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The study of race and intelligence is the controversial study of how human intellectual capacities may vary among the different population groups commonly known as races. This study seeks to identify and explain the differences in manifestations of intelligence (e.g. IQ testing results), as well as the underlying causes of such variance.

Theories about the possibility of a relationship between race and intelligence have been the subject of speculation and debate since the 16th century. The contemporary debate focuses on the nature, causes, and importance, or lack of importance, of ethnic differences in intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability, and whether "race" is a meaningful biological construct with significance other than its correlation to membership of particular ethnic groups. Thus, the question of the relative roles of nature and nurture in causing individual and group differences in cognitive ability is seen as fundamental to understanding the debate.

The modern controversy surrounding intelligence and race focuses on the results of IQ studies conducted during the second half of the 20th century in the United States, Western Europe, and other industrialized nations.

Background information
Much of the research on intelligence currently cited is based on IQ testing in the United States. Modern theories and research on race and intelligence are often grounded in two controversial assumptions: While the g-based factor hierarchy is the most widely accepted current view of the structure of abilities, some theorists regard it as misleading. Moreover, a wide range of human abilities-including many that seem to have intellectual components are outside the domain of standard psychometric tests. Certain environmental factors, such as nutrition, are thought to moderate IQ in children, and other influences have been hypothesized, including education level, richness of the early home environment, the existence of caste-like minorities, socio-economic factors, culture, the effort gap, pidgin language barriers, quality of education, health, racism, lack of positive role-models, exposure to violence, the Flynn effect, sociobiological differences and stereotype threat. One focus of the scientific debate is whether group IQ differences also reflect a genetic component. Hereditarianism hypothesizes that a genetic contribution to intelligence could include genes linked to neuron structure or function, brain size or metabolism, or other physiological differences that could vary with biogeographic ancestry. There is also significant debate about exactly how environmental factors play their role in creating the gap and the interrelationships between these factors. Some researchers focus their attention on intervention techniques to close the gap.
 * that the social categories of race and ethnicity are concordant with genetic categories, such as biogeographic ancestry.
 * that intelligence is quantitatively measurable (see psychometrics) by modern tests and is dominated by a unitary general cognitive ability.

Robert Sternberg writes that race intelligence research that focuses on a genetic cause for the gap is attempting to show that one group is inferior to another group. The conclusions of some researchers: that racial groups in the US vary in average IQ scores, and the hypothesis that a genetic component may be involved, have led to heated academic debates that have spilled over into the public sphere.

Observations about race and intelligence also have important applications for critics of the media portrayal of different races. Stereotypes in media such as books, music, film, and television can reinforce old racist ideas and may influence the perceived opportunities for success in academics for minority students.

History
In the 19th and early 20th centuries research on race and intelligence was often used to argue that one race was superior to another, justifying poor outcomes and treatment for the "inferior race". Some early opinions about the differences among races grew out of stereotypes about non-whites developed during the period of colonialism and slavery.

Francisco Gil-White, author of Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on Black People Using Phony Science and Stephen Jay Gould author of The Mismeasure of Man have suggested that some modern research has similar motives.

Slavery and colonialism


Because the Atlantic slave trade raised moral questions from its inception, scientific theories about the mental capacities of Black people were provided to justify the enslavement of Africans. According to Alexander Thomas and Samuell Sillen, during this time period the Black man was described as uniquely fitted for bondage because of what researchers at the time called "his primitive psychological organization." Hence, a well-known physician of the antebellum South, Samuel Cartwright of Louisiana, had a psychiatric explanation for runaway slaves. He diagnosed their attempts to gain freedom as a mental illness and coined the term "drapetomania" to describe it.

Scientific arguments about the mental inferiority of Black people were instrumental in keeping slavery alive as an institution in the United States. It was widely regarded that Black people lacked the mental capacity to handle freedom. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun arguing for the extension of slavery in 1844 said, "Here (scientific confirmation) is proof of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death."

The writings of Sir Francis Galton, a British psychologist, spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly as they relate to heredity and eugenics. Galton estimated from his field observations in Africa that the African people were "two grades" below Anglo-Saxons' position in the normal frequency distribution of general mental ability. His work was seen as scientific validation of Africans' mental inferiority compared with Anglo-Saxons.

Immigration and segregation
In the 19th and 20th centuries research on race and intelligence has still been used to argue that one race is superior to another, justifying poor outcomes and treatment for the "inferior race". Researchers such as Amanda Thompson and Elazar Barkan have suggested that "Scientific racism" has been used to perpetuate the idea of the intellectual inferiority of African Americans and that it was used to justify segregated education in America.

The scientific debate on the contribution of nature versus nurture to individual and group differences in intelligence can be traced to at least the mid-19th century. Charles Darwin wrote in his Descent of Man (VII, On the races of Man): "Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties."

Lewis Terman wrote in The measurement of intelligence in 1916 "'(Black and other ethnic minority children) are uneducable beyond the nearest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the sense of the world…their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stock from which they come…Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can be made efficient workers…There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusual prolific breeding.'"

The opinion that there are differences in the brain sizes and brain structures of different racial and ethnic groups was widely held and studied during the 19th century and early 20th century. Average ethnic and racial group differences in IQ were first directly observed when analyzing the data from standardized mental tests administered on large scales during World War I. For example, in this test "Southern Whites", scored below "Northern Negroes." These results inspired the first theories of environmental influences on intelligence. An early advocate of these ideas was Ruth Benedict, who in her book, The Races of Mankind challenged the idea that people of different races had different inherent intelligences."The difference arose because of differences of income, education, cultural advantages, and other opportunities. --Ruth Benedict"

Foremost amongst those researching this was Stanley Porteus, who although not a staff member, gave some lectures at the University of Melbourne, devised his maze test as early as 1913, later applying it in his study of the Aborigines in the Kimberley region and Northern Territory of Australia (1929) and later the Kalahari tribesmen of southern Africa (1934). He also used it to assess the results of pre-frontal brain surgery on mental performance, publishing his results in 1931.

W.O. Brown, writing in The Journal of Negro History in 1931, wrote regarding early intelligence tests:

"After the World War and during the severe agitation for the restriction of immigration, aimed especially at the Southeastern Europeans, tests came into a new usage. ..the tests revealed the inferior intelligence of various racial and nationality groups. ..The Southeastern Europeans and the Negroes especially came of badly in these tests. ..The results of the tests elevated their dogma of racial inequality from a mere prejudice to the dignity of a scientifically validated opinion."

