Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker
December 17, 2007
NONE OF THE ABOVE
What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race
If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains
the Flynn effect---the steady rise in scores across generations?
1.
One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social
scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received
a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht,
and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations
of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data,
he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds
from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took
the same tests in the nineteen-fifties---and not just slightly
better, much better.
Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test
results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the
developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries.
In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around
the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three
points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered.
For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.
Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings---now
known as the Flynn effect---for almost twenty-five years. His
books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical
observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions,
and the evidence in support of his original observation is now
so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to
fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn
effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q.
of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s
of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120---more than
a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction,
the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have
had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82---seemingly below the
threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we
go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of
the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest,
bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated
largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.
2.
For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there
have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early
years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence
could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his
particular contributions was to coin the word ``moron.'' ``The
people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper
places,'' he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in
the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children
with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they
would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the
psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start,
which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children,
were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and
in 1994, Richard Hernsterin and Charles Murray published their
bestselling hereditarian primer ``The Bell Curve,'' which argued
that blacks were innately inferiour in intelligence to whites. To
the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first,
that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that
predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait
is stable---that is, it is determined by our genes and largely
impervious to environmental influences.
This is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when
he told an English newspaper recently that he was ``inherently
gloomy'' about the prospects for Africa. From the perspective
of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower
than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive
disability. In the controversy that followed, Watson was defended
by the journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for
the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work of J.
Philippe Rushton---a psychologist who specializes in comparing
the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the
length of the Negroid penis---Saletan took the fundamentalist
position to its logical conclusion. To erase the difference
between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote, would probably require
vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind of corrective
genetic engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. ``Economic
and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the
pattern,'' Saletan declared, claiming to have been ``soaking
[his] head in each's computations and arguments.'' One argument
that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn's,
because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties
upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is
that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it
can't be all that immutable and it doesn't look all that innate.
The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create
a ``crisis of confidence,'' Flynn writes in ``What Is Intelligence?''
(Cambridge; $22), his latest attempt to puzzle through the implications
of his discovery. ``How could such huge gains be intelligence gains?
Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents
or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q. tests were not good
measures of intelligence.''
3.
The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look
at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed
of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of
I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the
categories---those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary
or the ability to do basic arithmetic---have risen only modestly
over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category
known as ``similarities,'' where you get questions such as ``In
what way are `dogs' and `rabbits' alike?'' Today, we tend to
give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer:
dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American
would have said that ``you use dogs to hunt rabbits.''
``If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not
natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical
from their concrete referents,'' Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents
may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done
poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the
twentieth century's great cognitive revolution, in which we
learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract
categories. In Flynn's phrase, we have now had to put on ``scientific
spectacles,'' which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions
about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose
substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of
saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain
respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands
in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart
we are as how modern we are.
This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern
Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of
the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in
the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation
below their American and Western European counterparts.
Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and
blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at
the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of
the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants
into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic
to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when
talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence
of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the
discussion. ``Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the
1930s?'' the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in
their account of the Italian experience. ``Or is it possible that
somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history
of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish
Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general
undifferentiated mass of Americans?''
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?
When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty
Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people
who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable,
and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: ``abstract.''
Abstract could mean something like ``whatever it was that was
going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty
miles back.'' That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult,
but it wasn't: it merely required that we ask a slightly different
set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions,
and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the
contents of someone's mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as
guessing Winston Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the
trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an
abstraction, ``the Unknown Soldier''---which allowed him legitimately
and gleefully to answer ``I have no idea'' to almost every question.
There were four of us playing. We gave up after an hour.) Flynn
would say that my father was teaching his three sons how to put
on scientific spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped
up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let's be clear about what
this means. There's a world of difference between an I.Q. advantage
that's genetic and one that depends on extended car time with
Graham Gladwell.
4.
Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in the
I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again
and again to the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by
paper-and-pencil tests---and making sense of those scores, he
tells us, is a messy and complicated business that requires something
closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a philosopher.
For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that
I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a
specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created,
he reminds us, it is calibrated or ``normed'' so that the test-takers
in the fiftieth percentile---those exactly at the median---are
assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the
only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to
make the tests more difficult---to ``renorm'' them. The original
WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed
in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third
time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a
few years ago, as the WISC IV---with each version just a little
harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone ``has'' an
I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know
which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there's a
substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and
getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.
This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to diagnose people
as mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally taken to be
the cutoff. You can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with
that system. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states
used the WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But
since kids---even kids with disabilities---score a little higher
every year, the number of children whose scores fell below 70
declined steadily through the end of the eighties. Then, in 1991,
the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the percentage of kids
labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya,
Matthew Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state
had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of Americans
labelled mentally retarded should have doubled.
That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental disability
is one of the most stigmatizing of all educational and occupational
classifications---and yet, apparently, the chances of being burdened
with that label are in no small degree a function of the point,
in the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to sit
for his evaluation. ``As far as I can determine, no clinical
or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25
years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became
more lenient over time,'' Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. ``Yet no
one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They
simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q.
criterion for mental retardation.''
Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians
have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to
great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years.
Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of
European descent, for example, prompted the British
psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate
evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold
weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized
vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also
seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit
the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at
the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the
bottom.
Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn's accounting
skills. He looked first at Lynn's data, and realized that the
comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q.
estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren
with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban
sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6
but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American
estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San
Francisco's Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike
Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the
nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would
have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were
reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found,
they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans
had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.
The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on
its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had
succeeded not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their
lower I.Q.s. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of
statistical analysis, Flynn then worked out just how great that
overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins
the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations
has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that
threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would
appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of
97.
There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has
to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and
belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But
Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first
successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were
higher than everyone else's---coming in somewhere around 103.
Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational
scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract
thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that
their own children wore scientific spectacles. ``Chinese Americans
are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q.
rather than the reverse,'' Flynn concludes, reminding us that
in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success
we often confuse causes and effects. ``It is not easy to view the
history of their achievements without emotion,'' he writes. That
is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract
number is to trivialize it.
5.
Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray
at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject
was the black--white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five
years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably.
The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general
worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose
faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that
trend stalled---and the question was why.
Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing
different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to
be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the
future. ``By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the
juice out of the environment that you were going to get,'' he
said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent
difference between the races. ``Starting in the nineteen-seventies,
to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids
being born to really dumb mothers,'' he said. When the debate's
moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data
showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed
unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever
make further progress was inconceivable.
Flynn took a different approach. The black--white gap, he pointed
out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have
for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly
crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the
average black I.Q. is 95.4---only four and a half points behind
the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four
through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year,
until their scores settle at 83.4.
That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual
pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you
would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that
whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are
more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white
children---and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex
than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students
in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that ``kids who
want to be above average don't have to aim as high.'' There were
possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and
white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black
men are in jail---which is hardly the kind of environment in
which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.
Flynn then talked about what we've learned from studies of
adoption and mixed-race children---and that evidence didn't fit
a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a
difference whether it's a mixed-race child's mother or father who
is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black
father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black
mother and a white father. And it shouldn't make much of a difference
where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children
fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up
by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of
white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that
case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a
fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness---of
their being brought up in a different culture, under different
circumstances. ``The mind is much more like a muscle than we've
ever realized,'' Flynn said. ``It needs to get cognitive
exercise. It's not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible
mark.'' The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences
was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q.
measures not just the quality of a person's mind but the quality
of the world that person lives in.