Arthur Jensen | |
|---|---|
 Arthur Jensen, 2002 atISIR | |
| Born | Arthur Robert Jensen (1923-08-24)August 24, 1923 San Diego,California, U.S. |
| Died | October 22, 2012(2012-10-22) (aged 89) Kelseyville, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (BA) San Diego State University (MA) Columbia University (PhD) |
| Known for | Heritability of IQ,race and intelligence,g factor |
| Spouse | Barbara Jensen |
| Awards | Kistler Prize (2003),ISIR Lifetime Achievement Award (2006) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Educational psychology,intelligence,cognition,behavior genetics |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley, Editorial boards ofIntelligence andPersonality and Individual Differences |
| Thesis | Aggression in Fantasy and Overt Behavior (1956) |
| Doctoral advisor | Percival Symonds |
Arthur Robert Jensen (August 24, 1923 – October 22, 2012) was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor ofeducational psychology at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.[1][2] Jensen was known for his work inpsychometrics anddifferential psychology, the study of how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.
He was a major proponent of thehereditarian position in thenature and nurture debate, the position thatgenetics play a significant role in behavioral traits, such asintelligence andpersonality. He was the author of over 400 scientific papers published in refereed journals[3] and sat on the editorial boards of thescientific journalsIntelligence andPersonality and Individual Differences.[4]
Jensen was controversial,[5] largely for his conclusions regarding the causes ofrace-based differences in IQ.[6]
Jensen was born August 24, 1923, inSan Diego, California, the son of Linda Mary (née Schachtmayer) and Arthur Alfred Jensen, who operated and owned a lumber and building materials company.[7] His paternal grandparents were Danish immigrants and his mother was of half-Polish Jewish and half-German descent.[8]
As a child, Jensen was interested inherpetology and classical music, playing clarinet in theSan Diego Symphony orchestra.[9]
Jensen received a B.A. in psychology from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1945 and went on to obtain his M.A. in psychology in 1952 fromSan Diego State College. He earned his Ph.D. inclinical psychology fromColumbia University in 1956 under the supervision ofPercival Symonds on thethematic apperception test.[10] From 1956 through 1958, he did postdoctoral research at theUniversity of London,Institute of Psychiatry withHans Eysenck.
Upon returning to the United States, he became a researcher and professor at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he focused on individual differences in learning, especially the influences of culture, development, and genetics on intelligence and learning. He received tenure at Berkeley in 1962. He concentrated on the learning difficulties of culturally disadvantaged students.
Jensen had a lifelong interest in classical music and was, early in his life, attracted by the idea of becoming a conductor himself. At 14, he conducted a band that won a nationwide contest held inSan Francisco. Later, he conducted orchestras and attended a seminar given byNikolai Sokoloff. Soon after graduating from Berkeley, he moved toNew York, mainly to be near the conductorArturo Toscanini. He was also deeply interested in the life and example ofGandhi, producing an unpublished book-length manuscript on his life. During Jensen's period inSan Diego he spent time working as a social worker with the San Diego Department of Public Welfare.
Jensen's interest in learning differences directed him to the extensive testing of school children. The results led him to distinguish between two separate types of learning ability.Level I, orassociative learning, may be defined as retention of input and rote memorization of simple facts and skills.Level II, or conceptual learning, is roughly equivalent to the ability to manipulate and transform inputs, that is, the ability to solve problems.
Later, Jensen was an important advocate in the mainstream acceptance of thegeneral factor of intelligence, a concept which was essentially synonymous with hisLevel II conceptual learning. The general factor, org, is an abstraction that stems from the observation that scores on all forms of cognitive tests correlate positively with one another.
Jensen claimed, on the basis of his research, thatgeneral cognitive ability is essentially an inherited trait, determined predominantly by genetic factors rather than by environmental conditions. He also contended that while associative learning, or memorizing ability, is equally distributed among the races, conceptual learning, or synthesizing ability, occurs with significantly greater frequency in some races than in others.
