Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. So
Speaker 1: today it is an honor to have doctor James Flynn
Speaker 1: on the podcast. Doctor Flynn is Professor Emeritus the University
Speaker 1: of Otago and a recipient of the University's Golden Medal
Speaker 1: for Distinguished Career Research. In two thousand and seven, the
Speaker 1: International Society for Intelligence Research named him its Distinguished Contributor.
Speaker 1: His TED talk on cognitive and Moral Progress has received
Speaker 1: two point three five million visits. His latest books include
Speaker 1: Are We Getting Smarter? What Isn'telligence? How to Improve Your Mind?
Speaker 1: And most recently, Does Your Family Make You Smarter? Nature
Speaker 1: Nurture and Human Autonomy. Thanks for chatting with me today, Jim. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's a good list. You've certainly done a lot into
Speaker 1: your career. I tried to, you know, my basic home
Speaker 1: is moral and political philosophy. And while I have written
Speaker 1: those books on psychology, I published quite a bit in
Speaker 1: the philosophy area. I published a book called Fatan Philosophy,
Speaker 1: which gives you my personal view. And I'm just sending
Speaker 1: to press a book entitled Homage to Political Philosophy, which
Speaker 1: is designed how to instruct students into a love of philosophy. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so you made a joke once that you kind
Speaker 1: of vacation in psychology. So what got you interested in?
Speaker 1: So I became emotionally involved, particularly because of the race issue. Yes,
Speaker 1: So when was that? When did you first start getting involved?
Speaker 1: And you left the United States? So you had an
Speaker 1: academic post in the US, and you left and went
Speaker 1: to New Zealand. During the McCarthy period, my politics were
Speaker 1: considered unpalatable and I came to New Zealand where they
Speaker 1: were more normal. And that was in sixty three and
Speaker 1: I've been here ever since. So I often visit the States.
Speaker 1: I was writing a book on moral philosophy in about
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, and I wanted to include a few
Speaker 1: a section on how to deal with those who held
Speaker 1: racist ideals, And at that time I discovered the work
Speaker 1: of Arthur Jensen that, as someone who was clearly not
Speaker 1: a racist, that sheer evidence showed that blacks had on
Speaker 1: average worst genes for IQ than whites, and I thought,
Speaker 1: oh well, I'll look into this, and expanded into a chapter. Well,
Speaker 1: of course, it expanded into a whole book Race IQ
Speaker 1: and Jensen that as I found that his case was
Speaker 1: far more articulateidential than anything I had expected, and so
Speaker 1: I began to research around it and to learn, and
Speaker 1: finally proposed an alternative that the gap between black and
Speaker 1: white i q's environmental. And then, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: Jensen fired back, and I fired back, and away we
Speaker 1: went for thirty or forty years. Well as to how
Speaker 1: I got into psychology, of course, some of Jensen's arguments
Speaker 1: in favor of a genetic gulf between black and white
Speaker 1: involved the concept of g or the general intelligence factor,
Speaker 1: and this led me to examine it, and I found
Speaker 1: it wanting as a basis for the theory of intelligence.
Speaker 1: So much of my work over the last forty years
Speaker 1: has been trying to clarify the theory of intelligence. There
Speaker 1: is just now an article online which is by me
Speaker 1: for the journal Intelligence, which is entitled something like forty
Speaker 1: years of reflection about intelligence, and it tries to tell
Speaker 1: the reader, what are the listener my main contribution, and
Speaker 1: that is an effort to clarify intelligence and also distinguish
Speaker 1: between the contributions of genes and environment. Good will. You
Speaker 1: certainly contribute a lot to the field along those lines.
Speaker 1: Let's back up a second. I want you we have
Speaker 1: a lot of listeners who aren't familiar with all the
Speaker 1: technical aspects of this, so let me just explain just
Speaker 1: a quick minute primer here on what is g What
Speaker 1: is general intelligence? So it's this statistical phenomenon. Do you
Speaker 1: want to explain it? I could do it or you
Speaker 1: could do it. Sure, I can explain. Ok, there's nothing
Speaker 1: alien about it. Everyone at school found there were kids
Speaker 1: who tended to be good at all sports. That is,
Speaker 1: they weren't just better than average at cricket. They were
Speaker 1: better than average at rugby, they were better than average
Speaker 1: at fives, they were better than average at most everything.
Speaker 1: And in other words, they weren't there was a positive matrix.
Speaker 1: They were above average in all of these things, and
Speaker 1: we would call that athletic G. You've met people who
Speaker 1: have musical G. You find they pick up the piano readily,
Speaker 1: and then you go on and my heavens, they're also
Speaker 1: picking up the violin readily, and they would have musical
Speaker 1: G now. On an IQ test like the Wechler, you
Speaker 1: have ten subtests let's say vocabulary, comprehension, arithmetic, block design,
Speaker 1: and you find that a person who tends to be
Speaker 1: better than average on one of these subtests is far
Speaker 1: more likely to be better than average on all And
Speaker 1: G is a measure of that statistical tendency, that is,
Speaker 1: the tendency to which people who are either better or
Speaker 1: worse on a particular subtest to be better than worse
Speaker 1: on the lot, and that leads to the concept of
Speaker 1: G loading. You find that some of these subtests are
Speaker 1: better predictors of your overall performance than others. For example,
Speaker 1: vocabulary gives a better prediction of your overall IQ. Then
Speaker 1: let's say digit span forward, which is merely remembering numbers
Speaker 1: in the order in which they were read out. Obviously,
Speaker 1: if you had shoe tying is an eleventh subtest, it
Speaker 1: would have a very low G loading indeed, and that
Speaker 1: I doubt there's much correlation between how quickly you can
Speaker 1: tie your shoes in your vocabulary. Right, they're probably more
Speaker 1: correlated with Gardner's what is it athletic and sorry it
Speaker 1: dance intelligence? Well, that of course raised the whole different question.
