Is Non-racial IQ Research Being Strangled?

Andrew Sullivan complains that it is:

It's been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism. The reason is the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data, perhaps most definitively proven by UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen [...}

The right response to unsettling data is to probe, experiment and attempt to disprove them - not to run away in racial panic. But the deeper problem is that the racial aspects of IQ have prevented non-racial research into intelligence, and how best to encourage, study and understand it.

In support of his case, Sullivan cites an article entitled: IQ Blackout: Why Did Studying Intelligence Become Taboo? The author quotes UCLA post-doc researcher, Dennis Garlick. Dr. Garlick has some major publications under his belt. It doesn't seem to me that there is a professional blackout being imposed on his work, which, by the way, looks quite interesting.

Perhaps there has been a decline in funding of research into general intelligence (no numbers are cited in the article), but a Google Scholar search of the terms intelligence genetics, for example, turns up 25,200 results for the past 5 years. For the search terms intelligence MRI, I find 21,400 results in the last 5 years.

My suspicion is that the area of neuropsych and brain research has grown so large, costly and complex in recent years, that if there is a decline in funding, it might be because the piece of the research-funding pie going to the study of intelligence has fallen simply because of competition for resources. There's a helluva a lot of brain research going on out there. Not only is that research sucking up money, it's also drawing a lot of talented people to newly emerging areas of brain and mind investigation.

And digging a little further into Google Scholar, I see that the search results don't indicate that the WAIS-R has been seriously neglected. Sixty-seven hundred publications reference it or employ parts of the WAIS-R as measures for study during the past 5 years.

The results from year to year are fairly stable back to 1992, which is as far back as the Google scholar index goes.

A search of Stanford Binet yields 5,670 results in the last five years, and there are 16,200 results for the terms: Kaufman intelligence. Even more results turn up in a search for the WISC, which is to be expected given that IQ tests are most heavily used with children for diagnostic evals. Since 2006, publications reference the WISC 23,700 times.

Is this strangled non-racial research or research that is of no interest to Andrew Sullivan? Actually, I imagine he's just unaware. So much of the public discussion of intelligence has been politically motivated.

The focus in the political discussion has been on Full Scale IQ score, that single number that fascinates many lay people. FSIQ is of relatively limited clinical utility. There are circumstances in which that number is diagnostically relevant to a referral question and to our recommendations, but in my experience, it is not particularly relevant for most cases. Yes, you can say that someone with an IQ of 85 isn't going to be up to college level work, or that someone with an IQ of 130 has a great deal of intellectual capacity, but more often we're interested in specific cognitive functions, and we're looking for patterns of relative strengths and weakness across numerous functions to develop our diagnostic hypotheses. Within the WAIS itself, different scatterings of scores among the subtests often point us to much more important information than the FSIQ score which may tell us nothing about what we need to know.

For example, if we see someone whose vocabulary and level of factual information would be typical of an examinee with a Full Scale IQ in the 90th percentile, while scores on subtests that tap attention and concentration fall in the 30th percentile, we may be seeing an indication of relatively recent neurological impairment. Performance on the former measures are more strongly related to long-term functioning while the latter are more vulnerable to recent injury and dysfunction.

It's much more complicated than that, but I'm just trying to illustrate how different the public discussions of intelligence and intelligence testing are from the direction of research that is clinically most powerful.

Update:

My additional comment on Sullivan's subsequent defense of his position.

Update: and my final thought here.

Comments

[jon]

There are a lot of interesting things raised here - nice post.

I think that one additional factor that's relevant to the discussion is that government funding of scientific research overall has declined over the past 5 years. There was a time not long ago when 15-20% of grants submitted to the National Institutes of Health were being funded; now it's down to about 6 or 7%. There's a lot of important research that isn't being funded (perhaps this is necessary in the current economic crisis; I don't know).

As you rightly point out, it may also be that priorities have shifted away from the IQ research of the type that the author is describing.

Having said that, is it possible that a reviewer of a scientific journal or a reviewer on a federal grant panel might have a negative bias toward IQ research that might turn out results that suggest racial differences unaccounted for by environmental variables? I think that's possible. I serve on a grant panel (for basic neurobiological work, mostly in animal subject, not the type of work that tends to have political implications). Still, biases of reviewers can come into play - sometimes unfairly. Psychology researchers tend to be a pretty progressive group (myself included) and it's possible that some can take on the inappropriate role of intellectual defenders against reactionary views.

Ideally, politics doesn't play into prioritizing science. For the reasons you mentioned, its possible that there is no effort to squelch the IQ work. On the other hand, I think it's a realistic concern.

[SMA]

Thanks for some much needed perspective. Sullivan's concerns are reasonable, but it's evident that he accepted his own premise with checking it against any data.

[JL]

The focus in the political discussion has been on Full Scale IQ score, that single number that fascinates many lay people. FSIQ is of relatively limited clinical utility.

Perhaps, but Sullivan is clearly interested in IQ as a social science variable, i.e. as a predictor of social outcomes a la The Bell Curve, so subscale scores are less important to him than that the FSIQ. For clinicians the subscale scores may be more relevant (although many of their interpretative efforts verge on quackery).

Whether the race thing has led to a drying up of funding for IQ research in general is an empirical question, and I don't know the answer for certain. I would however say that in recent decades a bias against racial-genetic explanations in academe has meant that lots of research on the question has either not been done at all or at least has not been published. Lots of rather silly research has also been funded simply because it has promised to challenge the traditional psychometric approach to intelligence. It's also clear that there's very little funding available for anyone who wants to study if the racial gap is genetic in origin.

For some historian of science, it would be an interesting topic to study how the bias against genetic explanations has distorted research in social and behavioral sciences.

[Dr X]

although many of their interpretative efforts verge on quackery

How often do you read clinical reports and in what capacity do you read them? What do you see so often that verges on quackery? I ask because in my experience, seeing patients who've undergone assessments and in other work I've done where I review a large number of reports, interpretations are generally conservative and they don't occur in a vacuum. You wouldn't take one score difference and run with it, but you'd be interested in a pattern of relative weakness and strengths across a range of tests and observations. Thus my comment that it's much more complex than the example I offered.

[M Pearlstein]

***IQ have prevented non-racial research into intelligence***

In the 1970's I understand it was difficult even to get funding for twin studies. More recently, Linda Gottfredson's article about academic freedom, available on her faculty page, discusses efforts by her university to break her tenure when her IQ studies touched on ethnic differences.

Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending & Jason Hardy published a paper in 2006 hypothesising how high measured iq of ashkenazi jewish people arose. Steven Pinker has written that this could be tested reasonably easily, but the study has never happened. Presumably because of political reasons.

Also, a talk at Havard Medical School on the genetic basis of variation in mental ability was mysteriously canceled.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/11/talk-cancelled.html

[Chalice Wilkreson]

I also saw the Sullivan discussion and you have said what was troubling me - the assumption that a score on an IQ tests tell you all you need to know and therefore had explanatory power for differing racial outcomes [when there are so many other factors that could impact outcomes] - IQ has been used and abused and needs a much more nuanced approach than that used by Jensen et. al. and most importantly a distinction between science and political use of this data. Thanks.