12 ms·

Best-selling introductory psychology books give misleading view of intelligence

157 points by DanAndersen 9y ago

sosuke 9y ago
I'm so confused now. Who is right about this?
- poster123 9y ago
  For decades, the media have been misreporting what is known about intelligence, because it is politically incorrect. A good book documenting this is "The I. Q. Controversy: The Media and Public Policy" by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman (1988).
  - Someone1234 9y ago
    A book that sent out a questionnaire to [mostly white] academics and then tried to conclude fact about different race's intelligence as a result of those questionnaires? It is fluff. The whole methodology is set out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_and_Public_Policy_(book)#Synopsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_...
    - poster123 9y ago
      Since most professors in the U.S. are white, especially in 1998 when the book was published, I wonder why you think that the professors surveyed being "mostly white" discredits the book. Do you have any evidence that non-white professors were systematically excluded from the study?
      - Someone1234 9y ago
        > I wonder why you think that the professors surveyed being "mostly white" discredits the book. That wasn't what I said. What I said was: > then tried to conclude fact about different race's intelligence as a result of those questionnaires They surveyed one demographic and asked them to draw conclusions about another demographic without considering the innate biases of doing so. I called the book "fluff" which I stand behind. It doesn't provide any new scientific data, even the selection of questions, who they selected to send them to, and other actions by the researches introduced a ton of biasing issues. Their whole goal was to discrete what they viewed as "liberal academia."
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    That "political correctness" as you call it is masking a much deeper problem. If you believe that there are innate differences in intelligence then what do you do about it? If we are not going to discriminate based on innate differentiators like gender, race, etc, then how can we discriminate based on intelligence, if it is innate? The idea of social justice for people with innately low intelligence is very disruptive so better to pretend they don't exist.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      >If we are not going to discriminate based on innate differentiators like gender, race, etc, then how can we discriminate based on intelligence, if it is innate? I have to admit I feel a lot of anxiety trying to answer your question in good faith, because this is such a touchy subject. Accurately measuring innate differences, if such things exist, is essential to determining if systemic bias exists and to what extent. If Ashkenazi Jews have a higher than average verbal IQ, maybe it's not surprising that they appear over-represented in top tier verbal IQ jobs (media, etc.). If East Asians have higher than average spacial intelligence, maybe it's not surprising that they appear over-represented in engineering disciplines. Importantly, these statistical differences tell us nothing useful about any specific individual.
    - poster123 9y ago
      It is essential to discriminate in hiring on the basis of qualities that are relevant for the job. If a person's race or sex does not affect his or her ability to perform as a programmer, but his or her intelligence does, then of course you use perceived intelligence as a criterion. Athletic ability is heritable. How can sports teams not discriminate on the basis of athletic ability?
      - saas_co_de 9y ago
        > How can sports teams not discriminate on the basis of athletic ability? What applies to a few thousand people playing games does not necessarily apply to society at large. > It is essential to discriminate in hiring on the basis of qualities that are relevant for the job Yes, the job has to fit the person, but what about the salary? If a person can only qualify for a certain position based on their innate intelligence then they should not earn less because of that. Jobs might be distributed based on innate intelligence but distributing income based on innate intelligence would seem to be counter to the anti-discrimination norms that our society lives by.
- jehlakj 9y ago
  Also confused. Are they simply criticizing the experiments (whose results may still hold), or are there evidence that points to the contrary? What’s their motive? More funding?
forapurpose 9y ago
On one hand is, "A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University". On the other are, "the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US - some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive". Why would I believe the former? I'm not saying that Utah Valley U. researchers shouldn't raise questions, but that the standard for what I'm going to take at face value is much higher than one study that contradicts everyone else. One study is just the start of the start of a discussion. I think I'll let the body of evidence accumulate and let experts weigh in. One psychological concept I'm familiar with is confirmation bias. This article confirms beliefs held by some at HN about political bias, authority, and accuracy in science, (and unfortunately, an effort to rationalize and justify racism by finding some basis for it). That doesn't make this report any more likely to be accurate. Apparently, 29 leading textbooks contradict it; if not for the bias, why not take 29 publications at face value instead of 1? EDIT: a bunch of edits; sorry for the mess. EDIT: I'll add that this one study was published "in an open-access article in Archives of Scientific Psychology". It's not even peer-reviewed [EDIT2: It is, in fact, peer reviewed; sorry. I still expect the textbooks to be reviewed much more carefully than one paper.]
- ahultgren 9y ago
  Well, there is nothing to believe or not believe in this study; it simply points out that most of the books disagree with what's widely accepted in the field[0]. Which do you believe, the widely accepted theory or 29 books? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93Carroll_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93C...
