My theory is that Barack Obama, among his various superpowers, has the ability to reach out to groups of people across the world and subtly re-arrange their DNA. How else are we to explain this?
In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.
In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.
On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.
The study hasn’t yet been published (or accepted), and doesn’t seem to be online; here is the press release.
Via DougJ at Balloon Juice, who says everything that needs to be said. Including that this is no surprise at all, at least to people who recognize the phrase “stereotype threat.” Studies have shown that simply reminding women or minorities that they are women or minorities causes them to do statistically worse on tests involving subjects that they are, stereotypically, supposed to be bad at.
One is almost tempted to conclude that scores on standardized tests might be influenced by factors other than one’s genetic background. Who could have guessed?
There are undeniable genetic differences between blacks and whites. E.g., how many whites have ever run the 100 meters in under ten seconds? How many top black swimmers are there?
“Praise a fool and you may make him worthy”
The biggest mistake here: the fact that finding is “statistically nonsignificant” doesn’t tell you much at all. If your sample is small, you’ll often fail to get statistical significance even if the true gap is large. Failure to reject the null hypothesis doesn’t prove it, especially in a study with a small sample size. Also, it’s my understanding that releasing the results of a study prior to peer review is generally regarded as a red flag.
1. Note that they give the scores pre-Obama, but not post-Obama. So there was still a gap, but perhaps only at a 90% significance level rather than a 95% level.
2. Sample size of students is tiny, as you noted.
3. The number of questions is very small.
4. Self-selection effects (it’s an internet study, not a representative sample).
5. Different times of year may catch students in or out of school, different people who may have heard about the study (including from the experimenters, who may have sent flyers or emails to different places), etc.
The real test is whether the CHANGE in the gap is statistically significant.
Ben
The real question is whether anything at all in this study is statistically significant. One can’t tell whether the mean score of 8.5 on a sample of 20-ish is significantly different from a mean score of 12 unless one knows the distribution of the scores.
So I’d also like to know why a press release has been circulated while the data are not available for proper scrutiny?
This sort of crap happens all the time I’m afraid, and it definitely brings science into disrepute.
Peter
Peter
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There are undeniable genetic differences between blacks and whites. E.g., how many whites have ever run the 100 meters in under ten seconds? How many top black swimmers are there?
Good point! Along the smae lines, have you ever noticed how interesting it is that the British Empire included so many different groups with a genetic predisposition for playing cricket?
It’s interesting to learn that there is a gene for running the 100 metres. I always thought you had to train. I wonder if there is also a gene for being unable to see a stupid argument?
Standardized tests don’t measure anything, except the ability to take standardized tests, right? That’s why we dismiss SAT scores and IQ scores that show racial disparities out-of-hand, because they’re inherently culturally biased (for myriad reasons not addressed by this study’s hypothesis). Right? We don’t even know what g is, or if it exists, so the idea that it can be measured is evidentially groundless. RIGHT?
C’mon liberals. We can’t have it both ways. We shouldn’t get a free pass to trumpet results like this, when in the next breath we crap all over the same tests when they generate results we don’t like. Either these tests are worthless, or they’re not. Either they’re intrinsically culturally biased, or they’re not. Either we know what intelligence is, or we don’t. We don’t get to claim knowledge we don’t have when the utilization of that “knowledge” fits a pre-conceived notion. That’s the epitome of unscientific behavior. If it makes you happy, fine, say it makes you happy. No problem with that. But why even suggest it means anything remotely scientific? You just open the point up to ridicule by the bigots, and rightly so, which helps no one.
Low Math, Meekly Interacting said
“Either these tests are worthless, or they’re not.”
Ummm, no. The tests are clearly not worthless. If one person got something like 140 and another got an 80 saying the person with a 140 is more intelligent regardless of race should not be controversial. That said they obviously have problems and the point that people who like this finding should not be trumpeting the results is valid since it was not a huge study and the next one could show the exact opposite.
I think it is very plausible to assume that there are genes that regulate the type of muscle fibers you have which determine whether you are better suited for long distance running compared to the sprint.
There may be genes for being unable to see stupid arguments, as well as genes that make you dismiss any valid arguments that undermine your ideology out of hand.
I think it is very plausible to assume
Oh, is this how you do science?
Count Iblis
Right. Your statement has gone from “undeniable” to “very plausible”. Give it another day and it will be “bogus”.
Of course there are genetic differences between races. That’s why there are races. But when it comes to sport there are surely huge social and peer pressures determining which sports different people take up. Sprinting offers many black role models which must be a factor.
There are very few black golfers and I’ve never played bridge against a black opponent. Are those genetic too?
Peter
These tests are, at the very least, worthless for the purposes of measuring the genetic underpinnings of “intelligence”, of which we have neither an adequate definition, nor any plausible candidate alleles, haplotypes, genotypes, or epigenotypes. Both the existence of “g” and its putative heritable components are, at this stage, hypothetical. Even if they exist, these tests do not serve as an adequate probe, which has already been established, especially in the minds of those investigators whose politics lean left. That’s our background. Hence, such tests have precisely zero to say about genetic determinism, either pro or con, and to suggest they do is equally wrong for either hypothesis. The fact that yet another test shows environmental components to performance (a point even the determinists allow, so this post appears to attack something of a straw-man) may be interesting, but tells us precisely zero about heritable factors.
What we know about these tests is that there’s a correlation between high performance and comparable performance for a particular set of other tasks, such as other kinds of tests in an academic setting. That’s it. That anxiety can influence this performance isn’t a terribly remarkable finding, nor is it remarkable that members of different ethnic groups may be made anxious in ways particular to their group, given that their environment can impinge on them in particular ways. If this study, or any that preceded it, have any validity or statistical power, that’s what they’ve discovered. The rest we can only properly be agnostic about.
okay. so everyone has different levels of knowledge i for one believe that tests to judge whether blacks do better than whites is racial and not very accurate. to get an accurate percentage of the world you have to make everyone take the test! DUHH! i know alot of smart african americans and i know stupid ones, however, i also know alot of whites that are smart and probabaly even more that are dumb. ha. but anyways and then what about the hypocrites that dress like the opposite race? im white and smart, my bestfriend is white and dumb, my sister from another MOMMY (lol) is smart, her brother, yeah uhmm not so much!
point- you cant judge from a little percent of the world!!
JUST SAYING !