the work that is hardest to get accepted is not only their worst work, but also their best.
3.Grants. Grants provide an excellent way to reward conformity. People who work outside established paradigms often find it very difficult or impossible to get funded, so that they are effectively prevented from doing much of what they might have intended to get done. There are many forces that contribute to making granting agencies a conservative force (see Sternberg, 1996a, 1997). First, low selection ratios allow even one negative reviewer essentially to blackball a proposal. Second, programmatic agencies fund work within their established program of research but not outside it. Third, people who are asked to serve on review panels will, for the most part, be those working within established and accepted paradigms. Fourth, those who agree to spend the vast amounts of time it requires to be on such panels may tend even more toward conformity than those who would rather devote the time to their own research. Finally, proposals are expected to make contact with existing paradigms, and if they do not, they can be rejected for this reason alone.
4.Recognitions. Through prizes, awards, organizational offices, and the like, scientists can enforce their set of values, recognizing those who play the accepted game well and failing to recognize those who go outside the accepted limits. In some cases, these views may even have nothing to do with the work for which recognition is being given. For example, a lifetime achievement award to be presented to Raymond Cattell at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1997 was suspended pending investigation of his religious beliefs!
5.Book Reviews. Books of scholars who go beyond the limits are typically subject to negative reviews, sometimes by people who seem not to have read the books.
6.Graduate Students. "Respectable" researchers do not send their undergraduate students to work with "disreputable" researchers.
7.Informal Networks. Perhaps most importantly, those who work outside accepted networks never make it into the professional in-groups. They are less likely to be asked to serve on committees, write promotion letters, give invited talks at major scientific conferences, give departmental colloquia, and the like.
In sum, the various fields of science construct a system for enforcing conformity. Scientists who do not conform are "out." But other mechanisms come into play that not only reward scientists for divergent views, but actually encourage the scientists to diverge even more, even to the point of irresponsibility.
ENCOURAGING NONCONFORMITY TO THE CROWD AMONG SCIENTISTS
If scientists received no rewards at all for nonconformity, they might cease to be nonconformists. But there are at least three major sources of rewards for nonconfonnists.
1.Internal Rewards. Scientists who state what they believe and then fight for their beliefs have the satisfaction of knowing that they are saying and doing what they believe in. They can also hope that, in the long term, the scientific establishment will come around to their way of thinking and reward what they are doing. In fact, such changes are not unusual. In their writings, both Sandra Scarr and Robert Plomin have commented on how behavior-genetic work that was devalued in the 1970s came to be valued by the latter half of the 1990s.
2.Fringe Groups. Fringe groups of scientists may set up their own organizations to reward what they are doing, or may find that their work is ideologically consistent with the priorities of political or social fringe groups and thus accepted and even welcomed by such groups. Such scientists may therefore find themselves having to decide whether to associate with these groups in order to feel extrinsically rewarded. But these groups may in turn encourage the scientists to take positions even more extreme than those they believe in, and perhaps to take positions that are irresponsible.
3.The Media. By far the most powerful ally of the nonconforming scientist in this country can end up being the media. The media thrive on controversy and on the offbeat. Thus if virtually all scientists believe that AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and a few scientists do not believe this to be the case, the disbelievers may find themselves actually getting more media attention because of the divergence of their views. If most people believe that racial differences in psychometrically measured intelligence are largely environmental and a few scientists believe (or are willing publicly to state) that such differences are probably largely genetic, the views of the minority are likely to attract attention. Moreover, even if most of these scientists' views are conventional, it is the unconventional part of their views that is likely to attract the media attention.
The situation can become pernicious because media attention tends to be short-lived. Unfortunately, almost the only way for nonmainstream scientists to maintain media attention and the extrinsic reinforcement it brings is either to take new unconventional positions, or to become more extreme in the positions they already have taken. Many of us scientists who have worked with the media have found reporters trying to get us to make statements more extreme than we really believe, simply because such statements make for more interesting press coverage. The reinforcement system thus can turn a nonconforming but responsible scientist into a less responsible or even an irresponsible one. Worse, it may be only through the media that one can gain any coverage of one's divergent views. Iced out of mainstream science, scientists with nonconforming views may thus turn to the media to get press coverage of their views, not fully realizing the dangerous game into which they are entering. Of course, the press coverage further "turns off'" the so-called respectable scientists, so that what formerly might have been a bad situation with regard to the scientist's participation in mainstream science becomes an even worse one.
THE ROLE OF DEFIANCE OF THE CROWD IN SCIENCE
Defiance of the crowd in a Thanksgiving parade is rather innocuous. In science, defiance of the crowd has higher stakes. Elsewhere, Todd Lubart and I have proposed that defiance of the crowd is the hallmark of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1995). Individuals in science or any other field who make the most difference are those who defy the crowd. These individuals generate ideas that, like stocks with low price-earnings (PE) ratios, seem unattractive and even repugnant to others. The individuals work to raise the value of their metaphorical stocks, attempting to convince other people of the value of their ideas. Ultimately, they metaphorically "sell high," moving on to their next unpopular idea.
In our work, we give numerous examples of how initial receptions to creative ideas are often unfavorable and even patently hostile (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Scientists have developed a number of ways to ensure that scientists follow the crowd.
What's the problem, then? Why not just institute some kind of guarantee that scientists who defy the crowd will be rewarded rather than punished? The problem stems from the fact that creativity is typically defined not only in terms of novelty, but also in terms of quality and appropriateness. In terms of the stock-market analogy, one needs to remember that many and probably most low P-E stocks never do rise much in value. Consider the example of HIV and AIDS.
The scientist who denies that the human immunodeficiency virus causes AIDS takes a large risk. He will be disparaged by other scientists for defying the crowd. But if he can show to their satisfaction or that of others who hold power in the society that he is correct, then he may actually end up being a hero. In the case of the HIV opposition, no such demonstration has emerged. Nor has any credible science emerged from the efforts of proponents of cold fusion. In both cases, novelty without perceived quality has led proponents of offbeat views to be labeled not as creative, but rather, as crackpots. Creative people, of course, are risk-takers, but they tend to be sensible risk-takers (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). They are willing to take risks that, in the long run, are more likely to pay off. The risks taken by proponents of the theory that HIV does not cause AIDS and of the theory of cold fusion have, to date at least, failed.
THE CASE OF ARTHUR JENSEN
Where does Arthur Jensen fit into the schema that has been set up in this article? First, most of Jensen's career has been outside mainstream science. Since his article almost 30 years ago in the Harvard Educational Review (Jensen, 1969), Jensen has been viewed by many as outside mainstream science. This fact is ironic, because the overwhelming majority of his articles and books have been within mainstream science. Jensen's work on reaction time and intelligence (e.g., Jensen, 1982) is solidly within the information-processing tradition. Jensen's work on test bias (Jensen, 1980) is solidly within the psychometric tradition, as is his work on the g factor (Jensen, 1998). Thus, what constitutes a relatively small proportion of his work has, for the majority of the scientific community, defined him. As noted in an invitation letter to this symposium that "he has received very little official recognition for his work and probably will not in the future" (Detterman, 1997), Jensen's defiance of the scientific crowd has cost him. Awards and recognitions that he otherwise might have received for influential, highly cited work may never come.
