So, are $POORETHNICGROUP so poor, badly off and socially failed because they are about 15 IQ points stupider than $RICHETHNICGROUP? No, it may be the other way around: poverty directly loses you around 15 IQ points on average.
Or so says Anandi Mani et al. “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function” Science 341, 976 (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1238041. A PDF while it lasts (from the nice person with the candy on /r/scholar) and the newspaper article I first spotted it in. The authors have written quite a lot of papers on this subject.
The racists claim that this is irrelevant because of research that corrects for socioeconomic status and still finds IQ differences. Of course, researchers have found plenty of evidence of important environmental influences on IQ not measured by SES. It seems especially bad for the racial realist hypothesis that people who, for example, identify as “black” in America have the the same IQ disadvantage compared to whites whether their ancestory is 4% European or 40% European; how much African vs. European ancestry someone has seems to matter only indirectly to the IQ effects, which seem to directly follow whichever artificial simplified category someone is identified as belonging to.
Not completely serious, just wondering about possible implications, for sake of munchkinism:
Would it be possible to invent some new color, for example “purple”, so that identifying with that color would increase someone’s IQ?
I guess it would first require the rest of the society accepting the superiority (at least in intelligence) of the purple people, and their purpleness being easy to identify and difficult for others to fake. (Possible to achieve with some genetic manipulation.)
Also, could this mechanism possibly explain the higher intelligence of Jews? I mean, if we stopped suspecting them from making international conspiracies and secretly ruling the world (which obviously requires a lot of intelligence), would their IQs consequently drop to the average level?
Also… what about Asians? It is the popularity of anime than increases their IQ, or what?
Unfortunately, while we know there are lots of environmental factors that affect IQ, we mostly don’t know the details well enough to be sure of very much, or to have much idea how to manipulate it. However, as I understand it, some research has suggested that there are interesting cultural similarities between Jews in most of the world and Chinese who don’t live in China, and that the IQ advantage of Chinese is primarily among Chinese who don’t live in China, so something in common between how the Chinese and Jewish cultures deal with being minority outsiders may explain part of why both show unusually high IQs when they are minority outsiders (and could explain a lot of East Asians generally; considering how enormous the cultural influence of China has been in the region, it would not be terribly surprising if many other East Asian groups had acquired whatever the relevant factor is).
This paper by Ogbu and Simons discusses some of the theories about groups that do poorly (the “involuntary” or “caste-like” minorities). Unfortunately I couldn’t find a citation for any discussion of differences between voluntary minorities which would explain why some voluntary minorities outperform rather than merely equalling the majority, apart from Ned Block’s passing reference to a culture of “self-respect” in his review of The Bell Curve.
Would it be possible to invent some new color, for example “purple”, so that identifying with that color would increase someone’s IQ?
It’s been done—many people do in fact self-identify as ‘Indigo children’, ‘Indigos’ or even ‘Brights’. The label tends to come with a broadly humanistic and strongly irreligious worldview, but many of them are in fact highly committed to some form of spirituality and mysticism: indeed, they credit these perhaps unusual convictions for their increased intelligence and, more broadly, their highly developed intuition.
It seems especially bad for the racial realist hypothesis that people who, for example, identify as “black” in America have the the same IQ disadvantage compared to whites whether their ancestory is 4% European or 40% European
I’ve seen mixed reports on this. Human Varieties, for example, has a series of posts on colorism which finds a relationship between skin color and intelligence in the population of African Americans, as predicted by both the hereditarian and “colorist” (i.e. discrimination) theories, but does not find a relationship between skin color and intelligence within families (as predicted by the hereditarian but not the colorist theory), and I know there were studies using blood type which didn’t support the hereditarian theory but appear to have been too weakly designed to do that even if hereditarianism were true. Are you aware of any studies that actually look at genetic ancestry and compare it to IQ? (Self-reported ancestry would still be informative, but not as accurate.)
There is large enough variance in Neanderthal ancestry among Europeans that we might actually be able to see differences within the European population (and then extrapolate those to guess how much of the European-African gap that explains). I seem to recall seeing some preliminary reports on this, but I can’t find them right now so I’m not confident they were evidence-driven instead of theory-driven.
The really interesting thing is that you see results from all over the world showing this. Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s measuring 15 points lower than Protestants. Burakumin in Japan measuring 15 points lower than non-Burakumin. SAME GENE POOL. This strongly suggests you get at least 15 points really easily just from social factors, and these studies may (because a study isn’t solid science yet, not even a string of studies from the same group) point to one reason.
