A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans
A study from Wicherts et al published online in the journal Intelligence today:
On the basis of several reviews of the literature, Lynn… concluded that the average IQ of the Black population of sub-Saharan Africa lies below 70. In this paper, the authors systematically review published empirical data on the performance of Africans on the following IQ tests: Draw-A-Man (DAM) test, Kaufman-Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), the Wechsler scales (WAIS & WISC), and several other IQ tests (but not the Raven’s tests)… Results show that average IQ of Africans on these tests is approximately 82 when compared to UK norms.
UPDATE: Tables and Figures below the fold
Table 4. Results by subsets of samples.
Table 5. Estimates of mean IQs per country on the basis of studies in Table 2 and studies from the Raven’s study.
Fig. 1. Scatterplot of data from study by Lynn (2006) and Lynn and Vanhanen (2006).
Fig. 2. Scatterplot of data from study by Rindermann (2007).
Fig. 3. Scatterplot of data from study by Lynn and Mikk (2007).
Fig. 4. Scatterplot of data from study by Lynn et al. (2007).
Fig. 5. Mean of samples that meet our inclusion criteria against the inverse of the standard error.
Fig. 6. Mean of samples from studies published prior to 2006 against the inverse of the standard error.
Labels: IQ
link to study.
my bad, i thought i put that in there.
I’ve been arguing since 2002 that if the average IQ in black Africa is 70, then that shows that there is obviously much room for improvements in nurture to bring Africans up to African-American standards of IQ (around 85). But if the average IQ in Africa is really 82, then there isn’t all that much room for improvements in nurture in Africa.
But is that plausible?
Steve,
That problem is raised if the African-American genotypic IQ is 85. But if their genotypic IQ is higher, then perhaps both US and African blacks can rise..
edit:
of course, it does seem suspect that the african environment only subtracts 3 IQ points relative to the US black environment.. maybe its because there are environmental factors that uniquely affect african-americans that don’t effect africans..
Yeah, this reads like an own-goal — assuming Wicherts did nothing underhanded or incompetent, it implies that environmental quality matters *less* to mean IQ than *anyone* previously suspected. Granted there’s at least one other interpretation, but it’s a pretty damn hard sell.
yet another possibility is that sub-Saharan Africans, as a whole, have higher genotypic IQ’s than African-Americans.
African-Americans come overwhelmingly from Western Africa, right? Might be interesting to see what nations are included in this analysis, and where Western Africans score relative to their cousins in Ethiopia and Kenya, for example.
Oh, if only I had $31! Damn my budget.
of course, it does seem suspect that the african environment only subtracts 3 IQ points relative to the US black environment..
It is said in the abstract that the comparison is with UK norms, and as the average IQ of Britons is 2 points above that of Americans, wouldn’t that mean that the African environment substracts 5 points compared to the African American environment?
Remember that “african”-americans are, in reallity, a mix of african and european ascenstry.
80% african, 20% european, on average.
I’d be interested in Godless Capitialist’s views on this paper. I recently came across some comments of his and was quite impressed (see here). It’s a shame he seems to have cut back his comments.
If you want my $.02….I’ve said for a while that definitive settling of cross cultural IQ comparisons will only happen when we can measure intelligence in ratio-scale terms, e.g. in inverse seconds (like computer clock speed) or cubic centimeters (like MRI brain volumes) or some (simple) function thereof.
A multiple regression of pen-and-paper IQ upon all neurophysiological measurements known to correlate with IQ (brain volume, reaction time, etc.) would likely give you something highly predictive of IQ *yet* based entirely on physical measurements.
And physical measurements are of course time, space, and culture invariant. So you can now ask: is the Flynn effect due to genuine differences in (say) cranial volume? Or not? If you’ve got a strong predictor (say >.9 correlation with IQ), you would almost certainly be able to track the Flynn effect to the determinative columns in the multiple regression matrix.
Solid precedent for this are the brain imaging studies that began regressing IQ upon *multiple* brain volume measurements (of individual regions) rather than a simple scalar aggregate (namely the row sum, representing the entire volume for that individual). Areas known to be linked to cognition from prior information were most highly predictive of IQ.