Speaker 1: I mean, IQ tests don't include a subtest on softball, right,
Speaker 1: and Gardner would say, you could do badly on the
Speaker 1: IQ tests has presently come instituted, but you could still
Speaker 1: have what I guess you would call athletic G, the
Speaker 1: sort of GS that I've described earlier, and you could
Speaker 1: have musical G. I mean, there's no test on the
Speaker 1: Wexler for whether you're tone deft or not. He has
Speaker 1: a variety of intelligence which he distinguishes from what he
Speaker 1: calls analytical intelligence. Right, But obviously some of his so
Speaker 1: called intelligences are part of the positive manifold, like spatial, verbal,
Speaker 1: and mathematical. Well, yes, but of course it's interesting. While
Speaker 1: it is certainly true that to some degree a person
Speaker 1: good at sport may be above average in analytical intelligence,
Speaker 1: it's certainly not always true. I mean, you can find
Speaker 1: fighters in the ring who seem to have an instinctive
Speaker 1: knowledge of tactics and can hit very hard, indeed, who
Speaker 1: are probably not particularly good on arithmetis, on vocabulary, and
Speaker 1: he doesn't deny that these different intelligences have a certain correlation,
Speaker 1: but that correlation is far weaker of the correlation you
Speaker 1: have within the analytic field alone, you know, the Wexler subtests, right,
Speaker 1: So regardless of that argument, G still requires explanation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want to find out what the hell it refers
Speaker 1: to exactly? Yeah, what does it mean? What is causing
Speaker 1: the rise of the positive manifold or the fact that
Speaker 1: all these things are correlated to each other. And that's
Speaker 1: really where the crux of the debate in the field wise.
Speaker 1: So Jensen, as you mentioned, thought of G as an
Speaker 1: irreplaceable fuel. He thought that was the source of the
Speaker 1: positive manifold. But there's some other like the Vandard models,
Speaker 1: and there's some other developmental models arguing that G is
Speaker 1: actually an emergent property. It's not a causal force in itself,
Speaker 1: but it's something that is influenced by the co development
Speaker 1: of multiple other capacities. I was wondering where you kind
Speaker 1: of stood on that. Well, you can say, does G
Speaker 1: have a physiological origin or a social origin or is
Speaker 1: it a mix of the two. Now, I would think
Speaker 1: that probably the brain has a certain optimal blood supply,
Speaker 1: and if you have more or less than that, you
Speaker 1: may be to some degree handicapped. I don't deny that
Speaker 1: some people are born with neural connections, that is, connections
Speaker 1: between neurons that are more subject to improvement by practice.
Speaker 1: You know, my practice of mathematics certainly didn't lead me
Speaker 1: on to becoming an Einstein. So you can say that
Speaker 1: their part of G has to do with these physiological factors.
Speaker 1: I take it the kid who's better than all sports
Speaker 1: may have a faster reflex arc than normal people do,
Speaker 1: are a great distance runner, Their repulse turns returns to
Speaker 1: normal after exercise faster than people do. So there could
Speaker 1: be general physiological portions of the brain that to some
Speaker 1: degree underlie G. But there also can be social factors.
Speaker 1: That is, when a kid who goes to school who
Speaker 1: happens to be better at vocabulary often makes friends with
Speaker 1: people who are superior students who happen to be better
Speaker 1: at literature, and of course that social interaction rubs off
Speaker 1: on one another. You know you have a certain genetic
Speaker 1: tendency to be superior at one subject, why do you
Speaker 1: also show a tendency to be better at other subjects? Well,
Speaker 1: it may not be genetic at all. It may be
Speaker 1: just that being good at mass those you in with
Speaker 1: people who are in the chess club who have bigger
Speaker 1: vocabularies than most, and so forth. So G is not
Speaker 1: a concept to my mind that can be analyzed purely
Speaker 1: physiologically rather than sociologically as well. Further, there's a matter
Speaker 1: of IQ gains over time, where G has no real
Speaker 1: explanatory value whatsoever, and social priorities do. Let's take something
Speaker 1: like map reading. Well, when people began to drive cars,
Speaker 1: map reading became at a greater premium in society than before.
Speaker 1: And this means that the hippocampus enlarge. It's the part
Speaker 1: of the brain that exercises when you do map reading,
Speaker 1: just as when you lift weights your biceps skit unusual development. Now,
Speaker 1: and we found, for example, the taxicab drivers who have
Speaker 1: to know the map of London from scratch have much
Speaker 1: larger hippocampuses than bus drivers who follow a certain route. Now,
Speaker 1: of course we're getting automatic guidance systems, so it means
Speaker 1: that map breeding is less importment and the size that the
Speaker 1: the hippocampus should fall. So you can see social priorities
Speaker 1: have a great deal to do with whether a particular
Speaker 1: cognitive trait is emphasized and whether it's exercised or not.
Speaker 1: And this is not subject to G That is, I
Speaker 1: suspect that MAP breeding has a very humble G loading,
Speaker 1: but it could fluctuate quite extraordinarily as society evolves over time.
Speaker 1: And let's say, mental arithmetic might not expand much at all.
Speaker 1: Today we have calculators, don't we And it's less important
Speaker 1: perhaps that we can do the mental arithmetic of the
Speaker 1: wexlar iq test than in the past. Or rote memory
Speaker 1: may not expand over time. My mother knew all all
Speaker 1: of her relatives to the third degree and collateral and
Speaker 1: have a huge history of family lore. I don't have
Speaker 1: much need for that stuff. So while when you test
Speaker 1: an individual at a given time, you find G has
Speaker 1: some explanatory significance, you know you find well at a
Speaker 1: given time, if this person is better than average on vocabulary,
Speaker 1: they're likely to be better than average on other cognitive skills.
