In The g Factor, Jensen (1998, pp. 384-385) states that because races differ in SES levels, the Spearman-Jensen effect (i.e., g-loading correlates) found in racial IQ differences (hispanics, denoted H; blacks, denoted B; whites, denoted W) could simply reflect this fact. One reason seems to be that SES correlates with g-loadings although he affirms that it was irrelevant to Spearman’s hypothesis (furthermore, this does not necessarily imply that IQ gain due to SES improvement is itself g-loaded; see Jensen 1997, or Metzen 2012). When testing this hypothesis anyway, it was shown that the WISC subtests’ correlation with SES is correlated with WISC g-loading in both the white and black samples. Also, when matching for SES, the BW difference still correlates strongly with g-loadings. Presently, I will try to replicate this result.
Month: September 2013
Hu (2013, September, 5; 2013, July, 5; 2013, August, 18) has raised some interesting points. I will comment on a few of them here and present several new analyses.
Cultural Loading, Heritability, and the BW gap
As Meng Hu noted, Kan et al. (2011) showed that subtest cultural-loadings, as they estimated them, correlated both with the magnitude of the B/W subtest gaps and with subtest heritability estimates. The authors interpreted these associations as support for a GxE hypothesis of individual differences and offered a model similar to that proposed by Flynn and Dickens (2001). Moreover, Kan et al. (2011) saw the associations between cultural-load and heritability and between cultural-load and the magnitude of the BW gap as problematic for what they termed a biological g model. Below, I will show that g-loadings fully mediate the association between cultural loadings and the two other variables noted and therefore that what is in need of explanation is only the association between cultural-loadings and g-loadings. I will then proceed to offer an account for this.
First, I looked to see if g-loadings mediated the association between the BW gap and cultural loadings. They did. Then I looked to see if cultural-loadings mediated the association between the BW gap and g-loadings. They did not fully. The results are shown below. As reliability estimates were not presented for all subtests, I ran the analysis with and without reliability corrections. Continue reading
The present analysis is an extension of Spitz’s earlier (1988) study on the relationship between mental retardation (MR) lower score and subtest heritability (h2) and g-loadings. These relationships were found to be positive. But Spitz himself haven’t tested the possibility that MR (lower) score could be related with shared (c2) or nonshared (e2) environment. I use the WAIS and WISC data given in my earlier post, and have found that MR is not related with c2 and e2 values. These findings nevertheless must be interpreted very carefully because the small number of subtests (e.g., 10 or 11) is a very critical limitation.