Also — w.r.t. this particular paper, I do like the fact that Wicherts included scatterplots rather than correlations (the former are far more informative). I’ll sit down and look it over, but until then — Wicherts is technically skilled and a rather personally reasonable guy. He’s as far from Kamin, Turkheimer, Rose et alia as you can be — similar to Flynn in that respect.
Lynn on the other hand is not very technical and can be quite sloppy in his work (e.g. his recent post on VDare cited an incorrect racial order for A-levels — African immigrants actually outscore UK whites on some A-level related measures). But Lynn is definitely on to *something* with IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
So — while I think the broad gist of Lynn’s thought will hold up, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wicherts has something here.
?
does this include villagers? There is no way the urbanites such as Obama Sr can have “above average-by African standards” IQs of…100.
Just took a look at the paper.
Wicherts’ plots show a few things pretty convincingly:
1. The IQs for African subjects are likely to be significantly higher than estimated by Lynn and Vanhanen, yet still the lowest in the world. Wicherts shows this by comparing national IQ to Hanushek’s data, Rindermann’s data, and the TIMSS and demonstrating that the sub-Saharan African data points are off the regression line (Figs 1,2,3).
2. Lynn seems to have cherry picked the lowest estimates of African IQ scores to obtain a median around 69-70, but the actual median is around 78-82 — again still the lowest in the world . See Figure 6. Note that an obvious retort might be that Lynn’s studies could have been larger. However, Wicherts anticipates this by putting the standard error on the Y axis, which is inversely related to the sample size. I’d like to see a third axis of time added to the plot (to see Flynn type effects) but I think Wicherts makes his case.
Overall I think my initial prediction was right. Lynn is correct about the general trend of IQ being the lowest in the world in sub-Saharan Africa. But for reasons only known to him, he consistently and unnecessarily overstates the case. Did he really need to cite the median around 69 when it’s around 78? It just leaves the door open for critics. Anyway, this is a pattern with him (and to a lesser extent Rushton[1]) which is starkly different from someone like Jensen.
All that said, there’s no shortage of people lining up to attack Rushton and Lynn and I don’t want this to be construed as a typical nurturist jeremiad. My basic POV is that Rushton’s rule is up there with Chargaff’s rule in terms of getting at a fundamental biological truth which we don’t fully understand yet, and that “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” is an important conceptual breakthrough. Even if Rushton/Lynn are angry or racially motivated to an extent, and even if they have overstated their case, nevertheless there is a fairly large baby within all that bathwater no matter how much many (including myself) would like there not to be.
This is basically the same way I think about Lewontin — sure, he’s a communist and persecutor who lied about human differences. But you have to give the devil his due for pioneering the population genetic application of gel electrophoresis. All three guys are extremists who’ve nevertheless made far-ranging contributions to science.
[1] Razib can speak to this, but there are several aspects in which Rushton’s understanding of genetics is rather limited. For any other field and discipline, that wouldn’t be such a big deal — molecular biologists don’t know any popgen either. But w.r.t. race/IQ/genetics IMO you really do kind of have to be a polymath, or at least try to be one and be apologetic/honest when you don’t know a certain area that well.
see:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/03/validity-of-national-iq.php
based on all of the data i’ve seen, my best guess is that average IQ of African blacks in the worth environments really is ~70, but that absent the worst environmental effects the average IQ of African blacks is ~80.
Lynn is a Kuhnian ‘revolutionary scientist’ – trailblazing and generating a new new field, a new hypothesis.
Wicherts et al are coming along behind and doing ‘normal science’ – i.e. testing a hypotheses derived from from revolutionary science using standard methods and techniques, and applying greater resources.
However, Wicherts at al seem to lose track of the fact that all scientific ‘testing’ is of hypotheses, not of measurements. Hypotheses make predictions, they are tested by observing (and measuring) whether these predictions are fulfilled. The relevance of observed measurements comes from this hypothesis-testing aim.
In their paper, Wicherts et al replicate the hypothesis of Lynn – their results are consistent-with Lynn’s hypothesis. That is the primary finding, and this fact should be more clearly emphasized.
Secondarily, Whicherts et al also produce different measurements than Lynn, and this is interesting and useful and we can hope for further clarifying studies to provide further evidence.