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    > it simply points out that 29 books disagree with what's widely accepted in the field The study claims that. The textbooks claim otherwise. Why do you believe the study's claims? (I'd believe Wikipedia less than either.)
    - wuliwong 9y ago
      You could also allow yourself to exist in a gray area where you find this interesting but do not believe you know the exact truth.
lallysingh 9y ago
Sweet! Time to print new editions of all those textbooks! Time to buy a boat.
tokenadult 9y ago
Gottfredson's paper is a paper that I have read, and I see it is being used as the analytical framework for criticizing psychology textbooks. I do research for writing popular writings on psychology, so I have a whole bunch of introductory psychology textbooks in the office where I am typing this, and I have to agree that introductory psychology textbooks leave a LOT to be desired in representing the consensus of modern psychology research. That's true about research on human intelligence and true about any other psychology topic: the introductory textbooks only do a so-so job. That said, one might wonder where to find good information about current psychology research. Sometimes there are review articles that update practitioners on current research, which are incidentally read by scientists in other disciplines. I'll note for the record that not all psychologist agree EITHER with the review article I will link here, but it is a good readable account of current issues in the psychological research on human intelligence and well worth a read for Hacker News participants who are curious about these issues. It refers to many of the most important papers in the field, most of which I have read over the last three decades. Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159. doi:10.1037/a0026699 (Disclaimer: I have met many of the researchers on human intelligence, including Gottfredson, at professional conferences, but my views of what the overall research says and who has the best leads on open research questions are my own.) http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Nisbett(2012)%20.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
mywittyname 9y ago
It seems like there's a subset of psychological researchers that want so bad to debunk the years of research into IQ. I get that there are some uncomfortable implications that arise from accepting IQ as a measure of overall intelligence, but, from my understanding, IQ is an excellent predictor of income, social status, and academic & job performance. My opinion is that we are doing society a huge disservice by dismissing IQ.
- iek2929nsn 9y ago
  I’m not interested in an individuals IQ predictions I’m interested in theories that accurately model objectively as possible reality If IQ is a good measure for some applications, fine If it’s not when it comes to describing the reality of reality itself, not just contemporary social life, it should be pushed aside for a method that does better
- usr999999 9y ago
  This is largely anecdotal, so make of it what you will: I've observed high IQ scores to correlate more often with troubled lives than exceptional performance in job and status. It seems to me that these people tend to extremes and environmental aspects play a strong role in how these tendencies develop. Outright dismissing IQ would be detrimental, but its predictive value seems vague beyond some basic observations.
  - dmix 9y ago
    It's predictive to an extant. Many people who have taken up the mantel of IQ have taken it too far. And their (largely political) detractors have dismissed them merely because they have taken it too far. But much of it is still true from a more measured perspective. Which has some very inconvenient / awkward implications for many people who are seeking to dismiss it outright, rather than dismiss particular proponents of it... But taking any idea to the extremes, bulldozing over context and constraints of the data, and making grand generalizations from very simple base ideas is the bread and butter of politics, economics, and any bestselling non-fiction. Popular discourse may be a tribal battle between extremes, but real life isn't...
  - 9y ago
smallgovt 9y ago
>> To identify factual inaccuracies, Warne’s team used as a benchmark a consensus statement on intelligence research published in 1997 by Linda Gottfredson et al Is the best way to define 'fact' really a twenty year old study? Also, even if the results are believed, it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Afterall, they're reporting an average of 1 factual inaccuracy per book. When each book presents hundreds or thousands of truth claims, is 1 factual inaccuracy per book noteworthy? I'm willing to bet a much larger percentage of the 'scientific consensus' they define as 'fact' is in fact wrong.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tokenadult 9y ago
  I know eminent IQ researchers back at the time who declined invitations to sign on to the Gottfredson consensus statement (with good reason, in my opinion). On the other hand, it is still a reasonably fair statement of a lot of the consensus among IQ researchers, but as you say now twenty years out of date. (I read the consensus statement right after it was published.)
- prepend 9y ago
  The next paragraph explains why. The study is still accurate and they picked something old enough that should be known outside of specialists. If they compared to present day research then naturally many books published over the past 10 years wouldn’t know about it.
nokcha 9y ago
Link to the actual paper: http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-07714-001.pdf http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-07714-001.pdf
- tokenadult 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing that link. The underlying paper is (of course) better than the popular article kindly submitted to open the interesting discussion here. In particular, the paper makes clear its own methodological limitations.
- DanAndersen 9y ago
