Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count 1st Edition

I bought this book based one some gushing reviews and hoping it might do some good for my parenting skills. The main thrust of the book is to dissect the question of whether IQ is a useful test, and if so, whether it comes from your genes or your environment. The author piles on a mountain of evidence that while genes matter, the environment matters at least as much. If you are willing to buy that proposition at the start, then you can skip five of the first 6 chapters without serious loss. In fact the Epilogue nicely summarizes all of this information in just a few pages, so you should just read that first. The most interesting section of these chapters analyzes how certain types of analytical intelligence have actually been improving for the general population over the past few decades due to increased levels of schooling and earlier teaching of symbolic reasoning.

Chapter 4 talks about school as an environment and the main actionable comment is don't let your kid have a rookie teacher.

Chapter 7 talks about how poverty conditions greatly hurt IQ and this information will be quite important for people with a policy interest.

One of the main points of Chapters 4 and 7 is that certain computer-based programs are highly effective at improving IQ for a fairly low price.

Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the disproportionate success of Asian-American and Jewish people. Chapter 8 declares that Asians have normal IQ scores, but they work so hard that they effectively add (e.g. 15 points of) IQ and that makes a huge difference. There is a discussion of differences in Asian and American thinking styles that concludes Asians make good engineers and Americans make good scientists.

Chapter 9 says that Ashkenazi Jewish people *might* actually have a small genetic advantage due to brain anatomy but there is not enough evidence to prove that for sure; Nisbett asserts that, like Asian households, Jewish households emphasize hard work on studying, and this is probably an important reason for their relative success.

Far from endorsing any particular culture or race, Nesbitt points out that there were moments in history when many different cultures - Ancient Arabs, Spanish people, English people, Chinese scholars, etc. - became the most prolific in the world at intellectual achievement. This adds fuel to his point that culture matters.

Overall, Nisbett makes a powerful argument that HARD WORK significantly affects intelligence and that culture, family, schooling and other environmental factors greatly affect hard work and thus can determine intelligence. Therefore, he feels we should not give up any group, because enough of intelligence (or at least +/- 15 points of IQ plus a bunch of inangibles like self-discipline and practical intelligence) is determined by our environment that how we treat people will make a substantial difference in their ultimate success.

Chapter 10 finally gets to parenting and what you can do to improve the intelligence of your child, which comes down to: praising their hard work! Plus a bunch of minor suggestions, which you can read for yourself.

If you have read Malcom Gladwell's Outliers recently as I did (also on my Kindle!), the framework here is completely consistent with his idea: working longer and harder than average is essential to being more successful than average.

If you have not read Outiers yet, then go read it as it is a lot more fun than this book. If you have read Outliers but worried that it lacked academic rigor, then this book should interest you greatly. And if you think that people are either born smart or not, then this book will convince you that how you treat kids will still make a big difference to their future success.

This is a wonderfully well-written book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the heritability of intelligence. Both hereditarians and environmentalists will profit from exposure to the book. Richard Nisbett is an environmentalist and makes an eloquent and accessible case for his cause against those whom he calls "strong hereditarians," those who believe that .75 to .85 of the variation in IQ within a population is heritable.By his definition, he is an environmentalist because he believes that .50 or less of the variation in IQ is heritable. Certainly there are "strong hereditarians," such as Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, but the "strong hereditarians" he brings up and criticizes most are Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, the authors of the Bell Curve. The problem with this is that by his definition they are closer to the environmentalist side than the hereditarian side because they argue that .60 of the population variation in IQ is heritable (as Nisbett acknowledges on page 210). I mention this because one must bear in mind that among the chief adversaries on this issue, they are separated over whether .50 (or less) or .60 of the variation in IQ is heritable. Indeed, it is worth noting that by Nisbett's definition Judith Rich Harris, the author of The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, is an environmentalist.

One clear, but all too typical, error the author makes occurs in his discussion of "stereotype threat," the idea that when their race is made salient, blacks perform worse on IQ and achievement tests because they are afraid of confirming a stereotype. Nisbett asserts that when a test is presented as a puzzle, instead of as a test of intelligence, "black and whites do equally well on the test" ( p.95). This has become the typical take on Claude Steele's and Joshua Aronson original research. What has been lost over the years of interpretation and commentary since the research was done in the mid-1990s, however, is that the Stanford black and white sophomores involved in the study (which involved taking a few questions drawn from the GRE)where matched for their SAT scores they got before entering Stanford. Given the mountain of research now done, we know that stereotype threat is real, and it is possible that it accounts for up to 1/5th of the achievement gap on each of the three sections of the SAT (a standard deviation on each of the three tests). Nonetheless, we also know that most of the cause of the difference between blacks and whites on IQ and achievement tests has nothing to do with stereotype threat. Nisbett's error is shockingly common among even great social psychologists and Claude Steele has helped promote this misconception by what seems to be conscience distortion of his actual findings in accounts of his work in popular magazines like The Atlantic.

Finally, I will note that in the second to last chapter of the book, the author describes the means by which individuals can raise their own and their children's IQs. What he says is interesting enough but he fails to discuss the single most important thing that parents can do for their children--get married and stay married. Now, he does discuss the issue earlier in the book (p. 101), but he fails in the second to last chapter to mention the fact, for example, that Chinese- and Japanese-Americans have an out-of-wedlock birth rate a third that of whites (and 1/8th that of blacks) and they are half as likely to divorce (and a third as likely as blacks). Overall, those groups in the US with the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates (Asians and Jews) have the highest average IQ, and those with the highest such rates, have the lowest average IQ. The same is true of household income. As Nisbett notes, black households earn 67% of white households but this difference is mainly because black households are much more likely to be single-parent households (which overall earn only 42% of married couple households). Similarly, Japanese-, Chinese-, Filipino- and Indian-American households earn 20 to 30 percent more than white households because they are significantly more likely than white households to have two parents. So, regarding African-Americans, as long as fewer than 40% of African-American children are living with their biological fathers, no matter what else is done, there will be no substantial improvement in black average IQ. For example, Nisbett notes that African-American women are now twice as likely to go to college as African-American males, but what he fails to note is that when one compares African-American boys and girls whose biological parents are married, the boys are as likely to go to college as their sisters. The aggregate difference is exclusively a function of what is going on in single-parent households. In such households girls are vastly more likely to go to college than their brothers. (Could this surprise anyone?) As a Cornell researcher discovered a few years ago, 90 percent of students at the 50 most selective colleges and universities in the US come from intact households. We are as Andrew Hacker says, Two Nations, but the two Nations are not black and white, as Hacker says. We are a nation of the fathered and the fatherless. Until we acknowledge and address that fact, school changes and the like will have no real effect on the intellectual and achievement differences among different groups in the US. We must acknowledge and do something about the elephant in the room.

Brad Lowell Stone