This is a fantastic cartoon by Ruben Bolling deriding racist notions about intelligence. You can read more on this topic here. The Wikipedia article lists two controversial assumptions that modern theories on race and intelligence make. The one I most take issue with is is the notion that "intelligence is quantitatively measurable by modern tests and is dominated by a unitary general intelligence factor" It seems fundamentally wrong to assume something as complex and multi-dimensional as intelligence can be assigned a numerical value. Step 4 of the experiment proposed in this cartoon makes a good point too. These tests, in order for them to work, have to be designed for a particular person. If there are questions on the test in Shakespearian English then Shakespeare or somebody very familiar with his language will clearly be judged by that test to be the most intelligent. If there are questions on the test about late 80's sitcoms then people who know names like Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Dustin Diamond, Lark Voorhies, and Dennis Haskins will be judged to be intelligent. Thus, these tests test for an arbitrary notion of intelligence. In my opinion that is a pretty worthless thing to be testing for and it makes it easy to see how the opinions and bias of the people creating these tests would show up in the results. Basically the test tells more about the person who created it than the person who takes it.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Race and IQ Cartoon
This is a fantastic cartoon by Ruben Bolling deriding racist notions about intelligence. You can read more on this topic here. The Wikipedia article lists two controversial assumptions that modern theories on race and intelligence make. The one I most take issue with is is the notion that "intelligence is quantitatively measurable by modern tests and is dominated by a unitary general intelligence factor" It seems fundamentally wrong to assume something as complex and multi-dimensional as intelligence can be assigned a numerical value. Step 4 of the experiment proposed in this cartoon makes a good point too. These tests, in order for them to work, have to be designed for a particular person. If there are questions on the test in Shakespearian English then Shakespeare or somebody very familiar with his language will clearly be judged by that test to be the most intelligent. If there are questions on the test about late 80's sitcoms then people who know names like Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Dustin Diamond, Lark Voorhies, and Dennis Haskins will be judged to be intelligent. Thus, these tests test for an arbitrary notion of intelligence. In my opinion that is a pretty worthless thing to be testing for and it makes it easy to see how the opinions and bias of the people creating these tests would show up in the results. Basically the test tells more about the person who created it than the person who takes it.
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Assumption 1: IQ tests work, when comparing within the same sub-group.
Assumption 2: Any impact on intelligence due to family background only goes back a couple of generations (e.g to grandparents).
Hypothesis: poor white children will test similarly to poor black children, within a certain geographic area. This will show that performance on IQ test is not racially influenced.
Corollary: poor white children will test worse than middle-class white children.
Last time I read the research, the above hypothesis was being shown to be correct.
A more interesting question then becomes: why haven't more slave-descended African-Americans moved up the socio-economic ladder? For example, slave-descended African-Americans are more likely to drop out of high school, get involved in gangs, take drugs, etc, than children of African refugees (which would rule the race card out of play).
From the New Yorker's review of Malcom Gladwell's book, 'None of the above'...
"...The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?..."
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