But specific measurements can only be interpreted in the light of hypotheses; in other words the significance of IQ measurements comes from the hypotheses the predictions of which these measurements are being used to test.
A hypothesis can only be evaluated and rejected in comparison with an alternative hypothesis which is more powerful. Lynn’s hypotheses seem to have withstood this particular test, and I don’t see any other comparably explanatory and tested rival hypotheses that are being put forward here – or am I missing something?
Sadly, I can’t access the article. The abstract pins down the mean, but I’m curious if the meat of the study reveals any indication of a broader, flatter area under curve? Does higher genetic diversity translate into higher cognitive diversity, resulting in longer tails and more outliers?
the lowest IQs in the world are Aboriginals and various desert peoples.
lol,
the link you provide shows that their economic and educational performance matches that of an IQ ~ 70 population. But perhaps African national IQ isn’t very valid?
@geecee
On more objective, time-based IQ measures:
Jensen’s book The g Factor reviews a few studies of African reaction-times, as I recall, and they were about 1.5 sigmas below the white mean—far short of the 2+ sigmas predicted by IQ tests. So Africans were always one group where reaction time underpredicted IQ.
I’ve always kept that in mind in discussions of African g. If all you had was African reaction times, you’d get an IQ estimate quite close to Wicherts, et al.
Since, I can’t access the paper, like Kosmo, I’m also curious, does the paper speak at all about variation/S.D. within the SS African population and not just the mean? Like Mark, I also wonder how SS Africa varies by region? Also, how representative are the Samples used by Wicherts (or Lynn for that matter)? Are they drawn from the subset of urban populations that attend schools? If so, they may not be representative of the urban poor, peasant types on the land, or the populations as a whole. Then again, is it even possible to get meaningful IQs from pencil and paper tests from uneducated peasant types?
Also, I noticed that in many of the studies cited by Lynn and Rushton that yielded very low SS African IQ, the test used was the Raven’s progressive matrices. I think I remember reading in something written by Lynn or Rushton that in many of the samples where IQ was in the 60s there were floor effects; that the test was simply too hard for most of the test takers (or maybe that they just didn’t understand the test?) and that they couldn’t really get meaningful scores and a normal distribution.
“yet another possibility is that sub-Saharan Africans, as a whole, have higher genotypic IQ’s than African-Americans.”
I think you might be on the right track here actually ben. Have any of you guys seen Chris Rock’s stand up routine where he goes on about how African-American slaves might have been bred for their stupidity? (i.e. the individuals that could read were killed because of their masters fear of a revolution). That, or, the slaves that were captured and brought to America in the first place were in a sense selected partially on intelligence (i.e. the smart tribes and individuals weren’t captured). In fact, I think many of the slave traders were Africans themselves that captured other tribes to sell as slaves (correct me if I’m wrong in the case of African-Americans).
1. i added the paper’s figures to the post
2. in that old post i wrote:
Update: Although there are only four values, the sub-80 national IQs are outliers, all with positive residuals. While this is hardly informative, it trends in the direction of casting doubt on the validity of sub-80 national IQ values.
in other words, the achievement test scores predicted a higher average IQ for those populations than Lynn’s estimates. given how well they two variables correlate for IQs > 80, it stood to reason that the sub 80 IQ scores were underestimates.
wicherts et al. shows this is greater detail as part of their analysis.
hugs guys. here’s the pdf:
http://sharebee.com/6a3741cc
thanks lol,
would this mean that Wichert’s African IQ scores accurately predict African educational and economic outcomes?
i’ve added the IQ tables below the fold. something i’d note is that there is no apparent pattern favoring (North)East Africa over West Africa. The highest score is Sierra Leone. 91 points.
I’m surprised at the disparity between Ethiopians and Eritreans, but then it seems the latter’s score is based on only one study. I would have expected Ethiopians to score higher, probably because all the Ethiopians I know here in DC are fairly bright. But selective migration might account for that.
No doubt this is clear in the full study, which I cannot access at present, but what are the ‘five inclusion criteria’? These seem to reduce the number of ‘acceptable’ studies, and to increase mean IQ, quite dramatically. The authors seem in fact to be as selective in one direction as L & V are in the other. This may of course all be quite legitimate, but one would need to watch out for criteria that, intentionally or not, restrict the nature of the sampled populations, e.g. to children who have undergone a specified amount of modern education.
