Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

296 Educability and Group Differences
either group has in common with, say, the Eskimos or the Australian
Bushmen. Whatever experiential differences exist are largely
social status differences rather than cultural differences in any
meaningful sense of the word.
To say that an intelligence test is culturally-biased or statusbiased
means that the knowledge, skills, and demands of the test
sample the specific learning opportunities of one subpopulation
(i.e., social class or racial group) more than of another. One can
think of many examples of questions that would be easier for
children of one subpopulation than of another. The question, for
example, ‘What are chopsticks made of’ would favor Oriental
children; ‘What are tortillas’ would favor Mexican children;
‘What are chitterlings’ would favor Negro children; ‘What is
the Talmud’ wrould favor Jewish children, and so on. One could
presumably devise a test composed entirely of specially selected
items that would give a marked advantage to any particular subpopulation
one might choose. The culture-bias hypothesis claims
that this in fact is what has been done: intentionally or unintentionally,
standard intelligence tests have been composed of items
which favor middle- and upper-class whites and disfavor all other
groups, especially Negroes, other minorities, and lowTer-class
whites. How valid is this claim Since I have discussed these
issues at length elsewhere (Jensen, 1968c, 1970b), I will here
attempt only a brief summary of the main points.
Surely one can point to ‘culture-loaded’ items on many standard
intelligence tests. Questions about exotic zoo animals, fairy tales,
and musical instruments are obvious examples of items that should
favor children from well-to-do homes and disfavor children from
poor homes which afford little opportunity to learn about such
things. In one obvious attempt to discredit IQ tests, five highly
‘culture-loaded’ items from the Comprehension subtest of the
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) were selected for
display by proponents of the culture-bias hypothesis of Negrowhite
IQ difference (Bulletin of the Cambridge Society for Social
Responsibility in Science, 18 July 1970, p. 6). It may therefore
seem ironic to discover that, in fact, among the eleven subtests
of the WAIS, the one on which Negroes actually differ least from
whites is the very Comprehension test that was held up as an
example of test items that might seem to be culturally biased
against Negroes (e.g., ‘Why should people pay taxes’ ‘Why does