Month: August 2014

The Elusive X-Factor, or Why Jonathan Kaplan Is Wrong about Race and IQ

Philosopher Jonathan Kaplan recently published an article called Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors: environments, racism, and the “hereditarian hypothesis,” which can be downloaded here. His thesis is that the black-white IQ gap could plausibly be due to racism and what he calls racialized environments. He presents simulations in support of this argument. He also argues that “given the actual state of the world there is no way to generate any reasonably strong evidence in favor of the hereditarian hypothesis.”

I have written a detailed critique of his claims. In short, he is wrong. Here’s the abstract of my article:

Jonathan Michael Kaplan recently published a challenge to the hereditarian account of the IQ gap between whites and blacks in the United States (Kaplan, 2014). He argues that racism and “racialized environments” constitute race-specific “X-factors” that could plausibly cause the gap, using simulations to support this contention. I show that Kaplan’s model suffers from vagueness and implausibilities that render it an unpromising approach to explaining the gap, while his simulations are misspecified and provide no support for his model. I describe the proper methodology for testing for X-factors, and conclude that Kaplan’s X-factors would almost certainly already have been discovered if they did in fact exist. I also argue that the hereditarian position is well-supported, and, importantly, is amenable to a definitive empirical test.

The PDF is available at Open Differential Psychology. You can also read the article below the cut. Continue reading

Racial differences in the long-term trend NAEP scores (1975/78-2012)

I analyze the LTT NAEP achievement scores, a public data set available at NCES. In general, minority-majority ethnic groups show a secular decline in d gap, for both math and reading tests, and this occurs at all ages of assessment (9, 13, 17), and at all percentile levels. Some exceptions are noteworthy. There is no secular gain at age 17 among whites, and no meaningful decline in black-white difference for the NAEP math at ages 13 and 17. Within each year of assessment, no evidence is provided for the hypothesis that the racial gaps (notably, the black-white gap) widen with age after entering schools. There was simply no trend at all.
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