However, at the risk of further thread drift, I have to comment on Amp’s summary in #42:
“Oddly enough, white private school students become less popular with their white peers once their GPA gets above 2.0. (The popularity of blacks at private schools is not related to their grades).”

I wonder if the GPA of 2.0 is correct or a misprint, Amp. However, I can vouch for the inverse correlation of very high grades and popularity for white private school students, having been one myself. Geeks, especially female geeks, are viewed as weirdos and as social liabilities. Ever has it been thus, at least in the US. That’s why I don’t pay much attention to the blaming of blacks for the “acting white” stigma - the general culture, both black and white, reveres the jock, not the egghead.

It sounds to me that what you are saying is that cultural bias doesn’t have much to do with IQ tests, but in with intellectual pursuits in general. It sounds like you think the questions are not structured in a way as to be culturally biased at all. If I understand your position, that seems more likely, but…

I admit I am no expert in the area, but it seems to me that testing “intelligence”, if that is the goal, shouldn’t depend on a lot of factual knowledge gained in school (of course beyond a minimal level like learning the language of the test and basic math skills, etc), but the ability to accept, understand, process, and apply information given basic principles. Does that ability change much from a 13 year old child to an adult? If not, and it might be my ignorance in this area, your Nona shouldn’t be hindered by her lack of education on an IQ test.

As I alluded to in an above post, I don’t think IQ tests tell everything about how smart someone is. I think they certainly show important parts of the whole picture. Again, if someone consistently scores around 60 on an IQ test, is there going to be much doubt in your mind that that person probably isn’t as bright as most people, in general?

* A curious aside: I have always been curious about what Newton (imho one of the smartest people in recorded history) would have been like if he had been raised by nomadic Eskimos in relative isolation. Would we even know his name? Certainly there is the Indian example of another great natural genius Ramanujan. But while he was to some extent self-taught he wasn’t raised in complete isolation from textbooks and schools.

The differences in group IQ performance are predicated on (and predictable by) the local immersive culture that a youth is exposed to. Black kids whose peers torment them for acting white if they come to class on time score worse on IQ tests than do black kids from certain neighborhoods in NYC whose parents beat the hell out of them for getting to class late.

The best empirical research on “acting white” penalties for high grades is a paper a couple of Harvard folks published last year (pdf link). While those authors concluded that “acting white” does exist, the data doesn’t exactly match up with what you’re describing.

* For black students, the higher their GPA - up to 3.5 - the more Black friends they have. It’s only after GPA gets above 3.5 that the number of Black friends decreases. But a 3.5 is actually a very good GPA by most standards; so it’s hardly true - as most pop writings about “acting black” have it - that just cracking a book open or getting good grades will cause black students to be “tormented” by their black peers.

So you could just as easily claim, looking at the evidence, that black peer culture rewards good grades for all but the very top of the class, and that even for those making a 4.0, they are still - although less well-regarded than those making a 3.5 - better regarded than peers who get poor grades.

* The Harvard folks were only able to find measurable effects of “acting white” problems in public schools in which blacks were a 20% or less minority. In 80% and up black public schools, there is no “acting white” penalty associated with good grades - at least, none that was able to be measured. In all-black schools, the most popular students are the ones with the best grades. So if “acting white” penalities cause lower IQ scores, why don’t blacks students at mostly-black schools have markedly higher IQ scores than black students at mostly-white schools?

* High-achieving black girls had significantly less popularity drop-off than high-achieving black boys.

* Oddly enough, white private school students become less popular with their white peers once their GPA gets above 2.0. (The popularity of blacks at private schools is not related to their grades). What this means, I don’t know, but it indicates that “acting white” penalties are not, by themselves, capable of explaining the complex ways race, GPA and popularity interact.

* The “acting white” penalty problem appears much more severe among Hispanic students than among Black students.

* * *

There are, I have no doubt, multiple causes for lower Black IQ scores on average. One of those causes - and one that has FAR more empirical support than the “acting white penalty’ hypothosis - is “stereotype threat.”