Speaker 1: Over time, there are enormous improvements and cognitive skills which,
Speaker 1: rather than being governed by which is the most G loaded,
Speaker 1: are governed entirely by changing social priorities. Yes, and you
Speaker 1: and Dickens have the social multiplier model. Can you please
Speaker 1: explain a little bit of pouss you see within a
Speaker 1: cohart you are effectively in competition with other people. I
Speaker 1: experienced this in basketball. That is, at any given time,
Speaker 1: within a cohart whose genes make them slightly taller than
Speaker 1: average and a better reflex arc stand out. And you
Speaker 1: can say, well, these physiological traits have a great deal
Speaker 1: to do with who becomes best at basketball. But when
Speaker 1: I played Catholic youth basketball, we went back and scrimmaged
Speaker 1: a team that was five years younger than we were,
Speaker 1: and they just killed us. It had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with their being taller than us, It had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with their having a better freeflex arc. During those
Speaker 1: five years, American culture had made basketball glamorous and more
Speaker 1: and more people were participating in it. And originally it
Speaker 1: was enough to shoot and pass well. But then to
Speaker 1: be better than average when everyone could do that, you
Speaker 1: had to learn to shoot and pass with both hands,
Speaker 1: your left hand as well. And then when everyone did that,
Speaker 1: you had to be good at fadeaway jump shots. So
Speaker 1: when we scrimmage these people from five years before, they
Speaker 1: weren't bigger, faster, you know, they weren't have better reflex arcs.
Speaker 1: They just develop skills thanks to changing social priorities that
Speaker 1: left us completely in the shade. So that's what I
Speaker 1: mean by a social multiplier. You know, the individual multiplier
Speaker 1: within a cohort, being slightly taller and quicker than the others,
Speaker 1: that will almost always give you an advantage. But when
Speaker 1: you compare two groups over time, you have to introduce
Speaker 1: the concept of a social multiplier. And if society is
Speaker 1: encouraging a certain skill, that skill, when it goes up,
Speaker 1: forces everyone else to run to catch up. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't mean to put it completely competitively. Take the fact
Speaker 1: that people over time went to school more often. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a matter that you sat down and you said, oh,
Speaker 1: the kid across the street is getting an advantage. I
Speaker 1: better keep my kid in school longer. It was just
Speaker 1: a matter that since everyone was sending their kid to
Speaker 1: school longer, you did too. You know, it was just
Speaker 1: natural to go with a trend. So it wasn't so
Speaker 1: much that you were competing, but society, wanting a more
Speaker 1: educated workforce, was raising the average level of school. And
Speaker 1: then some parents did think, you know, now that kids
Speaker 1: are going to school for eight years, my kid had
Speaker 1: better get a high school diploma, so a competitivelopment could
Speaker 1: enter into it, and that people don't like to think
Speaker 1: of their children as less advantage than other children. So
Speaker 1: as you can see, if you look at schooling within
Speaker 1: a cohort, it may be that whether your brain is
Speaker 1: better engineered has a big effect on whether you out
Speaker 1: compete the kid next to you. You know, if you
Speaker 1: have more talent for a arrhythme, you'll get into honors classes,
Speaker 1: you'll get special tutoring. So on that level you find
Speaker 1: the individual multiplier operating. But if you look at the
Speaker 1: rise in vocabulary stories over time, it has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the brain changing its physiology. It has to
Speaker 1: do that industrial progress wanted a more educated workforce, therefore
Speaker 1: wanted kids to stay in the school longer, and staying
Speaker 1: in the school longer, they developed bigger vocabularies. It's the
Speaker 1: sociological multiplier at work. Good. Good, it's really great that
Speaker 1: you distinguish between the intergent generational effects and the within
Speaker 1: generation effects. They have different to distinguish those two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's very good. Let me get you just a simple example.
Speaker 1: Sure Jensen said that the years of education you got
Speaker 1: was fundamentally determined by g you know, or by the
Speaker 1: ability of your brain to improve. Well, my father had
Speaker 1: eight years of education and I have had I guess
Speaker 1: what's twenty two with a PhD. And so is my brother.
Speaker 1: I do not think that we are in any way
Speaker 1: genetically superior to our father. Although he left school after
Speaker 1: eight years, he could do the New York Times Crossford
Speaker 1: puzzle and inc. Which I can't do. But you see,
Speaker 1: within his generation six years was the median, and it
Speaker 1: may be that he had better genes for IQ than
Speaker 1: most and not putting above average. My brother and I
Speaker 1: may have better genes today, which gives us, let's say,
Speaker 1: twenty three years of education, but at the difference between
Speaker 1: my father and me. To explain that by genes is ludicrous.
Speaker 1: If someone in the present generation had only eight years
Speaker 1: of education, it would be probably that they were profoundly
Speaker 1: mentally retarded. Or my father to be considered profoundly mentally
Speaker 1: retarded genetically because he was born in eighteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: you know, is quite absurd. You have to see that
Speaker 1: the analogy just doesn't hold sure. And I like that.
Speaker 1: I think that is relevant when we think about human
Speaker 1: capacity and human autonomy within a generation as well. I mean,
Speaker 1: isn't it possible within the current generation to still be
Speaker 1: in it like an ancestral environment, to like kind of
Speaker 1: by what I mean by that is to kind of
Speaker 1: like to grow up an environment that is not cognitively enriched. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's certainly possible because people live in a certain subculture. Yes.
Speaker 1: I wrote a book once called I think it was
Speaker 1: called Asian IQ. You know, Achievement Beyond IQ. Asian Intelligence.
Speaker 1: Written so many books, I don't know how you remember
Speaker 1: the titles of them all. Yeah, And in that book
Speaker 1: you found that different subcultures in America had very different
Speaker 1: atmospheres in terms of intellectual achievement. That is, Jewish subculture,
Speaker 1: Chinese subculture, Irish subculture, Black subculture. Many of these placed
Speaker 1: a very different emphasis on cognitive and educational achievement. In
Speaker 1: my Irish household, if you came home and said you
Speaker 1: made the football team, there is jubilation. In a Jewish home,
Speaker 1: people would say, are you crazy? You may get a
Speaker 1: head injury and not qualify for medical school. You find
Speaker 1: this even today. If I go into a Chinese restaurant,
Speaker 1: I often see a kid asleepover these books and he
Speaker 1: wake up and pick up the book again. You don't
Speaker 1: usually see that in an Irish restaurant, that is, you
Speaker 1: don't see that single minded preoccupation with intellectual as achievement.