What about arranging a 10 question interview about this study with Wicherts himself, here at Gene Expression? And one with Lynn, in counterpoint.
David,
Wouldn’t “children who have undergone a specified amount of modern education” be precisely the ones we should be testing in Africa if we want to get a handle on African IQ?
Anyway, their inclusion criteria were:
1) Norms: “For our preferred estimate of mean IQ, we used only test scores for which western standardized IQ norms were available.”
2) Standardized test administration of entire IQ test: “The test should have been administered in accordance with the guidelines in the test manual… In addition, we only used test scores of IQ tests that were administered in their entirety.”
3) No reported problems during testing: “Test administration should not have been described as problematic by the original authors.”
4) No measurement bias: “We did not include in our estimate of average IQ of Africans data from tests that were found or expected (by the original authors) to be biased with respect to Africans.”
5) Normal samples: “We excluded from our preferred estimate of average IQ of Africans’ data from unhealthy or special populations. For instance, we excluded the WISC-R scores from a sample of deaf children from Nigerian (Alade, 1992) and we excluded samples of test takers that were specifically sampled because of their poor health.”
Nothing there about modern education that I can see. But their exclusion of unhealthy children may help explain why blacks in Africa, in this analysis, seem to average fairly close to blacks in the United States. (Presumably, tests on severely malnourished children were not included…)
Wouldn’t “children who have undergone a specified amount of modern education” be precisely the ones we should be testing in Africa if we want to get a handle on African IQ?…
That depends on whether we want to know phenotypic or genotypic IQ. Wicherts is primarily contesting Lynn’s numbers on the former.
Nothing there about modern education that I can see. But their exclusion of unhealthy children may help explain why blacks in Africa, in this analysis, seem to average fairly close to blacks in the United States. (Presumably, tests on severely malnourished children were not included…)
They didn’t exclude Ashem and James (1978): “The sample included normally nourished, reasonably nourished, and malnourished children. The average IQ of the entire sample was 92.6 (SD=19.5).”
You wouldn’t want to use completely malnourished samples because those wouldn’t be representative of national IQ.
There is a comment on the sub-saharan figures in the working paper on Nisbett’s book:
%20and%20How%20to%20Get% 20It%20(Working%20Paper).pdf
“While it is true that Wicherts and colleagues [86,87,88] extensively critiqued Lynn?s conclusion of an average IQ of 70 for sub-Saharan Africa, it is noteworthy that their re-analyses only increased the mean IQ for Africa to 80. On the Progressive Matrices, they were able to raise the mean from 70 to 78; on other tests such as the Draw-A-Man test, the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, and the Wechsler scales, they raised the mean from 70 to 81. Even if it should turn out that the mean IQ for Africa is 80 rather than 70, the difference between Africans and Whites would still be 1.25 SDs.
Lynn and Mikk [89], however, have corroborated Lynn?s estimate of a sub-Saharan African IQ of only 70 by showing comparable differences on large-scale tests of educational attainment. For example, the Trends International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is standardized with a mean of 500 and SD of 100 on representative samples of 14-year-olds with Ns = 2,000 to 10,000. First, the TIMSS scores correlated from .85 to .91 with the independently compiled national IQ scores [90,91]. Second, the African 14-year-olds score two SDs lower than their European counterparts [89]. On the 2003 TIMMS Science test, the results for England, Botswana, Ghana, and South Africa were 502, 369, 282, and 278, respectively; and on the Science test, 540, 366, 258, and 257. On the 2007 Math test, the results for England, Botswana, and Ghana were 513, 364 and 309, respectively; and on the Science test, 542, 355, and 303. Lynn and Mikk [89] calculated the Educational Quotient (or EQ) for all the available African data and found it was 68, commensurate with the IQ of 71 for these particular countries.
