The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

If you've just come home from a six-month safari, you may have missed the bitter disputes set off by The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Its authors, sociologist Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (hereafter M & H), have been roundly attacked for their ideas. Critique has followed on critique--gaining all the more sales for the book.

According to M & H all the world is divided into five "cognitive classes." Individuals are assigned to one or another of these classes by their IQ scores as measured by standard intelligence tests. At the top is Cognitive Class I, or "the cognitive elite," who in a graphic depiction of the normal bell-shaped curve's distribution of intelligence will occupy the right-hand tail. Class I individuals are defined as the top 5 percent of Americans who have IQs of 125 or more and who number some 12.5 million people. Among these "very bright" individuals are those who regularly find their way into the "cognitively challenging professions." In M & H's depiction of the world, the cognitive elite, especially the top 2 percent, regularly garner rich economic rewards, and enjoy rewarding work running the institutions and businesses of the United States.

The other four classes are also determined by IQ scores: The bright, IQs of 110 to 125; the normal, 90 to 110 who comprise half the population; Class IV, or the dull with IQs of 75 to 90; and Class V or the very dull in the other tail of the distribution with scores of 50 to 75.

Such a class schema is not just an abstract analysis, because for M & H cognitive class determines the fate of individuals and thourgh them American society. But to agree with M & H you have to grant their claims about the nature of human intelligence: Intelligence consists of a general cognitive capacity g, which can be reliably and validly measured by standard IQ tests; IQ in differing populations is to a large degree inherited; IQ is related to academic and other social outcomes. Those in Cognitive Class IV or V, with IQs lower than 90, will display a disproportionate amount of America's social pathology. And yes, the races differ in their average IQ score, with East Asians testing slightly higher than Caucasians, who in turn are on average a lot smarter (15 IQ points) than blacks as a group.

Since for M & H, IQ or cognitive capacity is in great part an inherited fixed endowment, environmental interventions have been, and always will be, ineffectual in achieving an egalitarian society of equal outcome. Yet over the last forty years increasing opportunities have opened up for individuals in the cognitive elite regardless of socioeconomic background. Today, as opposed to the 1950s, very bright children are tested, culled, and selected to attend the country's elite undergraduate and graduate schools. The Harvard class of 1952 was much less academically talented than the present Harvard classes made up of the brightest of the bright from all over the country.

Today's very bright graduates from elite institutions are described by M & H as being cognitively partitioned into high-paying professions on intellectual merit rather than family or social background. The very bright then proceed to find other smart people to marry. The children of this elite, in turn, will be brighter than other children, even granting the effect of regression toward the mean. Slowly but surely America's commitment to rewarding intellectual merit wherever it is found is creating and isolating a separate cognitively elite class.

But a more alarming development, in M & H's judgment, can be seen at the other end of the bell curve. The same forces working to produce the cognitive and economic partitioning of an elite are isolating another group without the requisite brains or education to succeed in contemporary America. This minority of the dull are being economically and socially marginalized by the demands of a high-tech society; and according to M & H, the cognitive disabilities of the dull do not reduce, but instead augment, their disproportionately high rates of reproduction. Ergo, a cognitively incapacitated underclass increases year by year. Here M & H throw in warnings about the dull status of recent immigrants. They see converging social pressures threatening to produce a dysgenic intellectual decline in the population, or the dumbing down of America.

Can anything be done to reverse this cognitive decline? M & H assume that educational interventions cannot do much. They also claim that it isn't possible to stop the filtering processes by which the very smart gain access to elite institutions and economic rewards. The cognitive elite, after all, is more productive economically and can hardly be kept from acquiring more wealth--or more capacity to control the rest of society. In a frightening future scenario floated by M & H (but of course not overtly endorsed), the affluent cognitive elite will not only withdraw into its own isolated enclaves of privilege, but finally, in disillusioned desperation, its members will create a "custodial state" to contain the underclass, "a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population."

But there may still be time to avoid such an unhappy outcome for our society. M & H recommend changing social policies so that we realistically take account of the determining role of IQ in social outcomes. Unfortunately, M & H's sketchy proposals for social remedies remain undeveloped and appear in a few flurried pages in their concluding chapter.

They recommend that the United States should simplify bureaucratic rules; return social functions to the neighborhood; punish crime quickly according to clearly understood rules; reward virtue and excellence while eschewing relativism, egalitarianism, and affirmative action; spend mre money on gifted children; make laws supporting marriage and stop subsidizing the reproduction of the dull through welfare; reform immigration laws and guarantee that everyone who works full time can escape poverty. While the details remain sketchy, the nostalgic vision presented to justify these proposals is that of the community found in traditional neighborhoods, where even the least bright could find a valued place in society.

So who could disagree with a message that the gravest challenge for any good society is coping with the inequalities found among individuals? Nor would anyone I know deny the existence of excellence or virtue; and surely everyone agrees that each person needs to have human dignity in a community. It's the rest of the M & H program and worldview that creates distrust. Take their ominously utilitarian definition of a valued place: "You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone."

