Are there any psychological differences between races?

Great Debates
1

While we have strictly enforced rules against “hate speech” in this forum, it seems that with some regularity we get threads like this current one:

“Race, Evolution, and Behavior”
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264248

and several other recent threads, which are generally civilized and circumspect in tone, but which appear to have a definite agenda, i.e., to legitimize the idea that some human races are “superior” to others in IQ or some other arguably important respect. Well, perhaps that question is an important one . . . but I’ve never seen it seriously debated in any GD thread except the kind started by what appears to be a racist flying under our radar; and (almost) everybody else immediately picks up on that and spends the whole thread trying to debunk the OP’s thesis. Which is worth doing, but does it reveal any new truths?

So let’s have a thread that doesn’t start with any thesis, merely a question presented for debate:

Is there any real, hard, scientific evidence that there are any inherent, hereditary psychological differences of any kind between different human “races” or colors or ethnic groups?

I’m not asking whether any group is “better” than another in any way, I’m just asking whether there are any differences – a question that can be framed, and answered, in nonjudgmental, value-neutral terms.

And I don’t just mean IQ, I mean any kind of different psychological characteristics or predispositions – personality-type scores on the Myers-Briggs test or the Enneagram, “emotional intelligence,” differences in the incidence of any given psychopathology, differences in predisposition to homosexuality, differences in the age at which a person reaches sexual maturity or emotional maturity, differences in . . . well, in anything which is a clearly identifiable aspect of human personality.

In short, are there any differences between racial or ethnic groups other than the obvious physical differences?

2

Blacks like music more ? :slight_smile:

hehe joke… good question.

Its pretty hard to separate genetic dispositions to behaviour versus acquired habits. Considering, for example, that most Black americans are poorer than whites only makes distinguishing if their are psychological traits even harder.

I’ve read a bit about evolution and I would venture that there are no psychological differences among races. Especially since mixing has become quite widespread.

3

There are WAY too many environmental factors and statistical deviation within each (poorly defined) “race” to make these kinds of analysis.

You would need about 100 genetically diverse samples of each “race” raised in exactly similar methods with exactly similar stimulus and protected from outside influences and undergoing constant psychological evaluation - and then, you would need a “control” group, from whence I don’t know.

When you do that, lemme know your findings.

4

Someone, (I believe it was IzzyR) made an astute observation in an earlier thread (probably one on “race” and the size of genitalia) that if we idenitify any two groups and test for some characteristic, it is extremely unlikely that the two groups will be identical. The chances are that one group will have (in aggregate) more of some tested value (intelligence, rhythm, speed, strength, genitals, whatever) than the other. So people who insist that “we are all the same” are doomed to be disappointed if they ever demand a test in the hopes of proving their contention.

Having noted that, however, questions such as those in the OP are still plagued by a slightly different problem: who gets to identify the groups that will be tested and how absolute (or meaningful) are the characteristics that we will use to divide the groups? The reason that anthropologists and other students of humanity have been backing away from studies of “race” is that there is no useful or meaningful distinction that is identified by the arbitrarily established “races.” We already know that there is more genetic diversity within groups than between groups. We already know that there are no objective standards that clearly demark all people into various races.

So, at the outset, the question is plagued by the problem that whatever groups we decide to measure will be defined by an arbitrary measure that will not provide any coherent group. We are left with the statistical probability that we will find more of some trait in one of our arbitrary groups than we will in some other arbitrary group, but since the groups will have been composed by caprice, the statistics will not actually tell us any more than that one arbitrarily chosen group is different than some other arbitrarily chosen group.

5

Well, that’s why I was careful not to identify them, but to leave the question open. If objective scientific research can find significant hereditary psychological differences between any two gene-pools, no matter how broad or narrow their boundaries, then that is a very important piece of scientific information, with implications for further research. If no scientists can find any such differences, that also is an important thing to know.

The racists who keep bringing up this stuff are right on at least one point: Any inherent psychological differences between different groups of humanity, if they do exist, would be important subjects of study; and we should not squelch such lines of research because their results might be politically inflammatory. If heredity – racial heredity or ethnic-group heredity or family heredity or even individual heredity – has some determinative influence on human psychology, then we should want to know everything about that that we can. Science should proceed always without fear of public opinion.