Speaker 1: And my father would have said, well, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: the Chinese score higher on IQ tests than we do,
Speaker 1: and they get more jobs, but who the hell wants
Speaker 1: to live like that. I would rather do reasonably well
Speaker 1: at school and argue politics at the pub, and I
Speaker 1: do take satisfaction when my kids make the football team.
Speaker 1: So you find cultural differences between groups that are very
Speaker 1: profoundly related to pressure within that group for intellectual and
Speaker 1: academic achievement. Now, let me tell you a story. Jensen
Speaker 1: said that one of the things that did blacks showed
Speaker 1: that blacks were probably genetically inferior for IQ is that
Speaker 1: black white differences became wider as you went up the
Speaker 1: G loading ladder. You remember that wrote memory has a
Speaker 1: very load deloading and their black white differences were relatively minor.
Speaker 1: And then you get up to vocabulary with a very
Speaker 1: high G loading and whites outperformed blacks by a far
Speaker 1: greater degree. And he said, since G is physiologically influenced,
Speaker 1: that is pretty good evidence that there's a physiological difference
Speaker 1: between black and white for intelligence. Now, I was the
Speaker 1: first to look at I first data from Germany where
Speaker 1: black and white children, not the first to look at
Speaker 1: the data, but the first to look at it from
Speaker 1: this point of view. When you had black and white
Speaker 1: occupation troops in Germany, they tested the offspring that they
Speaker 1: had with German women, and that they found that having
Speaker 1: a black father seemed to be no real handicap as
Speaker 1: compared to a white father. And there is great attention
Speaker 1: on that, but the samples are not really big enough
Speaker 1: and you can't draw strong inference. And one of the
Speaker 1: things I thought of was what's happened to G here?
Speaker 1: And when you look at the profile of these half
Speaker 1: black and all white kids on the Weschler, you found
Speaker 1: there was no G pattern at all. That is that,
Speaker 1: in point of fact, whatever differences there were between the
Speaker 1: two didn't correlate with G. If there was a slight
Speaker 1: advantage for blacks that could be on vocabulary, if there
Speaker 1: was a slight advantage for whites that could be on
Speaker 1: rope memory, and the TAR correlation was zero. Now what
Speaker 1: was different here? What was different here was that these
Speaker 1: half black kids raised in Germany were not being raised
Speaker 1: in a black subculture. They were just being raised by
Speaker 1: random German women spread throughout Germany with no black subculture
Speaker 1: at all. So when blacks lived in Germany without black subculture,
Speaker 1: there was no pattern of negative correlation with g at
Speaker 1: Elsie Moore's study, and she got kids, all of whom
Speaker 1: were black, and half of them were adopted by white
Speaker 1: professional parents and half were adopted by black professional parents,
Speaker 1: where the mothers had sixteen years of education. When she
Speaker 1: tested to them at the age of eight and a half,
Speaker 1: the black kids adopted by whites were thirteen points ahead
Speaker 1: of the black kids adopted by black professionals. And then
Speaker 1: she had these mothers come in for interview, and she
Speaker 1: found that the white mothers were universally encouraging when they
Speaker 1: encountered a problem with their kid, they would say, that's
Speaker 1: a good idea. Why don't you try that all smiles.
Speaker 1: The black mothers were universally centurious. You're not that dumb,
Speaker 1: you know better than that. In other words, there were
Speaker 1: subtle differences between the black and white subculture that influenced kids.
Speaker 1: Abilit is it problem solving that had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with black and white genes. They had to do with
Speaker 1: the different kinds of preschool experience of kids in the
Speaker 1: black and white subcultures. And if I followed this up
Speaker 1: throughout the age of twenty four, and I've tried to
Speaker 1: show that at every stage white subculture places much more
Speaker 1: emphasis on complex problem solving than black subculture. So I
Speaker 1: don't know which is more controversial. If you said it
Speaker 1: was one hundred percent genetic or you say one hundred
Speaker 1: percent environmental. You know it's like between black and white. Yeah,
Speaker 1: between black and white. I don't know if there what
Speaker 1: is there any resolution to this that empirical evidence sure,
Speaker 1: and that the present IQ gap, there is enormous evidence
Speaker 1: that much of that gap is environmental. Now we'll only
Speaker 1: know whether all of it is eventually. But I did
Speaker 1: a study with Dickens where between nineteen seventy two and
Speaker 1: two thousand and two, blacks made up five of the
Speaker 1: fifteen points and there are only ten points behind whites.
Speaker 1: And this showed itself in academic achievement scores on the
Speaker 1: nation's report card. They made the same gains there. Now,
Speaker 1: I think you'd have to be mad to think that
Speaker 1: even today the black and white environment for cognition is equivalent. Sure,
Speaker 1: So let's say they make up another five points over
Speaker 1: the generation. Well, that cuts it to five, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: So now we're getting down to the point where you know,
Speaker 1: twins and singletons have a four point difference between their IQ,
Speaker 1: and no one runs around the streets killing each other
Speaker 1: over that. I mean, if a blacks get to the
Speaker 1: point where there are only two or three points behind whites,
Speaker 1: it may be because even then, white culture is more
Speaker 1: like the Chinese and black culture is more like the Irish.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to say I know for certain
Speaker 1: the gap is environmental, but I do know for certain
Speaker 1: that the present gap is not entirely explained by genes,
Speaker 1: and I have a lot of evidence that seems to
Speaker 1: indicate that the differences are really subcultural in origin. The
Speaker 1: question between black and white is an evidential one, but
Speaker 1: no one wants to say that. They want to say
Speaker 1: the sky would fall if there was a slight genetic component. Therefore,
Speaker 1: we must classify this as non scientific, and therefore we
Speaker 1: must attack everyone who investigates it, right, which wouldn't be
Speaker 1: the case. I mean, nothing would justify racism. So let
Speaker 1: me ask you a question. You seem to be fairly
Speaker 1: confident that the environment the main core environmental factor are
Speaker 1: child wearing practices. Have you considered the extent of variants
Speaker 1: explained by other environmental factors such as I don't know,
Speaker 1: like the effects of having a lot of more saliens
Speaker 1: around you, you know, violence, just like schooling, whole different ques,
Speaker 1: poor building like buildings that are you know, like it's
Speaker 1: hard to have to score well on cognitive tests when
Speaker 1: you're being distracted by life concerns and survival. Right. Yes,
Speaker 1: if a black kid is living in a solo parent
Speaker 1: home and there are a series of lovers who are violent.
