Abstract
In American political culture, there are two competing narratives of intelligence. The first is predicated, in part, on the pioneering work of French psychologist Alfred Binet and the battery of tests he developed near the turn of the nineteenth century to help identify French school children in need of remedial instruction. Contrary to Binet’s stated intentions and beliefs, when his methods were imported to America, they were used to construct the narrative of IQ, or the intelligence quotient. The bulk of this narrative was written by Charles Spearman, the creator of the statistical technique known as factor analysis as well as the theory of a general factor for intelligence, referred to as g. In this narrative, intelligence is a single property, measureable, heritable, comparable, and localized within the head. In both popular and scientific uses of this narrative, g has reached a degree of reification such that it is spoken of as if the skull could be split open, and g located in a specific place within the gray matter of the brain. Perhaps most important for American political culture, g is a largely fixed quantity, and is not particularly susceptible to environmental interventions, with the exception of physical or chemical damage to the brain itself. It plays a central role in the beliefs of many Americans with regard to social competition of all kinds, and, because of its history and significance, it has been a controversial narrative since its inception.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
For other examples, see Beyond Therapy (2003), the final report from the President’s Council on Bioethics headed by Leon Kass, or the techno pessimism of Bill Joy’s Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us, for two of the most prominent examples.
- 2.
While, in some cases, “executive function” is used as a substitute for g, or IQ, it actually refers to a specific cognitive function, localized within the upper cortex, and dedicated to specific decision making processes, e.g. it works to assimilate specific sets of information and enable conscious decision making under certain circumstances. It is, however, not synonymous with intelligence or cognition, and cannot function without the other cognitive units within the brain.
- 3.
I have referred to this kind of case study elsewhere in my work as “genealogy,” as much of my method of historical analysis is derived from Nietzsche’s ethic and method of history. However, the specific method of genealogy I am working to develop is still too poorly defined to function on its own, and thus, in this chapter I will refer, instead, to deep historical case studies.
- 4.
This misapprehension is founded generally on well-meaning, but misguided attempts to study the subject scientifically.
- 5.
This combined elements of physiology with European laboratory psychology, and the continued influence of the American infatuation with various forms of craniometry to constitute the field of psychometrics.
- 6.
Carson and Gould both note that the idea had already existed popularly in both places that and this tended to fuel the direction that researchers chose to go in examining intelligence.
- 7.
Arthur Jensen opened his 1969 paper on racial differences in IQ, “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement” with the line, “Compensatory education has been tried, and it apparently has failed.” Jensen is here being explicit about the ideological motivations behind his study and the policy implications he believes it carries. Common resources—primarily tax receipts—according to Jensen are wasted when they are spent on “compensatory” education because the racial differences in innate IQ negate any perceived benefit in providing an equal and quality education to all American children. The paper is a precursor to The Bell Curve, which was far more direct in discussing the folly of compensatory education and the need to channel young people in educations and careers that are appropriate to their innate and unalterable intellectual ability.
- 8.
While there are similarities between competition in democratic societies and competition, in other socio-political contexts, the differences are profound enough to require a completely separate analysis and thus I will not be dealing with non-democratic societies. For the purposes of this paper, I will refer to competition generally but by that, I will mean the very specific circumstances of competition in western liberal democracies. Ideology is pervasive in the formation of institutions and the impact of classical liberal ideology on the formation western liberal democracies and market economies justifies a distinct analysis of the role of competition and technology.
- 9.
e.g. some individuals with very high mathematical aptitude but low social intelligence and others with very high verbal intelligence but low spatial intelligence.
References
Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Carson, John. 2007. The measure of merit: Talents, intelligence, and inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gardener, Howard E. 2006. Multiple intelligences: New horizons in theory and practice. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard. 1983. Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Gould, Stephen J. 1996. The mismeasure of man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Guston, David H., and Daniel Sarewitz. 2002. Real-time technology assessment. Technology in Society 24: 93–109.
Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. 1994. The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: The Free Press.
Hochberg, Leigh R. 2008. Turning thought into action. The New England Journal of Medicine 359(11): 1175–1177.
Jensen, Arthur R. 1969. How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review 39: 1–123.
Jensen, Arthur R. 1985. The nature of the black-white difference on various psychometric tests: Spearman’s hypothesis. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 193–258.
Joy, William. 2000. Why the future doesn’t need us. Wired magazine 8.04, April.
Kass, Leon. 2003. Beyond therapy: Biotechnology and the pursuit of happiness. New York: Harper Perennial.
Kennedy, Philip R. 2006. The future of brain computer interfacing in a brave new world. BioSystems Reviews, February.
Lebow, Richard N. 2000. Contingency, catalysts, and international system change. Political Science Quarterly 115(4): 591–616.
Pinker, Steven. 2009. My genome, myself. The New York Times, 11 Jan, MM24+.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hays, S.A. (2013). Narratives of Intelligence: The Sociotechnical Context of Cognitive Enhancement in American Political Culture. In: Hays, S., Robert, J., Miller, C., Bennett, I. (eds) Nanotechnology, the Brain, and the Future. Yearbook of Nanotechnology in Society, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1787-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1787-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1786-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1787-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)