RESEARCH

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The history of research on the genetics of intel- ligence is fraught with social bias. During the eugenics era, the hereditary theory of intelligence

justified policies that encouraged the proliferation of favored races and coercively stemmed procreation by disfavored ones. In the 1970s, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued that black students’ innate cogni- tive inferiority limited the efficacy of federal education programs.1 The 1994 controversial bestseller The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, rehashed the claim that race and class disparities stem from immu- table differences in inherited intelligence, which could not be eliminated through social interventions.2 Today most scientists studying the genetics of intelligence dis- tance themselves from this history of social bias by argu- ing that their research need not investigate intellectual differences between social groups. Rather, they argue, examining the heritability of intelligence can be socially neutral and may even help to reduce social inequities.3

I argue that research on the genetics of intelligence cannot be socially neutral. The original purpose of men- tal tests was to determine individuals’ “fitness” for social roles. Even if we divorce the heritability of intelligence from a eugenicist mission, measuring intelligence re- mains useful only as a gage of individuals’ appropriate positions in society. Research into the genetics of intel- ligence ultimately helps to determine individuals’ inher- ited capacity for particular social positions, even when researchers aim to modify the effects of inheritance.

Moreover, intelligence has social value. Many aspects of mainstream U.S. culture treat people who are deemed to be more intelligent as more socially valuable than peo- ple who are deemed to be less intelligent. Research into the genetics of intelligence, therefore, helps to identify an aspect of the inherited worth of individuals. This fea- ture of intelligence testing historically legitimated race and class hierarchies in explicit terms. Today, research on the genetics of intelligence—even if the research does not use social classifications—maps onto existing social hierarchies and the stereotypes about intelligence that support them. Efforts to improve individuals’ intellectu- al capacities or social mobility would be better served by nurturing the actual skills that intelligence is supposed to make it possible to develop and, more importantly, by more equitably distributing educational resources in our society. Such efforts need no genetic information— or even IQ testing—and are likely to be hindered by the hereditary concept of intelligence.

Scientists doing basic research investigating the role genes play in the mechanisms of brain development un- derlying cognitive function may not be concerned with this social context. They may be interested purely in how genes and brains work generally in human beings. But as soon as their findings are translated into knowledge about heritable intelligence, their research will take on the social implications that inevitably result from rank- ing human beings by cognitive capacity and attributing their rank in significant part to their genes.

The Purpose of Intelligence Testing

The very origins of predicting intelligence are rooted in ranking people socially. Tests that measure intel-

ligence were created to determine people’s “fitness” for

Can Research on the Genetics of Intelligence Be “Socially Neutral”?

By dOrOTHy rOBerTs

Dorothy Roberts, “Can Research on the Genetics of Intelligence Be ‘Socially Neutral’?,” The Genetics of Intelligence: Ethics and the Conduct of Trustworthy Research, special report, Hastings Center Report 45, no. 5 (2015): S50-S53. DOI: 10.1002/hast.499

S51SPECIAL REPORT: The Genet ics o f In te l l i gence: E th ics and the Conduct o f Trus tworthy Research

social roles.4 Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, con- fused inherited social privilege with inherited intelligence when he wrongly assumed that the British elite achieved their stature owing to their innate “genius.”5 He argued that fitness in humans depended on “General Ability or Intelligence” and proposed “to show . . . that a man’s natu- ral abilities are derived by inheritance” (p. 1). The aim of the first mental test center in London, established in 1882, was to demonstrate that scores matched social status or “reputation.”6 In other words, intelligence testing became the linchpin for proving that social status was inherited. The quest to settle the debate over nature and nurture was a way of scientifically legitimizing the unequal social order and justifying intervention in a way that maintained that hierarchy.

In the United States, the reification of intelligence as the primary indicator of human value facilitated the eugen- ics movement. Promoting the “hereditarian theory of IQ,” eugenicists claimed that the IQ test could quantify innate intellectual ability in a single objective measurement, de- spite the objections of the test’s creator, Alfred Binet.7 Binet developed the first intelligence test in 1904 for screening children in school for remedial instruction but rejected its use to measure innate cognitive ability. Just as damaging, intelligence became shorthand for moral worth as well as cognitive capacity. The introduction of “mental tests” at the turn of the twentieth century replaced physical mea- surements, such as cranial capacity, as the means of ranking human beings in terms of inferiority and superiority.

