FEATURE ARTICLE
The Role of Intelligence in Modern Society
Are social changes dividing us into intellectual haves and have-nots? The question pushed aside in the 1970s is back, and the issues are far from simple
Earl Hunt
Intellectual Resources in the Workforce
Facts about intelligence are relevant to policy in another area: the question of how society should use those resources that it already has. Affirmative-action
programs are now on the political chopping block, and the question raised by Herrnstein and Murray?Do they discriminate against the capable, and thereby squander the nation's intellectual resources??is squarely in front
of us.
From a narrow perspective, if the payoff for performance is highest at the top end of intellectual demands, we should be zealous about ensuring that the most demanding, generally best paid, jobs do in fact go to the most
competent. To the extent that IQ scores indicate who these people are, we should pay a premium for intelligence. This policy, which Herrnstein and Murray (and others) advocate, has an unfortunate side effect. At the present time assignment of jobs solely on the basis of performance predictors, such as skills tests, would result in marked underrepresentation of minorities in high-level job classes. This, in itself, would create a costly division
in society, because the ethnic groups involved would understandably refuse to accept this outcome as just.
The only way out of this situation is to make major investments in training and education in the affected communities, so that the distribution of workforce
skills becomes more equitable across ethnic groups. There is also a good deal of evidence that successful investment must include participation and support by the minority communities themselves. Simply admitting more minority-group
members to present programs does not work. In fact, there is evidence that some such efforts have amounted to certification that minority group members have passed through an educational program without a concomitant emphasis on performance. A recent survey of workplace skills showed that blacks with graduate-school experience have, on the average, writing and computational
skills equivalent to whites who have only a community-college education (Kirsch et al. 1993). The issue is the changing of skill levels, not certification
levels!
The Bell Curve leaves the impression that nothing can be done because of immutable IQ differences. This position goes beyond the evidence. In fact, Herrnstein and Murray admit that some educational improvement programs
that they regard as far too expensive to be feasible nationwide have been effective. The decision about whether a program is "too expensive" or not is a matter of political rather than scientific judgment.
As this essay has shown, our knowledge of intelligence has been extracted from complex statistical relationships. Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
What social policies are dictated by selected facts about intelligence depends on who is doing the selecting. Besides, while social policies are certainly constrained by scientific findings, it is seldom the case that findings
in the social sciences will dictate just one policy.
Variations in intelligence have always been with us. How important they are depends on the technological level and social organization of society. The "village idiot" was a stock figure in medieval and early industrial stories. In pre-industrial days, though, an able-bodied person, living in a tightly knit society where economic, extended family and social roles merged, may have been able to be a contributing member of society. In fact, in such societies most of the brighter members of society may not have been
able to divorce themselves from the problems of dealing with such individuals, so that it was to their advantage to see that everyone could cope. This probably became less true as agrarian societies were replaced by industrial
ones. Today we live in a society where economic roles dominate other roles, where the extended family is reduced to an exchange of Christmas cards with cousins (and even ex-spouses) and where the movers and shakers of society
can, indeed, afford to remove themselves from the moved and shaken. There are fascinating questions here for those interested in the intersections between sociology, economics, anthropology and cognitive psychology. We
do not have the answers yet. We may need them soon, for policy makers who rely on Mokita are flying blind.
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