Second, Jensen has been courted both by political fringe groups and by the press. Not despite but rather because of the unpopularity of his views, Jensen has been a media figure to an extent that is rare in mainstream psychology. Few psychologists are as well known, and some who perhaps are, such as the late Richard Herrnstein, are known for much the same reason -- not for their mainstream work (in Herrnstein's case, on animal learning), but for their work on race, heritability, and intelligence.
Scientifically, I disagree with most of the corpus of Jensen's work for reasons that are not relevant to this article but are discussed elsewhere (e.g., Sternberg, 1985, l996b). But in terms of the criteria by which I believe scientific work should be judged -- such as creativity, basis in theory, empirical rigor, and impact -- I believe that most of Jensen's work fares well. The corpus of Jensen's psychometric work on the general factor and of his information-processing work on reaction time -- but not of his behavior genetic work, including work on racial differences.-- place him as one of the outstanding leaders in the field of human intelligence. Indeed, few people now alive have had more impact on the field, for better or worse. And few people studying human intelligence have more scientific investigations to their credit. Indeed, much of the highly cited work in the field of intelligence has little or, arguably, no scientific basis at all.
I exclude from this accolade Jensen's work on behavior genetics and racial differences in intelligence because, for a number of reasons discussed elsewhere (e.g., Sternberg, I 996b), I believe this work to be not only wrong, but wrong-headed. My goal here, though, is not to discuss substantive differences, but rather, how a field should evaluate scientific work that defies the crowd.
Arthur Jensen is, in my opinion, an epitome of the need to change the reward system in science. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that many other scientists believed as I do that Jensen's work on information processing and on psychometrics has been ground-breaking but his work on behavior genetics has not been, or even has been regressive. How does the reward system function?
Much of the way the academic reward system functions -- not just in science -- is by the reputation of the academic (Caplow & McGee, 1958). When reputation is viewed unidimensionally or almost unidimensionally, the field may find itself forced into judgments it should not make. If one body of work within a corpus is disfavored, scientists may end up generalizing this disfavor unfairly to other work by the same investigator.
At times, some kind of combination formula with regard to the bases of evaluation is inevitable. For example, when a department has just one available slot for a job and someone must be hired, a hard choice must be made despite the fact that an idiographic model of evaluating candidates might seem much more appropriate than a nomothetic model. But many decisions need not be unidimensional.
Many and probably most major scientific awards are to individuals for the cumulative corpus of their work. As a result, a scientist who has done even one stream of unpopular work may find him or herself iced out of the awards system because this work damages -- rightfully or wrongfully -- the valuation given to the overall corpus or work. Perhaps a better way to grant recognition would be to a program of work, with the individual rather than the work being seen as incidental. Thus, instead of giving an award to Scientist X for Research Program A, the award would be given to Research Program A -- not necessarily the whole corpus of a scientist's work -- with the scientist receiving the award incidentally. The focus would be on the work, not on the scientist. In the case of Jensen, one could recognize the value of his work on reaction time or the general factor without recognizing the value of other work. In the case of Cattell, one would reward the work, say, on the theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence or on the 16-personality factor theory irrespective of what Cattell's personal beliefs might be.
In some cases, judgments of work are being influenced not by portions of the person's work, but by judgments of the person's character with respect to things that arguably have nothing to do with the work. Cattell's religion is a case in point. A more extreme example is Paul DeMan. The work of Paul DeMan, in particular, and deconstructionism in general, are undergoing a thorough reexamination in light of fairly recent discoveries that DeMan wrote virulently anti-Semitic tracts in his youth. Such tracts certainly may and probably must greatly damage our evaluation of DeMan as a person. But Richard Wagner the composer and Ezra Pound the poet were also virulent anti-Semites. Their work stands as it was, regardless of how personally despicable either or both of them likely may have been. It would probably be a loss to the world if Wagner's and Pound's works were ignored because of their despicable personal views or because of their deeply flawed personal characteristics.
If we are to believe Gardner (1993), many creative individuals have had much less than savory personal characteristics. There is good reason to judge people and their work separately, and then to judge people's distinct programs of work separately. Indeed, almost every creative individual has produced work of which he or she is, at best, not proud, and at worst, ashamed (or should be).
CONCLUSION
Science has a number of ways of enforcing adherence to the dictates of the crowd. Scientists who choose to defy the crowd can still gain reinforcement, but when it comes from others, it is often in the form of temptations that can lead the scientist down a path to irresponsibility. Scientists would do better if they focused their evaluations not on individuals, but on programs of work within the total corpus of the scientists' work. In this way, people whose work is viewed as undesirable in some ways are not punished so that neither they nor other work they may do is taken seriously.
In the case of Arthur Jensen, I believe that a large body of his work is deserving of great commendation (although I disagree with most of it). I hope it is for his work on information processing and the general factor that he is remembered, not for his work on behavior genetics, test bias, or racial differences in intelligence and related traits.
If there is anything for which citizens of a country should give thanks on Thanksgiving Day, it is not that they can join a parade, but that they can choose to walk, at the very least, away from it, and at best, in opposition to it.
Acknowledgements: Preparation of this article was supported under the Javits act program (Grant R206R5000 I) as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement or the U.S. Department of Education.
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The "Jensen Effect" and the "Spearman-Jensen Hypothesis" of Black-White IQ Differences by J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON, University of Western Ontario
Arthur Jensen's research on the biological basis of mental ability has culminated in his encyclopedic new work The g Factor (1998) which massively confirms "Spearman's (1927) hypothesis" that Black-White IQ differences vary systematically as a function of each test's g loading. More generally, The g Factor consolidates the psychometric, neurophysiological, behavior genetic, and comparative evidence for the existence and importance of g and links it to evolutionary processes. But perhaps Jensen's greatest legacy to science will be his pioneering method of correlated vectors which subsumes, under a much broader principle, his famous (1969a) hypothesis about the heritability of the Black-White IQ gap and, as Osborne (1980) dubbed it. the "Spearman-Jensen hypothesis" that Black-White IQ differences are greatest on the g-factor. Jensen's method of correlated vectors demonstrates that g (specifically a test's g loading) is the best predictor of that test's correlation with a given variable, in future, when a significant correlation occurs between g-factor loadings and variable X, the result might usefully be called a "Jensen Effect" (for that X variable). because otherwise there is no name for it, only a long explanation of how the effect was achieved. Naming it the "Jensen Effect" would honor one of the greatest psychologists of our time.
A Personal Note
Perhaps I am the only psychologist of my generation who missed the tumultuous appearance of Arthur Jensen's (1969a) famous Harvard Educational Review article arguing that IQ is heritable and that genetic factors are involved in the Black-White IQ gap. The attendant brouhaha failed to reach my attention in England where I was an undergraduate student at the University of London. Two years later, however, when Hans Eysenck popularized Jensen's argument in his 1971 book Race, Intelligence, and Education, I was a graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Eysenck's book created such a furor that a small group of us social psychologists decided to study the issue. Jensen's clearly argued response to seven "replies," as well as his original exposition (all usefully compiled in an offprint series by the Harvard University Press) led some of us to believe that he might well be right.