Here’s Claude Steele describing a typical study aimed at measuring stereotype threat:

So we give them, what you saw this afternoon is people taking a particularly frustrating test. It’s a very difficult test taken from a section of the Graduate Record Examination in literature. We know it’s going to cause frustration and that is going to trigger the relevance of the stereotype. When they experience that frustration, they’ll sense, oh boy, I could be seen stereotypically here. I could be confirming the stereotype. And for the students you saw who are very strong students, very committed to succeeding in school, that prospect of being seen stereotypically is disturbing. And it can undermine their performance right there. And that’s generally what happens. Compared to white students in that situation, they in that situation are not subject to that kind of a stereotype. And so they may be haunted by all kinds of things with regard to performing on standardized tests, but they’re not haunted by the prospect of confirming this stereotype. So you get two groups of students, white, black, who are equally prepared. Equal skills, everything. You give them this very difficult test that is presented as diagnostic of ability. The black student has this extra pressure on performance. And that is in our research invariably reflected in lower performance.

Then you shift conditions just with the touch of a change of the instructions, you present the same test as a test that is something we use to study problem solving in the laboratory and is not diagnostic of ability. That turns the stereotype off for the black student. Now as the black student experiences frustration on this test, it has nothing to do with the prospect of confirming a stereotype or being seen from the standpoint of the stereotype. And if that pressure of being seen stereotypically is enough to depress their performance, then taking off that pressure should increase their performance. And that’s what happens in this research. Presenting the same test as non-diagnostic of ability, black students perform just as well as equally prepared white students in that situation.

Yeah, that would be my assumption too. Unless your friend kicked the smack or something in the timeframe, then the testing method was poor.

Which means that the testing method was poor; it doesn’t say anything about IQ testing in general. It says that one (or both) of his testers fucked up, or that he himself was screwing around, or some other confounding variable was operative.

The difficulty with your koan-based IQ test example is that presumes a separate culture which is not accessible to Americans. (Which is largely true - while individual Americans who are motivated to seek out knowledge of koans are capable of doing so, the number who are so motivated is very small, and the rewards for doing so not obvious.) Yeah, Americans would do badly on a test culturally themed around a Korean idea that we don’t use much. But so what?

In the case of testing within our own national group, there is no such separate cultural matrix. White Appalachian Catholic children are exposed to the concepts of numerical progression and time management, as are black Methodists in Texas, Asian Presbyterians in Minnesota, and Jewish agnostics in California. WASP kids in Connecticut aren’t being taught secret knowledge denied to 1st generation Sicilian immigrants; they’re just listening to the same knowledge better.

The old racial theories about IQ can be dismissed. The differences in group IQ performance are predicated on (and predictable by) the local immersive culture that a youth is exposed to. Black kids whose peers torment them for acting white if they come to class on time score worse on IQ tests than do black kids from certain neighborhoods in NYC whose parents beat the hell out of them for getting to class late. Groups whose immersive local culture - the group of peers, parents, role models and teachers - inculcate intellectual skills do well, and those whose immersive cultures don’t, do poorly.

The Flynn effect dovetails neatly with this phenomenon, as it reflects that by and large, once freed from gross discrimination, each generation puts more emphasis on education and learning than their parents did, because people can empirically see that doing so produces better outcomes for kids, and people love their kids and want them to succeed. Generally there is only so much improvement that can be done in a generation; my great-grandparents were dirt farmers, and by God they saw to it that Nona learned to read. Nona was a shopkeeper, and by God she saw to it that my mom got the chance to go to college. My mom was a schoolteacher, and by God she made sure that I went to the best school I could handle. Betcha a million bucks that IQ testing would show the Flynn pattern of improvements in our family in each subsequent generation. I would way outscore Nona on an IQ test - but she’s a shrewd old bird, and while I’m somewhat intrinsically smarter than she is, it’s not nearly as great a difference as the tests would show. I just got raised a lot better, mentally speaking.

Everybody can read Shakespeare and everybody learns to tell time. Some kids get ego reinforcement for reading Shakespeare and being prompt, and some kids don’t. That is sufficient to explain the group differences, from what I can see. It’s regrettable - tragic even - but it doesn’t make the tests invalid or worthless. Adults who as kids were trained to ignore time boundaries, avoid books, and devalue abstract knowledge are less competitive in the arenas considered important by predictive tracking (what we correlate IQ tests too) - the symbolic economy, and its educational parallel universe.

The tests do have cultural bias - they are biased against people who haven’t adequately assimilated their culture. That failure may well not be their fault, but it reflects a genuine difference in functional ability. In your koan example, the Americans who do poorly on the koan test ARE stupid - if they’re in a country where being able to manipulate koans is of utility.

Ability to function in the majority culture is a legitimate component of intelligence, just as ability to function in/relate to subcultures is a legitimate component of intelligence. Even more valid is the ability to on-the-fly assess which cultural expectation is appropriate in a particular context.