In hindsight, we see that, far from being an objective measure used to rank people neutrally, the IQ test was a deeply biased measure used to legitimize discrimination against populations labeled by those in power as socially inferior. Psychologist Henry H. Goddard’s influential re- search on the heritability of feeblemindedness attributed the behavior of paupers, prostitutes, and criminals to in- herited mental deficiencies. Psychologists also used the tests to demonstrate that blacks and recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were intellectually infe- rior to Americans of Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian descent. In A Study of American Intelligence, published in 1923, Princeton psychology professor Carl C. Brigham analyzed data from an army program that tested the intelligence of 1.7 million recruits, reporting, “At one extreme we have the distribution of the Nordic group. At the other extreme we have the American negro. Between the Nordic and the negro, but closer to the negro than the Nordic, we find the Alpine and Mediterranean type.”8 Brigham’s social bias

seems obvious to Americans today most especially because the social definition and ranking of whites have changed.

Thus, the very purpose of IQ tests was to confirm the current social order as naturally proper. Intelligence tests were not misused to support hereditary theories of social hierarchies; they were perfected in order to support them. The IQ supplied an essential difference among human be- ings that deliberately reflected racial and class stratifications in order to justify them as natural.9 Research on the genet- ics of intelligence was far from socially neutral when the very purpose of theorizing the heritability of intelligence was to confirm an unequal social order.

Today, scientists who subscribe to genetic theories of intelligence distance their views from eugenics. They ar- gue that research on the genetics of intelligence is now de- void of eugenicist motives and can serve to objectively and scientifically identify people’s intellectual levels without the taint of social bias. Indeed, some claim that, far from discounting educational programs for the less intelligent, considered incapable of being helped, their research can target interventions to those predicted by genetic tests to be helped by special training (see essays by Kathryn Asbury and by Matt McGue and Irving Gottesman in this special report).10 While eugenicists sought to use heritability stud- ies to improve the human race, these researchers seek to use them to improve individual achievement.

Yet genetic research into intelligence shares with eugen- ics a biological explanation of social inequality. Even if cur- rent studies are not aimed at confirming a natural order of social groups, they nevertheless are aimed at produc- ing biological information relevant to individuals’ social positions. Why else care about measuring and predicting people’s intelligence if not to determine how suitable they are for particular classrooms, vocations, and occupations? As Ken Richardson writes, “Since tests were constructed to predict school achievement, which determines entry in the job market, there is an inevitable correlation between test scores and occupational and social status.”11 The purpose of identifying whether or not individuals are predisposed to some particular level of intelligence must be to fit them in some socially salient category.

Moreover, identifying genes that are associated with in- telligence is a way of determining which people are predict- ed to have higher or lower intelligence based on biological differences. This does not mean that people’s social roles will be used to predict their intelligence, as was done by eu- genicists. However, research on the genetics of intelligence will likely—if not inevitably—be used to predict people’s biological suitability for particular social roles.

Intelligence tests were not misused to support hereditary theories of social hierarchies; they were perfected in order to support them.

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Intelligence, Genes, and Social Values

Another reason that this research cannot be socially neutral is that the study of genes is not hermetically

sealed from social assumptions, norms, and values. Even after the Human Genome Project produced new knowl- edge about human genetic unity and diversity, many sci- entists have continued to employ racial classifications and ideologies in their studies with little critical thought.12 Nor can the meaning of intelligence be divorced from social val- ues. Psychologists cannot even agree on what intelligence is.13 Even if an intelligence quotient expressed as a single number that is used in ranking people in linear order is a valid proxy for a very specific type of cognitive function— general cognitive ability, or g—it does not represent many other types of cognitive function.14 Most IQ tests measure a narrow range of intellectual skills, such as memory and general knowledge, or limited forms of thinking—mainly linguistic and mathematical—and focus on past learning, which reflects educational opportunities. There are many equally important kinds of intelligences, such as practical, emotional, spatial, and musical, that the tests ignore.15 The more complex we understand intelligence to be, the less likely we are to see IQ as sufficient to represent it or to expect geneticists to identify a gene or group of genes that predicts it.

