Thread by @PaoloShirasi

[THREAD]

A VERY BASIC INTRODUCTION TO THE HEREDITARIAN POSITION ON RACE AND IQ.

PART 22: Cultural Fairness of IQ Tests

Some people have argued that the “cultural specificity” of intelligence makes IQ tests biased towards the environments in which they were designed, and therefore a particular test developed for a “white” culture may not accurately measure intelligence in a non-white one.

Although this argument isn't really made that much anymore in published research because it hasn't held up in studies, it still occasionally appears in some college textbooks, according a recent review of intelligence instruction materials.

A survey of intelligence experts conducted in 2008 found that only 13% of them believed that IQ tests are racially or culturally biased.

The evidence against bias has continued to grow since then; that percentage is very likely even less now.

Efforts to create tests in which black performance would improve produced instruments which contained very little g-loading (i.e., didn't really measure general intelligence).

A 2000 review of the literature concluded that “the issue of test bias is scientifically dead.”

A recent study found that general intelligence (“g”) is a "universal phenomenon" found in all 31 non-Western nations investigated. Therefore, “it is theoretically possible to conduct [culturally appropriate] cross-cultural research on intelligence.”

Another analysis found that the most common cognitive testing construct (i.e., theoretical framework that underlies IQ tests) was found to have no apparent cultural bias.

It's also difficult to imagine IQ tests developed in the West as culturally biased when northeast Asians score higher on them than whites. East Asians average higher scores than whites both in the US and in Asia, and even on tests specifically designed for “whites”.

Finally, there is an simple and reliable way to gauge general intelligence that is almost indisputably culture-free — that test being reaction time — and this type of testing shows the same differences between races that standard IQ tests show.

This is because “reaction time measures the neurophysiological efficiency of the brain’s capacity to process information accurately — the same ability measured by intelligence tests.”

A combination of reaction time measures produces a multiple correlation of .67, about the same magnitude as the correlation between reasoning ability and vocabulary — so it's a good indicator of IQ.

Unsurprisingly then, various types of reaction time testing in multiple studies produced consistent results in the familiar descending order: Northeast Asians fastest (both in US and Asia), whites intermediate, and blacks slowest.

SOURCES:

intelligence.martinsewell.com/Gottfredson199…

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2019-…

pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6df5/f2ce2951c…

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

gwern.net/docs/iq/2016-s…
www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfreds…

Deary, I. J. (2000). Looking down on human intelligence: From psychometrics to the brain. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Jensen, A. R. (1998b). The g factor. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Warne, Russell T. (2020). In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, Cambridge University Press, 90-104.