Arthur Jensen: biography of this psychologist and researcher

Arthur Jensen's life is characterized by a strong defense of the findings he made during his investigations. This has been of great interest for the psychology of individual differences and, above all, in the study of intelligence.

However, it should be said that in the same way that he was a prolific scientist, he was also a character controversial, especially when he tried to get the world to see his findings on racial differences in the area cognitive. Let's see what controversy his work generated through this Arthur Jensen biography.

• Related article: "theories of human intelligence"

Brief biography of Arthur Jensen

Arthur Robert Jensen was born on August 24, 1923, in San Diego, California, United States. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley, and also at San Diego State College and Columbia University.

He wrote his doctoral thesis with Percival Symonds on the Thematic Apperception Test, a projective test which is based on the idea that the unconscious is captured and projected onto sheets, revealing aspects of personality, vital needs and desires that are desired to be met, as well as problem solving skills issues. Between the years 1956 and 1958 he carried out postdoctoral research at the University of London, in its institute of psychiatry together with Hans Eysenck.

Upon returning to the United States, he became a professor and researcher at the University of California, where he focused on individual differences and learning. Within his studies on how children learn, he focused especially on the differences in the degree of difficulty in learning between different ethnic groups, especially if the ethnic group under study presents cultural characteristics that imply some type of disadvantage.

During his formative and research years he was influenced by charles spearman and hans eysenck. at your job he touched on various fields of psychology, especially educational psychology, behavior genetics, intelligence and cognition.

Apart from his professional career, little is known about the intimate life of Arthur Jensen. He was married to his wife Barbara and always had a great interest in music. In his wish to be a conductor and, at the age of fourteen, he participated in a national contest in the city of San Francisco directing a band, winning it.

Arthur Jensen passed away on October 22, 2012 in Kelseyville, California at the age of 89.

Study of intelligence and controversies about IQ

Interest in differences in learning ability led Jensen to administer IQ questionnaires in schools throughout the United States. His results led him to hypothesize about the existence of two different types of learning abilities..

• Level I: associative learning, stimulus retention, memory.
• Level II: conceptual learning, more related to problem solving.

Over time, Jensen recognized that his proposal for level II resembled Charles Spearman's g-factor idea.

According to Jensen, general cognitive ability is essentially an inherited trait, determined primarily by genetic factors rather than environmental influences. He also initially understood that the ability to memorize was a trait that was distributed similarly between races, while the The capacity for synthesis, or conceptual learning, was something that seemed to be more developed in white people than in non-white people. races. It would be this idea that would mark the path to controversy.

But the real controversy would come in February 1969, when he published his work in the Harvard Educational Review, titled How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?. In it he concluded that programs aimed at increasing IQ in the African-American population had failed and that such an objective was presumably impossible, since, according to Jensen, 80% of the IQ variance in the study population was due more to genetic factors than to environmental influences.

Basically, from this work it could be deduced that black citizens of the United States would never have the same IQ as their white counterparts. In a society in which the rights of African-Americans were being achieved by fighting and which, since times of Martin Luther King, it was something that meant a great deal of tension at a social level, this type of statement was putting a finger on the sore.

The work became one of the most cited in the history of research in psychology and the study of intelligence, although it is safe to say that most of the subpoenas were intended to refute what Jensen was saying. holding up.

As a result of the controversy, Jensen's own life was affected. Crowds protested calling for Arthur Jensen to be fired. It was even the case that the protesters came to puncture the wheels of Jensen's car and threaten his family. The police considered that such threats were real and it was necessary for Jensen and loved ones to leave their home for a while.

Needless to say, it's not that Jensen was racist. He simply limited himself to stating what he had found in his investigations and that, given the opportunity, he would have investigated again to see if he could refute himself.

He was aware of the traditional educational differences between blacks and whites in the United States., an environmental factor whose weight was not negligible. What Jensen wanted to indicate with his study was that, although educational programs could mean the improvement of the African-American standard of living and culture, he noted the possibility that there were differences associated with race.

In fact, and according to Thomas Sowell, who was critical of many of Jensen's theses but still wanted to defend him, indicated that Jensen, in 1969, when he was studying African-American children by giving them IQ questionnaires, he got scores that seemed very low. Seeing, he set out to repeat the test, once he managed to get the children used to his presence and to be calmer. He was willing to replicate any experiment as many times as it took.

You have to understand that from a biologist perspective, the g factor was seen as something that was supported by multiple biological variables and that, based on the apparent differences found between whites and blacks in various tests cognitive, it was understood that race, as a biological factor, could be related to performance intellectual.

It should be noted that races should not be seen as discrete and defined categories (actually, the concept of race in humans is something very strongly criticized), but rather as sets of human characteristics that have been showing more in certain populations by processes of natural selection and that are the result of possessing certain genes that have survived to the next generation.

Recognition at the academic level

Despite his controversy over black and white IQ differences, Arthur Jensen was awarded the 2003 Kistler Award for his original contributions, understanding the connections between the human genome and the functioning of the society. His view of how genetics influences the functioning of society, related to behavioral genetics, has been considered one of the great discoveries of the 20th century in terms of individual differences and their implication at a social level.

In 2006 the American Society for Intelligence Research rewarded and recognized Jensen for with a award for his professional and vital career, not without controversy, for the psychology of differences individual.

Plays

Below we will see four books by Arthur Jensen that, although they have not been translated into Spanish, turn out to be a good example of this psychologist's vision of differences regarding the construct of intelligence, in addition to showing in some of them concepts related to psychometrics and obtaining data through the questionnaires.

1. Bias in Mental Testing (1980)

Bias in Mental Testing, in Spanish "Bias in research with mental tests", is a book in which theExamines bias when administering questionnaires that measure IQ, although they are presumably standardized.

This is a fairly exhaustive book, with around 800 pages in which Jensen explains in detail the possible evidence of bias when administering intelligence questionnaires in a large number of populations american.

The message that can be taken from the book is that the tests that were being administered did not show There was no type of bias if they were administered to people whose mother tongue or fluent in English.

However, with this he comes to indicate that yes It is necessary to linguistically adapt these questionnaires to groups whose own language is other than English, even if they have been raised in the United States. This will avoid all kinds of cultural bias.

2. Straight Talk about Mental Tests (1981)

The title of this book could be translated as "Straight Talk About Mental Testing." Is about a book that talks about psychometrics but adapted to a more general public, without necessarily being statisticians or research psychologists.

3. The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998)

In this book Arthur Jensen exposes the concept of the general intelligence factor. It also exposes the historical trajectory of the concept and the different models that have approached it and tried to conceptualize it.

He also defends the heritability of intelligence, in addition to exposing its biological correlates and its predictability.

4. Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences (2006)

In this book exposes how the brain processes information and different ways in which these processes can be measured.

For Jensen, the speed of thought seemed to be a more important phenomenon than the very concept of IQ.

While one comes to indicate how quickly one is capable of solving problems of any kind, the other It was conceptualized more as a kind of score that allowed you to consider yourself above or below in a ranking.