Jensenism, described as one of the great heresies of 20th century science, continued to inspire heated debate at the London School of Economics for the next two years, culminating in a physical assault on Professor Eysenck when he came to give us a lecture in 1973 on "The Biological Basis of Intelligence." I was more than just a horrified witness to this 'political action' by a dozen Maoists (proudly sporting red Mao-Tse Tung badges in their lapels). I was even featured in a newspaper photograph in a scrum around Eysenck, energetically pulling at rampaging 'demonstrators,' but wearing the fashionably long hair of the time, it might not be obvious from the photograph whose side I was on! The Maoists made no attempt to hide after Eysenck was hustled away, for the police were not to be called and there was an unfortunate sentiment that Eysenck only got what he deserved. "No Enemies on the Left" was a mantra at the L.S.E. in the early 1970s.
The first time I heard Jensen speak in person was at the 1978 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto where he (1979) presented "g: Outmoded Theory or Unconquered Frontier?" The science was inspirational, all about reaction-time and speed-of-processing correlates of IQ. The large ballroom was filled to overflow and the audience, rapt with attention, burst into enthusiastic applause when he had finished. If only in contrast to anxious expectations, the 'infamous Dr. Jensen' struck me as warm, humane, and giving of one of the most exciting talks I had ever heard.
I eventually met Jensen in early 1981 while spending a term as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley's Institute of Human Development. Having just written a book explaining altruism from a social learning perspective (Rushton, 1980),. I was broadening my focus to encompass behavioral genetic and sociobiological viewpoints. Although many of those at the Institute of Human Development had earned international reputations for documenting the early emergence of personality traits and their power to predict social adjustment, few were interested in searching for behavior genetic causes. The reason was not hard to find. At Berkeley, any discussi> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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ervous hop, skip, and a jump away from Jensen's controversial racial hypothesis.
Jensen occupied an office in the School of Education, one floor up from my office in the psychology department. We easily established rapport. The question of race differences was beginning to fascinate me and on this topic, of course, Jensen was most informative. Over several lunches at Pasand, one of his favorite local Indian restaurants, he sketched out his views and helpfully answered queries. Back at his office he provided reprints. It was clear that Jensen's defining trait was intellectual curiosity and for him the study of race differences presented an acid test. How could the topic, which loomed so large in education and society, be avoided for ideological reasons if psychology was to be scientific and if the individual scientist was to maintain personal integrity? I came away profoundly influenced and determined to read the relevant literature.
International Distribution of IQ, Brain Size, and Related, Traits
Many researchers were inspired by "Jensenism." Lynn (1978, 1982) and Vernon (1982) not only pushed the envelope, but extended the 'outside of the envelope' and made the race-IQ debate international in scope with their findings that East Asians average higher on tests of mental ability than do Whites, whereas Caribbeans (and especially Africans) average lower. As Lynn's (1997) and Jensen's (1998) most recent reviews show, East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average lQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90. (Blacks in sub-Saharan Africa score about 2 standard deviations [approximately 30 IQ points] below the mean of Whites on nonverbal tests.)
As a budding sociobiologist, I too was inspired by Jensenism. It seemed to me that by its impact on diverse areas of behavioral science, Jensenism might help complete the Darwinian revolution. I began to review the international literature, studying not only IQ, but other behavioral traits like speed of physical maturation and longevity, personality and temperament, family structure and crime, and sexual behavior and fertility, and later brain size (Rushton, 1984a, 1984b, 1988). I have found that on these traits East Asians are slower maturing, less fertile, less sexually active, with larger brains and higher IQ scores than Africans, who tend towards the opposite in each of these areas. Europeans, I found, fell between the other two groups. As Jensen (1984) elaborated (in a commentary on my first review), a network of such related evidence provides more opportunity for finding and testing alternative theories than does any single dimension drawn from the set.
As a now avowed Jensenist, I carried out experiments finding, for example, that the amount of inbreeding depression on 11 sub-tests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children in Japan predicted the magnitude of the Black-White differences on the same sub-tests in the U.S. (Rushton, 1989). Inbreeding depression, a purely genetic effect, was a sufficiently robust predictor to overcome generalization from the Japanese in Japan to Blacks and Whites in the U.S. There really is no other explanation, other than a genetic one, for the correlation between inbreeding depression and Black-White differences.
I also calculated cranial capacities from external measurements of the head using large archival data sets including a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel (Rushton, 1992), a sample of tens of thousands of men and women collected by the International Labour Office in Geneva (Rushton, 1994), and a sample of thousands of American children from birth to age seven (Rushton, 1997). After adjusting for the effects of stature, weight, and sex, the cranial capacities consistently averaged higher for East Asians than for Europeans, who averaged higher than Africans, as reviewed by Rushton and Ankney (1996) and Jensen (1998).
Jensen's The g Factor
All the issues Jensen raised in 1969 are still with us today. Indeed, much of the opposition to IQ testing and heritability would probably disappear if it were not for the stubborn and unwelcome fact that, despite extensive well-funded programs of intervention, the Black-White difference refuses to go quietly into the night.
Jensen's long intellectual march has culminated triumphantly in his latest book, The g Factor (1998), an exposition of the reality of Spearman's (1927) seminal concept of g, the general factor of intelligence. Jensen's tome does not draw back from Jensenist conclusions--that the average difference in IQ found between Blacks and Whites has a substantial hereditary component, that this difference is related mainly to the g-factor, and that it has important societal consequences.
Chapter 11 of The g Factor fully documents how, on average, the American Black population scores below the White population by about 1.2 standard deviations, equivalent to 18 IQ points. This mean difference between Blacks and Whites in IQ scores has scarcely changed over the past 80 years (despite some claims that the gap is narrowing) and can be observed as early as three years of age. Controlling for overall socioeconomic level only reduces the mean difference by 4 IQ points. Contrary to purely cultural explanations, culture-fair tests tend to give Blacks slightly lower scores, on the average, than more conventional tests, as do non-verbal tests compared with verbal tests, and abstract reasoning tests compared with tests of acquired knowledge.
The reason, in fact, that Jensen pursued Spearman's hypothesis is that it so exquisitely solved a problem that had long perplexed him about test bias with respect to Black-White differences. He had noted that the Black-White differences are markedly smaller on tests of rote learning and short term memory than on tests of reasoning and those requiring any transformation of the information. He initially formalized these observations in his so-called Level I-Level II theory (Jensen, 1968). Level I tasks were those that required little or no mental manipulation of the input to arrive at the correct output. A clear example of Level I ability is Forward Digit Span in which people recall a series of digits in the same order as that in which they are presented. Level II tasks, however, require some mental manipulation of the input in order to arrive at the appropriate response. A clear example of Level II ability is Backward Digit Span in which people recall a series of digits in the reverse order to that in which they are presented. Jensen found that Black-White differences are twice as large for Backward as for Forward Digit Span. As this finding did not readily lend itself to an explanation in terms of cultural bias or in terms of any other theory Jensen knew of except his Level I-Level II notion, he kept thinking about it.
After Jensen re-read Spearman, he realized that his Level I-Level II formulation was only a special case of the more general hypothesis proposed by Spearman. Jensen began testing Spearman's hypothesis on a wide variety of psychometric tests administered to large representative samples of the American White and Black populations (Jensen, 1985, 1987). The g Factor summarizes the results from 17 independent data sets on a total of nearly 45,000 Blacks and 245,000 Whites derived from 171 psychometric tests. g loadings consistently predict the magnitude of the Black-White difference (r = +.63). Spearman's hypothesis is borne out even among three-year-olds administered eight sub-tests of the Stanford-Binet. The rank correlation between g loadings and the Black-White differences is +.71 (p <.05).