So, I totally buy the “cognitive load decreases intellectual performance, both in life and on IQ tests” claim. This is very well replicated, and has immediate personal implications (don’t try to remember everything, write it all down; try to minimize sources of stress in your life; try to think about as few projects at a time as possible).
I don’t think it’s valid to say “instead of A->B, it’s B->A,” or see this as a complete explanation, because the ~13 point drop is only present in times of financial stress. Take standardized school tests, and suppose that half of the minority students are under immediate financial stress (their parents just got a hefty car repair bill) and the other half aren’t (the ‘easy’ condition in the test), whereas none of the majority students are under immediate financial stress. Then we should expect the minority students to be, on average, 6.5 points lower, but what we see is the gap of 15 points.
It’s also plausible that the differentiatior between people is their reaction to stress—I know a lot of high-powered managers and engineers under significant stress at work, who lose much less than a standard deviation of their ability to make good decisions and focus on other things and so on. Some people even seem to perform better under stress, but it’s hard to separate out the difference between motivation and fluid intelligence there.
Being poor means living a life of stress, financial and social. John Scalzi attempts to explain it. John Cheese has excellent ha-ha-only-serious stuff on Cracked on the subject too.
I wasn’t meaning to put forward a study as settled science, of course; but I think it’s interesting, and that they have a pile of other studies showing similar stuff. Now it’s replication time.
Being poor means living a life of stress, financial and social.
Then why, during the experiment, did the poor participants and the rich participants have comparable scores when presented with a hypothetical easy financial challenge (a repair of $150)?
The claim the paper makes is that there are temporary challenges which lower cognitive functionality, that are easier to induce in the poor than the rich. If you expect that those challenges are more likely to occur to the poor than the rich (which seems reasonable to me), then this should explain some part of the effect- but isn’t on all the time, or the experiment wouldn’t have come out the way it did.
I wasn’t meaning to put forward a study as settled science, of course; but I think it’s interesting, and that they have a pile of other studies showing similar stuff. Now it’s replication time.
While I have my doubts about the replicability of any social science article that made it into Science, the interpretation concerns here are assuming the effect the paper saw is entirely real and at the strength they reported.
So, are $POORETHNICGROUP so poor, badly off and socially failed because they are about 15 IQ points stupider than $RICHETHNICGROUP? No, it may be the other way around: poverty directly loses you around 15 IQ points on average.
Or so says Anandi Mani et al. “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function” Science 341, 976 (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1238041. A PDF while it lasts (from the nice person with the candy on /r/scholar) and the newspaper article I first spotted it in. The authors have written quite a lot of papers on this subject.
The biggest problem I have with racists claiming racial realism is this.
The racists claim that this is irrelevant because of research that corrects for socioeconomic status and still finds IQ differences. Of course, researchers have found plenty of evidence of important environmental influences on IQ not measured by SES. It seems especially bad for the racial realist hypothesis that people who, for example, identify as “black” in America have the the same IQ disadvantage compared to whites whether their ancestory is 4% European or 40% European; how much African vs. European ancestry someone has seems to matter only indirectly to the IQ effects, which seem to directly follow whichever artificial simplified category someone is identified as belonging to.
Not completely serious, just wondering about possible implications, for sake of munchkinism:
Would it be possible to invent some new color, for example “purple”, so that identifying with that color would increase someone’s IQ?
I guess it would first require the rest of the society accepting the superiority (at least in intelligence) of the purple people, and their purpleness being easy to identify and difficult for others to fake. (Possible to achieve with some genetic manipulation.)
Also, could this mechanism possibly explain the higher intelligence of Jews? I mean, if we stopped suspecting them from making international conspiracies and secretly ruling the world (which obviously requires a lot of intelligence), would their IQs consequently drop to the average level?
Also… what about Asians? It is the popularity of anime than increases their IQ, or what?
Unfortunately, while we know there are lots of environmental factors that affect IQ, we mostly don’t know the details well enough to be sure of very much, or to have much idea how to manipulate it. However, as I understand it, some research has suggested that there are interesting cultural similarities between Jews in most of the world and Chinese who don’t live in China, and that the IQ advantage of Chinese is primarily among Chinese who don’t live in China, so something in common between how the Chinese and Jewish cultures deal with being minority outsiders may explain part of why both show unusually high IQs when they are minority outsiders (and could explain a lot of East Asians generally; considering how enormous the cultural influence of China has been in the region, it would not be terribly surprising if many other East Asian groups had acquired whatever the relevant factor is).
