---
title: "Race and intelligence"
chunk: 3/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:16.114269+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The consensus view among geneticists, biologists and anthropologists is that race is a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one, a view supported by considerable genetics research. Race is a social construct based on folk ideologies that differentiate groups based on social disparities and superficial physical characteristics. A 2023 consensus report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine stated: "In humans, race is a socially constructed designation, a misleading and harmful surrogate for population genetic differences, and has a long history of being incorrectly identified as the major genetic reason for phenotypic differences between groups."
The concept of human "races" as natural and separate divisions within the human species has also been rejected by the American Anthropological Association. The official position of the AAA, adopted in 1998, is that advances in scientific knowledge have made it "clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups" and that "any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations [is] both arbitrary and subjective." A more recent statement from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (2019) declares that "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters."
Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace, the philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther, and the geneticist Joseph Graves, have argued that the cluster structure of genetic data is dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the influence of these hypotheses on the choice of populations to sample. When one samples continental groups, the clusters become continental, but if one had chosen other sampling patterns, the clustering would be different. Weiss and Fullerton have noted that if one sampled only Icelanders, Mayans and Maoris, three distinct clusters would form and all other populations could be described as being clinally composed of admixtures of Maori, Icelandic and Mayan genetic materials. Kaplan and Winther conclude that while racial groups are characterized by different allele frequencies, this does not mean that racial classification is a natural taxonomy of the human species, because multiple other genetic patterns can be found in human populations that crosscut racial distinctions. Moreover, the genomic data underdetermines whether one wishes to see subdivisions (i.e., splitters) or a continuum (i.e., lumpers). Under Kaplan and Winther's view, racial groupings are objective social constructions (see Mills 1998) that have conventional biological reality only insofar as the categories are chosen and constructed for pragmatic scientific reasons. Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) argue that the social construction of race derives not from any valid scientific basis but rather "from people's desire to classify."
In studies of human intelligence, race is almost always determined using self-reports rather than analyses of genetic characteristics. According to psychologist David Rowe, self-report is the preferred method for racial classification in studies of racial differences because classification based on genetic markers alone ignore the "cultural, behavioral, sociological, psychological, and epidemiological variables" that distinguish racial groups. Hunt and Carlson disagreed, writing that "Nevertheless, self-identification is a surprisingly reliable guide to genetic composition," citing a study by Tang et al. (2005). Sternberg and Grigorenko disputed Hunt and Carlson's interpretation of Tang's results as supporting the view that racial divisions are biological; rather, "Tang et al.'s point was that ancient geographic ancestry rather than current residence is associated with self-identification and not that such self-identification provides evidence for the existence of biological race."

== Group differences ==
The study of human intelligence is one of the most controversial topics in psychology, in part because of difficulty reaching agreement about the meaning of intelligence and objections to the assumption that intelligence can be meaningfully measured by IQ tests. Claims that there are innate differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups—which go back at least to the 19th century—have been criticized for relying on specious assumptions and research methods and for serving as an ideological framework for discrimination and racism.
In a 2012 study of tests of different components of intelligence, Hampshire et al. expressed disagreement with the view of Jensen and Rushton that genetic factors must play a role in IQ differences between races, stating that "it remains unclear ... whether population differences in intelligence test scores are driven by heritable factors or by other correlated demographic variables such as socioeconomic status, education level, and motivation. More relevantly, it is questionable whether [population differences in intelligence test scores] relate to a unitary intelligence factor, as opposed to a bias in testing paradigms toward particular components of a more complex intelligence construct." According to Jackson and Weidman, 

There are a number of reasons why the genetic argument for race differences in intelligence has not won many adherents in the scientific community. First, even taken on its own terms, the case made by Jensen and his followers did not hold up to scrutiny. Second, the rise of population genetics undercut the claims for a genetic cause of intelligence. Third, the new understanding of institutional racism offered a better explanation for the existence of differences in IQ scores between the races.

=== Test scores ===