Speaker 1: There is a case in New Zealand when a skeptic
Speaker 1: about whether poverty environments were bad for kids went into
Speaker 1: a home and as soon as the child saw this visitor,
Speaker 1: he crawled under a couch. That was the mere appearance
Speaker 1: of a male was a threat. So I'm not discounting
Speaker 1: that in the preschool environment in black homes there is
Speaker 1: on average something that may be equally as important as
Speaker 1: less intellectual challenge. Right, so then prejudice enters in I
Speaker 1: don't know if you noticed my statistic. New York City alone,
Speaker 1: no undercover cup has ever been shot by another coup
Speaker 1: Since nineteen forty two, as I recall, something like at
Speaker 1: least thirty black undercover policemen have been shot by a
Speaker 1: white cup and that's because you see a black with
Speaker 1: a gun, the stereotype is that he must be a criminal.
Speaker 1: And you have these terrible situations where blacks who go
Speaker 1: undercover as policemen are the prey of whites, and the
Speaker 1: whites are for conscience stricken they don't want to shoot
Speaker 1: their black comrades. That you see with a black or
Speaker 1: a gun, you think of a criminal. When you see
Speaker 1: a white with a gun, you think he may have
Speaker 1: some legitimate reason for us. So there are a whole
Speaker 1: range of factors that enter in to the plight of
Speaker 1: black males in America on average. Yeah, so these are
Speaker 1: really important to have these open, honest conversations as about
Speaker 1: all the potential causal factors. I mean, if we really
Speaker 1: want to help blacks, the only approach is a scientific
Speaker 1: study of their situation, right, I mean, how are people
Speaker 1: to know what afflicts blacks if they don't use science.
Speaker 1: Are they going to conduct horoscopes? Right? And if you
Speaker 1: make this a forbidden area for scientific inquery, well, then
Speaker 1: we've got our arm tied behind our back. I agree
Speaker 1: with that. I agree that we need an open, honest
Speaker 1: conversation of all the causal factors, all the potential calls
Speaker 1: of factors. In terms of what the realistic data tells
Speaker 1: us about the races, it seems to indicate that racial
Speaker 1: differences in terms of genes would be quite small, and
Speaker 1: we'd do better to get on with building a better
Speaker 1: society for everybody and treating each kid as an individual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could agree with that more what you just said.
Speaker 1: And you know there there's a quote that you from
Speaker 1: your book, your latest book, I thought was very interesting
Speaker 1: because this stuff tends to get political, and that's why
Speaker 1: I really liked you kind of transcending the politics for
Speaker 1: a second. You said, quote, to suffer as a child
Speaker 1: in an impoverished home is an evil in itself, no
Speaker 1: matter what the eventual effects on intelligence. Right and left
Speaker 1: differ only as to means that is, how to strike
Speaker 1: a balance between the welfare state and the free market
Speaker 1: as a cure. I thought that really nailed these contentious divide,
Speaker 1: the political divide, but also transcends it in a way
Speaker 1: because it makes it clear that what we all care
Speaker 1: about as a fundamental humanity is you know, right? Right?
Speaker 1: And so I thought that was a really, really wonderful one. Evidence,
Speaker 1: no evidence at all that some major racial group in
Speaker 1: the world today is so tainted by genes that they
Speaker 1: can't participate fully in the rich life of a good culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the fundamental question is settled no one because
Speaker 1: of race, because of the frequency of racial genes, I
Speaker 1: mean everyone as an individual. The best genes in America,
Speaker 1: for IQ, could be a black male, but statistically, if
Speaker 1: there are differences, they're quite minor. And the fundamental thing
Speaker 1: was the one posed by Plato. He thought, unfortunately that
Speaker 1: certain Barbarian groups didn't possess the genetic quality that they
Speaker 1: could be educated enough to be integrated into Greek society. Well,
Speaker 1: he was wrong. Every racial group has sufficient cognitive potential,
Speaker 1: and the potential is so overlapping that none of them
Speaker 1: would be excluded statistically from participation in a rich society
Speaker 1: because of their race. Right. I'm glad you made that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I wanted to ask you, do you think Charles
Speaker 1: Murray has been unfairly criticized and maligned? Oh, definitely, I
Speaker 1: mean it was shocking. I've written a book, by the way,
Speaker 1: about the decline of free speech in American universities that
Speaker 1: I'm now talking about for a publisher. That Murray was
Speaker 1: not allowed to speak at Middlebury was just absurd. In
Speaker 1: my book, I point out all of the insights I
Speaker 1: would have lost if I hadn't argued with Charles Murray
Speaker 1: over the years. I mean, even if you don't agree
Speaker 1: with the position, if it's intelligent and evidently based, you
Speaker 1: learn an enormous amount from trying to see the extent
Speaker 1: to which it's true. And Charles Murray, along with Jensen,
Speaker 1: and along with Richard Linn, have been the people who
Speaker 1: have educated me the most in psychology. Murray is certainly
Speaker 1: without racial bias. He certainly is someone without gender bias.
