Product Description

A bold refutation of the belief that genes determine intelligence. Who are smarter, Asians or Westerners? Are there genetic explanations for racial differences in test scores? What makes some nationalities excel in engineering and others in music? Will math and science remain a largely male preserve. From the damning research of The Bell Curve to the more recent controversy surrounding geneticist James Watson's statements, one factor has been consistently left out of the equation: culture. In the tradition of The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, world-class social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence as something that is biologically determined and impervious to culture--with vast implications for the role of education as it relates to social and economic development. Intelligence and How to Get It asserts that intellect is not primarily genetic but is principally determined by societal influences. Nisbett's commanding argument, superb marshaling of evidence, and fearless discussions of the controversial carve out new and exciting terrain in this hotly debated field.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54966 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 282 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393065053
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Whether intelligence is largely determined by genetics or environment has long been hotly contested. Nisbett, a University of Michigan psychology professor, weighs in forcefully and articulately, claiming that environmental conditions almost completely overwhelm the impact of genes. He comes to this conclusion through a careful statistical analysis of a large number of studies and also demonstrates how environment can influence not only IQ measures but actual achievement of both students and adults. (People often overachieve when appropriate incentives are in place, Nisbett argues.) Nisbett builds a very strong case that measured IQ differences across racial, cultural and socioeconomic boundaries can easily be explained without resorting to hereditary factors. The result is a very positive message: schools, parents and government programs can have a huge impact if they take the right, which are not necessarily the most expensive, steps. Without those steps, he says, the current role of socioeconomic factors is frightening, with economically disadvantaged children largely condemned to failure. Although Nisbett relies heavily on statistics to document his claims, he does so in a manner accessible to general readers and uses a thoroughly appealing style to engage them throughout. (Feb.)
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Review
A devastating and persuasive refutation of all those who believe intellectual ability is fixed at birth. Few Americans have done as much to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human. (Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink)

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.... Offers terrific advice for addressing poverty.... [and] provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses. (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times)

Richard E. Nisbett, a prominent cognitive psychologist who teaches at the University of Michigan, doesn't shirk the hard work....he offers a meticulous and eye-opening critique of hereditarianism...its real value lies in Nisbett’s forceful marshaling of the evidence, much of it recent, favoring what he calls ‘the new environmentalism,’ which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q. (New York Times Book Review, Jim Holt)

[Nisbett’s] biggest message, largely unspoken, is one of persistence and hope. If all kids are capable of learning under the right circumstances, parents and teachers should never give up on children who appear to be low performers. Everyone has the inherent ability to be smart. (Associated Press, Dinesh Ramde)

About the Author
Richard E. Nisbett is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has written numerous books on intelligence and cultural psychology and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Customer Reviews

It's not hard work to see that hard work matters
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.

An excellent introduction to intelligence and case against strong hereditarianism
Nisbett's latest book serves several purposes. On one level, he is arguing with his fellow IQ researchers that "schools and culture matter" more than the field suspected (e.g. a 1987 survey by Stanley and Rothman found high estimates of individual heritability and plurality support for the view that both genetic differences and environment played a role in American IQ gaps). Nisbett marshals a persuasive case, and while his thesis is forcefully stated he is scrupulous in pointing out contrary arguments and evidence. Occasionally the main text seemed to overstate a point, but in the vast majority of such cases a turn to the notes section or appendices revealed that the complications had been mentioned there (with a few exceptions related to the views of hereditarians on dysgenics and the causes of low IQ in Africa), and the book could serve as a good introduction to the field for laypeople.

Another major element of the book is a call for bringing scientific rigor to education. Rigorous controlled experiments, research that takes our knowledge of IQ into account, genetics-aware studies such as Eric Turkheimer's (which measure environmental effects on phenomena such as substance abuse using twins to control for genetic effects), and clear thinking have the potential to greatly improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of education and improve cognition. Fear of hereditarian views and associations with racism often hinder educational policymakers from taking our scientific knowledge of IQ into account, with negative effects on educational quality, and we may hope that this text will help to diminish that stigma and help to drive further improvements in cognitive ability.