Dorthy Roberts writes that the history of the eugenics movement in America was strongly tied to the older scientific racism used to justify slavery. Roberts writes that paralleling the development of eugenic theory was the acceptance of intelligence as the primary indicator of human value. Eugenicists claimed that the IQ test could quantify innate human ability in a single measurement, despite the objections of the creator of the test, Alfred Binet. Beginning in the 1930s, race difference research and hereditarianism — the belief that genetics are the primary cause of differences in intelligence among human groups — began to fall out of favor in psychology and anthropology after major internal debates. In anthropology this occurred in part due to the advocacy of Franz Boas, who in his 1938 edition of The Mind of Primitive Man wrote, "there is nothing at all that could be interpreted as suggesting any material difference in the mental capacity of the bulk of the Negro population as compared with the bulk of the White population." The hereditarian position was challenged by Boas' claim that cranial vault size had increased significantly in the U.S. from one generation to the next, because racial differences in such characteristics had been among the strongest arguments for a genetic role.

Inspired by the American eugenics movement, Nazi Germany implemented the T-4 Euthanasia Program in which roughly 200,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans were killed, and about 400,000 sterilized. The association of hereditarianism with Nazi Germany created a modern academic environment that has been very skeptical of suggestions that there are racial or ethnic differences in measures of intellectual or academic ability and that these differences are primarily determined by genetic factors.

Modern work


The contemporary scholarly debate on race and intelligence may be traced to Arthur Jensen's 1969 publication in the Harvard Educational Review of "How Much Can We Boost IQ and School Achievement?" In this paper, he wrote on some of the major issues that characterize the genetic hypothesis of racial IQ differences, and on compensatory educational programs. Reports on Jensen's article appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times Magazine.

In the 1980s Nobel Prize winner for his work on the development of transistors, William Shockley, postulated that the higher rate of reproduction among US African Americans was having what he termed a "dysgenic" effect (meaning an opposite of eugenics), ; especially as influenced by welfare subsidies (e.g., AFDC), which he opined, unintentionally encouraged childbearing by less productive mothers. He described this work as the most important work of his career, even though it severely tarnished his reputation. Shockley's published writings on this topic, were largely based on the research of Cyril Burt. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. He was subsequently criticized by the media; however his involvement brought public recognition to several controversial topics.

Press attention returned to the issue of race and intelligence in 1994 with the publication of The Bell Curve, which included two chapters on the subject of racial difference in intelligence and related life outcomes. In response to The Bell Curve, Stephen Jay Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man in 1996. Among other things, he criticized the IQ test as a measure of intelligence, citing what he perceived as inherent racial and social biases as well as systematic flaws in the testing process.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has sought to fight racism. On several occasions he publicly debated Arthur Jensen and William Shockley arguing that environmental factors could explain the black-white IQ gap.

Scientific racism
Many studies that purport to be both science-based and attempt to influence public policy have been criticized for scientific racism; the most recent examples of are those of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein. Melvin Konner, in his book Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit Konner accused Murray and Hernstein of trying to make public policy based on speculations about race. He wrote that Rushton's application of a theory drawn from evolutionary biology to the difference between races had no academic legitimacy.
 * "What of the latest currents of thought? Are they likely to lead to, or at least encourage, further distortions of social policy? The indications are not all encouraging. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a book in 1994 clearly directed at policy, just as Jensen and others had in the 1960s and 1970s. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994) teamed a psychologist with a conservative policy advocate to try to prove that both the class structure and the racial divide in the United States result from genetically determined differences in intelligence and ability."


 * "Their general assertions about genes and IQ were not very controversial, but their speculations on race were something else again."


 * "Also in the 1990s, Phillipe Rushton has tried to couch racial differences in IQ in a theory drawn from evolutionary biology. This theory takes the concepts of r and K selection, crudely useful when applied to a vast range of living creatures considered on a continuum, and apply it to subtle differences in skull form, mental test results, and sexual behavior within our one species. This theory has no academic legitimacy and little relationship to real evolutionary theory, but it taints the whole Darwinian enterprise, strongly recalling the “scientific anthropology” of the era of slavery."


 * "The reality is quite different. As argued by George Armelagos in his Presidential Address to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (“Race, Reason and Rationale,” Evolutionary Anthropology 4, 1995, pp. 103–109) race itself is a dubious concept for the human species. Obviously it is sociologically meaningful, but even in the social realm it is a constantly moving target with little or no core biological legitimacy."The Tangled Wing Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit'' Times Books Pub: 2002 ISBN 0-7167-4602-6

In the official statements of position endorsed by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, as reported in The New York Times, "A view widespread among many social scientists is that race is not a valid biological concept. However, biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a race structure in the human population; a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians."

Race as biology
Some geneticists argue race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device, and even that genetic differences among groups are biologically meaningless, on the basis that more genetic variation exists within races than among them, and that racial traits overlap without discrete boundaries. Lewontin, for example argues that there is no biological basis for race on the basis of research indicating that more genetic variation exists within such races than between them.

Some critics of race may not consider this a problem for race and intelligence inquiries. Jared Diamond, who praises Cavalli-Sforza's genetics research over the decades for "demolishing scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races", also argues that if such relations exist then "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" due to that intelligence was likely selected for in hunter-gatherer New Guinea societies where the challenges were tribal warfare and food procurement, compared with high population density European civilizations where the major survival pressure was on genes for resisting epidemics Other geneticists, in contrast, argue that categories of self-identified race/ethnicity or biogeographic ancestry are both valid and useful, that these categories correspond with clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data, and that this correspondence implies that genetic factors might contribute to unexplained phenotypic variation between groups.

A survey taken in 1985, asked 1,200 scientists how many disagree with the following proposition: "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens." The responses were: biologists 16%, developmental psychologists 36%, physical anthropologists 41%, cultural anthropologists 53%. A survey of cultural and physical anthropologists done in 1999 found that the concept of race was rejected by 69% of physical anthropologists and 80% of cultural anthropologists.

Race as a social construct
Robert J. Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko, and Kenneth K. Kidd write that the overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis. Race, they write, fits into no known genetic pattern. Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. This concept of race serves a social rather than a biological purpose. Different types of parentage have, at various times and places, given rise to racial labeling (e.g., “Aryan race,” “German race,” and “Jewish race”). Hence race is a highly inconsistent concept. In contemporary North American society, Blacks and coloreds are considered to be one “race,” since any individual who possess any degree of nonwhiteness is automatically grouped in the Black category. (see: One drop rule) In other countries different racial groupings are often employed. In Beyond the Bell Curve: Toward a Model of Talent and Character Development Serge Madhere critiques hereditarian assumptions about ability, biology, and ecology. He argues that the measures of ability assessed on IQ tests are essentially measures of literacy, which is largely a socially constructed outcome. This proposition is validated using data from a large national sample of students and hierarchical regression techniques.

Intelligence
Comparisons of the intelligences of people of different races have often been based on IQ tests. The nature of intelligence and whether or not it can be captured in a single number is a matter of debate.