  Thanks! I wasn't sure whether to link the summary blog post or the original paper. Having both is definitely good for the discussions here.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    BPS is hit and miss. Sometimes they're great; sometimes they really mangle the science. https://www1.bps.org.uk/networks-and-communities/member-microsite/division-clinical-psychology/understanding-psychosis-and-schizophrenia https://www1.bps.org.uk/networks-and-communities/member-micr... First response from 2014: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/publication-types/report/understanding-psychosis-and-schizophrenia-a-critique-by-laws-langford-and-huda/ https://www.nationalelfservice.net/publication-types/report/... Newer response to updated document from 2017: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/psychosis/understandingpsychosis/ https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/psychosis/u... It's a bit worrying that they get so much wrong.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
onuralp 9y ago
Two comments: - Lay people seem to have a very good intuition about the actual heritability of intelligence (taken to assess the genetic and environmental determinants of intelligence). [0] - If you'd like to read an up-to-date and thorough literature review on human intelligence, I highly recommend "Intelligence: All That Matters" by Stuart Ritchie. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468694
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Intelligence studies : Left :: Climate science : Right The Left views the expert consensus on intelligence in much the same way that the right views the expert consensus on climate change. The consensus view is rejected not because of evidence, but because of what it does to their model of the world and fear that it will open the door to great abuses in the future (increased government regulation for climate change, and increased racism and discrimination for intelligence studies).
- goodroot 9y ago
  I find it unusual that one can use a polarized axiom as the basis for what's considered rational thought. Life is deep, unfathomably complex, nuanced, and believe or not, bipartisan. You can introduce more flavour by expanding your window beyond two disparate colours.
  - hueving 9y ago
    It's commentary on how politics quickly interfere with rational thought when things hit too close to a key pillar. Particularly after this last presidential election people have made their political leanings a core part of their identity so anything that's a threat to a political belief is an attack on their identity.
- gilbetron 9y ago
  Climate Science and Psychology are very different types of science. Linking intelligence and race is anti-science, not science. Climate science doesn't need consensus, because it is actual science (not on the level of physics or chemistry, but much closer than Psychology)
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
  - gilbetron 9y ago
    So am I downvoted because the downvoters believe race and intelligence is linked, or because we have some staunch Psychology defenders?
closed 9y ago
This may be a bit off the deep end, but in 2014 the Journal of Intelligence had a special issue on the state-of-art for intelligence research (in psychology). It's open access :). http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jintelligence/special_issues/int_where http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jintelligence/special_issues/int...
- wuliwong 9y ago
  Just to make sure I understood, that link is a collection of hand-picked papers? I expected it to be a review article, summarizing a bunch of past work. Just wanted to be sure that I was looking at the right thing.
  - closed 9y ago
    Yeah, that's right--it was a special issue of the journal, where they invited many people to write review articles on intelligence.
abvdasker 9y ago
This doesn't make any sense. He's taking a study over 20 years old designed to measure academic consensus and then using it to try and disprove 29 textbooks authored by leading psychologists. Couldn't the latter be said to be a (much more recent) form of academic consensus? Why should a measure of academic consensus over 20 years old be used as some kind of evidence against newer ideas?
mcguire 9y ago
* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests. That one is true. "This contradicts the 1997 consensus statement which tackles this issue and concludes that “intelligence tests are not culturally biased”." Well, glad we got that out of the way.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  There's a ton of evidence that IQ tests are not culturally biased. For example, the SAT is a form of IQ test. So the performance of practically every college student in the country vs their SAT score is available to us. The predictive value of IQ is solid regardless of your own culture or the university in question.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    What if both the SAT and "college performance" are biased in the same way?
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      Then job performance, income, criminality rates, health and mortality rates are also biased in the same way across cultures and time all around the globe.
- nokcha 9y ago
  >* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests. >That one is true. In what sense are they "rather arbitrary"? It sounds to me that you might be suggesting that there is little correlation between performance on different IQ tests or different parts of the same IQ test. But the authors of the paper claim (with cited evidence) that "a common g factor accounting for about half of variance on cognitive tasks has been found across many human cultures (e.g., Carroll, 1993; Dolan, 2000; Dolan & Hamaker, 2001; Frisby & Beaujean, 2015; Gurven et al., 2017; Reuning, 1972)".
  - 9y ago
skytrue 9y ago
Psychology as a field is one that is constantly becoming out of date. General consensus amongst psychologists often doesn't reach academic text quickly, because of the bureaucracy that exists inside the APA (American Psychological Association). See the controversy around the most recent version of the DSM. I've observed that academics in the field will often take theory as most likely fact, if only because the actual published academic material hasn't caught up yet, but they've all been to the various conferences that are relevant to their particular field (social psychology, cognitive, etc). Any study that is citing materials from over 20 years ago is grossly outdated. Many of the materials from even 10 years ago are becoming outdated. And now, more recently, we've started to examine the racial bias that exists in our systems of research, so I expect past material to come under even further scrutiny.