Is that it? While M & H drop references to the Founding Fathers and to a philosopher or two, they don't really seem to be cognizant of why and how other moral, philosophical, or religious traditions found and justify the ideal of moral and social equality. Christian affirmations of the intrinsic and equal value of each individual as created and beloved by God find little support in The Bell Curve's totally secular worldview. Here cognitive elites can enjoy wealth and status as their rightful due; they need not recognize any moral obligations to share with their neighbors or worry about a just society. In fact, the whole book seems morally and spiritually tone-deaf.

Still, readers might overlook ethical flaws and half-baked policy recommendations if the treatment of intelligence were sound and convincing. But here M & H's one-dimensional intellectual and scientific analysis is weak and marred by errors and omissions. One grievous mistake, uncovered by a critic who investigated the sources cited, is the noncritical reporting of crudely biased studies purportedly showing an average IQ of 70 among Africans. The studies cited to show East Asian superiority may also be suspect.

Race differences, however, are not the only, or at least not avowedly, the main point of The Bell Curve. The central analysis focuses on an all-white sample who were given IQ tests and then followed up over the years with measures in education, employment, marital, reproductive, criminal, and health outcomes. High IQ scores were found to be positively related to positive social outcomes, while low IQ scores were related to negative outcomes. But the strength of these statistical relationships and their proper interpretation is problematic; correlations never prove causation since so many other variables may be operating within a complex social situation.

The most crucial problem in M & H's work arises from their fervent belief that standard IQ tests measure what we mean by intelligence, and that IQ measures will be little affected by environmental conditions and interventions. Many other psychologists who study intelligence challenge the false reification of IQ, or g, and claim it to be only a statistical artifact created by tests and testing. Others take the moderate view that yes, IQ tests--when properly administered--may measure one facet of cognitive capacity. But there also exist other important dimensions of operating intelligence which are not measured by standard IQ tests.

Fluid intelligence may be different from measures of crystallized intelligence; and social intelligence and other forms of intelligence are definitely not tapped by IQ tests, even if middle-class cultural biases can be eliminated. Reading historical accounts of how IQ tests were developed, one finds out that items which did not fit into one narrow hypothesized definition of intelligence were discarded.

More to the point, most developmental psychologists affirm that even those cognitive capacities tested by IQ tests are dependent on early and continuing environmental factors that stimulate and sharpen mental capacities. The most dangerous bias in all of M & H's work is their willful underestimation of research on environmental and intervention factors. They ignore or dismiss studies which record success in raising IQ. M & H will concede the increase by fifteen points of average IQ scores in other countries over the years, and the increase of anticipated IQ scores in adopted children; but they continue to maintain that most environmental efforts will be fruitless. That's why we should spend more money on the gifted, who can be more economically and socially productive. Such a fixed, fatalistic faith in innate genetic endowments appears unfounded and impervious to counterevidence.

M & H never discuss, for instance, the new findings in brain studies which support the theory of multiple intelligences by finding multiple and separate modular brain structures for different kinds of cognitive functioning. Other studies of the brain point to the malleability and potential for change in brain structures that can be produced by cognitive stimulation, practice, and new social experiences. They ignore emotional and language development, along with developmental studies of intelligence over the life cycle. In the narrow focus of M & H, only one (severely criticized) statistical approach to testing and intelligence is relied upon.

From my own research on the role of emotions on cognitive functioning and memory processes, I see many other problematic issues in M & H's work. Thinking and emotions interact; self-expectations and achievement motivation make a difference when it comes to testing. Negative moods and negative emotions of fear and sadness can depress and slow the cognitive functioning of memory and information processing. On the other hand, positive emotions such as love can effectively attune a person's intelligences and attention to produce effective concrete and creative problem solving. Along with other missing psychological matters of importance, there's no recognition by M & H of the huge research literature on creativity and divergent thinking, which is measured by quite separate methods and seen as distinct from the kind of intelligence that IQ tests can measure.

Well, then, if the arguments of The Bell Curve are so deeply flawed, intellectually and ethically obtuse, why are we all spending so much energy criticizing it? Isn't this a case, in Alexander Pope's words, of "breaking a butterfly on a wheel"? No, not really. The fact that the book is now on the best-seller list can be one justification for taking the time to critique its message and methods. There's nothing like an enthusiastically championed half-truth, accompanied by pages of statistics and graphs, to create mystifications that can have dangerous social consequences. Each new negative review will point out problems that nonspecialists might not spot, making it that much harder for the work to be used to justify policy decisions.

At best, The Bell Curve can be an object lesson for all of us tempted to live by brains alone. Even the best and the brightest, with the highest IQs in the land, can produce works limited in moral insight and devoid of practical wisdom. Make that dull, very dull.