“Intelligence” may offer the clearest example we have of how ideology can corrupt social science. Although the topic has been politicized by both left and right, during the last generation the ideological pressures have come almost entirely from the left, and along these lines: that intelligence is essentially the product of experience—above all, the nature of the child’s environment—the genes having little to do with it; group differences in test performance are spurious, contrived to favor the socially privileged; the meaning of intelligence is in any case unclear; and the methods of measuring it inadequate and likely to be prejudicial.

This indictment reflects a more general aversion towards heredity, intelligence being only one of a large number of qualities where a genetic influence is denied. Until recently, schizophrenia was thought to be produced by pathological childrearing, despite much evidence for a significant biological influence. When the infantile autism disorder (the “Rain Man” syndrome) was diagnosed in the 1940’s, it was also taken to be the result of a disturbed upbringing—in this case, by a “refrigerator mother.” This assumption, especially, illustrates vividly the power of dogma over observation, as significant features of the syndrome point to a strictly neurological explanation.

Although fierce environmentalism has given way where severe mental disorder is concerned, it remains stubbornly in place regarding intelligence. It is not hard to see why: measured intelligence is highly correlated with both social class and class origin. Professionals (and their children) score higher than skilled tradesmen (and theirs) who, in turn, score higher than unskilled laborers and their offspring. While this tells us little about the genetics of intelligence, nevertheless it is sometimes taken quite seriously indeed: environmentalists argue that the class-IQ linkage demonstrates that the socially-favored pass on their social advantages; hereditarians hold that genetic merit is rewarded economically. The argument is intensified by the black-white disparity in tested intelligence. As the authors of this excellent study tell us, observed racial difference is at the heart of the modern IQ controversy, where it has produced a resistance to “rational public discussion.” Are those differences due to test bias, or the outcome of deprivation? If not—what then?

There is another element in the dispute—the struggle to dominate public opinion. Many environmentalists are willing to acknowledge some hereditary contribution to intelligence, as, long as it is kept out of sight. They fear that ordinary citizens, not grasping the subtleties of the argument, will find their bigotry toward members of social and racial minorities confirmed, a result that would reduce support for special efforts intended to benefit the deprived. In short, the IQ controversy involves much more than an argument about the “facts”; it concerns equally how facts are to be understood.

All these issues and many more are covered in this exemplary work. Snyderman and Rothman have given us a remarkably complete account of the controversy, its history, and current status. That is a considerable achievement, since it comprises a large number of smaller disputes, some of them highly technical. We have here a balanced, accessible, and accurate appraisal of the evidence, subordinated to an ingenious format that combines discussions of the central questions with a survey of expert opinion. Over six hundred scholars, chosen for their competence in testing and education, were questioned on such issues as the definition of intelligence, its measurement, its relation to later success, the plausibility of group differences, and its heritability. We learn that these specialists “share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy.” They “also believe that individual genetic inheritance contributes to variations in I.Q. within the white community,” a somewhat smaller majority expressing “the same view about Black-White and SES (socioeconomic status) differences in I.Q.”

Should these conclusions come as a surprise to you, the reason is probably the discrepancy between them and what you’ve gathered from television and the better newspapers. The pivotal part of this book examines how the subject of intelligence has been covered by the media, through content analyses of news reports carried by the major news magazines, the television networks and the most influential national newspapers. These reports, the authors found, were both wanting in their grasp of the complexities of the subject and affected by a tendency to reduce, simplify, and dramatize them. Those are sins generic to journalism, of course, and to that degree they can be understood, if not quite forgiven; far more troubling is the frequency of serious error. For example, such significant figures as Arthur Jensen and Richard Hernstein were reported to hold views they would not entertain for a minute. Most troubling of all, as you might guess, is the consistency and pervasiveness of comfortably biased assumptions: that IQ is a myth, that intelligence is hard to define and measure, that IQ tests are racist and sexist and don’t predict much of anything anyway, and that heredity has almost nothing to do with intelligence. The media offers a topsy-turvy view of reality, in which mainstream scholarly opinion is represented as deviant while genuinely deviant views, such as those espoused by Leon Kamin, are treated as widely accepted conclusions. The explanation is that the media have been free to determine who is and who is not an expert, what is and is not the truth, and have elevated scholarly views they find ideologically acceptable above those they consider “reactionary” and unacceptable.

It is now 20 years since the appearance of Jensen’s article on early education—that shot heard around the world, initiating the IQ controversy in its modern version. Since then, we have witnessed an explosion of new information, which has deepened our view of the issues without seriously altering its essential direction. Yet we find the same division between the psychometrician’s understanding of IQ and that of liberal opinion, which continues to dominate the media.

Not long ago, the Today Show presented a woman telling us that the SAT is discriminatory because girls find some questions harder to answer than boys do. She was rebutted by a woman from the Educational Testing Service who said otherwise, and who knew what she was talking about—as her adversary plainly did not. Yet both women seemed equally plausible; how could ordinary citizens choose between them? A great many no doubt took their cue from Jane Pauley’s smirk, signaling that yet another grave injustice to women had been uncovered. The real injustice, however—to both men and women—may be that that buzzword, “discrimination,” deters us from examining more significant questions: e.g., why have the SAT scores for both sexes in the United States declined so sharply during the last quarter century, and why have boys’ scores made a partial recovery while girls’ scores have not? As Barbara Lerner—an authentic expert on these matters—has said, disparaging the tests or doing away with them will not help our youngsters, while hurting minorities and women worst of all.

 

[The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy, by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books) 192 pp., $24.95]