PRELUDE

The Man Behind the “Ism”

For all the controversy that has raged around Jensenism, the general public knows relatively little about Jensen himself. Why? First, almost all of his more than 400 publications have appeared in technical journals or books. What’s more, he’s a born introvert. If you sat next to him on an airplane, you’d probably assume he was an auditor or bank examiner rather than a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If you met him during his long tenure on the Berkeley campus, you’d be much more likely to think he taught business or law than psychology.

So who is Arthur R. Jensen? Did anything in his past—nature or nurture— play prologue to Jensenism? The play on the words “nature” and “nurture” comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but the enigma of heredity versus environment goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers. When they encountered non-Greeks they wondered whether heredity or environment (especially climate) could account for the differences in appearance and behavior. Similar observations were made by the ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, and India. In the age of science, first anthropology, then psychology, then sociology has each tried to resolve in its own way the riddle of human differences. How qualified is Arthur Jensen to speak on so enduring, so difficult, and so emotionally loaded a topic as the connection between intelligence, race, and genetics?

The authoritative Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology describes him as:

One of the most visible educational and differential psychologists in the past half-century. Jensen is professor emeritus of educational psychology in the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. During the forty years of his tenure at Berkeley, he was a prolific researcher in the psychology of human learning, individual differences in cognitive abilities, psychometrics, behavioral genetics, and mental chronometry, and his activity has continued since his official retirement in 1994. His work, published in seven books and some 400 articles in scientific and professional journals, has placed him among the most frequently cited figures in contemporary psychology, and his name has become one of the “isms” of our language.

jensen before jensenism

Arthur R. Jensen was born in 1923 in San Diego, California, where his father owned a lumber and building-supplies business. His paternal grandparents, the Jensens, were immigrants from Copenhagen, Denmark. On his mother’s side, Jensen’s grandfather was German. His maternal grandmother came from a Polish Jewish family. Both families disapproved of the marriage across religious lines, and the couple left Berlin and put down new roots in the San Diego area. Fluent in Polish, his grandmother was selected to greet the world-famous pianist Ignacy (Jan) Paderewski when he came to San Diego. Early on, Jensen noted how the dour demeanor of his Danish relatives contrasted with the fun-loving atmosphere of his mother’s side of the family.

As a boy, Jensen attended San Diego public schools. He was a loner who read voraciously and said little—except when he had a subject to speak on. Then he would hold forth at the dinner table, enthusiastically recounting all he had read, until his only sibling, a younger sister, would plead, “Do we have to listen to another one of his lectures?” Young Jensen had little interest in team sports; he preferred hiking through the woods or swimming. His hobbies, which he pursued with diligence, were herpetology and classical music. He collected snakes, which he would trade to the reptile keeper of the San Diego Zoo to feed the zoo’s king cobra, in exchange for white rats, which Jensen in turn fed his snakes.

Jensen’s first goal in life was to become a clarinetist in a symphony orchestra, or better yet, a conductor. His playing was good enough to earn an audition with Leopold Stokowski’s American Youth Symphony, and Jensen performed as second clarinet with the San Diego Symphony for a year when he was only seventeen. He soon realized, however, that no matter how much or how hard he practiced, he lacked the “special something” required to make it to the peak of the musical world. So Jensen switched career paths, entered the University of California at Berkeley, and majored in psychology.

Jensen’s interests in herpetology and classical music provide clues to the eventual rise of Jensenism. He clearly had an interest in biology. Catching and keeping snakes and lizards required carefully observing their behavior. At 15 he performed experiments to determine whether it was temperature or light that caused the lizards to go underground. (He found it was temperature.)

Jensen remains passionate about music, though he hasn’t performed in years. He has a massive collection of recordings and he and his wife are season ticket holders for the San Francisco Opera. When lecturing in Europe he makes it a point to attend symphony and opera performances. Jensen’s decision to abandon a musical career provides a key insight into his view not only of himself but of the world. Clearly, he had the ability to make a living from music. But the fire that burns inside Arthur Jensen, though invisible from the outside, is to perform at the very highest level he can. As he states in Chapter 1, he has always been interested in people who have “made it.” It is not a desire for the trappings or rewards of success that drives Jensen but the conviction that he’s doing what he does best. As he once told me, “The two smartest things I ever did were to decide to become a professor because it’s the only thing I can really do at a level I’m truly satisfied with and to marry Barb because she does so much that allows me to focus on my work and brings so many things into my life I wouldn’t have without her.”

