No, there was no implication of causality from the start. This study was done while I was at the University of Miami, whose psychology department is one of the most prestigious in the country. It's inconceivable that any proposal implying causality from the outset would have made it past the very initial approval stage.culaavuso wrote:the original premise that race was a direct causal factor was a faulty premise
The result of the study maintained that the correlation between ethnicity and IQ test scores is very real. When people take IQ tests, they may tick a box indicating what general ethnicity they are, and from collecting this raw data you can observe a strong correlation between skin color and IQ. Of course that doesn't imply causality. Attendance as you said is one factor, but there are many others. One is that in asian countries, it's quite the cultural norm for women to engage in studies that require critical thinking, such as mathematics, science, engineering, and philosophy. It's quite the norm for women to become computer programmers, technicians, scientists, and robotics engineers. The Japanese in particular stand out as highly adept test-takers; they have to take highly competitive entrance exams just to get into high school.culaavuso wrote:The result of the study mentioned seems to be that IQ results varied between schools and there happened to be a correlation between ethnicity and attendance of any particular school.
Similarly, the correlation between skin color and university entrance test scores is very real. One of the reasons is simply that young asian students are more used to taking tests than other races, and have more test-taking experience.
To the non-scientific readers of this post, I want to make one thing absolutely clear. When one says that there is a correlation between skin color and IQ score, this statement implies only one thing: that people of some races are better at taking IQ tests than others. Don't read into it what is not there.
I agree that investigating some questions can lead to the discovery that the question itself was misguided, but I disagree that this is a more useful question in research, simply because it is too broad. When you choose a topic of research, you never start with a broad topic. You always start with a narrow topic, e.g. "Why are Asian students who go to middle-class universities scoring higher than others on the SAT?" and then as you gather more data you may find it desirable to broaden the focus of your research at some point.culaavuso wrote:A more directly useful question at the outset would have been "what makes some students perform significantly better or worse on IQ tests than others, and how can IQ test outcomes be improved?"