Spearman's hypothesis applies even to the g factor extracted from performance on elementary cognitive tasks. In some of these studies, 9-to-12-year-olds are asked to decide which of several lights is illuminated and move their hand to press a button that turns that light off. All children can perform such tasks in less than one second, but children with higher IQ scores perform faster than do those with lower scores, and White children, on average, perform faster than Black children (Vernon & Jensen, 1984). The correlations between the g loadings of these types of reaction time tasks and the Black-White differences range from +.70 to +.8l.
Jensen also applied Spearman's hypothesis to East Asian-White comparisons, using the same reaction time measures. The direction of the correlation is opposite to that in the Black-White studies, indicating that, on average, East Asians score higher in g than do whites. No one so far seems to have looked at East Asian-White differences on conventional psychometric tests as a function of their g loadings. From the study just mentioned, however, Jensen's prediction should be clear: One should find the mirror image of Spearman's hypothesis for Black-White differences. It might be interesting to note, in light of the above, that in an early reply to a charge of "white supremacy," Jensen (l969b, p. 240) made a remarkably presaging conjecture, He wrote: ". . .if I were asked to hypothesize about race differences in what we call g or abstract reasoning ability, I should be inclined to rate Caucasians on the whole somewhat below Orientals, at least in the United States."
The Spearman-Jensen Hypothesis
Osborne (1980) suggested that if scientific credit was to be assigned appropriately, the "Spearman hypothesis" that Black-White differences are greater on more g-loaded sub-tests should become the "Spearman-Jensen hypothesis" because it was Jensen who brought Spearman's hypothesis to widespread attention, and it was Jensen who did all the empirical work confirming it. Jensen (1997) himself has noted that, "Because Spearman himself never presented it as a formal hypothesis, a few people have objected to my crediting it to Spearman. So whenever I say 'Spearman's hypothesis,' I hope you will visualize these words in quotation marks."
The Jensen Effect
The Spearman-Jensen hypothesis turns out to be readily subsumable under a more general principle that, when resulting in a positive finding, we might call a "Jensen Effect." Recall that the Spearman-Jensen hypothesis was tested by first extracting the g factor from a variety of cognitive tests, and then relating these scores (a 'vector' of scores, i.e., with direction as well as quantity), to the mean Black-White differences on those same tests (a second 'vector' of scores). Jensen extended this method of correlated vectors to a variety of variables. Using this procedure, Jensen (1998) showed that the vector of a test's g loadings is the best predictor of that test's correlation with a variety of variables, including not only scholastic and work-place performance, but also brain size, brain pH, brain glucose metabolic rate, average evoked potential, reaction time, and other physiological factors. The Jensen Effect can be seen whenever there is a significant correlation between the vector of the sub-tests' g loadings and the vector of the same sub-tests' loadings on variable X (where X is some other, usually non-psychometric variable).
This methodological innovation of Jensen's may be an even greater discovery than the totality of empirical results generated by it, important though these undoubtedly are. His method of correlated vectors is fully explicated in The g Factor (Appendix B) and is also discussed in the opening remarks of this symposium. To honor Jensen's accomplishments into the future, I propose that when a significant correlation occurs between the two vectors the result be called a Jensen Effect (for that X variable), because otherwise there is no name for it, only a long explanation of how the effect was achieved.
Chapter 12 of The g Factor presents Jensen's technical arguments for why he believes that race differences are about 50% genetic in origin. He emphasizes the fact that it is precisely those components of intelligence tests that are most heritable and that most relate to brain size which most profoundly differentiate Black from White groups. The heritability data are especially interesting because genetic theory and culture theories of race differences make predictions opposite to each other. Culture theory predicts that differences between races will be greater on those culturally malleable items on which races can grow apart as a result of dissimilar experiences.
The g Factor also cites the evidence of transracial adoption studies. Three studies have been carried out on Korean and Vietnamese children adopted into White American and White Belgian homes. Though many had been hospitalized for malnutrition, prior to adoption, they went on to develop IQs ten or more points higher than their adoptive national norms. By contrast, Black and mixed-race (Black-White) children adopted into White middle-class families typically perform at a lower level than similarly adopted white children. In the well known Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, by age 17, adopted children with two White biological parents had an average IQ of 106, adopted children with one Black and one white biological parent averaged an IQ of 99, and adopted children with two Black biological parents had an average IQ of 89 (which is not different from that of Black children raised by Black parents in these northwestern states).
The g Factor also devotes a fair amount of space to racial differences in brain size. Chapter 6 reviews the literature which shows that the brain-size IQ relation emerges most clearly using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (r = .44 across eight separate studies). Chapter 12 documents the three-way racial gradient in brain size established by aggregating data from studies using four kinds of measurements: (a) wet brain weight at autopsy, (b) volume of empty skulls using filler, (c) volume estimated from external head sizes, and (d) volume estimated from external head measurements and corrected for body size. East Asians and their descendants average about 17 cm3 (1 in3) larger brain volumes than do Europeans and their descendants, whose brains average about 80 cm3 (5 in3) larger than do those of Africans and their descendants. Jensen (1998, pp. 442-443) calculated an "ecological" correlation (used in epidemiological studies) of +0.998 between median IQ and mean cranial capacity across the three populations of "Mongoloids," "Caucasoids," and "Negroids."
Finally, The g Factor considers the race differences from an evolutionary perspective. Jensen accepts the "Out-of-Africa" theory, that Homo sapiens arose in Africa about 100,000 years ago, expanded beyond Africa after that, and then migrated east after a European/East Asian split about 40,000 years ago. Since evolutionary selection pressures were different in the hot savanna where Africans evolved than in the cold Arctic where Mongoloids evolved, these ecological differences had not only morphological, but also behavioral effects. The farther north the populations migrated 'Out of Africa,' the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children during prolonged winters. As these populations evolved into present-day Europeans and East Asians, they underwent selective pressure for larger brains.
The g Factor's strong conclusion about race differences in fact came as something of a suprise to me. In all my discussions with Jensen about race differences since 1981, I had been struck by his careful circumspection. More than once he went so far as to say that he doubted that methods were available for determining whether Black-White differences were heritable (including the methods of behavior genetics). As best I recall, he said something like: "We can never 'prove' for certain that the race differences in IQ are heritable in the sense that we can 'prove' something in mathematics. All empirical science can do is increase the probability that genetic factors are involved."
Pushing Out the Envelope Even Further
Science is a never ending journey and Jensenism has traveled far since 1969. With regard to the significance of brain size, for example, early on, Jensen described brain size as unrelated to IQ (1969a, p. 73; 1973, p. 333, 349), and did not cite the literature on racial differences in brain size. Somewhat later, in Bias in Mental Testing (1980), he cited Van Valen's (1974) re-assessment of the literature showing a +.30 correlation between brain size and IQ along with a Table from Hooton (1939) showing a linear relation between head size and socioeconomic status. By 1984, Jensen cited Ho, Roessmann, Straumfjord, and Monroe's (1980) autopsy studies showing a Black-White brain weight difference of about 100 grams and outlined a variety of ways to examine relations between race, brain-size, and IQ. By the time of The g Factor, Jensen's own studies had shown that head size was related to IQ even within-families, that the head size/IQ relationship occurred on the most g-loaded tests, that Blacks and Whites differed in head size, and that the Black and White differences in head size disappeared when Blacks and Whites were matched for IQ.