Perhaps because of his personal experience with music, Jensen has been keenly aware of his own and others people’s limitations, and he is therefore skeptical of pie-in-the-sky claims that “If you can dream it, you can be it!” Instead, he has always practiced and preached a methodical approach of setting stepwise goals and reevaluating the next step to take as each successive rung is reached or not.

AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

But why psychology? As we follow the career of Arthur Jensen and the story of Jensenism, we will also trace the intellectual odyssey of psychology in our time. From its beginning, psychology has varied wildly in what, how, and why it studies. One tradition—exemplified by B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism—searches for universal laws that describe the behavior of all organisms. Differences between individuals, species, or groups are treated as random error, much as a chemist allows for the measurement errors that come from using imperfectly calibrated scales. A second tradition, based more on the biological sciences, sees observed differences as psychology’s wheat, not its chaff. That tradition tries to explain human differences in terms of the best mix of hereditary, biological, and cultural causes. Whether the focus is on universal laws or individual and group differences, however, both these traditions are “reductionist” approaches because they reduce the dizzying multiplicity of behavior to either universal laws or a small number of factors.

In contrast, depth psychology and dynamic psychology are more humanistic and holistic. They try to solve each individual’s “problems” by understanding the totality of his or her existence. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is the classic example. Those who follow the model of the hard sciences reject such methods as being literary or mystical, not scientific. But to many, the methods of hard science are too cold and detached. They argue that an obsessive drive for scientific purity produces a sterile psychology, indifferent to individual suffering and irrelevant to the problems of society.

These then are psychology’s Scylla and Charybdis—a summons for methodological purity that steers research further and further toward impersonal generalization versus a cry for commiseration that leads into the mists of mythology, not science. Jensen was drawn to psychology because he believes that it can produce answers to important problems for individuals and society. He became disenchanted with pure experimental psychology because he saw it sharpening its focus by excessively narrowing it. He wasn’t interested in spending his career determining the precise difference in reaction time in two experimental situations for its own sake. However, when he wanted to know what differences in a purely objective measure such as reaction time could reveal about individual and group differences in IQ , he revived and reestablished the field of mental chronometry, even designing some of the measuring instruments himself.

When Jensen turned to clinical psychology, he again became disenchanted— this time because his own studies proved that tests based on the assumptions of depth psychology simply were not valid predictors of anything except how that person answered that test. The situation is much like trying to measure people’s musical or athletic ability by asking them to name their favorite artists or players. The test is reliable. Most people will have the same personal picks from one day to the next. But this tells us nothing about their own ability.

After graduating from Berkeley in 1945, Jensen returned home and worked at his father’s business, then as a technician in a pharmaceutical laboratory, as a social worker, and as a high school biology teacher and orchestra conductor while getting a master’s degree in psychology from San Diego State University. Then in 1952 Jensen went to Teachers College, Columbia University, to study educational and clinical psychology. There he worked as a laboratory technician in Columbia’s Zoology Department and as a research assistant to his major professor and mentor, Percival Symonds, an exponent of dynamic psychology and projective tests. Together, they co-authored From Adolescent to Adult (1961), based on their research. Jensen’s doctoral dissertation, “Aggression in Fantasy and Overt Behavior” (1956), cast doubt on the scientific ability of one such test, the Thematic Apperception Test, to predict individual differences of aggression, either in degree or type.

During a year’s clinical internship at the University of Maryland’s Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore (1955–1956), Jensen became further disillusioned with dynamic psychology. At the same time, he was drawn to quantitative and experimental research on personality by Hans J. Eysenck at the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry. A postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) allowed Jensen to spend 1956–1958 working in Eysenck’s lab. There he thrived, his passion for research that emphasized both scientific rigor and real-life relevance being shared not only by Eysenck but also by others in the London School of psychology. The intellectual origins of Jensenism lie in the scientific worldview and methods of the London School, which was established by Sir Francis Galton and Charles Spearman, the founders of psychometrics, differential psychology, and behavioral genetics.

Jensen’s first appearance on TV (Channel 2, Oakland) after he first wrote on the role of genetics and IQ in school achievement while a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. (Spring 1967)

Inspired by his work at Eysenck’s lab, Jensen returned to the States and was appointed assistant professor of educational psychology in the University of California at Berkeley in 1958. In 1966 he became full professor and then research psychologist in the Institute of Human Learning there. Jensen spent his first sabbatical year (1964–1965) in Eysenck’s lab. In 1966–1967 he was an invited fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

It was only in the late 1960s, after he had established a solid reputation based on a decade of careful, noncontroversial research and over 30 publications on human learning, that Jensen expanded his focus to include individual differences in scholastic performance among culturally disadvantaged minority groups such as Mexican Americans and Blacks. He began by assuming that any observed group differences were the result of socioeconomic and cultural factors. Increasingly, however, Jensen realized that the prevailing opinion among educational psychologists at that time just didn’t tell the whole story. His reading and research interests turned more and more to biology and genetics.

