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Thread ID: 8509 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-07-27
2003-07-27 09:39 | User Profile
From the Human Races Archive site: The intelligence of American Jews [url=http://www26.brinkster.com/archived/viewnews.asp?newsID=189663112164]http://www26.brinkster.com/archived/viewne...ID=189663112164[/url]
Author: Richard Lynn Filed: 4/2/2003, 7:14:31 PM Source: Personality and Individual Differences doi:10.1016/S0191-8869(03)00079-5
Received 18 March 2002; revised 15 May 2002; accepted 27 January 2003. ; Available online 26 March 2003
Abstract
This paper provides new data on the theory that Jews have a higher average level of verbal intelligence than non-Jewish whites. The theory is considered by examining the vocabulary scores of Jews, non-Jewish whites, blacks and others obtained in the American General Social Surveys carried out by the National Opinion Research Centre in the years 1990âââ‰â¬Å1996. Vocabulary size is a good measure of verbal intelligence. Jews obtained a significantly higher mean vocabulary score than non-Jewish whites, equivalent to an IQ advantage of 7.5 IQ points. The results confirm previous reports that the verbal IQ of American Jews is higher than that of non-Jewish whites.
Author Keywords: Jews; Intelligence
The results provide seven points of interest. First, they confirm the previous studies showing that American Jews have a higher average verbal intelligence level than non-Jewish whites. Second, the 7.5 IQ point Jewish advantage is rather less than that generally proposed and found in the studies reviewed in the introduction finding that Jews have verbal IQs in the range of 110âââ‰â¬Å113 but is closely similar to the figure of 107.8 obtained in the Bachman study which is arguably the most satisfactory of the previous studies in terms of the size and representativeness of the sample.
Third, the present data has strengths in comparison with a number of previous studies in so far as they are based on a nationally representative and reasonably large sample size of 150 Jews and 5300 gentile whites. The very close similarity between the present result and the Bachman result suggests that the best reading of the verbal IQ of American Jews is 107.5 (present study) or 107.8 (Bachman). These figures are well below previous estimates of Jewish verbal ability.
Fourth, an average verbal IQ of 107.5 would confer a considerable advantage for American Jews in obtaining success in professional work. There would be approximately four times as many Jews with IQs above 130, compared with gentile whites. This may provide a plausible explanation for the 4.8 over-representation of Jews listed in American reference books of the successful such as Who's Who, American Men and Women of Science, The Directory of Directors, The Directory of Medical Specialists and the like and calculated by Weyl (1989).
Fifth, the small difference of 1.4 IQ points between the non-Jewish whites and the "other" category is not statistically significant or very informative. The category is largely made up of Hispanics and Asians, who are themselves a heterogeneous category. Hispanics have mean IQs below whites (e.g. Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), East Asians have about the same IQ as whites ( Flynn, 1992) or slightly higher than whites ( Lynn,1995), while South Asians have mean IQs lower than those of whites according to the calculations of Flynn (1992). Aggregating these groups produces a combined mean very close to that of non-Jewish whites.
Sixth, despite some three-quarters of a century of research and quite a number of papers on the intelligence of American Jews there is still a lot of useful research to be done on this question. Probably the best approach would be to analyse Jewish abilities in terms of the construct of g and of the eight second order cognitive factors in the taxonomy of intelligence proposed by Carroll (1993) and the similar taxonomy advanced by McGrew and Flanagan (1998). These second order factors are fluid intelligence (reasoning), crystallized intelligence (verbal comprehension and knowledge), general memory and learning, visualization, broad retrieval ability, cognitive speed and processing speed. Probably all that can be concluded with a fair degree of confidence at present is that Jews have high crystallized intelligence (verbal ability) of which the vocabulary test used in the present study is a good measure and that on this ability their IQ in relation to gentile whites is approximately 107.5. The Backman (1972) study provides IQs for several of the second order factors (given in the introduction to this paper) but these are so variable and in some instances so low as to raise doubts about their credibility. It is difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a non-verbal reasoning IQ of 91.3, and at the same time a mathematical IQ ("quantitative reasoning" in the McGrew and Flanagan taxonomy) of 109.7. It is also difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a verbal IQ of 107.8 while at the same time having a short term verbal memory IQ of 95.1. These results are in need of checking and replication. At present it is doubtful whether any conclusion can be reached about the intelligence of American Jews except that their verbal intelligence or, if this is preferred, their gc (crystallized intelligence) is about 107.5.
Seventh, the factors responsible for the high Jewish verbal IQ raise interesting questions. It has been proposed by MacDonald (1994) that these lie in centuries of eugenic customs, especially the high status and high fertility of rabbis, a group with high verbal intelligence whose high fertility could have promoted the increase of genes for verbal intelligence in Jewish populations. While there are no strong data on the fertility of rabbis, there can be little doubt that it must have been higher than that of clerics in Christian gentile populations that have been required to be celibate for much of the last 2000 years. Another factor that has sometimes been suggested to explain the high intelligence of the Jews is the frequent persecutions to which these have been subjected during the last 2000 years, which the more intelligent may have anticipated and escaped by migration while the less intelligent may have been less able to anticipate the dangers of the situation and would have been killed. However, it is difficult to see how this could have acted differentially on verbal intelligence and not (if Backman's result is accepted) on non-verbal reasoning. Environmental explanations for the high Jewish IQ are difficult to find. Even if it is supposed that Jews provide their children with a good environment for fostering the intelligence of their children, there is a problem in providing an explanation for why they do this. Furthermore, it is not well-established that within family environmental factors have any long term effect on intelligence. The high IQ of the Jews also raises a problem for those such as Scarr (1995) who maintain that racial discrimination is an important cause of the low IQ of blacks. Jews have suffered a great deal of discrimination over the last 2000 years but it has apparently not had an adverse effect on their intelligence or at least on their verbal intelligence.
2003-07-27 09:39 | User Profile
I've already posted this before.