Destructive Trends in Mental Health

The Well Intentioned Path to Harm

Rogers H. Wright, Nicholas A. Cummings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135423551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book takes as its inspiration the assumption that the atmosphere of intellectual openness, scientific inquiry, aspiration towards diversity, and freedom from political pressure that once flourished in the American Psychological Association has been eclipsed by an "ultra-liberal agenda, " in which voices of dissent, controversial points of view, and minority groups are intimidated, ridiculed and censored.

Chapters written by established and revered practitioners explore these important issues within the contexts of social change, the ways in which mental health services providers view themselves and their products, and various economic factors that have affected healthcare cost structure and delivery.

In short, this book is intended to help consumers, practitioners, and policy makers to become better educated about a variety of recent issues and trends that have significantly changed the mental health fields.

Section C

Political Influence on Science and Practice

9

SUPPRESSING INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH:
HURTING THOSE WE INTEND TO HELP

Linda S. Gottfredson

Research on intelligence is a tale of good and evil, or so the media would have us think. We are presented as mean-spirited pseudoscien-tists who are greasing the slippery slope to oppression and genocide with their elitist racist ideologies about human differences. On the other side are the earnest souls who would save us from those horrors by exposing the unscientific and immoral basis of the so-called “science” of intelligence differences. Even when the science is conceded to be accurate, it is often labeled dangerous and irresponsible (Block & Dworkin, 1974). If not life-imperiling, it at least threatens the foundations of American democracy. In short, the world must be made safe from intelligence research.

Perhaps ironically, institutional psychology has been busy doing just that for over thirty years. The media can keep repainting its libelous portrait of intelligence research only with the complicity of intelligence's mother field, psychology. Although intelligence tests are frequently cited as psychology's biggest success, psychology often treats researchers who study the origins and consequences of individual and group differences in general intelligence as its biggest embarrassment, the troublesome child or mad uncle whom a socially ambitious family would lock up or have disappear. In doing so, it has undermined the integrity of psychological science, encouraged fiction-driven social policies that continue to disappoint and ratchet up blame, and blinded us to the daily risks and challenges faced by the less able among us.

A CASE STUDY IN SUPPRESSION: ARTHUR JENSEN AND THE SILENCED MAJORITY

Psychology is not a monolith, of course, but a semi-organized social system governed by regard and reputation, often dispensed (as well as coveted) by official representatives such as journal editors, awards committees, and association officers. It therefore seems emblematic that the American Psychological Association (APA) has never given an award to Arthur R. Jensen, the greatest contemporary scholar of intelligence and one of the fifty most “eminent psychologists of the twentieth century” (Detterman, 1998; Dittman, 2002, p. 29). Neither has the newer but more scientifically oriented American Psychological Society (APS).

Fair, Formidable, Fearless—and Correct After All

Jensen personifies the dedicated empiricist who seeks scientific truths, not popular acclaim. He would rather be right than seem right, which is personally costly when the truth is unpopular. He incurred steep costs by publishing and defending his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” (Jensen, 1969), and he continues to incur costs with his subsequent work. Recognizing that Jensen “will not receive the honors his work merits from organizations like the American Psychological Association,” editor Douglas Detterman (1998) dedicated a special issue of the journal Intelligence (“A King Among Men”) to honoring Jensen.