- breck 9y ago
  Some people have researched this. I remember reading "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" by Arbesman, and IIRC psychology papers had some of the lowest half-lives of all the sciences. In math the half-life of a paper was something like 85 years, but in pysch it was closer to 10. I forget the exact statistics and don't have the book here but it was pretty interesting. Scientometrics and Eurekometrics are two areas of research that delve into this sort of thing more.
quadrangle 9y ago
The most remarkable thing BY FAR: That some expert(s) are actually looking at and critiquing introductory textbooks! This type of issue is present in nearly every field. Education would be dramatically improved if more actual experts reviewed more of the introductory materials (ideally all the way down to elementary school level).
franciscop 9y ago
One of the most shocking things for me when I went through highschool a decade ago was how new things we learned about maths/physics showed the previous things we learned were not accurate. Things like relativity and time dilation, integrals/derivatives, etc. This was further proved (but not that shocking then) when I went through Engineering in the University with fluid mechanics et al. I think when learning a whole new topic, specially ones experienced at a practical level, we need to start at a point with some broad oversimplifications. Not saying that is what happens here since I know little about psychology, but I would expect the same to apply here. Then we will be ready to dig deeper.
- TipVFL 9y ago
  When I was in elementary school my dad constantly pointed out that they were teaching me nothing but lies. Sometimes he'd ask me what we were learning and then he'd give me questions to fluster the teacher. Teachers either loved it, or hated it (most hated it). For some topics it makes sense to start with a simplified view, but I don't understand the general trend of insisting it's actually correct while they do it. It's already hard to convince some kids to learn, when they later find out that most of it was lies it has to sap their motivation further. The simple solution, when you're dealing with a simplified/incorrect version of something for educational purposes, admit that's what you're doing, and why. An example of this madness: in my high school physics/chemistry class the teacher asked how many states of matter there are are, I raised my hand and said 4. She said, "Wrong, there are three." I said, "Solid, water, gas, and plasma. Four." Her response, "Look in your book, what does it say? THREE: water, solid, and gas." I told her that plasma is the most common form of matter in the universe and a textbook wouldn't change that. I got detention. I got detention for insisting plasma exists, in a high school science class.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    You got detention for not counting Bose-Einstein condensates mate.
  - zbyte64 9y ago
    Weird, I had some stupid opinions but never got detention for them. But I also never interrupted class to say science was wrong about radiometric dating and evolution \-0-/
posterboy 9y ago
Those books are written by psychologists, maybe they have a good reason to be ... imprecise, underspecific? Be honest: nobody "knows"; Instigate thought: don't serve the truth on a silver tablet. That seems to be true for every advanced topic. Reverse psychology is still psychology.
ggm 9y ago
When laypeople misuse science and maths, (I am in this context a layperson btw) the consequences depend on the applicability of the subject to ordinary discourse and events. Because I don't work in bomb science, power engineering or nuclear medicine, If I misuse facts about nuclear fission making decisions to hire a new staffer, the consequence is low. Nothing about nuclear fission informs what happens in the workplace. So the colloquial lack of understanding on my part as to what science actually says about nuclear physics is low. When I mis-use understanding of I.Q. and g to make a hiring decision, the consequences are huge for the person hired and the organisation. Assumptions about normative behaviour, likely success, future hiring, application of applied knowledge, ability to learn, all these things have direct meaning and importance. The impact on the hire, or non-hire is also immense. Future promotion, reward, positional authority can all be affected by somebody in the psych space, working in H/R, mis-applying domain-specific knowledge around IQ and intelligence. Its not nuclear physics, but its being mis-applied. Thats the problem. (that it's being mis-applied: not that it isn't nuclear physics. Although a quality of its mis-application is about it not being hard science: its guesswork, rei-fied through G and other statements of single-value measure against an imprecise measurement. I don't actually think social science is well named.)
epx 9y ago
Hard right: everybody should take an IQ test Libertarian right: I take drugs to increase my IQ Libertarian left: there is no IQ Hard left: everybody has the same IQ
drngdds 9y ago
It's probably worth noting that the "consensus statement" cited here was only signed by 52 of the 131 researchers it was sent out to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intell...
- notahacker 9y ago
  It's also worth noting that judging from the examples provided, the methodological approach of Warne et al. is to suggest textbook authors are guilty of a specified fallacy if they make any statement which appears to conflict with Gotfredsson's listed points in any way (even if that statement is itself cited, quite possibly true and not actually presented as a refutation - fallacious or otherwise - of any claims made about intelligence)
deviationblue 9y ago
Kinda related to this, probably a good idea to re-evaluate EQ while we're at it. Although, my gut feeling is that a healthy mix of IQ and EQ makes good worker bees (if that's the metric we're interested in). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_performance#Emotional_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_performance#Emotional_inte...

