The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles A. Murray Page B
Authors: Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles A. Murray
Tags: United States, General, science, Social Science, History, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Education, Life Sciences, Genetics & Genomics, Educational Psychology, Intelligence Levels - United States, Nature and Nurture, Intelligence Levels - Social Aspects - United States, Intellect, Intelligence Levels
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the expert testimony before the Court favoring it, it seemed to make good common sense.
THE RECEIVED WISDOM OVERTURNED
The problem is that common sense turned out to be wrong. In the last decade, the received wisdom has been repudiated by research and by common agreement of the leading contemporary scholars. 11 The most comprehensive modern surveys of the use of tests for hiring, promotion, and licensing, in civilian, military, private, and government occupations, repeatedly point to three conclusions about worker performance, as follows.
Job training and job performance in many common occupations are well predicted by any broadly based test of intelligence, as compared to narrower tests more specifically targeted to the routines of the job. As a corollary: Narrower tests that predict well do so largely because they happen themselves to be correlated with tests of general cognitive ability.
Mental tests predict job performance largely via their loading on
g.
The correlations between tested intelligence and job performance or training are higher than had been estimated prior to the 1980s. They are high enough to have economic consequences.
We state these conclusions qualitatively rather than quantitatively so as to span the range of expert opinion. Whereas experts in employee selection accept the existence of the relationship between cognitive ability and job performance, they often disagree with each other’s numerical conclusions. Our qualitative characterizations should be acceptable to those who tend to minimize the economic importance of general cognitive ability and to those at the other end of the range. 12
Why has expert opinion shifted? The answer lies in a powerful method of statistical analysis that was developing during the 1970s and came of age in the 1980s. Known as meta-analysis, it combines the results from many separate studies and extracts broad and stable conclusions. 13 In the case of job performance, it was able to combine the results from hundreds of studies. Experts had long known that the small samples and the varying validities, reliabilities, and restrictions of range in such studies were responsible to some extent for the low, negligible, or unstable correlations. What few realized was how different the picture would look when these sources of error and underestimation were taken into account through meta-analysis. 14 Taken individually, the studies said little that could be trusted or generalized; properly pooled, they were full of gold. The leaders in this effort—psychologists John Hunter and Frank Schmidt have been the most prominent—launched a new epoch in understanding the link between individual traits and economic productivity.
THE LINK BETWEEN COGNITIVE ABILITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE
We begin with a review of the evidence that an important statistical link between IQ and job performance does in fact exist. In reading the discussion that follows, remember that job performance does vary in the real world, and the variations are not small. Think of your own workplace and of the people who hold similar jobs. How large is the difference between the best manager and the worst? The best and worst secretary? If your workplace is anything like ours have been, the answer is that the differences are large indeed. Outside the workplace, what is it worth to you to have the name of a first-rate plumber instead of a poor one? A first-rate auto mechanic instead of a poor one? Once again, thecommon experience is that job performance varies widely, with important, tangible consequences for our everyday lives.
Nor is variation in job performance limited to skilled jobs. Readers who have ever held menial jobs know this firsthand. In restaurants, there are better and worse dishwashers, better and worse busboys. There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse,
THE RECEIVED WISDOM OVERTURNED
The problem is that common sense turned out to be wrong. In the last decade, the received wisdom has been repudiated by research and by common agreement of the leading contemporary scholars. 11 The most comprehensive modern surveys of the use of tests for hiring, promotion, and licensing, in civilian, military, private, and government occupations, repeatedly point to three conclusions about worker performance, as follows.
Job training and job performance in many common occupations are well predicted by any broadly based test of intelligence, as compared to narrower tests more specifically targeted to the routines of the job. As a corollary: Narrower tests that predict well do so largely because they happen themselves to be correlated with tests of general cognitive ability.
Mental tests predict job performance largely via their loading on
g.
The correlations between tested intelligence and job performance or training are higher than had been estimated prior to the 1980s. They are high enough to have economic consequences.
We state these conclusions qualitatively rather than quantitatively so as to span the range of expert opinion. Whereas experts in employee selection accept the existence of the relationship between cognitive ability and job performance, they often disagree with each other’s numerical conclusions. Our qualitative characterizations should be acceptable to those who tend to minimize the economic importance of general cognitive ability and to those at the other end of the range. 12
Why has expert opinion shifted? The answer lies in a powerful method of statistical analysis that was developing during the 1970s and came of age in the 1980s. Known as meta-analysis, it combines the results from many separate studies and extracts broad and stable conclusions. 13 In the case of job performance, it was able to combine the results from hundreds of studies. Experts had long known that the small samples and the varying validities, reliabilities, and restrictions of range in such studies were responsible to some extent for the low, negligible, or unstable correlations. What few realized was how different the picture would look when these sources of error and underestimation were taken into account through meta-analysis. 14 Taken individually, the studies said little that could be trusted or generalized; properly pooled, they were full of gold. The leaders in this effort—psychologists John Hunter and Frank Schmidt have been the most prominent—launched a new epoch in understanding the link between individual traits and economic productivity.
THE LINK BETWEEN COGNITIVE ABILITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE
We begin with a review of the evidence that an important statistical link between IQ and job performance does in fact exist. In reading the discussion that follows, remember that job performance does vary in the real world, and the variations are not small. Think of your own workplace and of the people who hold similar jobs. How large is the difference between the best manager and the worst? The best and worst secretary? If your workplace is anything like ours have been, the answer is that the differences are large indeed. Outside the workplace, what is it worth to you to have the name of a first-rate plumber instead of a poor one? A first-rate auto mechanic instead of a poor one? Once again, thecommon experience is that job performance varies widely, with important, tangible consequences for our everyday lives.
Nor is variation in job performance limited to skilled jobs. Readers who have ever held menial jobs know this firsthand. In restaurants, there are better and worse dishwashers, better and worse busboys. There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse,
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