IQ
All such tests are often called "intelligence tests," though the use of the term "intelligence" is itself controversial. A low but significant correlation was found in tests administered to two groups of kindergarten children in a study reported in 1991 School grades are the better predicator of later academic success than IQ and the relations may be lower for specific populations. In a sample of 127 students enrolled in a private day school located in a large metropolitan area, the correlations ranged from .11 to .22 with the median of .18.

"Many of the most widely used tests are not intended to measure intelligence itself but some closely related construct: scholastic aptitude, school achievement, specific abilities... . Scores on intelligence-related tests matter, and the stakes can be high," according to the task force appointed by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association. Such tests are argued to be good measures of the psychometric variable g (for general intelligence factor''). While some psychologists regard g as the fundamental measure of intelligence, others emphasize the strengths and weaknesses present in each person's performance on different aspects of the tests.

Although the correlation is fair in some academic areas, the correlation between IQ tests and many real-world results is inconsistent. For example, the hereditary transmission of wealth via IQ is near zero. Some psychologists question the validity of IQ testing and say that aspects of intelligence is not reflected in IQ tests. Criticisms of the validity of IQ testing focuses on questions of test bias. Several conclusions about tests of cognitive ability are now largely accepted by intelligence researchers: Sternberg writes that conventional tests of intelligence can be useful, but only if they are carefully interpreted, taking into account factors such as cross-cultural issues.
 * IQ scores measure many, but not all of the qualities that people mean by intelligent or smart. (For example, IQ does not measure creativity, wisdom, or personality.)
 * Especially in developing nations, there are many factors that may adversely affect IQ. See Health and intelligence.

Multiple intelligences
Psychologist Howard Gardner says there are multiple forms of intelligence, which he calls multiple intelligences not often captured by the usual IQ tests. Multiple Intelligences can include the following: linguistic; logical-mathematical; spatial; bodily-kinesthetic; musical; naturalistic; interpersonal and intrapersonal. This raises the possibility that it may not be possible to construct a single meaningful ordering on intelligence.

Another theory is the Triarchic theory of intelligence which was formulated by Robert J. Sternberg. According to this theory the three components of intelligence are analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence. According to Sternberg, only analytic intelligence is measured by standardized IQ tests.

Environment
Steve Sailer has stated that, "a bad environment can hurt IQ and can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans’ white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research. (Thus African-Americans white genes probably couldn't account for more than 3 points of the gap between African-Americans and Africans.) This suggests that the harshness of life in Africa might be cutting ten points or more off African IQ scores."

Test data
The gaps found between the average intelligences of races or ethnicities varies depending on methods used for racial grouping, the method and setting used to test intelligence, the health and economic situation of the test takers, the interplay between the culture of the person taking the test and the culture of those who made the test, and the period in history when the test was performed.

Depending on the way intelligence is measured a variety of gaps may be found between different racial and ethnic groups. Some groups that perform well on one task may do poorly on others. For example, Moroccan and North American individuals were asked in a study by Richard K. Wagner to remember patterns of Oriental rugs and pictures of everyday objects, such as a rooster and a fish. Moroccans, who have long experience in the rug trade, seemed to remember rug patterns better than the North American individuals. Likewise, in 1979 Robert Serpell had Zambian and English children perform a number of tasks. He found that English children did better on a drawing task, but that Zambian children did better on a wire-shaping task.

Attempted world-wide compilations by Herrnstein and Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, Richard Lynn and Rushton of average IQ by race generally place Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians at the top, followed by Whites, Arabs and Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans and Australian Aboriginals.

The IQ scores vary greatly among different nations for the same group. Blacks in Africa score much lower than Blacks in the US. However contrary to indications from the IQ and the Wealth of Nations study, the majority of blacks enrolled in Ivy League Universities in the US are either from Africa or the Caribbean. The chairperson of the sociology department at Harvard University stated: "Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race." This is seen as evidence that racial prejudice combined with the status of being a minority that has been excluded from society does have a significant effect on academic achievement. However, according to the African-American economist Thomas Sowell racism and the legacy of slavery do not stand up under scrutiny of historical facts as explanations to the IQ disparity between Blacks and Whites. He argues that "redneck" black culture is the reason for the low IQ and poor academic performance of black Americans. Gaps are seen in other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, including university admission exams such as the SAT and GRE as well as employment tests for corporate settings and the military (Roth et al. 2001).

Another researcher Philippe Rushton found African university students averaged an IQ of 84. In some studies, by other researchers, they have scored lower (IQ = 77). In still others of our studies, highly-selected engineering students who took math and science courses in high school scored higher (IQ = 103). Rushton also points out that immigrants regardless of race outperform native populations and adds that in theory Africans would revert back to their normal IQ in future generations if kept in the harsh African environment and cultural setting.

Facial recognition ability has also shown differences by race. Richard Ferraro writes that facial recognition is an example of a neuropsychological measure that can be used to assess cognitive abilities that are salient within African-American culture. In the US Blacks' performance is significantly better than that of whites', and blacks are better at recognizing faces of whites than whites are at recognizing blacks. A 1991 study found that white subjects performed significantly more poorly on trials involving African American faces than on trials involving White faces, whereas no such difference was obtained among African American subjects. One possibility is that expertise in perceiving faces of particular races is associated with increased ability to extract information about the spatial relationships between different features. Further research using perceptual tasks could shed light on the specific cognitive processes involved in the other-race effect.

Explanations




The consensus among intelligence researchers is that IQ differences between individuals of the same race reflects functionally and socially significant differences in the intelligence. There is still substantial debate about the influence of various environmental factors on IQ test score differences between races and ethnic groups in a given country, and whether or not genetics may also play a role.

Test bias
While the existence of average IQ test score differences has been a matter of accepted fact for decades, a great deal of controversy exists among scholars over the question of whether these score differences reflected real differences in cognitive ability. Some claim that there is no evidence for test bias since IQ tests are equally good predictors of IQ-related factors (such as school performance) for U.S. Blacks and Whites. The performance differences persist in tests and testing situations in which care has been taken to eliminate bias. It has also been suggested that IQ tests are formulated in such a way as to disadvantage minorities. Controlled studies have shown that test construction does not substantially contribute to the IQ gap. Still, a 2007 study at Case Western Reserve University found that cultural differences in the provision of information account for racial differences in IQ. The study also found that test problems, similar to some problems found on conventional IQ tests, were only solvable on the basis of specific previous knowledge. Such specific knowledge based questions showed evidence of test bias since the performance on non-specific knowledge based questions did not always correlate with the performance on the knowledge based question. Arguing that IQ tests are often wrongly described as measuring "innate" rather than developed ability, write that this "labeling bias" causes people to inappropriately attribute the Black-White gap to "innate" differences. They argue that non-cultural environmental factors cause gaps measured by the tests, rather than innate difference based on genetics, and that to use these tests as a measure of innate difference is misleading and improper.