Speaker 1: I happen to know him personally, and he wants to,
Speaker 1: of course follow the evidence. And when he makes a point,
Speaker 1: you can bet your bottom dollar he has evidential support
Speaker 1: for and it's worth taking into account. And you may
Speaker 1: only half agree with him, but you'll learn a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot from arguing with him. The most important
Speaker 1: part of the Bell curve is not what it says
Speaker 1: about race, and it's very guarded about race. The most
Speaker 1: important thing in the Bell curve is the meritocracy thesis,
Speaker 1: the view that we liberal lefty self destruct. You know,
Speaker 1: we try to eliminate environmental differences and privilege, and that
Speaker 1: means that all talent differences will now be genetic, and
Speaker 1: in an open society, you'll have all the talent for
Speaker 1: genes going to the top, and the bottom will become
Speaker 1: a sort of genetic dump. And that rather than working
Speaker 1: towards a society we on the liberal left would admire,
Speaker 1: we're working towards a society that will be a horrible
Speaker 1: gene cast meritocracy. Now, that's a thesis that's far more
Speaker 1: worthy of refutation than anything else in the book. And
Speaker 1: I've tried to do that in several of my books.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in the one that would probably be
Speaker 1: the best, it's my little book Fate and Philosophy, in
Speaker 1: which I have a section on the meritocracy thesis. And
Speaker 1: virtually every reviewer put that in the two hard basket
Speaker 1: whether they didn't want to confront this devastating critique of
Speaker 1: liberal ideals and practice. And that's actually one of the
Speaker 1: most worships, yeah, trying to answer in the book. I mean, yes,
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating question. I would love to hear your
Speaker 1: thoughts on that, is, anyone we can summarize that section
Speaker 1: in two minutes, well, very quickly. I think that rather
Speaker 1: than a tendency towards that type of society with affluence
Speaker 1: and a humane society, you find that people play to
Speaker 1: their own strength in terms of personal development. That is,
Speaker 1: you don't find that every talented person is trying to
Speaker 1: get to the upper class in terms of prestige and wealth.
Speaker 1: You find that when we're not threatened by poverty, a
Speaker 1: person who'd prefer to be a poet becomes a poet,
Speaker 1: and a person who would prefer to spend thirty hours
Speaker 1: a week training for the marathon does that, And a
Speaker 1: person who'd prefer to be a philosopher finds they want
Speaker 1: starve as a philosopher rather than becoming a corporate lawyer.
Speaker 1: So I think when you look at the dynamics of
Speaker 1: modern society, you find, assuming that it has humane values,
Speaker 1: actually the social progress and influence means that people fly
Speaker 1: off in one hundred different directions in terms of talent,
Speaker 1: and there's no single hierarchy of wealth and status that
Speaker 1: claims all of talent for itself. So that would be
Speaker 1: a very brief answer. So you know what I found
Speaker 1: really interesting about your book, your latest book, is you
Speaker 1: bring up a point that is not raised often enough,
Speaker 1: and that is that nature and nurture aren't the only
Speaker 1: two options on the table here. You know, you say,
Speaker 1: autonomy actually comes at this like twenty percent unexplained sort
Speaker 1: of variance and a chance this chance level. And I
Speaker 1: think it's really interesting because people seem to want to
Speaker 1: place autonomy either within so they'll say, if something is
Speaker 1: one hundred percent environmentally determined, a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 1: will think, oh, that means that we have autonomy. You know,
Speaker 1: that's right. Well, that doesn't mean that, right, of course
Speaker 1: it doesn't. I mean, imagine that you live in the
Speaker 1: best home in America. You could be accidentally dropped on
Speaker 1: your head as a kid, you know, and that would
Speaker 1: mean that, due to an accident, your genes and your
Speaker 1: environment would not be totally explanatory of your eventual IQ.
Speaker 1: An accident of life history would be important, wouldn't it. Yes.
Speaker 1: And it may be that you're zooming along towards medical
Speaker 1: school and Vietnam comes along and you're drafted to an
Speaker 1: environment which for three years is a very unpromising environment indeed,
Speaker 1: and sets back your intellectual and development. Now, every psychologist
Speaker 1: will admit that the factors of genes and environment have
Speaker 1: to be qualified by life history, and that that type
Speaker 1: of good or bad luck in life history means twenty
Speaker 1: percent of IQ variants, which is a lot. Now, just
Speaker 1: as someone could be drafted out of medical school and
Speaker 1: a fate of patriotism, they could volunteer to go in
Speaker 1: the army, you know, and be a foot soldier. Well,
Speaker 1: that would be an act of autonomy, wouldn't it, And
Speaker 1: it's not distinguishable from bad luck. The fact that that
Speaker 1: amount of IQ variants exists as a symptom of life
Speaker 1: history means that a lot of those people have made
Speaker 1: free choice vices that either benefit them or hurt them.
Speaker 1: I at one time had about with chronic anxiety, and
Speaker 1: I chose to take air apacts, which relieved it, and
Speaker 1: that meant that I returned to an environment that matched
Speaker 1: my genes. A Christian scientist would perhaps not have taken it,
Speaker 1: would have made a voluntary choice and would have not
Speaker 1: taken the medication. So voluntary choice had everything to do
Speaker 1: even in a situation where genes and environment seemed fully explanatory.
Speaker 1: I created a correlation between genes environment to my voluntary choice.
Speaker 1: But certainly the existence of that twenty percent of IQ
Speaker 1: variant shows there are a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: world who have made choices that have lifted them into
Speaker 1: an environment above their quality of genes or sunk into
Speaker 1: an environment below their quality of genes. It isn't an
Speaker 1: index of it's an index that we know that autonomy
Speaker 1: is important. It doesn't, however, show the degree of autonomy
Speaker 1: because to autonomous choices, you could actually make your genes
Speaker 1: an environment correlate, as when I took that medication. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and is this does relate to your distinction between external
Speaker 1: and internal environments? Yes, there is, of course a big difference.
Speaker 1: When my brother went into the army during World War Two,
Speaker 1: he probably suffered less from the environment the army gave him.
Speaker 1: He was in a chemist and went into chemical warfare,
Speaker 1: and since there wasn't any chemical warfare, they didn't know
Speaker 1: what the hell to do with them. So they sprayed
Speaker 1: all these chemists with mustard gas see how they would
Speaker 1: react to it. And you can say this was a
Speaker 1: brutish environment. But my brother had learned to play chess,
Speaker 1: and while he was in the army, rather than just
Speaker 1: being exposed to sergeants screaming at him, he found a
Speaker 1: guy and they played chess together. In other words, he
Speaker 1: carried with him into the army a set of traits
Speaker 1: that helped mitigate its deleterious influence on his intelligence. My
Speaker 1: uncle Ed, who went into factory work at eleven during
Speaker 1: World War One, got a reputation for being peculiar because
Speaker 1: when he was on ship he would read books by torchlight.
