Arthur Jensen

Arthur Jensen (August 24, 1923 - present )it is an American Educational Psychologist, major proponent of the hereditarian position.

Student of: Eysenck, Symonds
Influenced by: Burt
Time Period: Current Efforts

Education
University of California, Berkeley, B.A. in psychology (1945)
San Diego State College, M.A. in psychology (1952)
University of Maryland, Psychiatric Institute, Baltimore, MD, clinical internship (1955-1956)
Columbia University, Ph.D. in clinical psychology under Symonds (1956)
University of London, Institute of Psychiatry, postdoctoral research fellow under Eysenck (1956-1958)

Career
University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor and professor (1958-1992); professor emeritus (1992-present)
Kistler Prize for original contributions to the understanding of the connection between the human genome and human society (2003)

Major Contributions
Major proponent of the hereditarian position
Author of more than 300 articles, book chapters and books

Definition of Intelligence
“A working definition of intelligence, then, is that it is the g factor of an indefinitely large and varied battery of mental tests….We are forced to infer that g is of considerable importance in ‘real life’ by the fact that g constitutes the largest component of total variance in all standard tests of intelligence or IQ, and the very same g is by far the largest component of variance in scholastic achievement (Jensen, 1979, pp. 249-50).”

Ideas & Interests
Arthur Jensen’s emergence as an important figure in the history of human intelligence theory occurred in February of 1969, with the publication of a controversial essay in the Harvard Educational Review.  In the article, Jensen presented evidence that racial differences in intelligence test scores may have a genetic origin. This assertion, and Jensen’s concomitant recommendation that white and African-American children might benefit from different types of education, drew strident criticism from many members of the academic community and the public at large (Ciancolo & Sternberg, 2004). Jensen’s interest in this topic began when one of his graduate students noted that the white special education students he was working with appeared to be more genuinely “retarded” than the students from minority groups who had been placed in special education. In fact, it seemed to Jensen’s student that whereas the white children functioned at a low level both inside and outside the classroom, the minority children sometimes appeared “quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal intelligence, except in their scholastic performance and in their performance on a variety of standard IQ tests (Jensen, 1974, p. 222).”  Jensen’s student wanted to know if there were any “culture-free” intelligence tests that might explain the differences he observed in his students. This question spurred several experiments, and the results persuaded Jensen that standard g-loaded intelligence tests are fairly good measures of intellectual ability, and that racial differences in average IQ scores are not due to any “culture unfairness” intrinsic to the tests.  Jensen articulated evidence to support these views in his 1969 article. Jensen accepts Spearman’s idea of a general factor in human intelligence, and his own theory divides intelligence into two distinct sets of abilities:  Level I abilities account for memory functions and simple associative learning, and Level II abilities comprise abstract reasoning and conceptual thought. Jensen concluded from his research that Level I abilities are equally-distributed among the races, whereas white and Asian students demonstrate advantages in tests of Level II abilities. Since Level II abilities appear to be more important for success in school, white and Asian children are at an advantage (Fancher, 1985). In years since the publication of the 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, Jensen has published a large body of empirical research demonstrating that genetic factors are a substantial source of the variance in individual differences in IQ (Fancher, 1985).  Despite the controversial nature of his claims, in 2003 Jensen won the prestigious Kistler Prize for original contributions to the understanding of the connection between the human genome and human society.

Selected Publications

Jensen, A. R.  (1969). How much can we boost I.Q. and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review, 33, 1-123.

Jensen, A. R., (1972). Genetics and education. New York: Harper and Row.

Jensen, A. R. (1973).  Educability and group differences. New York:  Harper and Row.

Jensen, A. R. (1979). Bias in mental testing. New York: Free Press.

Jensen, A. R. (1981). Straight talk about mental tests. New York: Free Press.

Jensen, A. R. (1984). Jensen oversimplified: A reply to Sternberg. Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 7, 125-130.

Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g factor: The science of mental ability. Westport, CN: Praeger.

Jensen, A. R., & Miele, F. (2002).  Intelligence, race and genetics:  Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen.  Boulder, CO:  Westview Press.

References

Cianciolo, A. T., & Sternberg, R. J. (2004).  Intelligence:  A brief history.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing.

Fancher, R. (1985).  The intelligence men:  Makers of the IQ controversy.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Jensen, A. R.  (1969). How much can we boost I.Q. and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review, 33, 1-123.

Jensen, A. R. (1974).  What is the question? What is the evidence?  In T. S. Krawiec (Ed.), The psychologists (Vol.2) (pp. 206-234). Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Jensen, A. R. (1979). Bias in mental testing. New York: Free Press.