Increases in IQ scores over time


The secular, international increase in test scores, commonly called the Flynn effect, is seen by Flynn and others as reason to expect the eventual convergence of average black and white IQ scores. Flynn argues that the average IQ scores in several countries have increased about 3 points per decade during the 20th century, which he and others attribute predominantly to environmental causes. This means, given the same test, the mean black American performance today could be higher than the mean white American performance in 1920, though the gains causing this appear to have occurred predominantly in the lower half of the IQ distribution. If changes in environment can cause changes in IQ over time, they argue, then contemporary differences between groups could also be due to an unknown environmental factor. On the supposition that the effect started earlier for whites, because their social and economical conditions began to improve earlier than did those of blacks, they anticipate that the IQ gap among races might change in the future or is even now changing. An added complication to this hypothesis is the question of whether the secular IQ gains can be predominantly a real change in cognitive ability. Flynn's face-value answer to this question is "No", and other researchers have found reason to concur. wrote that "the gains cannot be explained solely by increases at the level of the latent variables (common factors), which IQ tests purport to measure".

Racism and discrimination
Researchers such as Jack Demaine find racial categorizations problematic in educational settings. Racial categorizations, Jack Demaine writes, may have adverse impacts on the education of minorities. Similarly, Alastair Bonnett, Bruce Carrington state:

"The collection of ethnic and racial statistics has become common in a growing number of institutional settings. Yet contemporary approaches to race and ethnicity suggest that the very process of compelling people to assign themselves to one of a small number of racial or ethnic 'boxes' is, at best, essentialist and, at worst, racist."

Stereotype threat


Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear may in turn lead to an impairment of performance (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2005). Stereotype threat has been documented by the social psychologists Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson, Irwin Katz, and Steven Spencer, who have conducted several studies on this topic.

"'When capable black college students fail to perform as well as their white counterparts, the explanation often has less to do with preparation or ability than with the threat of stereotypes about their capacity to succeed.' - Claude M. Steele, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1999 Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students"

Steele and Aronson write that making race salient when taking a test of cognitive ability negatively affected high-ability African American students. Steele writes that the stigma of being African American is still relevant, as it has an effect on the educational outcomes of African Americans. Stereotypes such as: Asian-Americans excelling in mathematics or African-Americans always testing poorly can be extremely harmful. Stereotype threats can seriously alter academic achievement and motivation.

In a paper prepared for an APA convention, Steele writes: "Thus the predicament of 'stereotype vulnerability': The group members then know that anything about them or anything they do that fits the stereotype can be taken as confirming it as self-characteristic, in the eyes of others, and perhaps even in their own eyes. This vulnerability amounts to a jeopardy of double devaluation: once for whatever bad thing the stereotype-fitting behavior or feature would say about anyone, and again for its confirmation of the bad things alleged in the stereotype."

Steele and Aronson are not first to test stereotype threat. During the 1960s Irwin Katz, psychologist, suggested that stereotype threat could also influence performance on IQ tests. Katz found that Blacks were able to score better an IQ subtest if the test was presented as a test of eye-hand coordination. Blacks also scored higher on an IQ test when they believe the test will be compared to that of other blacks. Katz concluded that his subjects were thoroughly aware of the judgment of intellectual inferiority held by many white Americans. With little expectation of overruling this judgment, their motivation was low, and so were their scores. Paul Sackett, a psychologist agrees that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon and that it is is a potentially important contributor to the racial achievement gap. He cautions however, that these findings may be widely misinterpreted to mean that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates the entire Black-White performance gap, and encourages researchers to continue their study of this and other phenomena.

Physiological responses to racism
Stereotype threat can result in physiological responses that can be measured objectively. For example, a study by Blascovich J, Spencer SJ, Quinn D and Steele C. reported that African Americans under stereotype threat exhibited larger increases in arterial blood pressure during an academic test, and performed more poorly on difficult test items. Some researchers feel this may explain the higher death rates from hypertension related disorders among African Americans. A study by Toni Schmader and Michael Johns reported that stereotype threat can effectively reduce working memory capacity, another factor in poor test performance. Stereotype threat may undermine intellectual performance by triggering a disruptive mental load. Jean-Claude Croizet, Gérard Després, Marie-Eve Gauzins, Pascal Huguet, Jacques-Philippe Leyens and Alain Méot reported increased heart rates for test subjects operating under stereotype threat.

Quality of education
Some researches have written that studies that find test performance gaps between races even after adjusting for education level, such as the analysis found in The Bell Curve, fail to adjust for the quality of education. Not all high school graduates or college graduates have received the same quality of education. A 2006 study reported that that years of education is an inadequate measure of the educational experience among multicultural elders, and that adjusting for quality of education greatly reduced the overall effect of racial differences on the tests. A 2004 study reported that quality of education and cultural experience influence how older African Americans approach neuropsychological tasks and  concluded that adjustment for these variables may improve specificity of neuropsychological measures. Yet another study reported that, although significant differences were observed between the ethnic groups when matched for years of education, equating for literacy level eliminated all performance differences between African Americans and Whites on both cancellation tasks which assess visual scanning. (Like reaction time tests cancellation task tests are sometimes regarded as "culture free" tests of intelligence.) Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin wrote in their 2006 book that unequal distributions of inexperienced teachers and of racial concentrations in schools can explain all of the increased achievement gap between grades 3 and 8.

A 2004 study in South Africa found highly significant effects for both level and quality of education within the black African first language groups taking the Wechsler IQ tests. Scores black African first language groups with advantaged education were comparable with the US standardization, whereas scores for black African first language participants with disadvantaged education were significantly lower than this. The study cautioned that faulty conclusions may be drawn about the effects of ethnicity and the potential for neuropsychological misdiagnosis.

Racial discrimination in education
Roslyn Arlin Mickelson writes that racial discrimination in education arises from actions of institutions or individual state actors, their attitudes and ideologies, or processes that systematically treat students from different racial/ethnic groups disparately or inequitably. Despite advancement in education reform efforts, to this day African American students continue to experience inequities within the educational system. Hala Elhoweris, Kagendo Mutua, Negmeldin Alsheikh and Pauline Holloway conducted a study of the effect of students' ethnicity on teachers' educational decision making. The results of this study indicated that the student's ethnicity did make a difference in the teachers' referral decisions for gifted and talented educational programs. Recently, a number of scholars have examined the issue of disproportionate representation of minority students in special education programs

Teachers' perceptions of a students cultural background may effect school achievement. African American students with African American cultural backgrounds, for example, have been found to benefit from culturally responsive teaching. In a 2003 study researchers found that teachers perceived students with African American culture-related movement styles as lower in achievement, higher in aggression, and more likely to need special education services than students with standard movement styles irrespective of race or other academic indicators.