Speaker 1: He had learned, you know, to love reading, and so
Speaker 1: he created an external environment thanks to his own internal environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so when you look at an environment, there's an interplay
Speaker 1: between external and internal. A certain startup person who has
Speaker 1: developed excellent traits like exercising their mind or go into
Speaker 1: an environment which for all purposes appears to be the
Speaker 1: same as another person's external environment, but they will resist
Speaker 1: in stillatorious influences. Yeah, and I don't think a lot
Speaker 1: of people really are aware or make that distinction between
Speaker 1: the internal external environments. I think that's really good. So
Speaker 1: in addition to having you can have a very rich
Speaker 1: internal environment and still have what you refer to as
Speaker 1: a family handicap. Right, you can still live in your
Speaker 1: own mind to some degree, even in a bad environment.
Speaker 1: And you can be in what seems superficially like a
Speaker 1: good environment and yet somehow be resistant to every good
Speaker 1: thing that would do to you. Yeah, and you calculated
Speaker 1: a very interesting calculation of the real world implications of
Speaker 1: having a family handicap on SAT scorers. So you said,
Speaker 1: if the typical person who scores one hundred and fifteen
Speaker 1: happens to come from a home equivalent to their genetic promise,
Speaker 1: they would have scored one to eighteen. But if they
Speaker 1: had the bad luck to come from a home at
Speaker 1: the twelve percentile of cognitive quality, they would have scored
Speaker 1: only one or nine, nine or nine points less. And
Speaker 1: you convert nine points to that's a sixty six point
Speaker 1: SAT difference. Yes, I I tried to show that what
Speaker 1: we're told by people that by seventeen, environment has faded
Speaker 1: away by an influence, that you're entirely controlled by your genes. Well,
Speaker 1: by seventeen, your vocabulary is enormously important in terms of
Speaker 1: doing well on the SAT verbal, and universities use the
Speaker 1: SAT verbal to see which their students are at risk
Speaker 1: and even at seventeen your vocabulary, there is sufficient family
Speaker 1: environment still lingering to determine very importantly what university you're
Speaker 1: eligible for. So there's very clear implications here of environment
Speaker 1: on your opportunities for getting up passing today, Idea want
Speaker 1: to emphasize that a person who suffers from an umpoverished environment,
Speaker 1: of course deserves help for that reason alone, setting aside
Speaker 1: whether they get into Georgia Tech or Harvard. It's still
Speaker 1: interesting that it can have an influence. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: made that point earlier as well. So you have done
Speaker 1: an analysis of the different cognobility profiles that show the
Speaker 1: most persistent family effects and which show the least persistently. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's right. For example, arithmetic, the influence the preschool influence
Speaker 1: of your family fades out very quickly, while with vocabulary
Speaker 1: it lingers on and on. Right. So why vocabulary, Well,
Speaker 1: because unless you're completely alienated, you do sit at the
Speaker 1: dinner table and still talk to your parents, and you
Speaker 1: talk to their friends. And while the family loses out
Speaker 1: to your peer group to a large degree, you know,
Speaker 1: you do start to surround yourself with peers and adapt
Speaker 1: your vocabulary to theirs. There is at least some continuity,
Speaker 1: at least in the early twenties, when you've left home
Speaker 1: completely of family influences on vocabulary, the arithmetic situation is
Speaker 1: almost entirely as to whether your folks have taught you
Speaker 1: arithmetic before you go to school or not. And that
Speaker 1: is almost completely overwhelmed by arithmetic classes where everyone learns arithmetic,
Speaker 1: and the kids that are brighter learn more of it
Speaker 1: than the kids that are less bright. So if you
Speaker 1: look down the different cognitive skills, I thought of the
Speaker 1: only review I've seen in my book was sharply critical,
Speaker 1: and I thought, for Heaven's sake, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things in the method of knowlogy of that book
Speaker 1: that I didn't know, don't other people want to know them.
Speaker 1: I look at all the mental skills on the Wexler
Speaker 1: tests and on ravens, and I try to discern, and
Speaker 1: I think I do discern that at what age current
Speaker 1: environment take over from the previous environments like family, And
Speaker 1: of course current environment has the toughest time submerging family
Speaker 1: for vocabulary, it has its easiest time for mental arithmetic.
Speaker 1: And I try to give reasons for all the different
Speaker 1: cognitive traits as to why some of them family influence
Speaker 1: fades away earlier or later than others. Yeah, you did
Speaker 1: a heck of a job with that, and your age
Speaker 1: table method is really impressive. Well, I hope though. You know,
Speaker 1: people keep saying, do I give a sufficient theoretical justification
Speaker 1: of it? Well, I don't know a try, but let's
Speaker 1: imagine that I couldn't give a theoretical justification. The mere
Speaker 1: fact that it mimics the results of the twin studies
Speaker 1: shows that it's terribly useful when you have data where
Speaker 1: twin data is absent. You know, you can actually go
Speaker 1: to the manuals and you can see in that particular
Speaker 1: country at that time what the effects of family and
Speaker 1: current environment are on a mental skill. Now, it might
Speaker 1: be a lot better to have twin data, but you know,
Speaker 1: twin studies have only been done in a relatively few countries.
Speaker 1: I'm not arguing that we should replace twin data. I'm
Speaker 1: saying we should supplement it. Yes, absolutely, And one interesting
Speaker 1: finding that you did using this new age table method
Speaker 1: is the effects of adoption are very little after the
Speaker 1: age of let's say twenty right, Yes, even vocabulary after
Speaker 1: the early twenties, residual family environment becomes fairly minor and
Speaker 1: you get a good matching between genes and environment. But
Speaker 1: always remember that twenty percent where the match doesn't occur,
Speaker 1: right autonomy, Yeah, that's where the autonomy. Well autonomy plus
Speaker 1: bad luck yeah right yeah, so chances, Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: can't partition that. It would be interesting to have some
Speaker 1: studies see how much of it is bad luck and
Speaker 1: how much of it as choice. You know, I wrote
Speaker 1: this article for scientif American recently summarizing this toy model
Speaker 1: that these physicists came up with, showing just how prevalent
Speaker 1: the effects of chance had when they compound, you know,
Speaker 1: in the rich get rich and poor get poorer sort
Speaker 1: of way. So I think we would have to kind
Speaker 1: of model it in that sort of dynamic way, right, yes,
Speaker 1: So what can we learn from astronomy about human intelligence? Well,
Speaker 1: from astronomy we learned something that is relevant to the
Speaker 1: theory of intelligence. Some people say, why can't we give
Speaker 1: a definition of intelligence which is so precise that we
Speaker 1: can measure it. Well, that's not the role of intelligence,
Speaker 1: And the same thing is shown in astronomy. I mean,
Speaker 1: in astronomy you have concepts that you want to be
Speaker 1: fairly broad. For example, gravity was a fairly broad concept.