Except that this isn’t what IQ tests are claimed to test. You can take the fact that the do also test that (okay, only the dominant culture part) and try to claim it is a positive, so if lower average scores for blacks as a group on IQ scores are a valid reflection of active racism on the part of test designers and givers, the lower test scores are accurate in so far as IQ is now a measure of how well you can (and that includes ‘are allowed to’) function in the dominant culture. The same racist bias of the IQ designers and proctors (my understanding is that many IQ tests are more heavily proctored than simple multiple choice or fill in the blank tests) is also present in the general White population, so the lowered IQ scores would accurately correlate to life outcomes (if your IQ scores are the victim of bias, so will be ther rest of your life), but to then call it intelligence seems dubious. “I’m just glad I was smart enough to be born into the dominant group.” Nu-uh.

If a particular group of people do badly on a particular test, that either means that the test is biased against that group in some way, or it means that what that test measures is something that group is deficient in. However, other than measuring people’s ability to take a specific test, tests are not perfect instruments, so if a particular group of people, who you have no other reason to think are deficient in the characteristic that the test is attempting to measure, get poor results on the test, then you can conclude that what the test is actually measuring is contaminated with something that that group of people are deficient in. Thus, the koan based IQ test, which does well for measuring the intelligence of people who have been raised working with and thinking about koans, will show Americans to be not very intelligent. Now, if one considers Americans to be abnormally stupid, then one will trumpet the koan IQ results as proof of one’s assumptions. However, if one doesn’t see any reason to think that Americans are particularly stupid, then one might suspect that there are cultural biases built into the koan IQ test.

The genuinely-held belief that a picture of an apple is the expected answer to a numerical sequence is indicative of a profound cultural skills deficit in an individual - whether that deficit lies in unfamiliarity with mathematical logic, or whether the deficit lies in the ability to recognize whether a mental set based on logic or a mental set based on experience is the appropriate set to employ. Whether it is “fair” to measure or score that deficit is not particularly material; the deficit exists, and will correlate strongly to an individual’s ability to function intellectually.

Which, every question on an IQ test should.

Sure, if given the sequence 1/2; 1/4; 1/16 on some test and asked to give an answer for the next logical unit I suppose I could draw a picture of an “Apple” and explain that “well, that’s the how many pieces are there when I cut each piece of my apples in half in each step.” Sorry, no matter how many smiley face stickers you get on a math test such an approach would be incorrect in the context of the question.

But understanding the context and intent of the question is entirely a matter of culture. Someone raised on logical sequence problems as a family game knows intuitively what is being asked for. Someone who has never seen a logical sequence problem before may well give the apple answer. They saw how the number sequence was strucutred, but they didn’t know how to frame the answer. It sort of like someone playing Jepordy who has never watched the show before, “What do you mean, ‘phrase the answer as a question,’ what the hell kind of sense does that make?”

Just because you are used to the way that logical sequence questions are structured (don’t tell me the rule of the sequence, or something that the sequence reminds you of, tell me the next number in the sequence using the most likely logical sequence rules) doesn’t mean it isn’t entirely culture bound. If you took a IQ test in a culture that valued the ability to construct koan-like metaphysial responses (something that smarter people will be able to do better than stupid people, for some meaningful sense of smart and stupid) we would both probabaly test out as seriously mentally deficient. And, if corelation with life outcomes is the best proof for the valididty of IQ, I’d point out that we’d also probably both be failures in such a culture. Would that mean we weren’t smart?

That the example you give as proof of it not being culture laden is so totally culture laden is certainly proof of something.

Also, you are still ignoring the fact that unless the test is perfect, radfem’s argument from how it is actually used still stands, even if it also serves as a passable test for some sense of intelligence.

Honestly, not even a little convincing.

First, it doesn’t seem like the kind of question on an intelligence test. Knowing Jackson was the next president (yes I had to google) is more about what you have learned in history class rather than something you can figure out on the fly using logic or reading comprehension (which is something IQ tests generally try to do). If that question was on an actual modern IQ test I would say its a lousy question.

Secondly, even assuming it was an actual IQ test question, would Asians somehow have a cultural advantage over whites and blacks about knowing the order of US presidents?

Sample question from IQ test: what’s the next word in this sequence?

Madison, Monroe, Adams, ?

Convincing enough for you?

Could try to explain that and maybe give some examples of culturally biased logic questions? In my opinion, understanding the question in context (very important) is an indicator of intelligence and is the first step to a reasonable answer.

