Best-selling introductory psychology books give misleading view of intelligence

Gottfredson&#x27;s paper is a paper that I have read, and I see it is being used as the analytical framework for criticizing psychology textbooks. I do research for writing popular writings on psychology, so I have a whole bunch of introductory psychology textbooks in the office where I am typing this, and I have to agree that introductory psychology textbooks leave a LOT to be desired in representing the consensus of modern psychology research. That&#x27;s true about research on human intelligence and true about any other psychology topic: the introductory textbooks only do a so-so job.<p>That said, one might wonder where to find good information about current psychology research. Sometimes there are review articles that update practitioners on current research, which are incidentally read by scientists in other disciplines. I&#x27;ll note for the record that not all psychologist agree EITHER with the review article I will link here, but it is a good readable account of current issues in the psychological research on human intelligence and well worth a read for Hacker News participants who are curious about these issues. It refers to many of the most important papers in the field, most of which I have read over the last three decades.<p>Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., &amp; Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159. doi:10.1037&#x2F;a0026699<p>(Disclaimer: I have met many of the researchers on human intelligence, including Gottfredson, at professional conferences, but my views of what the overall research says and who has the best leads on open research questions are my own.)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.virginia.edu&#x2F;~ent3c&#x2F;papers2&#x2F;Articles%20for%20Online%20CV&#x2F;Nisbett(2012)%20.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.virginia.edu&#x2F;~ent3c&#x2F;papers2&#x2F;Articles%20for%20O...</a>

Intelligence studies : Left :: Climate science : Right<p>The Left views the expert consensus on intelligence in much the same way that the right views the expert consensus on climate change. The consensus view is rejected not because of evidence, but because of what it does to their model of the world and fear that it will open the door to great abuses in the future (increased government regulation for climate change, and increased racism and discrimination for intelligence studies).

It seems like there&#x27;s a subset of psychological researchers that want so bad to debunk the years of research into IQ. I get that there are some uncomfortable implications that arise from accepting IQ as a measure of overall intelligence, but, from my understanding, IQ is an excellent predictor of income, social status, and academic &amp; job performance.<p>My opinion is that we are doing society a huge disservice by dismissing IQ.

Two comments:<p>- Lay people seem to have a very good intuition about the actual heritability of intelligence (taken to assess the genetic and environmental determinants of intelligence). [0]<p>- If you&#x27;d like to read an up-to-date and thorough literature review on human intelligence, I highly recommend &quot;Intelligence: All That Matters&quot; by Stuart Ritchie.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16468694" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16468694</a>

Psychology as a field is one that is constantly becoming out of date. General consensus amongst psychologists often doesn&#x27;t reach academic text quickly, because of the bureaucracy that exists inside the APA (American Psychological Association). See the controversy around the most recent version of the DSM.<p>I&#x27;ve observed that academics in the field will often take theory as most likely fact, if only because the actual published academic material hasn&#x27;t caught up yet, but they&#x27;ve all been to the various conferences that are relevant to their particular field (social psychology, cognitive, etc).<p>Any study that is citing materials from over 20 years ago is grossly outdated. Many of the materials from even 10 years ago are becoming outdated. And now, more recently, we&#x27;ve started to examine the racial bias that exists in our systems of research, so I expect past material to come under even further scrutiny.

The most remarkable thing BY FAR: That some expert(s) are actually looking at and critiquing introductory textbooks!<p>This type of issue is present in nearly every field. Education would be dramatically improved if more actual experts reviewed more of the introductory materials (ideally all the way down to elementary school level).

&gt;&gt; To identify factual inaccuracies, Warne’s team used as a benchmark a consensus statement on intelligence research published in 1997 by Linda Gottfredson et al<p>Is the best way to define &#x27;fact&#x27; really a twenty year old study?<p>Also, even if the results are believed, it doesn&#x27;t seem to be a big deal. Afterall, they&#x27;re reporting an average of 1 factual inaccuracy per book. When each book presents hundreds or thousands of truth claims, is 1 factual inaccuracy per book noteworthy? I&#x27;m willing to bet a much larger percentage of the &#x27;scientific consensus&#x27; they define as &#x27;fact&#x27; is in fact wrong.

Link to the actual paper: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;psycnet.apa.org&#x2F;fulltext&#x2F;2018-07714-001.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;psycnet.apa.org&#x2F;fulltext&#x2F;2018-07714-001.pdf</a>

This may be a bit off the deep end, but in 2014 the Journal of Intelligence had a special issue on the state-of-art for intelligence research (in psychology). It&#x27;s open access :).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdpi.com&#x2F;journal&#x2F;jintelligence&#x2F;special_issues&#x2F;int_where" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdpi.com&#x2F;journal&#x2F;jintelligence&#x2F;special_issues&#x2F;int...</a>

* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests.<p>That one is true.<p>&quot;<i>This contradicts the 1997 consensus statement which tackles this issue and concludes that “intelligence tests are not culturally biased”.</i>&quot;<p>Well, glad we got that out of the way.

