Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help Linda S. Gottfredson School of Education University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA (302) 831-1650 Fax (302) 831-6058
[email protected] Running Head: Suppressing Intelligence Submitted: July 9, 2003 Prepared for R. H. Wright & N. A. Cummings (Eds.), Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well Intentioned Road to Hell. Suppressing Intelligence 2 Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help Research on intelligence is a tale of good and evil—or so the media would have us think. On one side we are presented mean-spirited pseudoscientists who are greasing the slippery slope to oppression and genocide with their elitist, racist ideologies about human differences. On the other side are the earnest souls who would save us from those horrors by exposing the non- scientific and immoral basis of the so-called “science” of intelligence differences. Even when the science is conceded to be accurate, it is often labeled dangerous and irresponsible (Block & Dworkin, 1974). If not life-imperiling, it at least threatens the foundations of American democracy. In short, we must make the world safe from intelligence research. Perhaps ironically, institutional psychology has itself been busy doing just that for over thirty years. The media can keep repainting its libelous portrait of intelligence research only with the complicity of intelligence’s mother field, psychology. Although intelligence tests are often cited as psychology’s biggest success, psychology often treats researchers who study the origins and consequences of individual and group differences in general intelligence as its biggest embarrassment—the troublesome child or mad uncle whom a socially ambitious family would lock up or have disappear.