Then in 1969 the Harvard Educational Review, one of the most prestigious journals in the field, asked Jensen to contribute an article to be entitled “How Much Can We Boost IQ and School Achievement?” The outline HER gave Jensen requested that he include a clear statement of his position on social class and racial differences in intelligence. Jensen discussed race and IQ briefly, saying only that while cultural factors were clearly involved in causing the 15-point difference in average IQ between Black and White Americans, genes couldn’t be ruled out. As for the article’s central question, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Jensen’s conclusion, based on his review of the evidence, could be summed up in two words: Not much.

Jensen’s HER article came at a time when “Black power” was clashing with the “White backlash” against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Against that backdrop, Jensen rocketed from relative anonymity as a respected but low-profile expert on human learning to blazing notoriety in the pages of Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times Magazine. He soon became a target of student protests, sit-ins, resolutions of condemnation, acts of vandalism, and death threats. The word “Jensenism” entered the Random House and Webster’s unabridged dictionaries.

During his academic career at UC Berkeley, including the 30-plus years after he became “controversial,” Jensen received every promotion possible—even to “super-grades” beyond the rank of full professor, which required recommendation by a panel of distinguished international experts not on the Berkeley faculty. Indeed, the closer one gets to expert opinion in the relevant disciplines of psychometrics (mental testing) and behavior genetics, the greater the support for Jensen and his work; and each year, that support increases. Of his more than 400 publications, none has been in fringe journals, and the overwhelming majority have been in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the relevant fields—journals such as Intelligence, Behavior Genetics, Personality and Individual Differences, The Psychological Bulletin, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences—and in such authoritative works as The Encyclopedia of Psychology and The Encyclopedia of Intelligence, where articles are by the editor’s invitation. In 1970 Jensen was a founding member of the Behavior Genetics Association. He has served as a consulting editor to both Intelligence and Behavior Genetics, and published articles in their first issues. Jensen is often asked to serve as a peer reviewer by these and by many other academic journals because their chief editors recognize the fairness and thoroughness with which he treats every article sent to him, regardless of whether or not it agrees with his own position.

In 1998 Intelligence published a special issue entitled “A King Among Men: Arthur Jensen.” It included Jensen’s own account of his career, his massive and ever growing bibliography, and commentaries on his life and works by some of his most important admirers and thoughtful, if grudging, critics.

Many reject Jensenism not because a careful study of the evidence has convinced them that it is scientifically wrong, but because they fear that racism might find scientific support if Jensenism gained general acceptance. That is, they reject Jensenism on moral rather than scientific grounds, often while attributing political rather than scientific motives to Jensen himself. However, Arthur Jensen is the least political person I know and also the most straightforward. What you see with Arthur Jensen is what you get. He is consumed by a Gandhian dedication to following principle in making decisions, but is willing to reevaluate his decisions based on new information.

Perhaps that dedication to principle above pragmatism in part explains why through all the turmoil and vituperation he has endured, Jensen really doesn’t hold any grudge against his opponents. Some, he believes, simply hold religiously to a different view of the world, where stubborn facts have to be subordinated to what they believe is the good of society. Others, he thinks, just don’t possess the quantitative or analytical skills or background to comprehend the issues objectively. About the worst thing I’ve ever heard him call such individuals, indeed the harshest word I’ve heard him use, is “mush-heads.” But Jensen is most put off by those who say they agree with his conclusions completely but do not understand how he arrived at them. “I’d rather sit across the table from either of the first two groups than the third, someone who likes what he thinks I’m saying just because it seems to agree with his own prejudices,” he once told me. Jensen has pursued the role heredity plays in the Black-White difference in average IQ not because he is obsessed with race but because he is dedicated to understanding what he believes is society’s most important possession— intelligence. To dodge the race question would be to ignore an important piece in the puzzle—an act of intellectual cowardice.

Our conversations on intelligence, race, and genetics now begin with my asking Jensen how a once noncontroversial name gave rise to the most controversial “ism” in contemporary behavioral science.

PRELUDE

The Man Behind the “Ism”

jensen before jensenism

AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

Further Reading