Instead, mental tests have been underestimating many individuals’ cognitive abilities in a socially biased way.16 Because the very meaning of intelligence is disputed and some people perform poorly on widely accepted tests for social reasons, research and tests privilege dominant so- cial groups. Our society is deeply stratified along race and class lines, which affects not only the information children learn, but their very habits of thought, ways of thinking, and responses to stereotypes.17

We know that the mental test performances of groups improve along with the groups’ social mobility.18 The av- erage IQ increases of Jews in the United States between the World Wars and in some nations since World War II, along with the decrease in mean IQ differences between blacks and whites over these periods, show that what is measured by IQ tests is not immutable but malleable in response to social changes. A recent review of new findings in the field of intelligence concluded, “We can be confi- dent that the environmental differences that are associated with social class have a large effect on IQ.”19 This evidence refutes the myth of innate racial differences in intelligence and reminds us that genes do much less to explain observed differences in some social environments than in others.

Moreover, the categories people fall into based on their IQs will be ranked according to greater or lesser intellec- tual ability. Could this ranking be recorded without any

social value being attributed to it? Herrnstein and Murray claimed in The Bell Curve that they weren’t eugenicists be- cause they did not place any particular value on greater or lesser intelligence. They were simply helping to create a harmonious village where everyone is matched to the vo- cation for which his or her mental ability is suited, and everyone could be valued equally.

One problem with this argument is that it is awfully hard to imagine a village in which all the people are equally respected in vocations determined by innate intelligence. We would first have to strip away a long history of cultural programming that equates intelligence with human worth and that degrades vocations associated with lower intelli- gence. We would also have to strip away the deep-seated stereotypes perpetuated for centuries that black people are naturally less intelligent than whites.

But even if this were possible, there is reason to object to people’s being assigned to classrooms or occupations based on genetic predispositions. Eugenicists sought to relegate individuals to stations in life based on their presumed in- born traits, without the opportunity for change. Modern- day proponents of gene-based tests for intelligence claim that their purpose is the opposite—to identify genetically which children would benefit most from different types of educational interventions. Because predicting intelligence genetically divides people into categories that are likely to be valued differently, it will push against equally distribut- ing resources to benefit all children. Would our society be motivated to devote extra resources to help those predicted to have lower intelligence?

This outcome of genetic testing is highly doubtful given the persistence of longstanding and glaring race and class inequities in public education. Moreover, by attributing children’s intellectual deficiencies to genes, this research diverts attention from the social impediments to children’s intellectual flourishing. Focusing on genes tends to encour- age gene-based rather than environmental or social solu- tions to problems.20 Worse, opponents of equal education easily exploit genetic theories of intelligence by arguing that groups who score lower on IQ tests are incapable of bene- fitting from social interventions. Intellectual enhancement programs are more likely to address social disadvantages if they nurture the actual desired skills or behaviors that intel- ligence is supposed to produce, that IQ tests are supposed to measure, and that genes are supposed to predict.

Mapping onto Existing Social Hierarchies

Finally, research into the genetics of intelligence will map onto already existing social hierarchies and the

stereotypes about intellectual ability that support them. Dominant U.S. society is marked by longstanding, wide-

S53SPECIAL REPORT: The Genet ics o f In te l l i gence: E th ics and the Conduct o f Trus tworthy Research

spread, and deeply embedded assumptions about the inher- ited intelligence of social groups. In particular, many white Americans believe that black people as a group are innately less intelligent than whites.21 A central component of white supremacist ideology is the view that black people are natu- rally fit to be subservient and naturally unfit for citizen- ship. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson rationalized denying equal rights to enslaved Africans on grounds that “the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endow- ment both of body and mind.”22 More recently, prominent U.S. scientists and journalists, including Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Herrnstein, Murray, and Nicholas Wade, argued that black people’s disadvantaged social status stemmed from inherited cognitive deficiencies.23

Ilan Dar-Nimrod and Steven J. Heine argue that es- sentialist biases lead people to view genetically influenced outcomes as inescapable.24 For many Americans, evidence that intelligence is inherited also supports the view that ra- cial differences in intelligence must be inherited. Even if researchers do not use race as a variable and have no interest in or expectation of finding race-based genetic differences, their findings will be interpreted in this influential social context. Given the powerful backdrop of racist notions of intelligence, it is impossible to conduct research on the genetics of intelligence without risking its use to support racist stereotypes.

