The equalitarian dogma revisited

Henry Garrett (1961), a president of the American Psychological Association, claimed that “the equalitarian dogma,” the belief that Blacks and Whites are genetically equal in cognitive ability, was the “scientific hoax of the century.” Since then, the dogma has become more ingrained, despite increased contrary evidence. The dogma has been perpetuated by intimidation as well as by pious thinking. Its long endurance is a scandal of great proportion and illuminates how science works, and sometimes does not. I discuss (a) current international data on race differences; (b) their genetic and evolutionary origins; (c) political fallout from my presentations; (d) corruption of scholarship that has occurred, illustrated partly by the example of Cyril Burt; and (e) what should be done to improve matters.     

Naming times for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures

This paper reports the results of two experiments. In the first, voice-key naming times were collected and in the second, keypress naming times were collected for 250 of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) pictures. The resulting naming times and correct naming rates were well predicted in multiple regression analyses by one or another measure of codability (name or concept agreement) and by age-of-acquisition ratings collected specifically for this study. Voice-key responses appeared to be somewhat more sensitive indicators of naming difficulty, although keypress responses did remarkably well. The Appendix presents the age-of-acquisition ratings, the trimmed vocal and keypress naming times, and the correct naming rates from the two experiments for the 250 pictures.     

Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany

The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification