Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability (2005)
| Venue: | Psychology, Public Policy, and Law |
| Citations: | 9 - 4 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Jensen05thirtyyears,
author = {Arthur R. Jensen},
title = {Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability},
journal = {Psychology, Public Policy, and Law},
year = {2005},
pages = {235--294}
}
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Abstract
The culture-only (0 % genetic–100 % environmental) and the hereditarian (50% genetic–50 % environmental) models of the causes of mean Black–White differences in cognitive ability are compared and contrasted across 10 categories of evidence: the worldwide distribution of test scores, g factor of mental ability, heritability, brain size and cognitive ability, transracial adoption, racial admixture, regression, related life-history traits, human origins research, and hypothesized environmental variables. The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black–White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black–White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics). Section 1: Background Throughout the history of psychology, no question has been so persistent or so resistant to resolution as that of the relative roles of nature and nurture in causing individual and group differences in cognitive ability (Degler, 1991;
