Ye olde cultural stereotypes argument, revisited

In a March 2008 entry, I responded to a French reader who said that blacks’ poor performance on tests of intellectual ability was due to cultural stereotypes. In the discussion, a reader, Bill from Maryland, made a comment to which I replied:

What Bill has brilliantly illustrated here is that black “stereotype vulnerability” is simply another, more acceptable term for low black IQ, since it turns out that “stereotype vulnerability” has exactly the same characteristics, symptoms, persistence, and lack of amenability to improvement as low IQ. It’s like deciding that “Negro,” or “colored,” or “black” are demeaning terms, and calling blacks “African-Americans” instead. But no matter how many times you change their name, they’re the same people.

- end of initial entry -

Susan G. writes:

Re claims of “stereotype vulnerability” causing blacks’ poor performance on tests of intellectual ability: this has been debunked repeatedly and conclusively by researchers for some decades now. The psychometric literature on it was summarized in Arthur R. Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing back in 1980. (The claim used to be that “test anxiety” or “low self-esteem” caused blacks” poor academic performance.) This now-old canard is promulgated only by those ignorant of the enormous literature on the subject. It was Jensen who designed and carried out many of the ingenious experiments testing the hypothesis that tests of intellectual ability were biased against blacks. His later work, The G Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998), exhaustively sums up in 600-some pages what we know about human intelligence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 24, 2012 11:40 AM | Send