Race and IQ

One of the flaws of any intelligence test is that it does not, and cannot, take into account the mood of the person whose intellect is being evaluated. Educational psychologists have long known that attitude can have a pronounced effect on the score. The same person, retested, may raise or lower his IQ by as many as 20 points depending on how he feels--challenged, anxious, bored. Even his feelings toward the person giving the test can be a factor. In the case of the black student, writes British Psychologist Peter Watson in New Society magazine, this variation is of great significance. In Watson's view, it can account for part or all of the 15 points by which Negroes generally fall behind whites in IQ tests--a gap that has been repeatedly stressed as evidence that blacks are intellectually inferior for genetic reasons.

Watson cites a study he made of black West Indian students at an interracial secondary school in East Ham, a London working-class neighborhood. When the examination was correctly identified as an IQ test, the students scored an average of ten points lower than when the exercise was falsely described as an experiment to help plan curriculum. Watson, who is white, also found that scores typically climbed when the IQ test--identified as such--was given by his assistant, "a very black West Indian Negro."

The East Ham study got its inspiration from earlier work by an American psychologist, Irwin Katz, now at the Graduate Center of New York's City University. Katz devised a series of experiments to determine, among other things, the effect on IQ performance of being black in a white-dominated society. As in East Ham, Katz's black subjects did better when they were deceived into believing that their intelligence was not being tested--that is, when the test was described as a simple drill in eye-hand coordination. In fact, when they were freed of anxiety about intellectual performance, the black students registered higher IQ scores under a white test giver than under a black one.

Katz concluded that his subjects were thoroughly aware of the judgment of intellectual inferiority held by many white Americans. With little expectation of overruling this judgment, their motivation was low, and so were their scores. Hence when the IQ test was disguised as something else, the human ambition to do well--which has nothing to do with color--could take wing. And as long as their intelligence was not being evaluated, Psychologist Katz's subjects felt more challenged to succeed before a white examiner than before one of their own kind.

Academic Storm. The findings by Katz and Watson undermine the notion that race and intellect can be glibly linked. They also challenge the hypothesis of Berkeley Psychologist Arthur R. Jensen that in some forms of intelligence the Negro is genetically doomed to a lower position than the white. This proposition, published last year in the Harvard Educational Review, provoked an academic storm that has yet to subside.

Neither Watson nor Katz denies that intelligence is in part hereditary. They say only that until the science of genetics develops more precise instruments, there is no sure way to measure heredity's contribution to human intelligence. Consequently, hypotheses about the effect of race on intellect remain unproved.

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