Ellis Cose writes that low expectations may have a negative impact on the achievement of minorities. He writes that black people did not need to read The Bell Curve to be aware of the low expectations held for them by the majority culture. He recalls examples of low expectations from his teachers in school who regarded his use of AAVE as "laziness" and teachers who did not feel it was important to purchase new text books because they did not expect the students to be able to read anything complex. He contrasts these low expectations with the high expectations philosophy of Xavier University where, using the ideas Whimbey articulated in his book Intelligence can be Taught teachers created a program called SOAR. SOAR raised the performance of black students and lead Xavier to become the university that sends the greatest number of black students to medical school in the United States. The SOAR program produced gains equivalent to 120 points on an SAT test. Cose writes that "..we must treat people, whatever their color, as if they have unlimited intellectual capacity."

Caste
This table illustrates how social status or caste position is related to test scores and school success in nations around the world. Source: Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Vos

These results, just like the inferior test scores of Eastern and Southern Europeans immigrants in the United States 75 years ago, may represent a social division that leads to the gaps in test scores, rather than a pre-established and "natural" hierarchy of "races." In other words, these divisions, are closely aligned with local "social constructs" of race, the outcomes for ethnic groups are, in the opinion of these authors, a result of the social structure rather than confirmation of its validity.

Health
Regarding the IQ gaps in the U.S., numerous explanations beside genetics have been proposed. Joel Wiesen lists more than a hundred. Increased rates of low birth weight babies and lower rates of breastfeeding in Blacks as compared to Whites are some factors of many that have been proposed to affect the IQ gap. The Flynn effect is often cited as evidence that average IQ scores have changed greatly and rapidly, for reasons poorly understood, noting that average IQ in the US may have been below 75 before the start of this effect, and thus some argue that the IQ gap between races could change in the future or is changing, especially if the effect started earlier for Whites.

Genetics

 * See also The genome and intelligence 

A few of the notable proponents of the partly genetic hypothesis are Raymond B. Cattell, Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck.

Rushton and Jensen examined 10 categories of research evidence from around the world to contrast "a hereditarian model" (50% genetic-50% cultural) and a culture-only model (0% genetic-100% cultural). In the article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" published in the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law they cite the following evidence to support the hereditarian model:

Some scholars have proposed that in order to make a racial hypothesis about intelligence the genes for intelligence need to be identified along with their frequencies in the various populations. However recent studies attempting to find regions in the genome relating to intelligence have had little success. A recent study used several hundred people in two groups, one with a very high IQ, average 160, and a control group with an average IQ of 102. By the fifth step the study could not find a single gene that was related to intelligence. Critics of these studies say the failure to find a specific gene associated with intelligence is indicative of the complex nature of intelligence. They contend that intelligence is probably under the influence of several genes. Some estimate that as much as 40% of the genome may contribute to intelligence.

Recently scientists at the University of Chicago identified two genes, microcephalin and ASPM. Mutations in these genes are associated with brain size abnormality, microcephaly. The normal variants are found at high frequencies in Asian and European populations but they are not found among Sub-Saharan Africans. The scientists stated that microcephalin may have arisen some 37,000 years ago coinciding with upper paleolithic transitions in Europe. They also stated that a variant of APSM arose about 5,800 years ago roughly correlating with the development of written language, spread of agriculture and development of cities. They thus believe these two genes conferred some cognitive abilities upon Asians and Europeans.

Other scholars have criticized the University of Chicago scientists because they made claims about these genes without undertaking any direct experimentation to test their hypothesis on increased intelligence and brain size. Subsequently when these experiments were done, no relationship was found between these genes and intelligence or brain size. Critics of these studies also say that as long as social and environmental disparities between the races exist it will be impossible to scientifically test whether there are any genetic differences in IQ between the various populations. They propose that if the historical effects of poverty and social bigotry were eliminated and differences in IQ between the races still persisted then there might be some utility in such research.

Theories on the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews
A link between disease mutations specific to the Ashkenazi Jews and high IQ scores has been suggested by scientists at the University of Utah, who cite evidence that sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells and that mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in some Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons. The researchers predict that these disease mutations will enhance IQ in heterozygotes. This prediction is based on evidence that selection pressure has increased the frequency of the disease mutations in the reproductively isolated Ashkenazi population in medieval times. The hypothesis has not yet been empirically tested.

Ashkenazi Jews have been reported to score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115.

According to Richard Lynn the most accurate reading of the IQ of Jews in Britain is 110. Lynn proposes that the overrepresentation of Jews as Nobel Prize Winners and as Fellows of the Royal Society can be partly explained by the higher average Jewish IQ because comparatively small differences in average intelligence can become very large differences in the very high I.Q ranges. Notable Jewish intellectuals include Einstein, Freud and Marx. Jews are over-represented among Nobel prize-winners by a factor of 8.0 in Britain and 12.3 in the United States.

Interpretations
Given the observed differences in IQ scores between certain groups, a great deal of debate revolves around the significance of these observations. Various interpretations of test data lead to a multitude of conflicting conclusions as to which specific explanations the data support.

Some people have attributed differential economic growth between nations to differences in the intelligence of their populations. One example is Richard Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. The book is sharply criticized in the peer-reviewed paper The Impact of National IQ on Income and Growth. Another peer-reviewed paper, Intelligence, Human Capital, and Economic Growth: An Extreme-Bounds Analysis, finds a strong connection between intelligence and economic growth. It has been argued that East Asian nations underachieve compared to IQ scores.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel instead argues that historical differences in economic and technological development for different areas can be explained by differences in geography (which affects factors like population density and spread of new technology) and differences in available crops and domesticatable animals. However,psychologist John Philippe Rushton suggests these environmental differences may operate in part by selecting for higher levels of IQ There is no evidence to suggest that such selective forces occur in regards to IQ. Consensus at the American Psychological Association is that a partly genetic hypothesis is as of now, inadequate in explaining differences in IQ among population groups.

Prejudice and IQ
A university study in the US was carried out in order to determine whether a relationship existed between prejudice and IQ. Students were given an IQ test and a test that measures racial prejudice. The study found that students who scored lower on IQ tests were more prejudiced.

Media portrayal
Media portrayal of race and intelligence in various mediums, such as films, books, and newspapers, characterize people of various races to be more or less intelligent. Likewise, reporting on research into race and intelligence has been criticized: either for giving scientific theories of race too much credit, or for rejecting the theories of some researchers in the name of racial harmony.

Examples
Critics of contemporary media have highlighted portrayals of minorities as less intelligent (or in the case of Asians, on occasion more intelligent ) in films and movies.

