Bell Curve

7 12 Notes to pages 245-254 Notes to pages 255-258 7 13behavior is the scientific literature extensive enough to have permitted athoroughgoing presentation of individual differences other than intellectual.35. The most serious problem is the established and pronounced tendency ofblack juveniles to underreport offenses (Hindelang 1978, 1981).36. Not surprisingly, the most serious offenders are the ones who most oftenunderreport their crimes. Serious offenders are also the ones most likely togo uninterviewed in survey research. At the other extreme, minor offendersbrag about their criminal exploits. They inflate the real level of "crime"by putting minor incidents (for example, a school.yard fistfight, which caneasily fit the technical definition of "aggravated assault") in the same caregorywith authentically felonious attacks.Since we are focusing on the role of intelligence, self-report data posea special problem, for it has been observed that people of low intelligenceare less candid than brighter respondents. This bias would tend to weakenthe correlation between 1Q and crime in self-report data.37. The authoritative source on self-report data for juveniles is still Hindelanget al. 1981. See also Hindelang 1978, 1981; Smith and Davidson 1986.38. Wolfang, Figlio, and Sellin 1972; Wilson and Herrnstein 1985.39. These results for the entire age range are substantially the same when agesubgroups are examined, but some differences may be found. Those whobecome involved with the criminal justice system at an early age tendedto have lower intelligence than those who first become involved later intheir teens.40. This represents the top decile of white males. To use the same index acrossracial groups is inadvisable because of the different reporting characteristicsof whites and blacks.41. For a review of the literature, see Wilson and Hermstein 1985.42. Elliott and Voss 1974.43. Thornberry et al. 1985 uses the Philadelphia Cohort Study to demonstraterising crime after dropout for that well-known sample.44. The sample includes those who got a GED-most of whom had gotten itat the correctional institution in which they were incarcerated at the timeof their interview. The results are shown in Appendix 4.Chapter 121. Gove 1964. The definition is listed, sadly, as "obsolete." We can think ofno modem word doing that semantic job now.2. More recently, Walter Lippmann used civility in his worrying book (Lippmann1955) about what he feared was disappearing with the rising"Jacobinism" of American political life, the shift he saw early in the centuryaway from representative government toward populist democracy. Early inhis career as a journalist and social commentator (Lippmann 1922b), Lippmannnoted that the ordinary, private person sets the concerns ofgovernance very low on his or her list of priorities. To govern us, he said,we needed a special breed of person, leaders with the capacity to fathom,and the desire to promote, the public good. That capacity is what he calledcivility. For a reflection on Lippmann's conception of civility by a socialscientist, see Burdick 1959.3. There are other rationales for not voting, as, for example, the one promotedon a T-shirt favored by libertarians: "Don't vote. It only encouragesthem."4. For an attempt to construe voting as a rational act from the economicstandpoint, see Downs 1957.5. Aristotle 1905 ed., p. 1129.6. Although the sample was not strictly representative of the American population,it was a broad cross-section, unlikely to be atypical except as a resultof its underrepresentation of rural and minority children. Hess andTorney 1967.7. The second graders were excluded from some of the analyses because somequestionnaire items evoked too high a rate of meaningless or nonresponses.8. A measure of political efficacy was based on the children's "agree" or "disagree"responses to five statements, including: "I don't think public officialscare much what people like me think." Or, "People like me don't haveany say about what the government does."9. Harvey and Harvey 1970.10. The exceptions included the measures for political efficacy and politicalparticipation, both of which were barely correlated with intelligence, althoughslightly correlated with socioeconomic status (primarily viaparental education, rather than family wealth). The authors speculatedthat the rising cynicism of the young during the later 1960s may in part accountfor these deviant results.1 I. Like other studies (e.g., Neuman 1986, see below), this one also found thatthe more intelligent someone is, the more likely he or she is to be liberalon social issues and conservative on economic ones. Chauvinistic, militaristic,and anticommunistic attitude were inversely related to intelligence.12. For a brief summary of this literature as of the late 1960s, see White 1969,who similarly concludes that political socialization, as he calls it, is highlydependent on intelligence itself rather than on socioeconomic status.13. Sidney Verba and Norman Nie ( 1972), leading scholars of American voting,distinguish cogently between the study of politics as a political scien-