The average IQ of 70 for sub-Saharan Africans is highly consistent and not due to a ?fluke? or to sampling error. Lynn?s [11,14] review covered over two dozen studies from West, Central, East, and Southern Africa, all of them corroborating an average IQ of 70. Some of these studies had quite large Ns. In Ghana, Glewwe and Jacoby [92] reported a World Bank study of 1,736 11- to 20-year-olds representative of the entire country. All had completed primary school; half were attending middle-school. Their mean IQ on the Progressive Matrices was less than 70. Nor should there be any doubt as to the impartiality of the investigators of African IQ as they include both Africans such as Fred Zindi in Zimbabwe [46] and non-hereditarians such as Robert Sternberg. For example, in Kenya, Sternberg and colleagues [93] administered the Progressive Matrices to 85 12- to 15-year-olds who scored an IQ equivalent of about 70. In Tanzania, Sternberg et al. [94] gave the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task to 358 11- to 13-year-olds who received a score equivalent to the 5th percentile on American norms (i.e., IQ = 75). After training on how to solve problems like those on the test, the children?s scores improved, but only to about the 9th percentile on American norms (IQ < 80).
Tests of university students confirm this pattern of results. One of us (JPR) traveled to South Africa to collect new IQ data from highly-select Black students at the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Seven independent studies were published yielding a median IQ of 84 (range 77 to 103). Assuming that African university students score 1 SD (15 IQ points) above the mean of their population, as university students typically do, a median IQ of 84 is consistent with a general population mean of 70. Other studies of university students have found Intelligence and How to Get It 22
a comparable IQ average of about 84 [95].
Studies conducted on the most select of all African university students, such as those in engineering schools, or on the basis of math and science competitions, find their average IQ is approximately 100 [96,97]. Assuming such students score two SDs above their group average, as they do at the best universities in the US, this value too indicates an IQ of 70 for the general population.”
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/Intelligence
Lynn’s latest paper on the results of the 2006 PISA:
“The contribution of national differences in IQ and education variables to national differences in educational attainment obtained in the 2006 PISA 56 nation study showed that the predictive validity of IQ alone was 0.84, and that national IQs together with one economic and two education variables had the validity 0.90 in predicting PISA 2006 results.”
‘National IQs predict educational attainment in math, reading and science across 56 nations’, Richard Lynna, , and Jaan Mikk
Intelligence, Volume 37, Issue 3, May-June 2009, Pages 305-310
Jason Richwine at the AEI blog makes an interesting point about this study:
How Malleable are Worldwide IQ Differences?
A new analysis of IQ in sub-Saharan Africa promises to make waves among those who study group differences in intelligence test performance. The most thorough investigation had been Richard Lynn?s 2006 survey of dozens of past studies, from which he estimated African IQ to be 67, about the 1st percentile of the European distribution. Now three Dutch researchers claim that number is too low. Their re-analysis indicates sub-Saharan African IQ could be as high as 82, meaning the average African scores better than 12 percent of Europeans.
Why the discrepancy between Lynn?s results and the new survey? It all comes down to which past studies get included in the survey and which do not. The past studies vary in quality considerably, and researchers have to make educated guesses about which results should be believed. The choices made by the authors seem reasonable, but a vigorous debate about their methods is surely on the horizon.
I look forward to following that debate, but right now let me comment on the authors? discussion section. They write:
?Although it cannot be precluded that genetic effects play a role in the low IQ performance of Africans, we view environmental circumstances as potentially more relevant to the present-day difference in mean.?
A smaller IQ deficit between Europeans and Africans may make us more hopeful that it can one day be eliminated, regardless of its underlying cause.
But a higher African IQ actually makes effective environmental interventions less plausible. Consider blacks living in the United States and Europe, who have a mean IQ of about 85. They have vastly better nutrition, healthcare, and early education than Africans. If African IQ were 67 as Lynn asserts, then the big jump from 67 in Africa to 85 in the West could be ascribed to the environmental improvement enjoyed by blacks living in Western countries. But if we believe the new African IQ estimate of 82, then all the benefits of living in a rich country apparently add just 3 points to black IQ, casting severe doubt on the value of environmental interventions to improve IQ in Africa.
Almost paradoxically, then, the higher we estimate African IQ, the less malleable it would seem to be.
I have now seen the full study, but not ‘studied’ it in depth myself (and probably won’t, as my interest in the subject is limited).