Speaker 1: It didn't the concept of gravity that let's say, the
Speaker 1: gravity's main concept is that the motions of a planet
Speaker 1: are influenced by other big heavenly bodies in your vicinity.
Speaker 1: Now you can always say, why can't we have a
Speaker 1: concept of a gravity that tells us just how to
Speaker 1: measure the motions of the planet. So you don't want that.
Speaker 1: What you want is a concept that focuses your research
Speaker 1: on planets and their location to one another, and you
Speaker 1: want it left open to scientific inquiry to see exactly
Speaker 1: how those variables influence planets. For example, Newton came up
Speaker 1: with the correct theory that you find that heavenly bodies
Speaker 1: influence one another in proportion to their mass and negatively
Speaker 1: in terms of the distant square. Descartes thought that the
Speaker 1: reason that the Sun influenced the Earth was that it
Speaker 1: created a whirlpool in the ether, and the planet's closest
Speaker 1: to the Sun were world around faster than the planets
Speaker 1: further away from the Sun. Well, he proved to be wrong.
Speaker 1: But what you wanted was a concept of gravity that
Speaker 1: gave empirical scientists sufficient elbow room to jump in with
Speaker 1: conflicting hypotheses, and I say the same thing about intelligence.
Speaker 1: You don't want a concept of intelligence that dictates theory
Speaker 1: as to how variables affect intelligence. You want a concept
Speaker 1: of intelligence that gives broad advice and say, well, this
Speaker 1: is the battleground on which theories should you know, vie
Speaker 1: with one another, but we all work within the advice
Speaker 1: given by that concept of intelligence, which is specific enough
Speaker 1: to direct our research, but broad enough to allow for
Speaker 1: differing results upper research. I like that. So you put
Speaker 1: forward this meta theory. Yes, I tried the second half
Speaker 1: of the book to give as well as I can
Speaker 1: the theory of intelligence that's emerged from my work over
Speaker 1: these forty years. I like that. And I like how
Speaker 1: you go through all these different theories of intelligence and
Speaker 1: kind of see how they and you show they are
Speaker 1: consistent with the meta theory, which is neat. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, you know we've talked about
Speaker 1: Howard Garner's theory earlier at the very beginning of this show.
Speaker 1: There was one point you made in that section that
Speaker 1: I really liked, So I just want to I want
Speaker 1: to bring it out, bring out that point. Now. You
Speaker 1: made the point that your major beef is with the
Speaker 1: hierarchy of values that we have in our society, of
Speaker 1: what abilities are important, and in that way you agree
Speaker 1: with Gardner. I agree with Garden. We can actually disagree
Speaker 1: with Gardner's you know, statistical analysis or the fact that
Speaker 1: they are completely independent, which modern research shows they are
Speaker 1: not completely independent. But regardless of that point, I think
Speaker 1: there's a really important point to be made there, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, our schooling, lot of our structures to climb
Speaker 1: that ladder rely so are so heavily g loaded in
Speaker 1: a sense, right yep. And as I say, I want
Speaker 1: just like Gardner does. I've never met Gardner, but I've
Speaker 1: corresponded and seen the stuff, and both of us want
Speaker 1: a society in which people who lack the entrepreneurial virtues
Speaker 1: and have other virtues have a better access to a
Speaker 1: good life. I mean, it's terrible how the present economic
Speaker 1: trend is separating off people with so called entrepreneurial virtues
Speaker 1: into an elite that leaves the rest of society behind
Speaker 1: in terms of access to life. To an extraordinary degree.
Speaker 1: It would be much better if we had a recognition
Speaker 1: that human beings are more than working machines, that they
Speaker 1: have a life outside of work. You know, it would
Speaker 1: be much better that rather than just emphasizing what pays
Speaker 1: in terms of the market, we encourage people in a
Speaker 1: humane way to have access to as good a life
Speaker 1: as possible. For example, there are plenty of people I
Speaker 1: know who love working with wood and working with their hands. Now,
Speaker 1: there's no reason why these states shouldn't provide workshops where
Speaker 1: they can go and exercise that skill that are relatively free.
Speaker 1: There's no reason why we shouldn't subsidize sport on the
Speaker 1: amateur level or theater where people who have intelligences, as
Speaker 1: Gardner calls them, different from analytical intelligences, have a much
Speaker 1: richer life. So he and I I think, have the
Speaker 1: same image or the common good. It's when Aristotle proclaimed,
Speaker 1: he said, you have a good society when there's a
Speaker 1: rich and rewarding way of life and as many people
Speaker 1: have access to its benefits as possible. And we by
Speaker 1: merely allowing the market to label what's socially valuable, we
Speaker 1: condemn many people not to have as rich a life
Speaker 1: as they could given their non entrepreneurial talents. Jim My
Speaker 1: Mentor Nick McIntosh, a year before he died, he was
Speaker 1: at the ISIR conference. Lubinski was interviewing him and said,
Speaker 1: who do you think is the most influential important intelligence
Speaker 1: researcher in the field, and he mentioned James Flynn and
Speaker 1: I can see why. So thank you so much for
Speaker 1: bringing your insight with humanity and moral philosophy and just
Speaker 1: who you are to the table. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for the chat today. Oh I'm very happy to appear
Speaker 1: and talk to you. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
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