The belief that intelligence is heritable and can be pre- dicted by tests has legitimated unjust social hierarchies and justified social policies designed to maintain them. There is no evidence that genetic tests for intelligence are necessary or will help to improve education for people from disad- vantaged social circumstances. To the contrary, the genetic theory of intelligence will “cut off all possibility of proper nurturance for everyone’s intelligence”25 and provide a justification for the very social structures that prevent the equitable sharing of educational resources. The weight of the evidence—historical, biological, and philosophical—is that research into the genetics of intelligence cannot be so- cially neutral and, indeed, will intensify social inequities.

Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Sonita Moss.

1. A. R. Jenson, Educability and Group Differences (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

2. R. J. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994)

3. E. C. Hayden, “Taboo Genetics,” Nature 502 (2013): 26-28. 4. K. Richardson, “Wising Up on the Heritability of Intelligence,”

Gene Watch 24, no. 6 (2011): 15-18. 5. F. Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Law and

Consequences (1869; repr., London: Forgotten Books 2012). 6. Richardson, “Wising Up on the Heritability of Intelligence.”

7. S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).

8. C. C. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1923), 197.

9. J. A. Belkhir and M. Duyme, “Intelligence and Race, Gender, Class: The Fallacy of Genetic Determinism,” Race, Gender, Class 5, no. 3 (1998): 136-76; Tukufu Zuberi, Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

10. K. Asbury, “Can Genetic Research Benefit Educational Interventions for All?,” The Genetics of Intelligence: Ethics and the Conduct of Trustworthy Research, special report, Hastings Center Report 45, no. 5 (2015): S39-S42; M. McGue and I. Gottesman, “Classical and Molecular Genetic Research on General Cognitive Ability,” The Genetics of Intelligence: Ethics and the Conduct of Trustworthy Research, special report, Hastings Center Report 45, no. 5 (2015): S25-S31.

11. Richardson, “Wising Up on the Heritability of Intelligence.” 12. D. Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing

Human Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice,” Science as Culture 16 (2007): 1-30; D. Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011); A. Morning, “Does Genomics Challenge the Social Construction of Race?,” Sociological Theory 32, no. 3 (2014): 189-207.

13. R. J. Sternberg and D. K. Detterman, What Is Intelligence? (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986); R. J. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko, and K. K. Kidd, “Intelligence, Race, and Genetics,” American Psychologist 60, no. 1 (2005): 46-59.

14. Gould, Mismeasure of Man; Richardson, “Wising Up on the Heritability of Intelligence.”

15. H. Gardner, “Cracking Open the IQ Box,” American Prospect (Winter 1994).

16. D. Ramos, “Paradise Miscalculated,” in S. Fraser, The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995): 62-69.

17. Gardner, “Cracking Open the IQ Box”; L. Suzuki and J. Aronson, “The Cultural Malleability of Intelligence and Its Impact on the Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11, no. 2 (2005): 320-27.

18. R. E. Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (New York: Norton, 2009): Nisbett et al., “Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments,” American Psychologist 67, no. 2 (2012): 130-59.

19. Nisbett et al., “Intelligence.” 20. T. Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 2003);

I. Dar-Nimrod and S. J. Heine, “Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA,” Psychological Bulletin 137, no. 5 (2011): 800-818.

21. S. Plous and T. Williams, “Stereotypes from the Days of American Slavery: A Continuing Legacy,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25, no. 9 (1995): 795-817; C. M. Steele, S. Spencer, and J. Aronson, “Contending with Group Image: The Psychology of Stereotype Threat and Social Identity Threat,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 37 (2002): 379-440.

22. T. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. W. Peden (1785; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 201.

23. Jenson, Educability and Group Differences; J. P. Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995); Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve; N. Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (New York: Penguin, 2014).

24. Dar-Nimrod and Heine, “Genetic Essentialism.” 25. S. J. Gould, “Curveball,” in The Bell Curve Wars, ed. Fraser,

11-22, at 22.

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