I think that the exclusion of data where there were ‘reported problems during testing’ could be important. It is common for IQ testers to find that uneducated rural populations (anywhere in the world) have difficulty in understanding test instructions, and indeed the very idea of the tests – see for example P. E. Vernon’s various writings. So ‘reported problems during testing’ could exclude most African rural populations.
Whether or not such exclusions are legitimate is problematic. Excluding the bulk of the population you are trying to sample is not on the face of it desirable. If the aim is to measure the average cognitive abilities of the total population, you need to find some test that is generally applicable, and if you can’t, the only legitimate conclusion is that the average abilities are unknown.
If on the other hand the aim is to estimate the potential IQ of Africans given reasonable levels of nutrition, education, etc, then excluding uneducated rural populations is fair enough.
Indidentally, Wicherts et al deal with the question of the correlation between national IQ and educational performance (TIMMS, etc) and argue that a regression of IQ on educational performance predicts an African mean IQ consistent with their own figures, and not with L & V’s.
“If on the other hand the aim is to estimate the potential IQ of Africans given reasonable levels of nutrition, education, etc, then excluding uneducated rural populations is fair enough.”
David, but even here you run into the problem of representativeness. For instance, would testing black charter school attendees in the US really be a good way to estimate the “potential” of the intercity African American population? They/their families have availed themselves of the educational opportunities offered by charter schools. Might they therefore not be truly representative of the population as a whole, many of whom are not interested in education?
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that any system of truant officers in most African countries is much less developed than in the US and imagine that school attendence is de facto more or less optional/at the discretion of the parents. Therefore, why should those attending school (whether urban or rural) be representative of the whole population? I think you are closer to the mark when you wrote that average abilities for the whole SS African population are unknown.
I took a (slightly) closer look at the paper. The exclusion of ‘problem’ studies is one factor in the differences between Wicherts and L & V, but probably not the main one. If you exclude the studies in L & V that fail this criterion, the mean IQ goes up by about 5 points, which is significant but not enough to close the gap.
I am very familiar with this kind of snide, snippy, sophomoric meta-analysis by generic number-crunchers because it emerged in medical science in the early 1990s, and is now mass-produced.
Medical meta-analysis is currently a research factory assembly-line activity built on extremely dubious assumptions and done as a profession (mostly government-funded in the UK).
In practice medical meta-analysis is corrupt and anti-scientific, because its underlying motivations and aims are neither scientific nor medical – they are political or managerial.
If you look at the discussion section of this papaer you can see the problem. In its effect, the thousands of words of methodology and stats are used only to generate clouds of smoke and obscure the obvious. The message of the paper has been spun in the opposite direction of their findings.
That’s mainstream meta-analysis for you: minute but fundamentally-arbitrary methodological accuracy trumps basic scientific honesty.
Meta-analyses are usually crap because they usually combine p-values (often by naive application of Fisher’s equation) rather than actually concatenating the underlying datasets (which have all kinds of different rows and columns). This problem is compounded b/c the p-values are often not intercomparable.
That’s a bit different from what was done here. Moreover, Lynn’s original study was meta-analytic in nature (at least in the sense of aggregating papers).
Still, no doubt Wicherts spun the paper as far more favorable to the nurturist view point than it is. The real upshot is that even after correction, Africans have the lowest IQ among all pops measured in the study…
bgc,
So true.
If you actually go back and read all of each and every one of the studies that are analyzed, considering their sample sizes, methods, etc, they sometimes don’t support the conclusions of the meta-analyses. Also, some meta-analyses can exclude relevant and superior studies that have more representative samples and better methods.
Very interesting. They should also review the reported east asian IQ. I suspect it is much higher than reported. I would think 110-115 compared to the reported 105. Lynn has an agenda so he always fudges his figures.
Very interesting. They should also review the reported east asian IQ. I suspect it is much higher than reported. I would think 110-115 compared to the reported 105. Lynn has an agenda so he always fudges his figures.
exactly. unlike the west east asia doesn’t have a culture which emphasizes education and excelling on standardized tests. look at south korea.
Yeah, I agree with razib’s sarcastic comment. Anyone familiar with East vs. West approaches to test-taking would see there are perverse differences.