Peers wrote with the highest praise for the scientist and the man, and with outrage at the abuse Jensen has suffered for maintaining his scientific integrity. Despite repeatedly being abused by “thugs with pens” and threatened physically, Jensen has “[f]or more than 40 years … unflinchingly strived to make psychology an honest science” (Scarr, 1998, pp. 227, 231). “Indeed, few people now alive have had more impact on the field” of human intelligence (Sternberg, 1998, p. 213). As a scholar, Jensen is “formidable” (Deary & Crawford, 1998, p. 274), “exceptional,” “innovative,” “prolific” (Nettlebeck, 1998, pp. 233, 239), “inspirational” (Rushton, 1998, p. 218), and “the quintessential scientist” (Kaufman, 1998, p. 253). He has “an ingenious ability to develop quantitative analyses that address fundamental issues in highly original ways that advance our knowledge of critical issues in the field” (Brody, 1998, p. 246); he does research of “exceptional thoroughness and scientific rigor” (Vernon, 1998, p. 267) that is “intensive, detailed, exhaustive, fair-minded, temperate, and courageous” (Bouchard, 1998, p. 283); and he “has continued to blaze trails where others would not lead but many would later follow” (Gottfredson, 1998, p. 291). One commentator became “so thoroughly impressed by Jensen's empiricism, wisdom, and sense of fairness” after reading Jensen's “brilliant, data-based, meticulous critique” of the commentator's own work, one that had made him “sweat” to see Jensen “so familiar with my work and … start his attack with smoking guns” (Kaufman, 1998, p. 250).

Detterman (1998, p. 177) emphasized an “unusual” trait of Jensen's “that [may be] impossible for Jensen's critics to understand” but which has allowed him to prevail scientifically. It is not the “thick skin” that many peers mentioned, but Jensen's “healthy agnosticism about everything.”

For years, his critics have called him every name in the book and have accused him of all kinds of biases and prejudices. In fact, I have never known anybody with fewer prejudices. The biggest prejudices scientists usually have are those in favor of their own ideas. … However, Jensen has no loyalty whatsoever to any theory or hypothesis even if they come from his own ideas. He would gladly know the truth even if it proved him wrong. In fact, he would be excited to know the truth.

Even into the late 1980s, Jensen assumed that only a small minority of experts shared his conclusions about intelligence. A handful had agreed publicly with the suddenly “notorious” Dr. Jensen, the inveterate Hans J. Eysenck (e.g., Eysenck, 1971) being the most vocal among them. More expressed their agreement only privately to him. Among the “closet Jensenists” in psychology were luminaries who could have provided Jensen's conclusions with strong and credible public support but instead asked him not to reveal their views. Beyond these small minorities, Jensen generally heard only resounding silence or condemnation from fellow psychologists.

The results of a 1984 survey (Snyderman & Rothman, 1988) of experts on intelligence and mental testing therefore surprised even Jensen. The experts' modal response on every question that involved the “heretical” conclusions from Jensen's 1969 article was the same as his (Jensen, 1998, p. 198). The experts' mean response overestimated test bias, however, because there is none against blacks or lower social class individuals (Jensen, 1980; Neisser et al. 1996; Snyderman & Roth-man, 1988, p. 134; Wigdor & Garner, 1982). Here, in abbreviated form, are the survey's major questions and the 600 experts' responses.

Q: What are the important elements of intelligence?

A: “Near unanimity” (96 to 99 percent) for abstract thinking or reasoning, problem-solving ability, and capacity to acquire knowledge (p. 56).

Q: Is intelligence best described as a single general factor with subsidiaries or as separate faculties?

A: A general factor (58 percent, or 67 percent of those responding; p. 71).

Q: What heritability would you estimate for IQ differences within the white population?

A: Average estimate of 57 percent (p. 95).

Q: What heritability would you estimate for IQ differences within the black population?

A: Average estimate of 57 percent (p. 95).

Q: Are intelligence tests biased against blacks?

A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean response of 2 (p. 117).

Q: Are intelligence tests biased against lower social class individuals?

A: On a scale of 1 (not at all or insignificantly) to 4 (extremely), mean response of 2 (p. 118).

Q: What is the source of average social class differences in IQ?

A: Both genetic and environmental (55 percent, or 65 percent of those responding; p. 126).

Q: What is the source of the average black-white difference in IQ?

A: Both genetic and environmental (45 percent, or 52 percent of those responding; p. 128).

Supposedly a fringe scientist, Jensen was actually in the mainstream because the mainstream had silently come to him (Gottfredson, 1997a). Meanwhile, public opinion was still being pushed in the opposite direction, creating an ever-greater gulf between societal perception and scientifically informed thought.