Reynolds, C. R. (1994).  Jensen, Arthur R.  In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.). Encyclopedia of human intelligence (pp. 629-631).  New York:  Macmillan.

Cyril L. Burt

Cyril L. Burt (March 3, 1883 - October 10, 1971) was a British Educational Psychologist, investigated differences in intelligence among social classes, gender and race, and the intelligence on separated twins. It was because his research that we discovered later why the children from poorer family gain knowledge slower than ones from middle class and up, and the Ericsson study of 10.000 hours of mastery was indirectly inspired by. He also helped women to fight the gender disparity using a part of his research.

Influences
Student of: McDougall
Influenced by: Galton, Spearman
Students: Eysenck
Influenced: Jensen, Vernon
Time Period: Contemporary Explorations

Education
Oxford Greats Course, Jesus College, Oxford, (1902-1907)
Teachers' Diploma, Jesus College, Oxford (1908)
Studied psychology under Oswald Külpe at the University of Würzburg, Germany (Summer, 1908)

Career
Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Liverpool (1908-1913)
Chief Psychologist, London County Council (1913-1932)
Professor of Educational Psychology, London Day Training Centre (1924-1932)
Charles Spearman Chair of Psychology, University College, London (1932-1950)
First psychologist to be knighted (1946)
Editor and co-editor, British Journal of Statistical Psychology (1947-1963)
Published more than 200 articles after his retirement from teaching (1950-1971)
First British subject to win the (American) Thorndike Prize, (1971)
President of British Psychological Society (1942)

Definition of Intelligence
"…[intelligence] denotes, first of all, a quality that is intellectual and not emotional or moral: in measuring it we try to rule out the effects of the child's zeal, interest, industry, and the like. Secondly, it denotes a general capacity, a capacity that enters into everything the child says or does or thinks; any want of 'intelligence' will therefore be revealed to some degree in almost all that he attempts; a weakness in some limited or specialized ability-for example, in the ability to speak or to read, to learn or to calculate-is of itself by no means a sign of defective intelligence. Thirdly, intelligence is by definition an innate capacity: hence a lack of it is not necessarily proved by a lack of educational knowledge or skill" (Burt, 1957, p. 64-65).

Major Contributions
Founded the field of Educational Psychology in Great Britain by creating and implementing a system for identifying mentally retarded students
Helped to establish the Eleven-Plus testing program in Great Britain
Helped to expand the statistical technique of factor analysis
Advocated for the hereditarian position: He is famous (and notorious) for his conclusions about the intelligence of identical twins reared apart
Investigated differences in intelligence among social classes, gender and race
Published nine books and more than three hundred articles, lectures and book chapters