One of the most shocking things for me when I went through highschool a decade ago was how new things we learned about maths&#x2F;physics showed the previous things we learned were not accurate. Things like relativity and time dilation, integrals&#x2F;derivatives, etc.<p>This was further proved (but not that shocking then) when I went through Engineering in the University with fluid mechanics et al.<p>I think when learning a whole new topic, specially ones experienced at a practical level, we need to start at a point with some broad oversimplifications. Not saying that is what happens here since I know little about psychology, but I would expect the same to apply here. Then we will be ready to dig deeper.

It&#x27;s probably worth noting that the &quot;consensus statement&quot; cited here was only signed by 52 of the 131 researchers it was sent out to.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mainstream_Science_on_Intelligence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mainstream_Science_on_Intell...</a>

Hard right: everybody should take an IQ test Libertarian right: I take drugs to increase my IQ Libertarian left: there is no IQ Hard left: everybody has the same IQ

When laypeople misuse science and maths, (I am in this context a layperson btw) the consequences depend on the applicability of the subject to ordinary discourse and events.<p>Because I don&#x27;t work in bomb science, power engineering or nuclear medicine, If I misuse facts about nuclear fission making decisions to hire a new staffer, the consequence is low. Nothing about nuclear fission informs what happens in the workplace. So the colloquial lack of understanding on my part as to what science actually says about nuclear physics is low.<p>When I mis-use understanding of I.Q. and g to make a hiring decision, the consequences are huge for the person hired and the organisation. Assumptions about normative behaviour, likely success, future hiring, application of applied knowledge, ability to learn, all these things have direct meaning and importance. The impact on the hire, or non-hire is also immense. Future promotion, reward, positional authority can all be affected by somebody in the psych space, working in H&#x2F;R, mis-applying domain-specific knowledge around IQ and intelligence.<p>Its not nuclear physics, but its being mis-applied. Thats the problem. (that it&#x27;s being mis-applied: not that it isn&#x27;t nuclear physics. Although a quality of its mis-application <i>is</i> about it not being <i>hard</i> science: its guesswork, rei-fied through G and other statements of single-value measure against an imprecise measurement. I don&#x27;t actually think social science is well named.)

This doesn&#x27;t make any sense. He&#x27;s taking a study over 20 years old designed to measure academic consensus and then using it to try and disprove 29 textbooks authored by leading psychologists. Couldn&#x27;t the latter be said to be a (much more recent) form of academic consensus? Why should a measure of academic consensus over 20 years old be used as some kind of evidence against newer ideas?

Kinda related to this, probably a good idea to re-evaluate EQ while we&#x27;re at it. Although, my gut feeling is that a healthy mix of IQ and EQ makes good worker bees (if that&#x27;s the metric we&#x27;re interested in).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Job_performance#Emotional_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Job_performance#Emotional_inte...</a>

Those books are written by psychologists, maybe they have a good reason to be ... imprecise, underspecific? Be honest: nobody &quot;knows&quot;; Instigate thought: don&#x27;t serve the truth on a silver tablet. That seems to be true for every advanced topic. Reverse psychology is still psychology.

I&#x27;m so confused now. Who is right about this?

Sweet! Time to print new editions of all those textbooks! Time to buy a boat.

On one hand is, &quot;A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University&quot;. On the other are, &quot;the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US - some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive&quot;.<p>Why would I believe the former? I&#x27;m not saying that Utah Valley U. researchers shouldn&#x27;t raise questions, but that the standard for what I&#x27;m going to take at face value is much higher than one study that contradicts everyone else. One study is just the start of the start of a discussion. I think I&#x27;ll let the body of evidence accumulate and let experts weigh in.<p>One psychological concept I&#x27;m familiar with is confirmation bias. This article confirms beliefs held by some at HN about political bias, authority, and accuracy in science, (and unfortunately, an effort to rationalize and justify racism by finding some basis for it). That doesn&#x27;t make this report any more likely to be accurate. Apparently, 29 leading textbooks contradict it; if not for the bias, why not take 29 publications at face value instead of 1?<p>EDIT: a bunch of edits; sorry for the mess.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;ll add that this one study was published &quot;in an open-access article in Archives of Scientific Psychology&quot;. It&#x27;s not even peer-reviewed [EDIT2: It is, in fact, peer reviewed; sorry. I still expect the textbooks to be reviewed much more carefully than one paper.]