At a higher level, the book is in some ways an ode to the randomized experiment, taking a strong stand against regressions that are helpless to identify causality and easily manipulable by motivated researchers. A reader gets the sense of a smart and honest empirical scientist who is eager to have questions resolved by hard evidence, and ready to change his mind in accord with those experiments, even when he comes to the table with strongly held initial views on a controversial topic of policy importance. This is something we need to see more of in scientific and policy debates and I give this book my strong recommendation. If you enjoy this book, I would suggest a follow-up with James Flynn's "What is Intelligence?" and Arthur Jensen's "The G-factor."

I will discuss the individual chapters below:

Chapter 1 provides a brief introductory account of IQ, and its importance for life outcomes, while mentioning other important traits such as motivation and self-control. It is quite satisfactory and puts IQ in context, without diminishing its role or getting embroiled in terminological disputes over the description of other abilities or discussion of their measurement.

Chapter 2 attempts to place the high heritability of IQ scores among middle class families (as much as 70-80% of variation in IQ can be explained by genetics within that group) into context, noting that adoptive households tend to be relatively good environments for children (confirmed by across-the-board boosts in IQ for adopted children, although these generally fade with time), and this consistently high quality means that variation in genetics plays a greater relative role. He also cites Turkheimer's research finding lower heritability of IQ among famlies with lower socioeconomic status.

Chapter 3 reviews the literature on the IQ-increasing effects of education, drawing on natural experiments of differential phase-in of education, or disruption due to strikes and disturbances. It is undeniable that schooling increases IQ relative to its absence, and these gains can be lasting. A discussion of the Flynn Effect, the secular increase in IQ scores over the last half century and more, follows James Flynn's "What is Intelligence?" and emphasizes that the particular IQ subtest scores that have increased cover skills that modern education and entertainment place much more emphasis on than in the past. One particularly devastating application is to the critique of 'culture-fair' nonverbal tests such as Raven's Progressive Matrices. These tests, which require subjects to identify patterns in abstract shapes, have shown extremely high culturally-driven increases over time, but they are also used extensively by researchers such as Lynn and Vanhanen to estimate developing country IQ levels. This application is typically defended along the lines that the within-country correlations of life outcomes and Raven scores are strong, but such correlations would not be disrupted by an across-the-board change such as the Flynn Effect (and have not been disrupted in rich countries) or its absence, and these tests are clearly 'culture-unfair.'

Chapter 4 covers the state of educational research, and is one of the best parts of the book, although the findings have been discussed elsewhere. Nisbett urges a scientific approach to educational research and policy, relying on randomized experiments, and critiques the ludicrous excesses of schools of education that reject the experimental method. Reviewing the research on funding levels, teacher quality, and class size, he rejects common myths and focuses on evidence. For instance, teacher quality matters quite a lot for student achievement, but it is not strongly related to seniority after the first two years or to Master's degrees, the criteria according to which most union contracts allocate raises. Instead, direct measurements of student improvement are the best predictors of future performance. Federal policy, the D.C. school system under Mayor Fenty and Michelle Rhee, and the Gates Foundation are all moving in this direction, and I hope that the new wave of experimentally-informed educational practices is able to displace ineffective policies and their political support.

Chapter 5 reviews the large differences in parenting between social classes, e.g. the number of words upper middle class parents speak to their children is much greater than the number spoken by lower class parents, and upper class parents are more encouraging of thought by their children. These results are confounded by genetics, which may simultaneously affect parenting style and child behavior, but they are very interesting nonetheless, and the gains of children raised in adoptive households and some parenting interventions suggest that they do have some causal importance. Importantly, such parenting practices do not change instantly when offspring rise into the middle class, which may be important in explaining the poor test performance of the children of first-generation middle class families of all groups.

Chapter 6 addresses the IQ gap between blacks and whites, arguing for a genetic contribution of zero, and must be read in tandem with Appendix 2, which provides more detailed arguments. Nisbett discusses a substantial partial closing of the IQ gap among children over the last 50 years, and corresponding improvements in school achievement. These gains weaken among teenagers and further among adults, but even on their own they represent a major advance, and suggest that efforts like KIPP could go much further.