Ideas & Interests
Sir Cyril Burt remains one of the most complex and intriguing figures in the history of intelligence testing. He was a pioneer of educational psychology in England and was one of the most respected and honored psychologists of his time. However, he had controversial ideas regarding the heritability of intelligence, and there is ample evidence that he used fraudulent data to support his views (Scarr, 1994). Throughout Cyril Burt's lifetime he remained committed to proving that intelligence is primarily and inherited characteristic. His long research career began in 1909 with a study comparing the intelligence of boys enrolled in an elite preparatory academy with the intelligence of boys attending a regular school.* To control for environmental influences, he chose measures (such as mirror drawing) that were unlikely to have been learned during the students' lifetimes. Since the prep school students scored higherr than the other students, he concluded that they had more innate intelligence. Moreover, he noted that the fathers of the prep school boys were more successful than the fathers the other boys. He interpreted this to mean that the prep school boys had benefited from their fathers' superior genetic endowments (Fancher, 1985). Burt did not believe that 100% of intelligence is inherited. In fact, he acknowledged that environmental influences are important. However, he argued that even environmental influences can have genetic causes. In 1922 he wrote:
That children of better social status succeed better with the Binet- Simon scale is not necessarily an objection to that scale; nor is it necessarily a ground for constructing separate norms: for, by birth as well as by home training, children who are superior in social status may be equally superior in genral ability. Conversely, if a child proves defective according to a scale that is otherwise authentic, the mere fact that his family is poor and his dwelling a hovel does not of itself condone his deficiency. His parents' home may be mean precisely because their hereditary intelligence is mean. Whether poverty and its accompaniments affect the child's performances in any direct fashion-whether, for example, in the Binet-Simon tests a child that inherits an abundance of natural ability may be handicapped through a lack of cultural opportunities-is a further and a separate issue (Burt, 1922, p. 192). Later in Burt's life he would be accused of using fraudulent twin data to support the primacy of genetics over envirnoment. Between 1943 and 1966 he published a series of articles on the intelligence of identical twins who had been raised in different homes. Every article confirmed that each set twins' intelligence test scores were extremely similar. After Burt's death critics pointed out several problems with these articles, including: The raw data supporting his results had either disappeared or had never existed, an inability to confirm that his research assistants were indeed real people, extremely unlikely similarities in the correlation coefficients of IQ scores across studies, inconsistencies in the numbers of twins he reported using, and the implausibility of finding 53 sets of identical twins who had been reared apart. Although Burt is famous for his controversial hereditarian views, he took precisely the opposite stance on the issue of juvenile delinquency. Although Burt's family was middleclass, he grew up in a working class area and many of his boyhood friends were from poor families (Fancher, 1985). He was therefore made keenly aware of the environmental conditions which might lead to social and legal problems. While lecturing at Liverpool, he spent some time living in the University Settlement, a housing project on the on the outskirts of a slum. The settlement had been created for the specific purpose of exposing researchers to slum conditions. Burt came away from this experience convinced that juvenile delinquency was not a hereditary blight, but an environmental one. In The Young Delinquent, he lamented that "contagion is all too often mistaken for heredity" (Burt, 1925). In 1926 Burt began advocating for a national testing program that could identify bright children from all socioeconomic levels. He believed that this would establish a meritocracy, giving economically disadvantaged children educational opportunities that they would not otherwise receive. However, since he believed that economically disadvantaged children were also more likely to be genetically disadvantaged, he was convinced that the number of bright lower-class students identified would necessarily be much smaller than the number of bright upper class students. (Fancher, 1985) His proposed testing program was implemented, and a version of it is used in the United Kingdom to this day. Since Burt believed that intelligence is not fixed until children are approximately eleven years old, he suggested that all British students be tested at this age. Results of the "Eleven-Plus" exam would be used to sift students into grammar schools (for the high scorers) or modern schools (for the rest). These school placements were permanent. The Eleven-Plus program proved to be a double-edged sword: Since universities required grammar school training for admission, many lower-class youth received educational opportunities that they might not otherwise have enjoyed. However, most students were placed in the modern schools--ending forever their chances of receiving a university education. (Fancher, 1985). Burt also had environmentalist leanings on the issue of intelligence and race. Like many psychologists of his time, he believed that the European races were intellectually superior to the so-called "savage races". However, he did not attribute this superiority entirely to genetics (Hearnshaw, 1979). In a 1912 Eugenics Review article he stated: "In the case of the individual we found the influence of heredity large and indisputable; in the case of the race, small and controversial." (Burt, 1912) Burt was also interested in gender differences in intelligence. One of his earliest studies investigated the differences in the perceptual and motor skills, reasoning ability, and emotionality of male and female schoolchildren. His research team came to the surprising conclusion that "with few exceptions innate sex differences in mental constitution are astonishingly small--far smaller than common belief and common practice would lead us to expect" (Burt & Moore, 1912). Later in his career he offered evidence from a variety of sources pointing to the superior linguistic capabilities of girls, and suggested that at various periods in their development, girls are intellectually superior to their male counterparts. He noted however, that this superiority is transient, and that the overall cognitive differences between boys and girls are negligible. (Burt, 1922, p. 193). When viewed within the social context extant during this stage of Burt's career, it is reasonable to say that his work helped women to achieve gender parity within the school system. (Hearnshaw, 1979). *His experimental design did not actually allow for a direct comparison of the two groups. His conclusions were based on interpretations of data from within each group.

Selected Publications:
Burt, C. (1909). Experimental tests of general intelligence. British Journal of Psychology, 3, 94-177.
Burt, C. (1921). Mental and scholastic tests. London: P.S. King and Son.
Burt, C. (1935). The subnormal mind. London: Oxford University Press.
Burt C. (1940). The factors of the mind: An introduction to factor analysis in psychology. London: University of London Press.
Burt, C. (1957). The causes and treatments of backwardness (4th ed.). London: University of London Press.
Burt, C. (1975). The gifted child. New York: Wiley.

References:
Burt, C.L. (1912). The inheritance of mental characteristics. Eugenics Review, 4, 168-200.
Burt, C.L. (1925). The young delinquent. London: University of London Press.
Burt, C. (1957). The causes and treatments of backwardness (4th ed.). London: University of London Press.
Burt, C.L., & Moore, R.C. (1912). The mental differences between the sexes. Journal of Experimental Ped., 1, 273-84, 355-88.
Fancher, R.E. (1985). The intelligence men: Makers of the IQ controversy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979). Cyril Burt, Psychologist. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univerisity Press.
Scarr, S. (1994). Burt, Cyril L. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), Encyclopedia of intelligence (Vol. 1). (pp. 231-234). New York: Macmillan.
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