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
