IQ Measures Modernization, Not Intelligence

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Dec 15, 2007 at 12:44

Indeed, I just feel it in my bones that one of the main reasons Saletin rushed headlong so eagerly into this act of stupidity was the perfectness of this embodiment.  "This will show those holier-than-thou anti-racist, noses-in-the-air, we're-so-scientific dirty fucking hippies!"

Yeah, right.  Well, having been through this movie before, I was well aware of how it would all turn out.  (Saletin was also encouraged by a similarly ignorant outburst by James Watson, which should have served to remind folks of the intentionally neglected crucial role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of DNA's structure.  But, I digress.) 

Three primary compass-orienting facts stand out--aside from the prima facie racism, that is:  (1) There is more genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa than there is in the entire rest of the human race.  This is a general truth of population genetics: whenever a species emerges in one place, and sub-populations migrate away, the sub-populations always have less genetic diversity.  Thus, any attempt to make arguments that would compare African (not just African-American) populations and other populations must take into account the substantial differences in degree of variation.  This naturally plays havoc with common, garden-variety racial stereotyping.  But it also means that pseudo-scientific studies have one more problem with their fundamental lack of genuine scientific validity.

(2) The existence of multiple intelligences.  It is patently obvious that IQ does not measure one unified thing, which is the basis of all human intelligence.  It's not just the whole body of work conceptually unified by Howard Gardner, the most up-to-date IQ tests are themselves composed of different modules that clearly reflect a multifaceted conception of intelligence, even if it isn't as diverse as Gardner's.  That said, the internal weighting of such tests is undeniably arbitrary and subjective to a certain extent.  Which is another way of saying that IQ is a construct, not a thing-in-itself.

(3) The fact that IQ has risen constently from generation to generation shows quite clearly that it is not a measure of a genetically fixed quantity.

These three facts were all well-known to the scientific community when The Bell Curve was published, and this fact did get out to those who cared to be informed.  Now, 13 years later, with the fully-functioning internets in place, it seemed intellectually suicidal for Slate to publish such drivel.  And so it was.

But a recent New Yorker article has appeared, vastly expanding on point #3, which ties in directly to some of my earlier posts on cognitive development.  And that actually gives this tired old subject reason for a fresh look.

One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties-and not just slightly better, much better.

Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.

Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings-now known as the Flynn effect-for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect.

Only by now, skipping down a bit, it's no longer quite such a mystery, according to Flynn's latest book, What Is Intelligence?:

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories-those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic-have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as "similarities," where you get questions such as "In what way are 'dogs' and 'rabbits' alike?" Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that "you use dogs to hunt rabbits."

"If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents," Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century's great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn's phrase, we have now had to put on "scientific spectacles," which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.

Now, this immediately calls to mind Robert Kegan's work on cognitive development generally, and his book, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life .  Kegan is quite explicit in arguing that modern life can be thought of as a curriculum that roughly half of all adults are failing, because it demands a level of complexity in their thinking that they have not acheived.  (Thus his title.)  He also argues that the educational experience itself--going to college, going back to graduate school--can play a decisive role in jump-starting the shift from one cognitive level to another, and that such transitions require both a cognitive challenge (no lack of that in modern life) and supportive structures that enable us to respond to that challenge.

Given that Kegan himself identifies three stages of adult development as "Traditional," "Modern" and "Post-Modern," the convergence between Flynn's most recent findings and Kegan's is strikingly obvious.  Flynn's analysis is a powerful confirmation of Kegan's theory, and Kegan's theory is a cognitive map for the further refinement of Flynn's analysis.

Just look at how Kegan's categories relate to one another, as the background subject aspects of consciousness at one level become the foreground objects of consciousness at the next:

Kegan's Subject/Object Schema of Cognitive Development
Stage	We Are: Subject (structure of knowing)	We Have: Object (content of knowing)	Underlying Structure
1	Perceptions SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS Impulses	Movement Sensation
2	Concrete POINT OF VIEW Enduring Dispositions	Perceptions SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS Impulses
3 Traditionalism	Abstractions MUTUALITY/ INTERPERSONALISM Relationship Inner states	Concrete POINT OF VIEW Enduring Dispositions Needs, Peferences
4 Modernism	Abstract Systems INSTITUTION Relationship-Regulating Forms Self-authorship	Abstractions MUTUALITY/ INTERPERSONALISM Relationship Inner states Subjectivity Self-consciousness
5 Post- Modernism	Dialectical INTER- INSTITUTIONAL Self-transformation	Abstract Systems Ideology INSTITUTION Relationship-Regulating Forms Self-authorship Self-regulation Self-formation

The way things go together at the traditional adult level of consciousness is in terms of durable categories--the subjective organizing principle of level 2, which becomes object at level 3--and how they relate to one another in the everyday world.  "Dogs" and "rabbits" are both durable categories (generic--typically, quite literally, genus-level biological groups--"natural kinds"), and "you use dogs to hunt rabbits."

It's only when you shift to level 4 that abstracting the fact that both are mammals becomes a natural thing to do.

Gladwell continues:

This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. "Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?" the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. "Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?"

This is, of course, precisely what happened.  Italian-Americans joined the mainstream.  Their kids went to schools where they were taught to think like members of the emerging massively-broad middle class, not like the sons and daughters of Italian villagers, whose lives had not changed substantially for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  The same was not so for those labelled "not white."  Like the Irish-Americans in the century before them, the Italian-Americans barely made it past that label.  Blacks and Latinos did not. 

Gladwell again:

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. "A wise man could only do such-and-such," they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, "How would a fool do it?" The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the "right" categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement-that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

There's a good deal more in Gladwell's piece, and it's worth reading in its entirety.  But the reaosn I bring it up here--aside from indicating just how piss-ignorant the so-called "scientific" racists still are, after all these years--is to shed another light on my recurring them of cognitive develpment as a dimension of our lives that has profound social, cultural and political significance.

There are many things we cannot see that have tremendous import.  Atoms are invisible, but everything we see is made of them.  So too, is consciousness invisible to us, and yet, without it we are nothing.  A politics of the invisible is absolutely vital for us, if we are ever to make visible political progress that's immune to cheap vanishing acts, such as those typified by Saletin in Slate.

A lot of people in America still think at level 3, and even at level 2 when it comes to national politics: "Brown skin scary!  White skin good!" as they say in the GOP presidential debates.  Part of what we need to do in response is take account of how people are automatically slicing up the world, if we want to talk to them about slicing it up a bit differently.