Race and intelligence: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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It is not universally accepted that intelligence is something that can be unequivocally measured by a single figure.<ref name="Schacter, Gilbert & Wegner 2007, pp 350-1">{{harvnb|Schacter|Gilbert|Wegner|2007|pp=350–1}}</ref> Different societies value and promote different kinds of skills, hence manifestations of intelligence are culturally variable and cannot be measured by the same criteria in different societies.<ref name="Schacter, Gilbert & Wegner 2007, pp 350-1"/> The overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis.<ref name="Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd 2005">{{harvnb|Sternberg|Grigorenko|Kidd|2005}}</ref>

In relation to the study of racial differences in IQ test scores it becomes a crucial question what exactly it is that IQ tests measure. Arthur Jensen, a man often criticized for his white supremacist pseudoscience by the SPL and other, was a proponent of the view that there is a correlation between scores on all the known types of IQ tests and that this correlation points to an underlying factor of [[general intelligence]], or ''g''. In most conceptions of ''g'' it is considered to be fairly fixed in a given individual and unresponsive to training or other environmental influences. In this view test score differences, especially in those tasks considered to be particularly "g-loaded" reflect the test takers innate capability.

Other psychometricians argue that, while there may or may not be a general intelligence factor, performance on tests rely crucially on knowledge acquired through prior exposure to the types of tasks that such tests contain. This view would mean that tests cannot be expected to reflect only the innate abilities of a given individual, because the expression of potential will always be mediated by experience and cognitive habits. It also means that comparison of test scores from persons with widely different life experiences and cognitive habits is not an expression of their relative innate potentials.{{sfn|Mackintosh|2011|p=359}}