The conclusion that there are racial differences in average brain size is becoming accepted. For example, Ulric Neisser, Chair of the recent American Psychological Association's Task Force Report on The Bell Curve (Neisser et al., 1996) acknowledged that, with respect to "racial differences in the mean measured sizes of skulls and brains (with East Asians having the largest, followed by Whites and then Blacks). . . .there is indeed a small overall trend" (Neisser, 1997, p. 80).
From the beginning, Jensenism did not stop with IQ. For example, Jensen (1 969a, p. 86) cited studies showing the early development of motor behavior in Black infants with some Black samples at six months of age scoring nearly one standard deviation above White norms. Paralleling the behavioral precocity, Jensen (1969a, p. 87) reported evidence of faster bone development in Black infants (established using X-rays) and earlier maturation of brain wave patterns (measured using EEGs). Soon after, Jensen (1973: 289-290) suggested that race differences in the production of two-egg twins, being most common among Blacks and least common among East Asians, with Caucasians intermediate, "may be a reflection of evolutionary age." In a long footnote, he wrote: "[T]he three racial groups lie on a developmental continuum on which the Caucasian group is more or less intermediate. A related fact is that there is an inverse relationship throughout the phylogenetic hierarchy between the tendency for multiple births and the prolongation of immaturity."
As a committed Jensenist, I pursued these hypotheses with vigor and proposed a gene based "life-history theory" familiar to evolutionary biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategy to account for the racial trade-off between brain size and egg-production, and other variables (Rushton, 1995). At one end of this scale r-strategies emphasize high reproductive rates while at the other K-strategies emphasize high levels of parental investment. This scale is generally used to compare the life histories of widely disparate species, but I used it to describe the immensely smaller variations within the human species. Following Jensen's trail I went on to hypothesize that Mongoloid people are, on average, more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn are more K-selected than Negroids. My book Race, Evolution, and Behavior documents the reality of racial differences in over 60 physical and behavioral traits.
Conclusion
In recent years, the equalitarian dogma has run headlong into some very bad karma. In the wake of the success of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), and other recent books that provide race-realist answers to the question of differential group achievement, there has been an intense effort to get the 'race genie' that Jensen's l969 Harvard Educational Review paper loosed safely back in the bottle, to squeeze the previously tabooed toothpaste back in the tube. By firmly establishing the psychometric, neurophysiological, behavior genetic, and comparative evidence for the existence and importance of Spearman's g, Jensen's The g Factor makes it near certain that such obscurantist efforts will end up shredded by Occam's razor.
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On Arthur Jensen's Integrity by SANDRA SCARR, University of Virginia, emerita
Few psychologists have engendered the controversy or endured the abuse that Arthur Jensen has in the past three decades. His adamant adherence to a hard-edged science and an uncompromising personal integrity have led to notoriety. Although these virtues might be rewarded, if applied to less controversial topics. Art Jensen has been vilified because he applied his standards to the most important and painful social issues of our day. In this article, I admire his ethics but trace the negative reactions he evoked. His legacy to psychological science goes beyond important studies on choice reaction times and intelligence, environmental effects on intelligence, and race differences in mental development: Art Jensen set a standard for an honest psychological science.
For more than 40 years, Arthur Jensen has unflinchingly strived to make psychology an honest science. My emphasis is on both words, honest, and science. For this alone, I would admire him enormously, but there is much more to admire about Art's lifework, which continues unabated by his official retirement. Besides his intellectual mentor, Robert Thorndike, and a few other pillars, such as Lee Cronbach, Robert Woodworth, and Lewis Terman, Arthur Jensen's contributions tower above educational psychology and psychometrics.
The Scientist
As his own essay (this issue) demonstrates, Art relentlessly pursues a hard-edged, hypothetic-deductive science that treads on a more emotional, humanistic psychology. Art has no sympathy for mushy thinking. For him, impressions and feelings are not data and have no place in psychology, beyond perhaps the hypothesis-formation stage. Art is ruthlessly scientific: If hypotheses derived from a theory cannot be tested by logical experimentation and data analysis, the theory does not deserve to be called psychological science.
Art rejects convenient compromises and politically expedient obfuscation. These virtues have not been universally appreciated. I have never known him to evade a controversy or mollify an opponent, when the intellectual stakes are high. Outspoken and bloodlessly calm in the face of threats, Art confronts the most emotional critics with logical argument and polite disdain. He remains agnostic where data do not drive him to a conclusion, and his agnosticism on matters of test bias, IQ testing, and racial differences in "g" has cost him dearly. Even with his back to the wall, he continues to proclaim the facts, as he sees them.
He exposes intellectual dishonesty in whomever he finds it, and there is plenty of intellectual dishonesty to find among our Politically Correct colleagues. Art is an important player in battles against the kind of naive environmentalism that has squashed constructive, scientific contributions from psychologists to the most important educational issues of our time, from Head Start to special education to university entrance requirements. Although we are both infamous for exposing naked Emperors, I may be just a tiny bit more tolerant of the bleeding-hearts among us -- a weakness that has saved me from much of the abuse he has suffered.
Research Contributions
Art's own studies of learning processes and "g" unwaveringly follow models derived from physical sciences. Psychological science consists of rigorous experiments, psychometrically credible tests, and sophisticated data analyses. He is an unapologetic reductionist, who believes that complex processes will always be explainable in simpler, component terms.
For Art, mind is no more than brain chemistry. In this belief, he clearly rejects systems theories and cognitive theories of mind, in favor of mechanistic, physical models. For those who believe that the whole may be more than the sum of its component parts, especially in biological systems, and that experience is constructed by minds, Art's strict adherence to physical science model may seem anachronistic.
Determined and persistent, Art followed several lines of research on learning and intelligence. To my mind, his three most important research contributions are:
1.The elegant series of studies on reaction times in complex, choice tasks;
2.His studies of older and younger siblings in California and Georgia to test competing genetic and environmental hypotheses about racial differences in IQ; and
3.The clever construct validity studies, matching the performance of younger White children to that of older Black children on tasks where Black-White difference are most prominent.
In the series of studies on reaction times, he showed that brain functions -- speed, reliability, and capacity -- can be measured in seemingly simple reaction time tasks that are importantly related to psychometric "g" and by extension to many forms of academic and other life achievements. Despite carping by critics from the narrow world of experimental psychology, Art showed real-life implications for laboratory tasks that heretofore ha4 gone unnoticed, except among laboratory psychologists. (I was there in Britain where the mocking of some learning researchers was extremely distasteful to all but the nastiest high-table fools.) In characteristic fashion, Art ignored the ad hominem slurs and persisted to show how important their seemingly trivial tasks really were. Art succeeded in giving psychometric "g" some important physical correlates (he might say physical bases, but I won't go that far). That line of research has many more miles to go.