Jensen's most controversial work, published in February 1969 in theHarvard Educational Review, was titled "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" It concluded, among other things, thatHead Start programs designed to boostAfrican-AmericanIQ scores had failed, and that this was likely never to be remedied, largely because, in Jensen's estimation, 80% of the variance in IQ in the population studied was the result of genetic factors and the remainder was due to environmental influences.[11]
The paper immediately prompted weeks of violent protest on the Berkley campus, with additional protests occurring throughout the 1970s.[12]
The work became one of the most cited papers in thehistory ofpsychological testing andintelligence research, although a large number of citations consisted of rebuttals of Jensen's work, or references to it as an example of a controversial paper.[13]
Jensen was among the most frequent contributors to the German journalNeue Anthropologie, a publication founded by theneo-NaziJürgen Rieger, and served alongside Rieger on this journal's editorial board.[14][15][16]
In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence,"[17] an essay written byLinda Gottfredson and published inThe Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on the meaning and significance of IQ following the publication of the bookThe Bell Curve. Jensen received $1.1 million from thePioneer Fund,[18][19]an organization frequently described as racist andwhite supremacist in nature.[20][21][22][23]The fund contributed a total of $3.5 million to researchers cited in The Bell Curve's most controversial chapter "that suggests some races are naturally smarter than others" with Jensen's works being cited twenty-three times in the book's bibliography.[24]
He died on October 22, 2012, at his home inKelseyville, California, at age 89.[1]
According toDavid Lubinski of Vanderbilt University, the "extent to which [Jensen's] work was either admired or reviled by many distinguished scientists is unparalleled."[25]
After Jensen's death,James Flynn of the University of Otago, a prominent advocate of the environmental position, toldThe New York Times that Jensen was without racial bias and had not initially foreseen that his research would be used to argue for racial supremacy and that his career was "emblematic of the extent to which American scholarship is inhibited by political orthodoxy", though he noted that Jensen shifted towards genetic explanations later in life.[1]
After psychologistPaul E. Meehl was honored by the APA in 1998, he wrote in the journalPsychological Reports that Jensen's "contributions, in both quality and quantity, certainly excelled mine" and that he was "embarrassed" that APA had not also honored Jensen, which Meeh claimed was due topolitical correctness.[26]
PsychologistSandra Scarr wrote in the journalIntelligence in 1998 that Jensen possessed an "uncompromising personal integrity" and set the standard for "honest psychological science". She described his critics as "politically driven liars, who distort scientific facts in a misguided and condescending effort to protect an impossible myth about human equality".[27]
Steven J. Haggbloom, writing forReview of General Psychology in 2002, rated Jensen as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, based on six different metrics chosen by Haggbloom.[28]
In 1980 Jensen published a book in defense of the tests used to measure mental abilities, titledBias in Mental Testing. Reviewing this book, psychologistKenneth Kaye endorsed Jensen's distinction between bias and discrimination, saying that he found many of Jensen's opponents to be more politically biased than Jensen was.[29]
Melvin Konner of Emory University, wrote:
Statements made by Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and other investigators in the late 1960s and early 1970s about race and IQ or social class and IQ rapidly passed into currency in policy discussions. Many of these statements were proved wrong, but they had already influenced some policymakers, and that influence is very difficult to recant.
Lisa Suzuki andJoshua Aronson ofNew York University wrote that Jensen had largely ignored evidence which failed to support his position that IQ test score gaps represent genetic racial differences.[30]
Paleontologist and evolutionary biologistStephen Jay Gould criticized Jensen's work in his 1981 bookThe Mismeasure of Man. Gould writes that Jensen misapplies the concept of "heritability", which is defined as a measure of thevariation of a trait due to inheritancewithin a population (Gould 1981: 127; 156–157). According to Gould, Jensen uses heritability to measure differencesbetween populations.[citation needed] Gould also disagrees with Jensen's belief that IQ tests measure a real variable,g, or "thegeneral factor common to a large number of cognitive abilities" which can be measured along a unilinear scale. This is a claim most closely identified withCharles Spearman. According to Gould, Jensen misunderstood the research ofL. L. Thurstone to ultimately support this claim; Gould, however, argues that Thurstone'sfactor analysis of intelligence revealedg to be an illusion (1981: 159; 13-314). Gould criticizes Jensen's sources including his use ofCatharine Cox's 1926Genetic Studies of Genius, which examineshistoriometrically the IQs of historic intellectuals after their deaths (Gould 1981: 153–154).
Bias in Mental Testing (1980) is a book examining the question of test bias in commonly usedstandardized tests. The book runs almost 800 pages and has been called "exhaustive" by three researchers who reviewed the field 19 years after the book's publication.[31] It reviewed in detail the available evidence abouttest bias across major US racial/ethnic groups. Jensen concluded that "the currently most widely used standardized tests of mental ability -- IQ, scholastic aptitude, and achievement tests -- are, by and large, not biased against any of the native-born English-speaking minority groups on which the amount of research evidence is sufficient for an objective determination of bias, if the tests were in fact biased. For most nonverbal standardized tests, this generalization is not limited to English-speaking minorities." (p. ix). Jensen also published a summary of the book the same year which was a target article in the journalBehavioral and Brain Sciences to which 27 commentaries were printed along with the author's reply.[32]
Straight Talk about Mental Tests (1981) is a book written about psychometrics for the general public.John B. Carroll reviewed it favorably in 1982, saying it was a useful summary of the issues,[33] as did Paul Cline writing for theBritish Journal of Psychiatry.[34] In 2016,Richard J. Haier called it "a clear examination of all issues surrounding mental testing".[35]
Theg Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998) is a book on thegeneral intelligence factor (g). The book deals with the intellectual history of g and various models of how to conceptualize intelligence, and with the biological correlates of g, its heritability, and its practical predictive power.
Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences (2006) deals withmental chronometry (MC), and covers the speed with which the brain processes information and different ways this is measured. Jensen argues mental chronometry represents a true natural science of mental ability, which is in contrast to IQ, which merely represents an interval (ranking) scale and thus possesses no true ratio scale properties.
Joseph Glicksohn wrote in a 2007 review forCanadian Journal of Experimental Psychology that "The book should be perused with care in order to ensure the further profitable use of [reaction time] in both experimental and differential lines of research."[36]
Douglas Detterman reviewed it in 2008 forIntelligence, writing that "the book would make a good introduction to the field of the measurement of individual differences in cognitive tasks for beginning graduate students."[37]Eric-Jan Wagenmakers andHan van der Mass, also writing forIntelligence in 2018, faulted the book for omitting the work by mathematical psychologists, advocating standardization of chronometric methods (which the authors consider problematic because it can hide method variance), and because it does not discuss topics such as themutualism model of theg-factor and theFlynn effect. They describe the book's breadth as useful, despite its simplistic approach.[38] Jensen was on the editorial board ofIntelligence when these reviews were published.
In 2003, Jensen was awarded theKistler Prize for original contributions to the understanding of the connection between the humangenome and humansociety. In 2006, theInternational Society for Intelligence Research awarded Jensen its Lifetime Achievement Award.[39]
Arthur R. Jensen, an educational psychologist who ignited an international firestorm with a 1969 article suggesting that the gap in intelligence-test scores between black and white students might be rooted in genetic differences between the races, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Kelseyville, Calif. He was 89. ...
The article itself became one of the most highly cited in the history of psychology, but many of the citations were rebuttals of Jensen's arguments or used the paper as an example of controversy.
A 1969 article by University of California at Berkeley educational psychology professor Arthur Jensen, who has received more than $1 million in Pioneer funds, argued that black students' poor academic performance was due to irreversible genetic deficiencies, so programs like Head Start were useless and should be replaced by vocational education.
Psychologist Arthur Jensen received $1.1 million from the Pioneer Fund. Twenty five years ago, he started writing that blacks may be genetically less intelligent than whites.Vanderbilt Television News Archive :ABC Evening News for Tuesday, Nov 22, 1994. Headline: American Agenda (Intelligence)
Since his death in 1972, Draper and the Pioneer Fund have been criticized for funding "race and intelligence research," which is a euphemism for "scientific" racism (Kenny 2002, Tucker 2002). Draper has become even more controversial since the publication of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray 1994), which purported to prove that white people's intelligence was superior to black people's intelligence, because the Pioneer Fund supported the controversial research in the book (Fraser 1995; Jacoby & Glauberman 1995; Baum 2004).
Leon Kamim, professor of psychology at Northeastern University and a well-known critic of hereditarian studies, observed that Herrnstein and Murray, in their discussion of race and IQ, had turned for assistance to Richard Lynn, whom they described as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences," "I will not mince words," wrote Kamin, calling it a "shame and disgrace that two eminent social scientists ... take as their scientific tutor Richard Lynn ... an associate editor of the vulgarly racist journalMankind Quarterly ... [and] a major recipient of support from the nativist and eugenically oriented Pioneer Fund.
According to Taxpayers the Pioneer Fund in its first charter had called for the encouragement of the "reproduction of individuals descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states or from related stock." Taxpayers also claimed that the fund supported racist research, including that of notorious scientist William B. Shockley. In a press release, "taxpayers described the Pioneer Fund as a "white supremacist" organization. What was the racist link between Prop. 187 and the Pioneer Fund? Taxpayers claimed that the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) had received S600,000 in grants since 1988 from the Pioneer Fund, and that Alan Nelson was FAIR's lobbyist in Sacramento when he coauthored Prop. 187.
Ideology: White Nationalist. Started in 1937 by textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund's original mandate was to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic stock of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." Today, it still funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the "science" of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities. The Pioneer Fund has supported many of the leading Anglo-American race scientists of the last several decades as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
And many of The Bell Curve's most important assertions which establish causal links between IQ and social behavior, and IQ and race, are derived partially or totally from the Mankind Quarterly Pioneer Fund scholarly circle. The University of California's Arthur Jensen, cited twenty-three times in The Bell Curve's bibliography, is the book's principal authority on the intellectual inferiority of blacks. He has received $1.1 million from the Pioneer Fund.
There was one name conspicuously missing from the list, someone whose contributions, in both quality and quantity, certainly excelled mine, namely, Arthur Jensen. At least a third, and arguably the majority, of the recipients would have to say that about themselves in relation to Jensen. No informed rational mind can have the slightest doubt as to the explanation of this distressing social phenomenon: Arthur Jensen's facts are unpleasant to face, and his theoretical inferences from the facts are politically incorrect.
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