The Silent Majority

It is no mystery why so many experts in intelligence-related fields moved intellectually in Jensen's direction. New research, often conducted by researchers eager to prove him mistaken (e.g., Brody, 1992, p. ix), kept supporting his conclusions. But why was the migration seemingly so secretive? And why did Jensen's colleagues keep silent while the media promulgated clear falsehoods as scientific truths, especially when, as Snyderman and Rothman (1988) demonstrated, the media portrayed expert opinion on intelligence as the opposite of what it really was? Worst of all, why did Jensen's peers turn away, or even throw a few stones themselves, while a brethren scholar with whom they agreed was viciously attacked?

Self-Serving Self Censorship

The ferocity of attacks on Jensen after publication of his 1969 article signaled what could happen to anyone who violated the new taboo against discussing the relation between intelligence and genes or race. If any reminder were needed, it was soon provided when Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein (1971) published an article in The Atlantic Monthly arguing that social class inequalities are rooted partly in genetic differences in IQ, a speculation since confirmed (Rowe, Vester-dal, & Rodgers, 1998). Herrnstein did not mention race, but was immediately denounced as racist (Herrnstein, 1973).

In fact, one need not mention either genes or race but merely take intelligence differences seriously to be accused of racism. Early in my career I reported that bright boys who had attended a school for dyslexics did not enter the usual high-level jobs (medicine, law, science, and college teaching). They had nevertheless succeeded at a high level by entering prestigious or remunerative occupations that required above-average intelligence but relatively little reading or writing: specifically, top management and sales positions. A colleague accused me of saying that “blacks can't make it because they are dumb.” She taught me that the taboo's boundaries are broad but uncertain and that enforcement begins on its far outskirts.

It is understandable that many people keep far away from those amorphous but stinging boundaries. Moreover, the farther one goes into forbidden territory, the more numerous and more severe the sanctions become: first the looks of disapproval and occasional accusations of racism, then greater difficulty getting promotions, funding, or papers published, and eventually being shunned, persecuted, or fired. Experiencing the first mild sanction is enough to cause many to envision the worst and reverse course. As one chaired professor told me, just seeing how Jensen was mistreated was enough to convince her, like others, to cease studying cognitive differences and switch fields in the early 1970s.

Because individual and group differences in phenotypic intelligence have substantial effects on so many social phenomena (e.g., Gordon, 1997; Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997), intelligence is relevant to many fields of psychological inquiry, among them education, child development, parenting, health behavior, vocational development, career counseling, and personnel selection. Avoiding the phenomenon, therefore, requires actively walling it off in a great variety of fields. Common forms of self-censorship include intentionally omitting relevant facts or findings from one's publications, ignoring them in others', failing to draw obvious connections between phenomena, neglecting to dispute clear but convenient falsehoods and to perform analyses that might produce the politically wrong answer, committing a deliberate act of omission, to which one leading social scientist later confessed (Coleman, 1990–1991). Researchers may also refuse to share relevant data with other scholars who are willing to perform the politically sensitive analyses that they are not, such as estimating the contribution of genetic differences to the mean black-white IQ difference (Rowe, 1997).

Cordoning off data, analyses, and conclusions according to the strictures of political correctness creates a safe distance between oneself and controversial research and researchers, but it simultaneously isolates those individuals and renders their research less credible to the scientif-ically uninformed. As they become the untouchables, “prudence” compels some of the discipline's informed members to distance themselves from them or their ideas by casting aspersions, lest potential critics think that they, too, harbor the proscribed thoughts. The best informed, who are often called upon for expert comment, cannot endorse clear falsehoods without jeopardizing their own standing within the discipline, but they sometimes dispute minor issues in a manner that the uninformed mistake for wholesale repudiation (Gottfredson, 1994a; Page, 1972).

Scientific societies also engage in various forms of self-censorship, presumably to avoid tainting themselves by giving credence to the disapproved person or idea. Although Jensen received honors before his 1969 publication (Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowship at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences), he has received none since then from American psychology for his remarkable scientific contributions. Hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section A Political Correctness, Sensitivity, and Diversity
• Section B Mental Healthcare Economics
• Section C Political Influence on Science and Practice
• The Editors
• Contributors
• Index