Closer to my interests, in the second example, Art saw an opportunity for a naturally occurring experiment -- the comparison of older and younger siblings, as a test of competing theories about the origins of racial differences in IQ. He reasoned logically (as always) that if environmental deprivations were responsible for lower test scores of Blacks, then the longer children were exposed to such environments, the more they would lag behind test norms; that is, the lower their IQ scores would become. Older siblings have longer exposure to such deprivations; hence, they ought to score lower on IQ and standardized achievement test than their younger sibs. If, on the other hand, genetic differences were primarily responsible for Black-White differences, then no older-younger sibling differences should be observed. Among Berkeley, CA school children, no older-younger sibling differences on tests were observed. In poverty-stricken, rural Georgia, however, the environmentally predicted declines in test scores were found.
More developmental psychologists are embarrassingly glib on racial differences; Any observed Black-White difference must be due to "racism," social disadvantage, and other neighborhood and school features, because they correlate with IQ. By using sibling comparisons, Art showed that such excuses (I refuse to call them explanations) were not true in Berkeley, where exposure to the mainstream culture is extensive for even the poorest minority children, whereas in rural Georgia, restriction of learning opportunities explained the sibling IQ differences. These studies showed that in really deprived rearing circumstances, even Art Jensen can find environmental effects! Kidding aside, these studies of sibling differences in IQ are all the more important because Art did them. One can only hope his critics will remember to attribute them to him.
The studies of sibling IQ differences in California and Georgia helped me to think about what kinds of environments have negative effects on intellectual development and which do not. Our own adoption studies found that children adopted in infancy into working class families achieved IQ levels as high as adoptees reared in privileged professional families, whereas biological offspring of such families differed by 10 IQ points, on average. Clearly, genes were the major cause of social class differences in IQ, not whether parents take their children to ball games or museums, or whether they listen to Country & Western tunes or to Mozart (take that, Art-the-music-snob). These results, and Art's sibling studies, led me to stand up for "good-enough parents," who provide loving support and learning opportunities, but not necessarily those the intelligentsia value most. My proposal, that most parents are "good enough" at child rearing to support their children becoming the best they can be, provoked PC colleagues to attack me as anti-child welfare, because surely every child needs to have parents just like them to become the best (their self-serving snobbery is appalling and unrecognized).
Since our working class Midwesterners were doing as good a job with their adopted children as their highly educated compatriots, my conclusion about "good enough" parents is logically inescapable. So is the conclusion from Art's research; to wit, the African-American families in California did expose their children to learning opportunities sufficient to maintain their intellectual growth over the school years. The fact that their IQ test scores lagged behind those of Whites is not likely to be explained by differences in learning opportunities.
An interesting parallel to this work is our longitudinal study of interracial adoptees. At the average of 7 years, the African-American adopted children scored 106.1 on IQ tests. By the average age of 18 however, their IQ scores had declined to 96.8. Children with one White and one Black parent scored, on average, 109.0 at age 7 and 98.5 at age 18; children with two Black parents (and later adoptive placements) scored 96.8 at age 7 and 89.4 at age 18. The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions; Art would have been.
A less recognized line of research, and one with great implications for developmental psychology, is Art's use of younger White children to model the test performance of older Black children. By showing that response and error patterns of Black children matched, on average, those of White children two years younger, Art did more than challenge the test-bias literature. He showed that differences in test performance among age-matched White and Black children can be most simply explained as differences in rates of mental development. The implicit analogy to physical growth is powerful: Slower growth rates over the same length of time lead to lesser final attainments, whether one is speaking of height or of intelligence. The implications of these studies are truly frightening, but Art does not flinch. I have yet to see these findings incorporated into introductory psychology textbooks or developmental texts, however, so the wrath of Politically Challenged has not rained down on him yet.
Scholarly Reviews
Among his many works, those that will be most widely cited and remembered are his rigorous reviews of data on test bias, evidence for the "g" in general intelligence, and reviews of research on group differences in IQ and achievement. In scholarly yet accessible prose, Art tells coherent stories that make the best sense of complex theories and data. Along the way, he refutes the many ad hoc claims about test bias, disposes of theories of multiple intelligences, and lays waste to naive environmental theories of race and social class differences in educational achievements. In a dozen impressive books and hundreds of articles, spanning 30 years, Art has brought uncompromising logic and scientific rigor to the most controversial topics of our age.
In my last term at the University of Virginia, I taught an undergraduate course on intelligence. The text was Bias in Mental Testing. At first, some students were surprised and even alarmed that many of their assignments were drawn from a book by that infamous Dr. Jensen. But they came to appreciate the serious nature of the book and its helpful chapters on testing, validity, reliability, and potential biases in mental tests. By the end of the semester, they felt they had accomplished several feats -- to have read nearly all of the 700+ pages and to have passed tests on the content. Another accomplishment was their open minds about the content and the author, whom they came to admire. It's a splendid book.
Notoriety
Art seems to have been genuinely surprised by the notoriety he attained from his writings on race and IQ. Others cannot understand his surprise. When one lobs hand grenades at the intelligence and potential achievements of others, one should anticipate a violent reaction. For Art to say that only 5% of the Harvard Education Review article concerned racial difference in IQ is like saying the only problem Lincoln had in the time he attended Ford's theater was the split second he was shot. Somehow, the percentage is not the critical issue in either case.
Anticipated or not, the consequences of his notoriety were severe and prolonged. Few can claim to be, or to have been, as sorely tested as Art has been in defense of psychology as a science. I have witnessed his steadfastness in the face of a screaming, unruly mob who disrupted his lecture on learning and intelligence and threatened his personal safety. I learned what it was like to be spat upon and to put my body on the line to get Art out of a University of Minnesota auditorium. It was shocking and frightening, as surely the radicals intended, but it was most of all infuriating, because no disciplinary actions were taken against those who assaulted us. Those were the wonderful 1970s.
As he mentions in his essay (this issue), his automobile tires were slashed, police had to open his mail, and his office at the University of California-Berkeley was stripped bare to protect him from a potential bomb. Art's office at Berkeley was more like a San Quentin cell than a typically cluttered faculty office. His family was threatened, and his personal freedoms seriously compromised -- all because he reported his conclusions about genetics and IQ, based on a serious scientific review of the research literature.
By his own account, he is no extravert. Nor, I may add, did warmth and humor soften the acrimonious exchanges he had with hostile audiences. One might also observe that insight into his violent, enraged opponents was lacking. The logical, unemotional Dr. Jensen would never behave in such an uncivilized manner, nor comprehend those who do.
Art Jensen has also endured abuse from thugs with pens instead of megaphones. Personally, I have no empathy for politically driven liars, who distort scientific facts in a misguided and condescending effort to protect an impossible myth about human equality (= identity). Art believes he understands the motives of the Marcus Feldmans, Steven Jay Goulds, and Leon Kamins of the intellectual world. They seem to speak his language, albeit with forked tongues. I find them despicable, because they have the knowledge and intellect to know that they deliberately corrupt science. To deny falsely the scientific evidence that nearly all measurable human traits are moderately to highly heritable is to deny parents and policy makers essential knowledge to run their own lives and the society as a whole. Self-appointed saviors of the equality myth are far more dangerous to an honest psychological science than a hundred outraged groupies who don't know that the lecture was supposed to be about, anyway.