Nisbett places a particular focus on evidence from European admixture in African-Americans (on average about 20%). For instance, he notes that skin color, facial features, and blood groups show only tiny correlations with IQ. These arguments turn out not to work because of the sample sizes and the genetics of those traits, but a similar analysis with DNA ancestry testing should now be feasible. More persuasively, Nisbett reviews the mixed evidence from studies of adopted children with one or two black parents. Each of the several studies has confounding effects at play, such as lack of parental IQ information, but collectively they leave it in doubt whether biracial children really do show an advantage over children with two black parents, and pose a challenge for hereditarians selectively focusing on the one (of three) major study showing an advantage for biracial children.

Nisbett presents a number of other lines of argument, with one particularly telling point being the fact that that among African-Americans women predominate in the upper IQ echelons, while among whites the pattern is reversed, and I expect that they will indeed shift scientific opinion towards a lower estimate of the importance of genetics. At the least, we should be confident that environmental interventions, provided that they are validated by randomized trials, can further increase black IQ and that fatalism is mistaken.

Chapter 7 discusses IQ-boosting programs such as the Perry Preschool Program, the Milwaukee Project, and the Abecedarian Program. Overall, there are many disappointing results and some gems, but those gems have shown in randomized experiments that they produce benefits that exceed their costs. IQ gains are often temporary, but a gain that lasts for several years after a program enables increased academic achievement and learning during that time (with lasting benefits), and some gains are significantly more long-lived. More importantly, life outcomes such as employment, use of public assistance, and crime can be dramatically affected. The Obama administration has promised to and is likely to roll out extensive programs along these lines, but the key to success will be rigorous and continuous evaluations that are taken into account in expanding some programs and paring back others.

Chapter 8 covers the high achievement of people of Northeast Asian descent (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). Nisbett correctly emphasizes that regardless of whether or not there is a moderate IQ advantage for these populations, their educational achievements are greatly superior to what would be predicted from IQ alone. Increased conscientiousness due to cultural values of duty to family, a belief in the importance of hard work relative to innate ability, and a tradition of education are cited as explanations for the difference in motivation. One point I would raise here is that cultural environment may also have selected for genetic variations affecting personality. Indeed, a polymorphism at the DRD4 locus associated with ADHD and impulsivity is found in very different regional proportions (it is high in countries recently populated by immigrants, for example) has been found to be extremely scarce in China. A unified stable state living very close to Malthusian margins for many centuries does seem potentially conducive to the evolution of increased conscientiousness among subsistence farmers.

Chapter 9 discusses the high IQ and intellectual achievements of Ashkenazi Jews. With respect to the latter, Nisbett rightly notes that there is strong variation in regional intellectual achievement independently of IQ, e.g. the lack of scientific advance from Texans (even limited to non-Hispanic whites). He discusses various accounts of Ashkenazi intelligence, most importantly the evolutionary biology approach of Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending. Those researchers use statistical analysis to argue that the clustering of Ashkenazi diseases that are linked to increased dendrite growth, myelin in the brain, or increased IQ is vanishingly unlikely unless the Ashkenazim were subject to recent selection, likely due to the extended period when the majority were in finance or related occupations and financial success was strongly associated with numbers of surviving children.

Nisbett thinks that this theory is plausible, although its prediction of increased IQ in heterozygotes for the recessive diseases has not yet been tested, but argues correctly that Jewish achievement exceeds what would be predicted from IQ alone. However, selection for success in moneylending and professional occupations would almost certainly select for self-control and low time preference as well as IQ, so evolutionary considerations may explain more of Ashkenazi success than the chapter suggests. Further genetic differences would support cultural differences: if a high fraction of one's relatives and peers are more intelligent and self-disciplined, that will foster a culture of intellectualism and achievement that will multiply the initial difference. Regardless of the exact causes, they should be studied to determine how to duplicate them elsewhere (whether through education or pharmacology/gene therapy).

Chapter 10 concludes the book with discussion of what parents can do to help cultivate their children's intelligence in a handy presentation that pays attention to relevant caveats and limits of our knowledge. A brief epilogue summarize the main claims of the book and pronounces strong hereditarianism overthrown.

The Elephant in the Room
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