Early stereotypes


Early minstrel shows lampooned the supposed stupidity of Blacks, movies such as Birth of a Nation questioned whether or not Black people were fit to run for governmental offices or vote. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun arguing for the extension of slavery in 1844 said "Here (scientific confirmation) is proof of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death."

Even after slavery ended the intellectual capacity of Black people was still frequently questioned. Lewis Terman wrote in The measurement of intelligence in 1916 "'(Black and other ethnic minority children) are uneducable beyond the nearest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the sense of the world…their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stock from which they come…Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can be made efficient workers…There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusual prolific breeding.'"

Modern stereotypes


Patricia J. Williams, writer for The Nation, said this of Jar Jar Binks, a character from the 2002 Star Wars film: "...intentionally or not, Jar Jar's pratfalls and high jinks borrow heavily from the genre of minstrelsy. Despite the amphibian get-up, his relentless, panicky, manchild-like idiocy is imported directly from the days of Amos 'N' Andy." Many aspects of Jar Jar's character are believed to be highly reminiscent of the archetypes portrayed in blackface minstrelsy.Patricia J. Williams:

According to Robert M. Entman an Andrew Rojecki, authors of the The Black Image in the White Mind, in television and film Black characters are less likely to be the "the intellectual drivers of its problem solving." Entman and Rojeki assert that media images of Blacks may have profound effects on the perceptions by both Blacks and Whites about black intellectual potential.

Contemporary sports commentators have questioned whether blacks are intelligent enough to hold "strategic" positions or coach games such as football. In another example, a study of the portrayal of race, ethnicity and nationality in televised sporting events by journalist Derrick Jackson in 1989 showed that blacks were more likely than Whites to be described in demeaning intellectual terms. Political activist and one-time presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson said in 1985 that the news media portray blacks as less intelligent than we are. Film director Spike Lee explains that these images have negative impacts. "In my neighborhood, we looked up to athletes, guys who got the ladies, and intelligent people," said Lee. "[Now] If you're intelligent, you're called a white guy or girl."

Even so-called positive images of Black people can lead to stereotypes about intelligence. In Darwin's Athletes: how sport has damaged Black America and preserved the myth of race, John Hoberman writes that the prominence of African-American athletes encourages a de-emphasis on academic achievement in black communities. In a 1997 study on racial stereotypes in sports, participants were shown a photograph of a white or a black basketball player. They then listened to a recorded radio broadcast of a basketball game. White photographs were rated as exhibiting significantly more intelligence in the way they played the game, even though the radio broadcast and target player represented by the photograph were the same throughout the trial. Several other authors have said that sports coverage that highlights 'natural black athleticism' has the effect of suggesting white superiority in other areas, such as intelligence.

East Asian intelligence stereotypes
thumb|left|80px|Fu Manchu. Asians have generally been portrayed in the media as intelligent but unsociable. The early 20th century fictional character Fu Manchu was one startling example of this kind of media portrayal:

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. –The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

White intelligence stereotypes


The social definition of "White" has changed over the years, and several White groups have at times been portrayed by the media as unintelligent. This includes ethnic groups such as the British, Irish, and Slavs.

English intelligence stereotypes
The English people are stereotyped as inordinately proper, prudish, and stiff and as having bad teeth. Characters in historical movies often have English accents even when the setting has nothing to do with England. Upper-class characters are also often given English accents. In more recent times, many movie villains, including Jafar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King, Hans Gruber from Die Hard, and Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs, have all been portrayed by British actors or given English accents.

Notably, in Disney films from the 1990s onward, English accents are generally employed to serve one of two purposes: slapstick comedy or evil genius. Examples include Aladdin (the Sultan and Jafar, respectively), The Lion King (Zazu and Scar, respectively), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor the Gargoyle and Frollo, respectively), and Pocahontas (Wiggins and Ratcliffe, respectively, both of whom happen to be played by the same actor, American David Ogden Stiers).

These two stereotypes are compounded in a scene in Pocahontas, in which Ratcliffe menacingly mentions giving the savages a "proper English greeting", in response to which Wiggins holds up two gift baskets.

Irish intelligence stereotypes
Although the Irish, Germans, French, etc are considered ethnic groups today, the common term in the 19th century was "race". Much was made of Celtic versus Anglo-Saxon racial characteristics, regarding historic identity and behavior patterns. An analysis of nineteenth-century British attitudes by Mary J. Hickman and Bronwen Walter wrote that the 'Irish Catholic' was one viewed as an "other," or a different race in the construction of the British nationalist myth. Likewise the Irish considered the English "other" and fought hard to break away and create their own homeland, which they finally did in the 1920s.

One 19th century British cartoonist even depicted Irish immigrants as ape-like and as racially different. One American doctor in the 1850s James Redfield, argued that "facial angle" was a sign of intelligence and character. He likened the facial characteristics of the human races to animals. Thus Irishmen resembled dogs, Yankees were like bears, Germans like lions, Negroes like elephants, Englishmen like bulls, Turks like turkeys, Persians like peacocks, Greeks like sheep, Hindus like swans, Jews like goats, and Frenchmen like frogs. In the 20th century physical stereotypes survived in the comic books until the 1950s, with Irish characters like Mutt and Jeff, and Jiggs and Maggie appearing daily in hundreds of newspapers.

Jewish intelligence stereotypes
Modern European antisemitism has its origin in 19th century theories—now mostly considered as pseudo-scientific—that said that the Semitic peoples, including the Jews, are entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European, populations, and that they can never be amalgamated with them. In this view, Jews are not opposed on account of their religion, but on account of their supposed hereditary or genetic racial characteristics including: greed, a special aptitude for money-making and low cunning.

In early films such as Cohen's Advertising Scheme (1904, silent) stereotyped Jews as "scheming merchants"

To this day Jewish people are sometimes stereotyped in media as being intellectually gifted.

The Bell Curve


The Bell Curve is a controversial, best-selling 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray exploring the role of intelligence in American life. The book became widely read and debated due to its discussion of race and intelligence in Chapters 13 and 14.

Press coverage has given considerable positive attention to theories of genetic racial differences in intelligence even though there is no consensus among researchers regarding their validity. Upon publication, The Bell Curve received a great deal of positive publicity, including cover stories in Newsweek ("the science behind [it] is overwhelmingly mainstream"), early publication (under protest by other writers and editors) by The New Republic by its editor-in-chief at the time Andrew Sullivan, and The New York Times Book Review (which suggested critics disliked its "appeal to sweet reason" and are "inclined to hang the defendants without a trial"). Early articles and editorials appeared in Time, The New York Times ("makes a strong case"), The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review. It received a respectful airing on such shows as Nightline, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the McLaughlin Group, Think Tank, PrimeTime Live, and All Things Considered. 