All in all, with clear conscience, Art stands up for data, searches for the most logical and supportable explanations, and rejects all of the ad hominem garbage thrown his way.
I did observe a humorous episode with the notorious Arthur Jensen. While at York University, we took a little stroll to a neighborhood shop, where another customer asked me if we were from the conference on intelligence. She had heard that the terrible Arthur Jensen was there. "I can't understand how they could have let him in the country!," she proclaimed. With Art standing mutely at my side, I told her that Dr. Jensen was indeed present. "Is he as awful as they say?," she asked. "Oh yes," I said, "dreadful!"At least that's the way I recall it.
Art Jensen's contribution to psychological science are enormous, and they continue to mount. His work includes the impeccable tome on test bias, the most thoughtful research on learning and intelligence, and some critical studies on race and environment. The massive body of work will persist for generations of psychologists. Yet, I believe that his most important contribution is intellectual honesty and integrity to a psychological science that is threatened with Politically Correct corruption. Art has not known how to be politically expedient, or to couch his ideas in soothing terms, so that he has often suffered academic rejection. But most people heard you, Art, and they remember, even if they did not like the message. Both inside and outside of academia, your intellectually honest legacy will prevail.
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Jensen on "Jensenism" by Arthur R. Jensen
University of California, Berkeley
"Though Jensenism is a term listed in several dictionaries, Arthur Jensen has produced a more extensive body of work than suggested by the dictionary entry. To the public, he is mainly known for his work on the genetics of intelligence. This article discusses the work that is publicly less well known. Work discussed includes studies in learning, memory. the cumulative deficit hypothesis, Spearman's hypothesis, and speed of information processing, to name a few. The publicly better known work is also discussed. A bibliography of Jensen's publications is included in an appendix. (Abstract written by D. Detterman)"
To discover that one's name has entered the dictionary as an "ism" is both flattering and embarrassing, and is cause for reflection. I know because it happened to me. Recent editions of a number of dictionaries contain the word "Jensenism." The Random House and Webster's Unabridged Dictionaries, for example, contain the following entry:
Jensenism, n. the theory that an individual's IQ is largely due to heredity, including racial heritage. [1965-1970]; after Arthur R. Jensen (born 1923), U.S. educational psychologist who proposed such a theory; see -ism] -- Jensenist, Jensenite, n., adj.
For those who understand the meaning of heritability in quantitative genetics, the wording is rather inept and the "theory" attributed to me has been around at least since the time of Francis Galton (1822-1911), whose Hereditary Genius (1869) predated the very article that led the popular press to label me a "hereditarian" by exactly one century. The dictionary definition can't be overly derided, however, as it is quite true that, in 1969, I did present a fairly comprehensive review of the evidence that IQ is substantially heritable and had stated that it is a reasonable hypothesis that genetic as well as environmental factors are involved in the well documented Black-White average difference in IQ. Also, I like to think that I was partly responsible for getting Galtonian thinking back on track in differential psychology after it had been derailed in the behavioral sciences for at least a generation following World War II (the period dominated by what Sandra Scarr once referred to as "naive environmentalism").
However, the more serious disadvantage of having one's name turned into an "ism" is that, from that moment on, one is liable to be identified only as the "ism" in the dictionary. The rest of one's research activity can be unfairly eclipsed, and findings and formulations that are unique and perhaps even fundamentally more important are forgotten. One of my aims here is to forestall this threatened eclipse of other aspects of my research and shine some light on how that which got me labeled as an "ism" fits into the larger orbit of my lifetime's work.
Essentially, I have always been a differential psychologist. Human idiosyncracies and individual differences in behavior interested me before I had ever heard of psychology. The first book I read on the subject, more or less by accident while in high school, was J.B. Watson's Psychology From the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1929). It was probably the main reason I chose to major in psychology in college, after reluctantly but realistically deciding not to pursue a career in music. Though I became acquainted with some well-known psychologists, such as Edward Tolman and Egon Brunswik, as an undergraduate psychology major at Berkeley, the one psychologist whose work most captured my attention (but whom I never saw in person) was the then Sterling Professor of Psychology at Yale, Clark L. Hull, a latter-day Watsonian and Pavlovian behaviorist. One could say that I became a Hullian, and I recall writing a long term paper for one of my courses extolling Hull's theory of learning -- excessively so, according to the comments of the TA (one of Edward Tolman's graduate students) who graded my paper. Primed, I suppose, by Watson, I was especially attracted to Hull's purely mechanistic system for explaining behavior, as spelled out in his Principles of Behavior (1942). B.F. Skinner's Behavior of Organisms (1938) was also appealing but lacked the systematic theoretical system that made Hull's approach seem more promising to me.
I was totally unaware at the time that these now classic works in psychology, and indeed my whole undergraduate education in psychology, neglected individual differences and the influence of genetic factors on behavior. These topics were scarcely admitted as part of the field of psychology, at least as it was presented at Berkeley in the 1 940s. Experimental psychology dominated the department at that time, and the implicit assumption of experimental psychology was that individual differences in the behavioral realm originated entirely outside the organism, through its exposure to different environmental contingencies, and they could be explained, if one were at all interested in doing so, in the purely stimulus-response-reinforcement terms of conditioning and learning. In its focus on discovering general laws or principles of behavior, experimental psychology traditionally treated individual differences as a nuisance variable, or as merely error variance in the statistical analyses of its data.
This limited perspective of my undergraduate courses in psychology was extremely implicit and so completely taken for granted that it did not enter my consciousness until some years later. I occasionally meet psychologists even today who think of individual differences as error variance or as purely a product of environmental diversity. I was still largely operating on this assumption in 1964 when I wrote a major paper that attempted to explain social class differences in scholastic learning entirely in terms of the then current S-R theories and principles of verbal learning (67). Ironically, the publication of that paper was so long-delayed that it appeared after my position on the major basis of individual and group differences had changed in a hereditarian direction. Large differences in the publication lag of one's articles and book chapters during certain periods may even create a false impression of contradictory vacillations in one's theoretical stance. The publication dates of one's articles are not always perfectly correlated with the actual chronology of one's changing position on theoretical issues.
Thanks to the beautiful "recreational reading" room (the Morrison Library) on the Berkeley campus, where I spent most of my evenings, I believe I got as much or more of my undergraduate education from entirely self-selected extracurricular reading as I got from my courses and textbooks. The most lasting influence I recall are works by M.K. Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, G.B. Shaw, Havelock Ellis, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Korzybski, and biographies of famous musicians, scientists, and philosophers. They instilled a certain critical sense as well as a humanistic idealism that, in the long run, made a greater impression on me than did most of the relatively uninspiring textbooks I was required to read in my courses. To make more time for the reading I most liked, it was my policy never to read anything in my college textbooks more than once.