Sure, if given the sequence 1/2; 1/4; 1/16 on some test and asked to give an answer for the next logical unit I suppose I could draw a picture of an “Apple” and explain that “well, that’s the how many pieces are there when I cut each piece of my apples in half in each step.” Sorry, no matter how many smiley face stickers you get on a math test such an approach would be incorrect in the context of the question.

But if instead someone answers 1/32, that would not be any less correct then 1/256. The question was ambiguous. Though more than one answer is correct, there are certainly wrong answers in the context of the question and part of intelligence is understanding that no matter your cultural background.

I read somewhere in some book that some kid was asked on a test to explain the steps he could take to use a barometer to measure the height of a building. If I remember this correctly he replied something like: “throw it off the top of the building and insert the time it takes to hit the ground in to this formula “. Then the teacher confronted him as told him that’s not the answer he wanted and gave the kid the opportunity to try again. The kid replied: “Set the instrument on the ground and make a mark at the top of the instrument. Then raise the bottom of the instrument to the line and make another mark at the top of the instrument again. Keep going up the side of the building until you get to the top…” Again confronted by the teacher the kid had several other novel ways to use the instrument to measure the height of the building (such as tying a string to the barometer, lowering in down until it touched the ground then measuring the string, etc). The point is, although the question was a little ambiguous, the kid was certainly bright enough to know the answer that teacher was looking for but purposefully chose not to.

Now maybe there are some cultural influences that might come up on the language portions of tests, but I have yet to see that demonstrated in a clear and convincing way (assuming of course that the test taker and the test use the same basic language). Otherwise it would seem that Asians, Indians (not native Americans), and other distinctly different cultures that routinely score high on IQ tests would suffer from some cultural bias as well.

On the other hand, being able to explain your rule by which you chose the next thing makes it less culture bound, except that it then adds on a layer of culture and education bound explaining skills, and the opportunity for prejudice on the part of the evaluator. Also, of course, if there actually is a cultural difference, then a reason that makes sense in my culture may seem completely screwy in yours.

That’s curious since I believe (and correct me if I am wrong) that Asians score higher and as high as whites and has been shown elsewhere women, on average, score about the same as men, but there seems to be more men on the edges (scoring both higher and lower).

I am not sold that IQ tests are a reliable measure of how “smart” someone is, but I think they might be an indicator.

As an example Richard Feynman (a brilliant physicist who stood out among a group very smart people) only had a tested IQ of 125. Respectable number, but it in no way would have been a predictor of how “smart” that man was.

All that said, some ARE smarter than other people. If someone scores a 60 on an IQ test is there really any doubt in anyone’s mind that that person, what ever their racial make up, is mentally handicapped (or at least not as bright as most people)? Intelligence tests do measure SOMETHING don’t they? Being able to pick out the next logical item in a sequence doesn’t seem particularly biased to me. Surely such an ability in some way is a reflection of how smart someone might be. To what extent, I don’t think anyone really knows.

The tests aren’t flawed in the least bit, as they are doing exactly what they were intended to do: *prove* that White people are innately smarter than non-White people and that men are inately smarter than women.

But you know what? I did see one occasion where there were allowances given for the fact that Black people score lower than White people due to nonbiological or inate reasons, and that was during the “mental retardation”(which is what it’s called in legal terms, since the Atkins decision though they could have chosen better words) phase of a death penalty trial with a defendent who scored in the mid-sixties on a Worchester test with 70 being the cut-off score. In his argument that the defendant wasn’t “mentally retarded” and thus unable to be executed, he said that he should be given 14 points in his score due to his race and discrimination involving the IQ test, putting his IQ well above the cutoff score on the “death” side.

So don’t ever say that there aren’t people out there who are concerned about social/cultural/educational influences on IQ scores among different races. ***roll eyes***

The Goopers look for ways to disqualify ballots disproportionately in majority-black districts or disqualify voter registrations in urban or majority-black districts since the GOP benefits from low turnout in those areas. Remember the Ohio GOP Secy of State made voter registration only valid if the voter registration cards were only heavy high quality paper stock, making it difficult for people to register anywhere else but at state offices, and making outreach efforts to register, perfectly legal in the state, very difficult in practice. This lasted about 2 days before the judge threw it out as patently violating Voting Rights Act. If rural whites were disproportionately under-registered or were first-time voters making the overvote, the GOP would move Heaven and Earth to make sure these folks faced no obstacles in registration or that their overvote would be counted according to their intention.