157 points by DanAndersen 9y ago

sosuke 9y ago

I'm so confused now. Who is right about this?

poster123 9y ago
For decades, the media have been misreporting what is known about intelligence, because it is politically incorrect. A good book documenting this is "The I. Q. Controversy: The Media and Public Policy" by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman (1988).
- Someone1234 9y ago
  A book that sent out a questionnaire to [mostly white] academics and then tried to conclude fact about different race's intelligence as a result of those questionnaires? It is fluff. The whole methodology is set out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_and_Public_Policy_(book)#Synopsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_...
  - poster123 9y ago
    Since most professors in the U.S. are white, especially in 1998 when the book was published, I wonder why you think that the professors surveyed being "mostly white" discredits the book. Do you have any evidence that non-white professors were systematically excluded from the study?
    - Someone1234 9y ago
      > I wonder why you think that the professors surveyed being "mostly white" discredits the book. That wasn't what I said. What I said was: > then tried to conclude fact about different race's intelligence as a result of those questionnaires They surveyed one demographic and asked them to draw conclusions about another demographic without considering the innate biases of doing so. I called the book "fluff" which I stand behind. It doesn't provide any new scientific data, even the selection of questions, who they selected to send them to, and other actions by the researches introduced a ton of biasing issues. Their whole goal was to discrete what they viewed as "liberal academia."
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  That "political correctness" as you call it is masking a much deeper problem. If you believe that there are innate differences in intelligence then what do you do about it? If we are not going to discriminate based on innate differentiators like gender, race, etc, then how can we discriminate based on intelligence, if it is innate? The idea of social justice for people with innately low intelligence is very disruptive so better to pretend they don't exist.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    >If we are not going to discriminate based on innate differentiators like gender, race, etc, then how can we discriminate based on intelligence, if it is innate? I have to admit I feel a lot of anxiety trying to answer your question in good faith, because this is such a touchy subject. Accurately measuring innate differences, if such things exist, is essential to determining if systemic bias exists and to what extent. If Ashkenazi Jews have a higher than average verbal IQ, maybe it's not surprising that they appear over-represented in top tier verbal IQ jobs (media, etc.). If East Asians have higher than average spacial intelligence, maybe it's not surprising that they appear over-represented in engineering disciplines. Importantly, these statistical differences tell us nothing useful about any specific individual.
  - poster123 9y ago
    It is essential to discriminate in hiring on the basis of qualities that are relevant for the job. If a person's race or sex does not affect his or her ability to perform as a programmer, but his or her intelligence does, then of course you use perceived intelligence as a criterion. Athletic ability is heritable. How can sports teams not discriminate on the basis of athletic ability?
    - saas_co_de 9y ago
      > How can sports teams not discriminate on the basis of athletic ability? What applies to a few thousand people playing games does not necessarily apply to society at large. > It is essential to discriminate in hiring on the basis of qualities that are relevant for the job Yes, the job has to fit the person, but what about the salary? If a person can only qualify for a certain position based on their innate intelligence then they should not earn less because of that. Jobs might be distributed based on innate intelligence but distributing income based on innate intelligence would seem to be counter to the anti-discrimination norms that our society lives by.
jehlakj 9y ago
Also confused. Are they simply criticizing the experiments (whose results may still hold), or are there evidence that points to the contrary? What’s their motive? More funding?

forapurpose 9y ago

On one hand is, "A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University". On the other are, "the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US - some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive". Why would I believe the former? I'm not saying that Utah Valley U. researchers shouldn't raise questions, but that the standard for what I'm going to take at face value is much higher than one study that contradicts everyone else. One study is just the start of the start of a discussion. I think I'll let the body of evidence accumulate and let experts weigh in. One psychological concept I'm familiar with is confirmation bias. This article confirms beliefs held by some at HN about political bias, authority, and accuracy in science, (and unfortunately, an effort to rationalize and justify racism by finding some basis for it). That doesn't make this report any more likely to be accurate. Apparently, 29 leading textbooks contradict it; if not for the bias, why not take 29 publications at face value instead of 1? EDIT: a bunch of edits; sorry for the mess. EDIT: I'll add that this one study was published "in an open-access article in Archives of Scientific Psychology". It's not even peer-reviewed [EDIT2: It is, in fact, peer reviewed; sorry. I still expect the textbooks to be reviewed much more carefully than one paper.]

ahultgren 9y ago
Well, there is nothing to believe or not believe in this study; it simply points out that most of the books disagree with what's widely accepted in the field[0]. Which do you believe, the widely accepted theory or 29 books? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93Carroll_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93C...
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > it simply points out that 29 books disagree with what's widely accepted in the field The study claims that. The textbooks claim otherwise. Why do you believe the study's claims? (I'd believe Wikipedia less than either.)
  - wuliwong 9y ago
    You could also allow yourself to exist in a gray area where you find this interesting but do not believe you know the exact truth.

