Comments on: The Obama effect: Have blacks in general suddenly become smarter?

By: kitty

kitty — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:32:54 +0000

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??????????????????????????

By: Left wing skeptic

Left wing skeptic — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:36:36 +0000

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….

By: Left wing skeptic

Left wing skeptic — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:17:25 +0000

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….

By: adele1979

adele1979 — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:48:10 +0000

Um, 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.