Linda Gottfredson

Linda Susanne Gottfredson (née Howarth; born June 24, 1947) is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S. public and private policies regarding affirmative action, hiring quotas, and "race-norming" on aptitude tests.

She is on the boards of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID), the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and the editorial boards of the scientific journals Intelligence, Learning and Individual Differences, and Society. Gottfredson has received research grants worth $267,000 from the Pioneer Fund.^[1][2]

Life and work

These are idealized normal curves comparing the IQs of Blacks and Whites in the US in 1981. Source: Social Consequences by Gottfredson. Labels show Gottefredson's expectations for job and life potential for people of different intelligence levels.

Born in San Francisco, she and her first husband Gary Don Gottfredson received bachelor’s degrees in psychology in 1969 from University of California, Berkeley, then worked in the Peace Corps in Malaysia until 1972. She also taught in schools for the disadvantaged for a time when she was young.^[3] They both went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1977.

Gottfredson took a position at Hopkins’ Center for Social Organization of Schools and investigated issues of occupational segregation and typology based on skill sets and intellectual capacity. She married Robert A. Gordon, who worked in a related area at Hopkins, and they divorced by the mid-90s.^[4]

In 1985, Gottfredson participated in a conference called "The g Factor in Employment Testing." The papers presented were published in the December 1986 issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, which she edited. In 1986, Gottfredson was appointed Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark.

That year, she presented a series of papers on general intelligence factor and employment. Gottfredson has said "We now have out there what I call the egalitarian fiction that all groups are equal in intelligence. We have social policy based on that fiction. For example, the 1991 Civil Rights Act codified Griggs vs. Duke Power, which said that if you have disproportionate hiring by race, you are prima facie -- that's prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. ...Differences in intelligence have real world effects, whether we think they're there or not, whether we want to wish them away or not. And we don't do anybody any good, certainly not the low-IQ people, by denying that those problems exist..."^[5]

Keith Booker, president of the Wilmington, Delaware, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said that Gottfredson's research "... is being done in the name of white supremacy... the Pioneer Fund supports only research that tends to come out with results that further the division between races...by justifying the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another."^[1]

In 1988 Gottfredson received the first of many grants from the Pioneer Fund for work on educational differences and occupational policy. She was promoted to full professor at the University of Delaware in 1990.

Gottfredson's research and views have stirred considerable controversy, especially her testimony on public affirmative action policy and her defense of The Bell Curve, especially Mainstream Science on Intelligence, a statement she wrote, which was signed by 51 colleagues and published in the Wall Street Journal.^[6] Since then she has written a number of articles on race and intelligence, especially as it applies to occupational qualification.

Selected articles and papers

• The General Intelligence Factor: Scientific American Presents, Winter, 1998. (original in PDF; German PDF)
• Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life (1997). Intelligence, 24(1), 79-132.
• Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud (1994), Society (issue on fraud).
• Circumscription and compromise (2006), Encyclopedia of Career Development. (Based on her much cited work on the subject.)^[7]
• Intelligence: Is It the Epidemiologists’ Elusive "Fundamental Cause" of Social Class Inequalities in Health? (2004), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Flynn, Ceci, and Turkheimer on Race and Intelligence: Opening Moves (2007) Cato Unbound
• What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis Is True? (2003)

References

External links

• Linda S. Gottfredson homepage (with online prints of publications)
• Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography - published in Intelligence in 1997.