lallysingh 9y ago

Sweet! Time to print new editions of all those textbooks! Time to buy a boat.

tokenadult 9y ago

Gottfredson's paper is a paper that I have read, and I see it is being used as the analytical framework for criticizing psychology textbooks. I do research for writing popular writings on psychology, so I have a whole bunch of introductory psychology textbooks in the office where I am typing this, and I have to agree that introductory psychology textbooks leave a LOT to be desired in representing the consensus of modern psychology research. That's true about research on human intelligence and true about any other psychology topic: the introductory textbooks only do a so-so job. That said, one might wonder where to find good information about current psychology research. Sometimes there are review articles that update practitioners on current research, which are incidentally read by scientists in other disciplines. I'll note for the record that not all psychologist agree EITHER with the review article I will link here, but it is a good readable account of current issues in the psychological research on human intelligence and well worth a read for Hacker News participants who are curious about these issues. It refers to many of the most important papers in the field, most of which I have read over the last three decades. Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159. doi:10.1037/a0026699 (Disclaimer: I have met many of the researchers on human intelligence, including Gottfredson, at professional conferences, but my views of what the overall research says and who has the best leads on open research questions are my own.) http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Nisbett(2012)%20.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

mywittyname 9y ago

It seems like there's a subset of psychological researchers that want so bad to debunk the years of research into IQ. I get that there are some uncomfortable implications that arise from accepting IQ as a measure of overall intelligence, but, from my understanding, IQ is an excellent predictor of income, social status, and academic & job performance. My opinion is that we are doing society a huge disservice by dismissing IQ.

iek2929nsn 9y ago
I’m not interested in an individuals IQ predictions I’m interested in theories that accurately model objectively as possible reality If IQ is a good measure for some applications, fine If it’s not when it comes to describing the reality of reality itself, not just contemporary social life, it should be pushed aside for a method that does better
usr999999 9y ago
This is largely anecdotal, so make of it what you will: I've observed high IQ scores to correlate more often with troubled lives than exceptional performance in job and status. It seems to me that these people tend to extremes and environmental aspects play a strong role in how these tendencies develop. Outright dismissing IQ would be detrimental, but its predictive value seems vague beyond some basic observations.
- dmix 9y ago
  It's predictive to an extant. Many people who have taken up the mantel of IQ have taken it too far. And their (largely political) detractors have dismissed them merely because they have taken it too far. But much of it is still true from a more measured perspective. Which has some very inconvenient / awkward implications for many people who are seeking to dismiss it outright, rather than dismiss particular proponents of it... But taking any idea to the extremes, bulldozing over context and constraints of the data, and making grand generalizations from very simple base ideas is the bread and butter of politics, economics, and any bestselling non-fiction. Popular discourse may be a tribal battle between extremes, but real life isn't...
- 9y ago

smallgovt 9y ago

>> To identify factual inaccuracies, Warne’s team used as a benchmark a consensus statement on intelligence research published in 1997 by Linda Gottfredson et al Is the best way to define 'fact' really a twenty year old study? Also, even if the results are believed, it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Afterall, they're reporting an average of 1 factual inaccuracy per book. When each book presents hundreds or thousands of truth claims, is 1 factual inaccuracy per book noteworthy? I'm willing to bet a much larger percentage of the 'scientific consensus' they define as 'fact' is in fact wrong.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tokenadult 9y ago
I know eminent IQ researchers back at the time who declined invitations to sign on to the Gottfredson consensus statement (with good reason, in my opinion). On the other hand, it is still a reasonably fair statement of a lot of the consensus among IQ researchers, but as you say now twenty years out of date. (I read the consensus statement right after it was published.)
prepend 9y ago
The next paragraph explains why. The study is still accurate and they picked something old enough that should be known outside of specialists. If they compared to present day research then naturally many books published over the past 10 years wouldn’t know about it.

nokcha 9y ago

Link to the actual paper: http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-07714-001.pdf http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-07714-001.pdf

tokenadult 9y ago
Thanks for sharing that link. The underlying paper is (of course) better than the popular article kindly submitted to open the interesting discussion here. In particular, the paper makes clear its own methodological limitations.
DanAndersen 9y ago
Thanks! I wasn't sure whether to link the summary blog post or the original paper. Having both is definitely good for the discussions here.
- DanBC 9y ago
  BPS is hit and miss. Sometimes they're great; sometimes they really mangle the science. https://www1.bps.org.uk/networks-and-communities/member-microsite/division-clinical-psychology/understanding-psychosis-and-schizophrenia https://www1.bps.org.uk/networks-and-communities/member-micr... First response from 2014: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/publication-types/report/understanding-psychosis-and-schizophrenia-a-critique-by-laws-langford-and-huda/ https://www.nationalelfservice.net/publication-types/report/... Newer response to updated document from 2017: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/psychosis/understandingpsychosis/ https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/psychosis/u... It's a bit worrying that they get so much wrong.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

onuralp 9y ago

Two comments: - Lay people seem to have a very good intuition about the actual heritability of intelligence (taken to assess the genetic and environmental determinants of intelligence). [0] - If you'd like to read an up-to-date and thorough literature review on human intelligence, I highly recommend "Intelligence: All That Matters" by Stuart Ritchie. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468694