It was my extracurricular reading, probably more than anything else, that led me to look for the ways psychological science might have practical applications that could benefit individuals and society. Some years later when I decided to enter graduate school to work toward a Ph.D., I examined various university catalogues to see what they offered in applied psychology. I recognized more of the names of psychologists whose works in applied areas, such as clinical and educational psychology, that I had already come across in my reading on faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University than in any other university catalogue. Egon Brunswik's course on the history of psychology had also left me with a distinct impression of Columbia as having one of the pioneer departments of psychology, shaped by such luminaries as James McKeen Cattell, E.L. Thorndike, and Robert Woodworth. (When I arrived at Columbia, Woodworth was still lecturing at age 87, and I audited his two courses.) The fact that Columbia University is located in New York City, home to Carnegie Hall, Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Metropolitan Opera, provided a powerful added attraction. The musical capital of America, New York is visited each year by many of the world's greatest orchestras, conductors, and virtuosos. And my interest in music has never been second to my interest in psychology, though I have necessarily devoted more time to the latter, of course, since it has been my livelihood. When I wasn't on the Columbia campus, chances are I was hanging out in Carnegie Hall, either at a concert or a rehearsal.
At Columbia's TC I studied educational, clinical, and personality psychology. My Ph.D. dissertation (under Professor Percival Symonds) was on the Thematic Apperception Test as a measure of aggression (2,3). 1 found my three years as Symonds' research assistant much to my liking. However, my interest in the subject of his research at that time, based on the psychoanalytic or "dynamic" interpretation of various projective techniques (8, 20), proved short-lived. Though Symonds was a man of noble character and in many ways a fine mentor, my three years at TC were probably influenced more by the lingering shadow of the psychologist who had been Symonds' mentor but who had died three years before I arrived at TC -- Edward L. Thorndike, probably America's greatest psychologist. Thomdike's influence and his conception of psychology still pervaded the intellectual atmosphere at TC during my tenure and was repeatedly reinforced by an imposing portrait of the great man that hung on the wall above the card-catalogues in the TC library. I felt compelled to read some of Thorndike's books and I liked them a lot, especially for their clear thinking and their objective and empirically anchored approach to the remarkably broad range of subject matter in psychology with which he dealt.
It is amazing how much of what today is viewed as established fact in psychology was either discovered or presaged by E.L. Thorndike. As he was one of the leading pioneers of psychology as a natural science, he became the first of my "heroes" in psychology; the other two (Galton and Spearman) I discovered a few years later. These are the three psychologists whose key works I return to and re-read for their wealth of hypotheses, original and insightful ideas, and inspiration, always to be rewarded. If there have been any authentic geniuses in the history of scientific psychology, in my estimation they include at least these three. (I have written about Galton [238, 352, 3831 and Spearman [239, 353, 383].)
During my clinical internship at the University of Maryland Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore, I examined a great variety of psychiatric patients, using all of the prevailing techniques of clinical psychology, and typically wrote a clinical report on each patient. During my training experience in psychotherapy, I quickly came to realize that I was less satisfied and less effective working with people directly than in working with data. I did not enjoy many of the routine aspects of clinical work, probably because I am quite low in extraversion. Hence I welcomed collaboration with one of my clinical supervisors in some research we did on the Rorschach as an index of pathological thinking that completely eschewed the traditional systems of scoring Rorschach protocols and was solely based on characteristics of the subject's verbal expression (5; see also 39, 46).
It was also at this time that I began seriously reading the books and articles of Hans J. Eysenck, who was then a maverick personality researcher and the professor of psychology in the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry. Most of my evenings that year were spent reading every book and article by Eysenck that I could find in the university library, as well as many of the references he made to the influential work of others, particularly Galton, Spearman, and Thurstone. This provided a much needed antidote to the predominantly Freudian or psychoanalytic concepts that informed my clinical work. It was not so much the specific aspects of Eysenck' s own theories or his research, but rather his general approach to psychology as a natural science that provided my first real sense of finally having discovered my true vocation. I felt I was no longer groping for the path that I should take to make my life seem worthwhile. I believed that research and teaching in the field of differential psychology, broadly conceived, was exactly the path for me. So I wrote to Eysenck for his permission and applied to NIMH for a postdoctoral fellowship to spend a year in Eysenck's department in London. Luckily, both were granted and, with a year's extension of my fellowship, I had the good fortune to spent two full years with Eysenck. (Six years later I returned to his department as a Guggenheim Fellow for another full year during my first sabbatical leave from Berkeley [detailed in 149, 378]).
I emphasize my postdoctoral work with Eysenck, because I believe it planted the seeds of virtually everything I have done since then. It put me on the path that I have followed, in one way or another, for all of my later research. Although each of the many subsequent byways could not have been anticipated, they all led more or less consistently in one general direction -- what came to be known as the London School of differential psychology, originated by Galton and with Spearman, Burt, and Eysenck successively as its leading exponents (283, 376, 377). (I knew personally only Eysenck [378] and Burt [126. 225, 326, 367].) The London School is not really a school or even a doctrine or a theory. Rather, it is a general view of psychology as a natural science and as essentially a branch of biology.
Its central concern is variability in human behavior. It is Darwinian in that it views both interspecies variation and an important part of intraspecies variation (both individual and group differences) in certain classes of behavior as products of the evolutionary process. It is behavior-genetic in that the evolutionary process depends upon genetic variation and selection, and the neural basis of behavioral capacities is subject to these evolutionary mechanisms the same as other physical characteristics. It is quantitative in that it emphasizes the objective measurement and taxonomy of behavior and the operational definition of latent traits or hypothetical constructs. It is analytical in that it subjects quantitative data to mathematical formulation and statistical inference. It is experimental in that it typically obtains measurements, both behavioral and physiological, under specifically defined and controlled conditions. It is reductionist in that it aims theoretically to explain complex phenomena in terms of simpler, more elemental processes. It is monistic (as opposed to dualistic) in that it neither posits nor seeks any explanatory principle that does not consist of strictly physical processes; it views complex psychological phenomena as emerging solely from interactions among more elemental neurophysiological processes and their past and present interactions with environmental conditions.
Besides the extensive reading, studying (courses in multivariate statistics with Patrick Slater and factor analysis with A.E. Maxwell), and writing (4, 6, 7, 9, 14) that occupied my time as a postdoc, I undertook laboratory research on individual differences in the effects of massed and distributed practice in selective stimulus-response learning and I devised a special apparatus for the directly measuring individual differences in reactive inhibition independent of any form of learning per se (51). The specific hypotheses I tested derived from Eysenck's theory of the basic neural processes responsible for individual differences in extraversion-introversion (or E, as it was called), which had been established as a continuous unitary trait by the factor analysis of personality inventories, behavioral ratings, and objective behavior measurements derived from certain laboratory techniques. Eysenck' s theory of E at that time brought me back to Clark Hull's theory of learning, which had first fascinated me as an undergraduate. I became a born-again Hullian, this time around becoming more thoroughly versed in every facet of Hull's theory and most of the theoretical and empirical literature related to it, including Pavlov's classic work on conditioning.
Eysenck's theory held that the basis of E is the rate of build-up of a hypothetical neural process called reactive inhibition, or IR (as defined in Hull's system). The theory contends that trait extraversion reflects a more rapid build-up and a slower spontaneous dissipation of IR under the conditions in which IR is hypothesized to be manifested in behavior, such as the experimental extinction and spontaneous recovery of conditioned responses, the effect of massed trials versus spaced trials in serial rote learning, and the reminiscence effect in motor learning (as on the pursuit-rotor). It was this aspect of Eysenck's research program that led me into theories of learning and the experimental psychology of human l