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Nicholas Kristof: Here’s how we can raise America’s collective IQ

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5:49 PM Friday, April 17, 2009

Poor people have IQ’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.

After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that IQ is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have IQ’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor anti-poverty programs can accomplish much.

Yet while this view of IQ as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong.

Terrific advice

Richard Nisbett, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective IQ. That’s important, because while IQ doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher IQ correlates to greater success in life.

Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: Very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Professor Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, IQ is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.

Income factor

When poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their IQ’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study.

Another indication of malleability is that IQ has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average IQ of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s IQ test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Nisbett says.

Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher IQ’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s IQ’s drop or stagnate over the summer months.

Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise IQ and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until first grade.

By age 5, the kids in the program averaged an IQ of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group.

Nisbett suggests putting less money into Head Start, which has a mixed record, and more into these intensive childhood programs.

Another proven intervention is to tell junior-high students that IQ is expandable, and that intelligence is something they can shape. Students exposed to that idea get better grades.

Girls and math

That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; without an excuse for failure, they excel.

The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. If we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the collective IQ in the U.S. by 1 billion points. That should be a no-brainer.

Nicholas D. Kristof writes for The New York Times.

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