Race and intelligence (Media portrayal)

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Main article: Race and intelligence
Demonstrators disrupt a 1999 academic conference in London at which 3 race and intelligence researchers were scheduled to speak. Arthur Jensen pictured lower left; Walter Kistler pictured upper left.[2]
Demonstrators disrupt a 1999 academic conference in London at which 3 race and intelligence researchers were scheduled to speak. Arthur Jensen pictured lower left; Walter Kistler pictured upper left.[2]

Some researchers argue media coverage of intelligence-related research is often inaccurate and misleading. Snyderman and Rothman (who don't conduct research related to race and intelligence) conducted a study of this phenomenon in 1988, drawing from their 1987 survey of expert opinion of intelligence-related topics.

Contents

[edit] Snyderman and Rothman study

Snyderman and Rothman (1988), conducted a study of the news media (newspapers, news magazines, and broadcast TV news) and surveyed the opinions of journalists and science editors. (They separately surveyed intelligence experts, including scholars in the subfields of psychology, sociology, cognitive science, education, and genetics.) They concluded that media coverage of intelligence related topics was overall inaccurate and misleading. They attributed this partly to a tendency of the news media to emphasize controversy, and the difficulty of accurately reporting technical issues such as complex statistics. However, they conclude that these factors alone cannot account for their finding that the media has misreported the views of the scientific community, especially about the role of genetic and environmental factors in explaining individual and group differences in IQ. Among psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, educators, and geneticists (in 1987), 53% thought that the black-white gap was partially genetic and 17% thought that it was entirely environmental. No poll option was provided to indicate "predominantly (but not entirely) environmental".

Journalists, science editors, and IQ experts were asked their "opinion of the source of the black-white difference in IQ":[1]

Group Entirely environment Entirely genetic Partially genetic Data Are Insufficient
Journalists 34% 1% 27% 38%
Editors 47% 2% 23% 28%
IQ Experts 17% 1% 53% 28%

They found that the media regularly presented the views of Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin as representative of mainstream opinion among experts, whereas those who stress that individual and group differences may be partly genetic (e.g., Arthur Jensen) are characterized as a minority. According to Synderman and Rothman, their survey of expert opinion found that the opposite is actually true. The proportion of experts supporting these hypotheses today is unknown. Prominent critic Robert Sternberg defended the minority view as such in 1995, stating "science isn't done by majority rule."[3] Critic Reginald Wilson states in 1992 "Although we may believe that we live in an enlightened age, most of my colleagues [in psychology] believe indeed that there are substantial genetic components to the lower IQ scores that are on average earned by African-Americans and by Hispanics compared to whites and Asians. And that has been substantiated by surveys of them and of the leading experts in the field" (Mathews 1992).

Snyderman and Rothman suggested that the personal views and preferences of journalists and editors influenced their reporting, especially their selection of which views to present and how to present them. They suggested that the desire of the journalists and editors to advance liberal political goals, which are seen by many as incompatible with a substantial genetic contribution to individual and group differences in IQ, caused them to preferentially report the views of experts who reject the heritability of IQ. However, note that journalists, editors and experts on average agreed on survey questions meant to measure social and political views, indicating that experts had liberal political goals despite their scientific views on IQ.

Reporting on the issues of within and between group heritability was found to be particularly poor. Whereas 94 percent of experts believed there is evidence for significant within-group heritability (with an average estimate of ~60% heritability), news media reports often either erroneously reported that experts believe that genetic control of IQ is total (~100% heritability) or that most experts believed that genetics plays no role (~0% heritability). News reports make the same mistakes (at approximately the same rate) when reporting the expert view on the contribution of genetics to racial-ethnic group differences in IQ. News reports also tended to cite the opinions of only very few experts (such as Jensen, Herrnstein, and William Shockley) to whom they often erroneously attributed a variety of views (e.g., that Blacks are inherently or innately inferior to Whites, that their views have adverse implication for education policy or adverse political implications, or that they are racist).[2] Snyderman and Rothman speculated that the misattribution of views to these individuals stems from attacks on them by public intellectuals, such as Kamin. On the other hand, Rushton and several other prominent researchers funded by the Pioneer Fund have often been criticized on these grounds also by academics.

[edit] Stereotype threat

A 2004 study found widespread and systematic research misinterpretation regarding one of the more popular explanations for the IQ gap.[3] Introducing stereotype threat to a test-taking environment has been shown to increase the existing gap between Blacks or Whites in relation to Whites or Asians respectively, and has thus been offered as a potential contributor to the gap.[4] However, 88% of accounts in the popular media, 91% in scientific journals, and 67% in psychology textbooks misinterpreted the findings as that eliminating the introduced stereotype threat eliminated the Black-White gap, when in fact the students had already been matched according to prior scores.[5] The authors suggest the appeal of the misinterpreted findings may have been a factor, and that such research results in general may in this way be systemically more readily accepted.[6]

[edit] The Bell Curve

In response to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association's Board of Scientific Affairs in 1995 established a special task force to publish an investigative report on the research presented in the book. [4]. Regarding genetic causes, they noted that there is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis. The January 1997 issue of American Psychologist included eleven critical responses to the APA report, most of which criticized the report's failure to examine all of the evidence for or against the partly-genetic interpretation of racial differences in IQ.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Snyderman and Rothman 1988
  2. ^ Snyderman and Rothman. See also Gordon 1997b, which focuses on a 1994 ABC News's segment on intelligence. Gordon states, for example:

    Anchor Peter Jennings introduced this featured part. . . "a new book, The Bell Curve, argued the proposition that intelligence is very much determined by an individual's race." . . . The book, along with all psychologists who recognize average differences among at least some races, argues that race is an inadequate and even improper basis for estimating the intelligence of an individual (particularly as much better and fairer ways are available), and that genes for intelligence, not race, largely determine an individual's IQ. Race may be a correlate of IQ, but it is not a determinant in any useful sense of an individual's IQ. . . In contrast to Mr. Jennings, for example, Professor Raymond Cattell, a firm believer in the existence of group differences, has emphasized explicitly, and in terms simple enough to have been understood by anyone in your audience, "Since the differences in mean are small compared to the within race differences it is a fallacious racism to perceive an individual in terms of his race." Similarly, The Bell Curve states, "The first thing to remember is that the differences among individuals are far greater than the differences between groups" (pp. 270-271).[1] (pp. 6-7)

  3. ^ Sackett et al. 2004: "One [issue raised by readers of this article] is that misinterpretation of research is regrettably all too common and thus that documenting misinterpretations in one single domain is of limited interest. Our response is that we are singling out this domain because the issue at stake is of such importance and because the interpretive errors are so rampant and so systematic" (p. 11).
  4. ^ Other researchers have extended these results to other groups (e.g., gender, age) (p. 11).
  5. ^ pp. 10-11.
  6. ^ "We can only speculate as to causes of the mischaracterization of the Steele and Aronson (1995) findings in these various media. . . A factor contributing to not noticing the adjustment may be the appeal of the misinterpreted findings (i.e., the conclusion that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates African American–White differences). Finding mechanisms to reduce or eliminate subgroup differences is an outcome that we believe would be virtually universally welcomed. Thus, research findings that can be interpreted as contributing to that outcome may be more readily accepted with less critical scrutiny" (p. 11).

[edit] External links


Series of bell curves Race and intelligence
Public controversy | Media portrayal | Utility of research | Accusations of bias
Average test score gaps among races | Explanations | References
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