Er, I realise that I am confused about #6. Its first paragraph seems like exactly the sort of thing someone might say about race, but then the second paragraph is pointing at a study concerned more with intelligence than with race (though it might have implications for inter-racial IQ comparisons).
Actually, it seems like an interesting study (though the press-release description at the other end of the link is a bit rubbish). What they did was to give (nonverbal) IQ tests to two culturally and racially different groups of people, along with lower-level and perhaps more objective tests of neurological functioning. Then they ran regressions to try to figure out what lower-level characteristics predict IQ scores in the two groups, and found that the results were quite different—suggesting that people in the two groups are attacking the IQ test problems in fundamentally different ways. I think this is the actual published study.
Of course, the state of psychology research being what it is, they did it with a total of 54 people, and if they did any actual statistical analysis of the difference in regression results between the Spanish and Moroccan subgroups beyond displaying some of the numbers and saying “look, they’re different!” then I haven’t found it. So I wouldn’t bet too heavily on it. But it’s suggestive, at least.
(I am not claiming that if it were correct it would demonstrate that either race or intelligence is unreal. It could be, e.g., that there are racial differences in how well people’s brains “choose” how to attack problems, and that this leads to systematic racial differences in cognitive ability. But prima facie it seems more likely that, as the researchers conjecture, these differences are a matter of culture and education more than of brain structure. If they’re real at all, of course.)
Er, I realise that I am confused about #6. Its first paragraph seems like exactly the sort of thing someone might say about race, but then the second paragraph is pointing at a study concerned more with intelligence than with race (though it might have implications for inter-racial IQ comparisons).
Actually, it seems like an interesting study (though the press-release description at the other end of the link is a bit rubbish). What they did was to give (nonverbal) IQ tests to two culturally and racially different groups of people, along with lower-level and perhaps more objective tests of neurological functioning. Then they ran regressions to try to figure out what lower-level characteristics predict IQ scores in the two groups, and found that the results were quite different—suggesting that people in the two groups are attacking the IQ test problems in fundamentally different ways. I think this is the actual published study.
Of course, the state of psychology research being what it is, they did it with a total of 54 people, and if they did any actual statistical analysis of the difference in regression results between the Spanish and Moroccan subgroups beyond displaying some of the numbers and saying “look, they’re different!” then I haven’t found it. So I wouldn’t bet too heavily on it. But it’s suggestive, at least.
(I am not claiming that if it were correct it would demonstrate that either race or intelligence is unreal. It could be, e.g., that there are racial differences in how well people’s brains “choose” how to attack problems, and that this leads to systematic racial differences in cognitive ability. But prima facie it seems more likely that, as the researchers conjecture, these differences are a matter of culture and education more than of brain structure. If they’re real at all, of course.)