This paper by Ogbu and Simons discusses some of the theories about groups that do poorly (the “involuntary” or “caste-like” minorities). Unfortunately I couldn’t find a citation for any discussion of differences between voluntary minorities which would explain why some voluntary minorities outperform rather than merely equalling the majority, apart from Ned Block’s passing reference to a culture of “self-respect” in his review of The Bell Curve.
It’s been done—many people do in fact self-identify as ‘Indigo children’, ‘Indigos’ or even ‘Brights’. The label tends to come with a broadly humanistic and strongly irreligious worldview, but many of them are in fact highly committed to some form of spirituality and mysticism: indeed, they credit these perhaps unusual convictions for their increased intelligence and, more broadly, their highly developed intuition.
Ah, “Brights” is Dawkins and Dennett’s terrible word for atheists; “Indigos” is completely insane and incoherent new-age nonsense about allegedly superpowered children. How did you conflate the two?
I’ve seen mixed reports on this. Human Varieties, for example, has a series of posts on colorism which finds a relationship between skin color and intelligence in the population of African Americans, as predicted by both the hereditarian and “colorist” (i.e. discrimination) theories, but does not find a relationship between skin color and intelligence within families (as predicted by the hereditarian but not the colorist theory), and I know there were studies using blood type which didn’t support the hereditarian theory but appear to have been too weakly designed to do that even if hereditarianism were true. Are you aware of any studies that actually look at genetic ancestry and compare it to IQ? (Self-reported ancestry would still be informative, but not as accurate.)
It’s because Europeans are 4% Neanderthal and partake of the Neanderthals’ larger brains, and Africans aren’t.
There is large enough variance in Neanderthal ancestry among Europeans that we might actually be able to see differences within the European population (and then extrapolate those to guess how much of the European-African gap that explains). I seem to recall seeing some preliminary reports on this, but I can’t find them right now so I’m not confident they were evidence-driven instead of theory-driven.
The really interesting thing is that you see results from all over the world showing this. Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s measuring 15 points lower than Protestants. Burakumin in Japan measuring 15 points lower than non-Burakumin. SAME GENE POOL. This strongly suggests you get at least 15 points really easily just from social factors, and these studies may (because a study isn’t solid science yet, not even a string of studies from the same group) point to one reason.
Could be interesting to know how much of that is the status directly, and how much is better nutrition and medical care.
That’s not obvious. Remember, there were strong taboos against interbreeding with Burakumin in Japan.
They separated only a few hundred years ago.
So, I totally buy the “cognitive load decreases intellectual performance, both in life and on IQ tests” claim. This is very well replicated, and has immediate personal implications (don’t try to remember everything, write it all down; try to minimize sources of stress in your life; try to think about as few projects at a time as possible).
I don’t think it’s valid to say “instead of A->B, it’s B->A,” or see this as a complete explanation, because the ~13 point drop is only present in times of financial stress. Take standardized school tests, and suppose that half of the minority students are under immediate financial stress (their parents just got a hefty car repair bill) and the other half aren’t (the ‘easy’ condition in the test), whereas none of the majority students are under immediate financial stress. Then we should expect the minority students to be, on average, 6.5 points lower, but what we see is the gap of 15 points.
It’s also plausible that the differentiatior between people is their reaction to stress—I know a lot of high-powered managers and engineers under significant stress at work, who lose much less than a standard deviation of their ability to make good decisions and focus on other things and so on. Some people even seem to perform better under stress, but it’s hard to separate out the difference between motivation and fluid intelligence there.
Being poor means living a life of stress, financial and social. John Scalzi attempts to explain it. John Cheese has excellent ha-ha-only-serious stuff on Cracked on the subject too.
I wasn’t meaning to put forward a study as settled science, of course; but I think it’s interesting, and that they have a pile of other studies showing similar stuff. Now it’s replication time.
Then why, during the experiment, did the poor participants and the rich participants have comparable scores when presented with a hypothetical easy financial challenge (a repair of $150)?
The claim the paper makes is that there are temporary challenges which lower cognitive functionality, that are easier to induce in the poor than the rich. If you expect that those challenges are more likely to occur to the poor than the rich (which seems reasonable to me), then this should explain some part of the effect- but isn’t on all the time, or the experiment wouldn’t have come out the way it did.
While I have my doubts about the replicability of any social science article that made it into Science, the interpretation concerns here are assuming the effect the paper saw is entirely real and at the strength they reported.