There seems to be some multiplier effect that exaggerates differences between groups. Some cultures (ie. East Asians) seem to over-perform on standardized test, but it makes a lot of sense when you see how they approach the idea of competitive exams. See South Koreans, Japanese, Chinese-Americans…
On the flip-side, and many studies have borne this out, black students in the US come from a quite forgiving culture and tend to put a lot less work into school and test-taking. Mediocrity isn’t so bad, and excellence is not so important.
I don’t think the generally accepted ordinal ranking of races in terms of average IQ is wrong, but I think the magnitudes are skewed by cultural factors.
I’m saying this as someone who has taught SATs, GREs and GMATs in Asia for almost 2 years now, and I can compare my experiences with Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian students. I’ve witnessed scores increase by “impossible” jumps of 1-2 standard deviations. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of all perfect SAT scores were korean or chinese, but I don’t think that means as much as some people think…
Are Indian-Americans genetically insanely good spellers?
Also worth examining Lynn’s figures for Arabs, Iranians, Indians etc. surely.
When Flynn analyzed the IQ data for 2nd generation Japanese-American and Chinese-American kids brought up in the 1960s, he found no IQ advantage. However, he did find that they academically were doing quite a bit better than the caucasian population. Most likely this can be attributed to their spending significant more time per night studying and doing homework.
IQ matters, but work ethic can prove decisive too.
IQ and personality – specifically Conscientiousness – are the best validated psychological features predictive of educational, economic and social status success.
But at present the main method for measuring personality is by self-rating questionnaires – and these can easily be faked; also different cultures seem to have different criteria for self-rating (international studies of personality are a near-random mess IMHO).
So, because it is more reliably and validly measured, IQ works much better than personality as a predictor cross-culturally at present.
But (so far as I am aware) between-culture IQ measures seems to work just as well as within-culture IQ measures as a predictor.
So the above speculations about culturally-determined test-taking attitudes are probably of little significance, or may be irrelevant, to the predictive value of IQ measurements under normal conditions.
Based on the latest then, it appears that africans are slightly more intelligent than indians and slightly less intelligent than arabs, persians and turks.
“But at present the main method for measuring personality is by self-rating questionnaires – and these can easily be faked; also different cultures seem to have different criteria for self-rating (international studies of personality are a near-random mess IMHO).”
This is why I never trust happiness surveys. They have the same problems. If someone asks how happy (or conscientious) I am, I am going to compare myself mainly to people I know personally, not someone in modern Saudi Arabia or a peasant in ancient Rome.
Double Helix:
I don’t think there really is such a thing as “indians” from the genetic perspective.
Ok, this is true of Europeans and more so Africans. But even Africans are mostly people from the Bantu expansion.
“Indians” are a conglomeration of caste groups which have been practicing endogamy — at various levels — for a couple thousand years. With quite different levels and sources of “source” DNA. For some groups the selection pressures have been similar to Ashkenazi. Other groups have been completely illiterate the entire time.
I’m thinking in terms of genetic complexity its the biggest mess on the planet.
And, of course, as in the US these differences generate fractious politics around civil service and university reservations with ST, SC then OBC (Other Backward Castes) to spread the gravy and garner more votes.
That’s why i’m with Sailer. Even though i like India — and love one Indian in particular — and worked with a lot of smart Indians (at a large software company) don’t bet on the joint, no matter how savy US Indians seem to be.
jim
jim, your point is well taken, but i do think indians are a distinct cluster within the west eurasian clade.
see here or here.
south asians are the second most diverse population next to africans though.
“I think you might be on the right track here actually ben. Have any of you guys seen Chris Rock’s stand up routine where he goes on about how African-American slaves might have been bred for their stupidity? “
It’s not just that. William Shockley was fretting decades ago about the rapid dysgenic rate among African Americans.
Anyway, I don’t believe this one bit. Jensen and Rushton make a convincing case that the African American IQ is actually 78. See page 8.
Unfortunately I can’t access the study right now but it sounds like BS that the IQ of an entire has been consistently underestimated by 12-15 points.
Someone is either grossly incompetent or lying. As a long time observer of these debates, I assume it’s the more politically correct side until I’ve had a chance to examine the data.
The word “continent” should be after “entire.”