The positive reception of The Bell Curve in media such as newspapers and television talk shows was troubling to critics such as economist Edward S. Herman and evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves who felt that it indicated a troubling acceptance of what Herman calls deterministic racist doctrines. Dennis M. Rutledge suggests that through soundbites of works like Jensen's famous study on the achievement gap, and Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve, the media "paints a picture of Blacks and other people of color as collective biological illiterates — as not only intellectually unfit but evil and criminal as well," thus providing, he says "the logic and justification for those who would further disenfranchise and exclude racial and ethnic minorities."

APA response
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. Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns. Regarding genetic causes, they judged 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.

Stereotype threat
Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear may in turn lead to an impairment of performance (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2005). Stereotype threat was first articulated and documented by the social psychologists Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson, and Steven Spencer, who have conducted several studies on this topic.

While Stereotype threat has not received as much media attention as The Bell Curve much of the media coverage has been positive. The Atlantic Monthly ran a feature article on the topic authored by psychologist Claude M. Steele in August 1999. Still one conservative researcher feels that the coverage has been inaccurate. In a 2004 study Sackett said he found indications of widespread and systematic research misinterpretation regarding one of the more popular explanations for the IQ gap. 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. However Sackett said 88% of accounts in the popular media, 91% in scientific journals, and 67% in psychology textbooks had 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. Sackett suggests 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.

Snyderman and Rothman
The Snyderman and Rothman study accused the media of liberal bias in reporting on race and intelligence. Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman argued in their joint paper in 1988 that media coverage of intelligence-related research is often inaccurate and misleading. They surveyed the opinions of journalists and science editors and intelligence experts (not necessarily with knowledge about race), including scholars in the subfields of psychology, sociology, cognitive science, education, and genetics. They argue that media coverage of intelligence related topics was overall inaccurate and misleading. They say 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.

In their 1987 survey, they wrote: "Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to support any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination."

No poll option was provided to indicate "predominantly (but not entirely) environmental.

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 substantially 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 true, however proportion of experts supporting these hypotheses today is unknown.

Surveys of academic opinion
A survey was conducted in 1987 of a broad sample of 1,020 scholars in specialties that would give them reason to be knowledgeable about IQ (but not necessarily about race). The survey was given to members of the American Education Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, Behavior Genetics Association, and Cognitive Science Society. According to the report, regarding the question "The source of black-white difference in IQ":

"This is perhaps the central question in the IQ controversy. Respondents were asked to express their opinion of the role of genetic differences in the black-white IQ differential. Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to support any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination."

Robert Sternberg cautioned against supposing that the survey represented anything but opinion saying, "science isn't done by majority rule". Respondents on average called themselves slightly left of center politically, but political and social opinions accounted for less than 10% of the variation in responses. Carol Swain, author of The New White Nationalism reacted with some dismay to the survey, stating:

"At least one important survey suggests that a belief in the biological inferiority of some races in regard to intelligence is more common than generally supposed. Smith College professor Stanley Rothman and Harvard researcher Mark Snyderman surveyed a sample of mostly scientific experts in the field of educational psychology in the late 1980s and found that 53 percent believed IQ differences between whites and African Americans were at least partly genetic in origin, while only 17 percent attributed the IQ differences to environmental factors alone (the remainder either believed the data was currently insufficient to decide the issue or refused to answer the question)."

According to the American Psychological Association's 1995 task force report on intelligence research:

"It is sometimes suggested that the Black/White differential in psychometric intelligence is partly due to genetic differences (Jensen, 1972). There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis."

The APA subsequently published eleven critical responses in 1997, most arguing that the report failed to examine adequately the evidence for the genetic hypothesis. Charles Murray, for instance, responded:"Actually, there is no direct evidence at all, just a wide variety of indirect evidence, almost all of which the task force chose to ignore." The report did agree with many of the non-race-based statements on intelligence made in The Bell Curve and concludes with a call for more reflection in debates on intelligence and for a "shared and sustained effort" in more research to answer the many unanswered questions that remain. Coming advances in genetics and genomics are expected to soon provide the ability to test hypotheses about group differences more rigorously than has as yet been possible.

Researchers who believe that there is no significant genetic contribution to race differences in intelligence include, , , , , , and. Some scientists who emphasize cultural explanations do not necessarily exclude a small genetic influence. suggests up to 20% genetic influence be included in the cultural explanation. Researchers who believe that there are significant genetic contributions to race differences in intelligence include, , , , , , , , , , , , , , and.

Opinions of scholars and others
A survey was conducted in 1987 of a broad sample of 1,020 scholars (65% replied) in specialties that would give them reason to be knowledgeable about IQ (but not necessarily about race; Snyderman & Rothman, 1987). The survey was given to members of the American Education Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, Behavior Genetics Association, and Cognitive Science Society. Political and social opinions, reported in the same survey, accounted for less than 10% of the variation in responses. (Respondents on average called themselves slightly left of center politically.) Measures of expertise or eminence accounted for little or no variation in responses.

One question was "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of the Black-White difference in I.Q.?" (emphasis original). The responses were divided into five categories:
 * The difference is entirely due to environmental variation: 15%.
 * The difference is entirely due to genetic variation: 1% (8 respondents).
 * The difference is a product of both genetic and environmental variation: 45%.
 * The data are insufficient to support any reasonable opinion: 24%.
 * No response (or not qualified): 14%.

The age of the survey and the anonymity of the respondents could constrain its interpretation.

In a 1988 survey, journalists, editors, and IQ experts were asked their "opinion of the source of the black-white difference in IQ"

The view of the American Psychological Association
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.

The task force agrees that there do exist large differences between the average IQ scores of blacks and whites, and that these differences cannot be attributed to biases in test construction, nor does it "simply reflect differences in socio-economic status". While they admit there is no empirical evidence supporting it, the APA task force suggests that explanations based on social status and cultural differences may be possible. Regarding genetic causes, they noted, "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 genetic hypothesis of racial differences in IQ.

Utility of research
Theories of race and intelligence have been challenged on grounds of their utility. Critics want to know what purpose such research could serve and why it has been an intense an area of focus for a few researchers. Some defend the research, saying it has egalitarian aims or that it is pure science, others say that the true motivation for the research is the same as that of the eugenics movement and other forms of scientific racism. Even supporters of intelligence research have described such research as analogous to "working with dynamite" or "dangerous play" in sports.

As to whether research in this area is desirable, John C. Loehlin wrote in 1992, "Research on racial differences in intelligence is desirable if the research is appropriately motivated, honestly done, and adequately communicated." [emphasis original] Defenders of the research suggest that both scientific curiosity and a desire to draw benefits from the research are appropriate motivations. Researchers such as Richard Lynn have suggested that conclusions from the research can help make political decisions, such as the type of educational opportunities and expectations of achievement policy makers should have for people of different races. Charles Murray, a conservative political pundit at the American Enterprise Institute has used their conclusions to criticize social programs based on racial equality that fail, he claims, to recognize the realities of racial differences.