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

Intelligence studies : Left :: Climate science : Right The Left views the expert consensus on intelligence in much the same way that the right views the expert consensus on climate change. The consensus view is rejected not because of evidence, but because of what it does to their model of the world and fear that it will open the door to great abuses in the future (increased government regulation for climate change, and increased racism and discrimination for intelligence studies).

goodroot 9y ago
I find it unusual that one can use a polarized axiom as the basis for what's considered rational thought. Life is deep, unfathomably complex, nuanced, and believe or not, bipartisan. You can introduce more flavour by expanding your window beyond two disparate colours.
- hueving 9y ago
  It's commentary on how politics quickly interfere with rational thought when things hit too close to a key pillar. Particularly after this last presidential election people have made their political leanings a core part of their identity so anything that's a threat to a political belief is an attack on their identity.
gilbetron 9y ago
Climate Science and Psychology are very different types of science. Linking intelligence and race is anti-science, not science. Climate science doesn't need consensus, because it is actual science (not on the level of physics or chemistry, but much closer than Psychology)
- quadrangle 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- gilbetron 9y ago
  So am I downvoted because the downvoters believe race and intelligence is linked, or because we have some staunch Psychology defenders?

closed 9y ago

This may be a bit off the deep end, but in 2014 the Journal of Intelligence had a special issue on the state-of-art for intelligence research (in psychology). It's open access :). http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jintelligence/special_issues/int_where http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jintelligence/special_issues/int...

wuliwong 9y ago
Just to make sure I understood, that link is a collection of hand-picked papers? I expected it to be a review article, summarizing a bunch of past work. Just wanted to be sure that I was looking at the right thing.
- closed 9y ago
  Yeah, that's right--it was a special issue of the journal, where they invited many people to write review articles on intelligence.

abvdasker 9y ago

This doesn't make any sense. He's taking a study over 20 years old designed to measure academic consensus and then using it to try and disprove 29 textbooks authored by leading psychologists. Couldn't the latter be said to be a (much more recent) form of academic consensus? Why should a measure of academic consensus over 20 years old be used as some kind of evidence against newer ideas?

mcguire 9y ago

* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests. That one is true. "This contradicts the 1997 consensus statement which tackles this issue and concludes that “intelligence tests are not culturally biased”." Well, glad we got that out of the way.

Consultant32452 9y ago
There's a ton of evidence that IQ tests are not culturally biased. For example, the SAT is a form of IQ test. So the performance of practically every college student in the country vs their SAT score is available to us. The predictive value of IQ is solid regardless of your own culture or the university in question.
- mcguire 9y ago
  What if both the SAT and "college performance" are biased in the same way?
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Then job performance, income, criminality rates, health and mortality rates are also biased in the same way across cultures and time all around the globe.
nokcha 9y ago
>* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests. >That one is true. In what sense are they "rather arbitrary"? It sounds to me that you might be suggesting that there is little correlation between performance on different IQ tests or different parts of the same IQ test. But the authors of the paper claim (with cited evidence) that "a common g factor accounting for about half of variance on cognitive tasks has been found across many human cultures (e.g., Carroll, 1993; Dolan, 2000; Dolan & Hamaker, 2001; Frisby & Beaujean, 2015; Gurven et al., 2017; Reuning, 1972)".
- 9y ago

skytrue 9y ago

Psychology as a field is one that is constantly becoming out of date. General consensus amongst psychologists often doesn't reach academic text quickly, because of the bureaucracy that exists inside the APA (American Psychological Association). See the controversy around the most recent version of the DSM. I've observed that academics in the field will often take theory as most likely fact, if only because the actual published academic material hasn't caught up yet, but they've all been to the various conferences that are relevant to their particular field (social psychology, cognitive, etc). Any study that is citing materials from over 20 years ago is grossly outdated. Many of the materials from even 10 years ago are becoming outdated. And now, more recently, we've started to examine the racial bias that exists in our systems of research, so I expect past material to come under even further scrutiny.

