The NYT said so last January and the academic study upon which that claim is based has recently become available online. So I suppose I should say a few words about the absurdity. The first thing to notice is that everybody else seems to think it is an absurdity too. They don’t put it as bluntly as I do, though. What they say is “This finding will have to be repeated by others before we take it seriously” — or words to that effect. And the reason why they say that is that Left-leaning social scientists have been labouring mightily for many decades at the task of getting black intellectual achievement up to white levels. And nothing that they try works. So to say that the election of Obama has suddenly closed that pesky gap is improbable to say the least.
I don’t have access to the full academic article but what I see in the abstract immediately reminds me of “the dog that didn’t bark” in the delightful Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze. The research involved giving the same group of people the same test four times. Now that immediately puts into the mind of any psychometrician “The practice effect” and so one would expect some mention of how that problem was dealt with. But there is no such mention. When you give the same test to the same people on two different occasions, you find, for various reasons, that they get higher scores the second time around. That is the practice effect. And to give the same test to the same people not twice but four times sets all the alarm bells about the practice effect ringing.
So there are two ways in which the final (post-Obama-election) results reported could simply be an artifact of the practice effect: 1) Everybody had got so good at the test by then that hardly anybody got anything wrong — thus equalizing the scores for blacks and whites; 2). Maybe blacks worked harder than whites at figuring out where they went wrong on the first couple of occasions and for that reason alone got their scores up to white levels eventually.
The only way those two possibilities could be precluded would have been for the authors to use not the same test four times but four parallel forms of the same test, and there is no mention of that. Parallel forms have to be very carefully constructed to ensure that they DO give the same scores for the same people and that is so onerous that I have never seen more than two forms of any test made available.
So the entire study would seem to be methodologically naive and incapable of supporting its conclusions.
I might mention that the entire study is the latest variation in the absurd “stereotype threat” literature. The stereotype threat theory says that blacks do badly at tests because they think blacks do badly at tests. The initial “proof” of the theory arose from a study wherein psychologists made some black test-takers especially aware of their blackness while others did not have their blackness mentioned. The more aware blacks got worse results. But the unaware blacks still scored the usual amount below whites. So it showed, rather clearly, that awareness of blackness was NOT the cause of the black/white gap — as the unaware blacks still did badly. Awareness of blackness can WORSEN black performance but unawareness cannot IMPROVE black performance. But to this day the theory is believed by most academics who refer to it. They still assert that awareness of being black is why blacks do badly. There are many other absurdities in the theory, one of which is that it seems to apply only to blacks and not to all minorities, but anybody who wants to look at the matter in detail should read here, here, here, here, here and here.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here
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4 users commented in " The Obama effect: Have blacks in general suddenly become smarter? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackUm, where do I begin? The title of this article is offensive, to start. The subject matter of this article is riddled with errors/inconsistencies/logical fallacies. For instance, perhaps you haven’t considered the unlikelihood of any test having the ability to accurately measure a person’s intelligence –the study was suspect from the start. Further, there is the inevitable cultural bias that any academic test would likely exhibit (though this would be dependent on who wrote the test, the subject matter of the questions, etc.). What you refer to as the “stereotype literature” is not absurd but the result of black test-takers having to read dumb posts like this that repeatedly tell them they are going to score lower on IQ tests and the American public school system’s history of unequal treatment of African Americans. Basically, this amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy, a well-documented phenomenon in many fields. Finally, the “leftist project” of trying to prove that black Americans are as intelligent as those of other groups reflects a passion for trying to understand test scores rather than just report a number. Once you delve into the many factors that contribute to “intelligence” and how it is supposedly measured, myriad issues and concerns emerge . . .
Do you study education? Have you spoken to African Americans’ of various economic and educational levels about their perceptions of schooling, their intelligence and testing in general? I suspect you don’t and haven’t. Maybe you should stick to Australian politics. I hope you have a better fundamental understanding of that reality than you do this one.
Hey, you have it half right. You are absolutely right that the Obama study is probably bunk. I’ve read the article, and while the practice effect issue is not really the issue, the self-selection of participants into the study is. A new Obama study is coming out that uses a genuine random assignment study to test the effect and finds no such Obama effect. It simply seems to be the case that Obama is not making black people perform better on tests.
Where you are wrong is about the larger stereotype threat literature, which now has about 300 solid publication behind it, most of which I have read. The critiques you cite are old. Yes you can indeed scare black students into performing below their abilities and widening the gap. But you can also reduce stereotype threat so that blacks perform better than they would otherwise. There are numerous intervention studies that have reduced the black white test score gap in schools. I suspect you don’t really want to hear about those.
The bottom line is that the Obama study is misleading but that doesn’t change the fact that stereotype threat is real (though hardly the whole explanation for the gap) and there are things that can be done to lift black performance. Even Charles Murray now acknowledges this, which, I would guess my have some currency with you….
There’s a cool experiment by Brown & Day that shows how Amy Wax, and Paul Sackett are wrong about this stuff. The found big differences between blacks and whites on a test of fluid intelligence could be narrowed by simply calling the test a puzzle rather than using the Standard Instructions. So given that it lifts the performance of blacks higher than under the standard way of presenting the test, it shows that part of the existing gap can be psychological. Amy wax recently got her clock cleaned about this stuff at the AMerican Enterprise institute. One of the original stereotype threat researchers, in a debate, exposed her inability to think scientifically about research–that she’s just a right- wing nut job who doesn’t like black people much. It’s on the American Enterprise Institute website….
come on this is so offensive doesn’t anyone see that i’m sure i’m not the only one also if a white person is behind this how racist does that sound??????????????????????????
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