In a book review J. Philippe Rushton called Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's book IQ And Global Inequality which links GDP with the racial composition of nations as "the most important contribution to economic understanding since Adam Smith".

Sociologist and demographer Reanne Frank says that some race and intelligence research has been abused "The most malignant are the "true believers," who subscribe to the typological distinctions that imply hierarchical rankings of worth across different races. Although this group remains small, the members' work is often widely publicized and well known (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Rushton 1991)"

Potential for bias
Proponents of genetic explanations of race/IQ correlation have often been criticized both of scientific misconduct and of their intimate links with groups that have historic ties to Nazis and eugenics of the early 19th century, such as the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund has been characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Beverly Daniel Tatum writes that dominant cultures often set the parameters by which minority cultures will be judged. Minority groups are labeled as substandard in significant ways, for example blacks have historically been characterized as less intelligent than whites. Tatum suggests that the ability to set these parameters is a form of white privilege. Proponents of genetic explanations of race/IQ correlation have in turn accused their critics of suppressing scientific debate in the name of political correctness. They claim harassment and interference with both their work and funding.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that IQ tests measuring general intelligence are crossculturally valid. There is little or no evidence of population-specific cultural effects apart from the obvious example of language bias. For example, Robert Sternberg et al. found that the IQ of 12- to 15-year-old Kenyans predicted school grades at about the same level as they do in the West. IQ also predicted university performance equally well in African and non-African engineering students in South Africa in a 2004 study. Salgado et al. (2003) demonstrated the international generalizability of general mental ability across 10 member countries of the European Community and differences in a nation’s culture, religion, language, socioeconomic level or employment legislation did not affect the predictive validity of IQ tests.

The Bell Curve has often been argued to embellish the view that IQ is inheritable. (Nature argument.) However, recent studies have argued that IQ itself is in fact malleable due to conditions of nuture.

Policy implications

 * See also: Intelligence and public policy

Public policy implications of IQ and race research are one of the greatest sources of controversy surrounding this issue. Regardless of the source of the gap, most educators agree that it must be addressed. They often advocate equitable funding for education.

Some proponents of a genetic interpretation of the IQ gap, such as and, have sometimes argued that their interpretation does not in itself demand any particular policy response: while a conservative/libertarian commentator For example, the policy recommendations of The Bell Curve were denounced by many. wrote: "We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. (p. 548)"

Two year later the 1996 U.S. welfare reform substantially cut these programs. In a discussion of the future political outcomes of an intellectually stratified society, they stated that they: "fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent - not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but ’conservatism’ along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below. (p. 518)"Moreover, they fear that an increasing welfare will create a "custodial state": "a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation of some substantial minority of the nation’s population. They also predict increasing totalitarianism: It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states. (p. 526)" may feel the results justify, for example, reductions in affirmative action, a liberal commentator may argue from a Rawlsian point of view (that genetic advantages are undeserved and unjust) for substantial affirmative action. Since all races have representatives at all levels of the IQ curve, this means any policy based on low IQ affects members of all races.

While not specifically race-related, policies focused on geographical regions or nations may have disproportionate influences on certain racial groups and on cognitive development. Differences in health care, nutrition, regulation of environmental toxins, and geographic distribution of diseases and control strategies between the developing world and developed nations have all been subjects of policies or policy recommendations (see Health and intelligence).

Melvin Konner, professor of anthropology and associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory University, called Bell Curve a "deliberate assault on efforts to improve the school performance of African-Americans". "This book presented strong evidence that genes play a role in intelligence but linked it to the unsupported claim that genes explain the small but consistent black-white difference in IQ. The juxtaposition of good argument with a bad one seemed politically motivated, and persuasive refutations soon appeared. Actually, African-Americans have excelled in virtually every enriched environment they have been placed in, most of which they were previously barred from, and this in only the first decade or two of improved but still not equal opportunity. It is likely that the real curves for the two races will one day be superimposable on each other, but this may require decades of change and different environments for different people. Claims about genetic potential are meaningless except in light of this requirement."

Finally, Gregory Stock, writes that germinal choice technology may one day be able to select or change directly alleles found to influence intelligence or racially identifying traits (such as skin color; see gene SLC24A5), making them susceptible to biotechnological intervention.

Collective Statements

 * APA Task Force Examines the Knowns and Unknowns of Intelligence
 * Statement on "Race" and Intelligence. American Anthropological Association. Adopted December 1994.
 * Mainstream Science on Intelligence. Intelligence, v24 n1 p. 13-23 Jan-Feb 1997

Review Papers

 * James Flynn and Charles Murray debate - news summary
 * June 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2.
 * Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability J. Philippe Rushton & Arthur R. Jensen
 * There Are No Public-Policy Implications Robert J. Sternberg
 * What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? Linda S. Gottfredson
 * Heredity, Environment, and Race Differences in IQ Richard E. Nisbett
 * The Cultural Malleability of Intelligence and Its Impact on the Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy Lisa Suzuki & Joshua Aronson
 * Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic Fallacy J. Philippe Rushton & Arthur R. Jensen
 * Race, Genetics and IQ Richard E. Nisbett (PDF)
 * The Inequality Taboo Charles Murray archived version
 * The Black-White Test Score Gap (1998) online (page-image) version of ISBN 0-8157-4609-1

Others

 * Crippled by Their Culture - Race doesn't hold back America's black rednecks. Nor does racism by Thomas Sowell
 * Race and IQ: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 by Thomas Sowell
 * The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on IQ and race
 * (Skeptic Magazine): Two book reviews, by Paul R. Gross and Alondra Oubre, of Sarich’s and Miele’s book, Race: The Reality of Human Differences
 * Criticism on source material of Bell Curve book
 * Poverty and Brain Development in Early Childhood 1999 report
 * Miscellaneous articles by Richard Lynn et al.
 * Are IQ Tests Biased?
 * Scholars Provide an Overview of Explanations for Black-White Test Score Gap
 * School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps
 * A review of the field (Jan. 2006) Kohn, Marek, "This racist undercurrent in the tide of genetic research: As taboos fall away, there's a danger that denial of racial difference will be replaced with uncritical acceptance," The Guardian.
 * The Lessons of the Ashkenazim: Groups and Genes, Steven Pinker, June 2006, The New Republic.
 * Are all races equally intelligent? -- Or: When is knowledge knowledge? by John J. Ray
 * Black-White Gap in IQ Scores Closing, Study Finds
 * Breaking Free of Nehruby Sanjeev Sabhlok : Chapter 2, section 6 of this book proposes a model of IQ determination which is strongly impacted by the level of freedom (and dignity)