breck 9y ago
Some people have researched this. I remember reading "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" by Arbesman, and IIRC psychology papers had some of the lowest half-lives of all the sciences. In math the half-life of a paper was something like 85 years, but in pysch it was closer to 10. I forget the exact statistics and don't have the book here but it was pretty interesting. Scientometrics and Eurekometrics are two areas of research that delve into this sort of thing more.

quadrangle 9y ago

The most remarkable thing BY FAR: That some expert(s) are actually looking at and critiquing introductory textbooks! This type of issue is present in nearly every field. Education would be dramatically improved if more actual experts reviewed more of the introductory materials (ideally all the way down to elementary school level).

franciscop 9y ago

One of the most shocking things for me when I went through highschool a decade ago was how new things we learned about maths/physics showed the previous things we learned were not accurate. Things like relativity and time dilation, integrals/derivatives, etc. This was further proved (but not that shocking then) when I went through Engineering in the University with fluid mechanics et al. I think when learning a whole new topic, specially ones experienced at a practical level, we need to start at a point with some broad oversimplifications. Not saying that is what happens here since I know little about psychology, but I would expect the same to apply here. Then we will be ready to dig deeper.

TipVFL 9y ago
When I was in elementary school my dad constantly pointed out that they were teaching me nothing but lies. Sometimes he'd ask me what we were learning and then he'd give me questions to fluster the teacher. Teachers either loved it, or hated it (most hated it). For some topics it makes sense to start with a simplified view, but I don't understand the general trend of insisting it's actually correct while they do it. It's already hard to convince some kids to learn, when they later find out that most of it was lies it has to sap their motivation further. The simple solution, when you're dealing with a simplified/incorrect version of something for educational purposes, admit that's what you're doing, and why. An example of this madness: in my high school physics/chemistry class the teacher asked how many states of matter there are are, I raised my hand and said 4. She said, "Wrong, there are three." I said, "Solid, water, gas, and plasma. Four." Her response, "Look in your book, what does it say? THREE: water, solid, and gas." I told her that plasma is the most common form of matter in the universe and a textbook wouldn't change that. I got detention. I got detention for insisting plasma exists, in a high school science class.
- euyyn 9y ago
  You got detention for not counting Bose-Einstein condensates mate.
- zbyte64 9y ago
  Weird, I had some stupid opinions but never got detention for them. But I also never interrupted class to say science was wrong about radiometric dating and evolution \-0-/

posterboy 9y ago

Those books are written by psychologists, maybe they have a good reason to be ... imprecise, underspecific? Be honest: nobody "knows"; Instigate thought: don't serve the truth on a silver tablet. That seems to be true for every advanced topic. Reverse psychology is still psychology.

ggm 9y ago

When laypeople misuse science and maths, (I am in this context a layperson btw) the consequences depend on the applicability of the subject to ordinary discourse and events. Because I don't work in bomb science, power engineering or nuclear medicine, If I misuse facts about nuclear fission making decisions to hire a new staffer, the consequence is low. Nothing about nuclear fission informs what happens in the workplace. So the colloquial lack of understanding on my part as to what science actually says about nuclear physics is low. When I mis-use understanding of I.Q. and g to make a hiring decision, the consequences are huge for the person hired and the organisation. Assumptions about normative behaviour, likely success, future hiring, application of applied knowledge, ability to learn, all these things have direct meaning and importance. The impact on the hire, or non-hire is also immense. Future promotion, reward, positional authority can all be affected by somebody in the psych space, working in H/R, mis-applying domain-specific knowledge around IQ and intelligence. Its not nuclear physics, but its being mis-applied. Thats the problem. (that it's being mis-applied: not that it isn't nuclear physics. Although a quality of its mis-application is about it not being hard science: its guesswork, rei-fied through G and other statements of single-value measure against an imprecise measurement. I don't actually think social science is well named.)

epx 9y ago

Hard right: everybody should take an IQ test Libertarian right: I take drugs to increase my IQ Libertarian left: there is no IQ Hard left: everybody has the same IQ

drngdds 9y ago

It's probably worth noting that the "consensus statement" cited here was only signed by 52 of the 131 researchers it was sent out to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intell...

notahacker 9y ago
It's also worth noting that judging from the examples provided, the methodological approach of Warne et al. is to suggest textbook authors are guilty of a specified fallacy if they make any statement which appears to conflict with Gotfredsson's listed points in any way (even if that statement is itself cited, quite possibly true and not actually presented as a refutation - fallacious or otherwise - of any claims made about intelligence)

deviationblue 9y ago

Kinda related to this, probably a good idea to re-evaluate EQ while we're at it. Although, my gut feeling is that a healthy mix of IQ and EQ makes good worker bees (if that's the metric we're interested in). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_performance#Emotional_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_performance#Emotional_inte...