To put this in perspective: For most of human history, most people have simply assumed, rightly or wrongly, that certain psychological traits did inhere in certain races or even nationalities. In 19th-Century Britain, most people would have assumed, hardly even would have questioned, that if an Irish and an English baby boy were inadvertently switched in the cradle, the Irish boy would astonish his English family by growing up to be a passionate, violent, hard-drinking poet; and the English boy, despite his home environment, would grow up to be a cold-blooded, rigorously honest prig. What’s more, there’s a cultural assumption that certain distinctive psychological characteristics inhere not only in races or nations, but in families. Remember the 1988 comedy Big Business? (Which I think is based on a plot much used in ancient Roman farces – e.g., a slave boy and a senator’s son are switched at birth.) In a small town in the Appalachians, a local woman and a superrich woman who is just passing through both give birth to twin girls at the same hospital on the same night. One girl of each pair is swapped into the other’s family by a nearsighted nurse. The Appalachian family produces one dark-haired woman (Lily Tomlin) who is honest, high-minded, and entirely at home in her world; and one red-haired woman (Bette Midler) who watches shows like Dynasty and dreams of wealth and power. The rich family in New York produces one woman (Midler again) who is a natural ruthless businesswoman, and one (Tomlin) who is sentimental and given over to fashionable causes.

Now, I’ve never heard of things like this happening in real life. From what I know of modern psychology, environment appears to be much, much more important than heredity in determining individual personality. But who knows? There might be some genuine wisdom in all this which our ancestors noticed and we have forgotten. It ain’t necessarily so – but we shouldn’t be afraid to study it.

6

The question is, how would you study it? Environment is too strong a factor, and you can’t really exclude it. I’m not just talking about home environment, but the external environment whereby others react to the subject. If you grow up being pointed out as different, that surely has some psychological effect which cannot be attributed to genetics.

7

I agree, the only available context to study folks in is the one we’ve got, which is all muddied up with social and historical meanings.

I’m not even convinced there are built-in psychological differences between the sexes.

8

I was posing the question of whether anybody has studied it by any scientifically sound methods (not the pseudoscience of The Bell Curve, Phillippe Rushton, et al.). In fact, I might have posted this thread in General Questions – but how long would it have stayed there?

9

That would be a good topic for another thread!

10

What are you looking for: one or two isolated studies, perhaps by reputable scientists, that show some measureable* psychological differece OR a well developed body of evidece that is generally accepted in the scientific community? If the latter, I think we can safely answer your question with “No”. If there were, it’d be all over the place-- not difficult to find.

*One could debate whether or not we are able to even measure such differences in the first place, or if we can do so do our methods contain error rates within any supposedly measured differences.

11

Behavioral Genetics is a reputable study of heritability of psychological traits. Mental disorders and learn disabilities has occupied a fair deal of the research, especially the research that reaches the attention of others. The brain is remarkably plastic, especially early in life, but broad categories of difference can be wired in.

The problem with the broader question is that you are likely to resort to grouping people according to the difference you are looking at. For instance the happy-race of humanity has fewer instances of depression than the sad-race of humanity, defined ofcourse by genes governing neurotransmiter concentrations.

I don’t think that any psychological meaningful trait has been linked to cosmetic features, so I don’t think that any of the existing obvious divisions will turn up behavioral differences. Really what you have is different sets of innate connectivity between parts of the brain that will produce different reaction to stimuli. Pulling it apart right now is at a very low level of resolution.

12

I hope this is not seen as too glib or too shallow but I truly believe that there is only one race, the human race.

13

As I said in that now closed thread, even that is an intellectually dishonest question. Better this:

There is no “blank slate”, we are each born with inate strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions. Certainly it is probable that different subpopulations have different sets of inate predispositions distributed within them other than those superficially apparent. What are those subpopulations and what are those traits? And what is the utility in knowing?

Declaring a priori that “race” is the meaningful divider is declaring an answer before collecting the data and obstructs an honest appraisal of the question.

“Race” is a meaningful sociologic construct, but its biological utility is very limited and only of use as a stand-in while we await more specific markers.

Let us give an example: Black Americans have a greater rate of kidney transplant rejection for the same level of immunosuppression than do White Americans. Based on this alone, in the absence of more understanding, it might make sense to start off Black Americans unndergoing kidney transplantation on a more intense anti-rejection regimen. But what are the possible explanations? It could be a racial biologic difference. It could be a socioeconomic effect. It could be an effect of culture (eg different diet or different use of some complentary medicine that interacts with the immunosuppressive medicine in some unforeseen manner). In this case it turns out to be the presence or absence of a particular allele, and testing for that allele can help decide which individuals, White or Black, are more likely to reject and therefore more likely to require a more intense program. The population at risk is not a racial group, but one that has a very specific genetic marker that happens to be slightly more common among American Blacks than Whites. But it could have been any other possible answer.

For other traits the answer may very well be that a group has a measurable biologically inate difference but that the group is a particular Asian ethnicity that lives in China but not other Chinese ethnic groups. Or those who trace heritage to Ashkenazi Jews only. And so on. The populations may need to be divided up differently depending upon which trait is in question.

And in most cases it is of limited utility, because even when there is a difference of the mean, the scale of intra-group variability so swamps the scale of inter-grouip variability that its use as a predictor for an individual outcome is insignificant.

That said, what do we know?

It can be reasonably predicted that the best and brightest individual for any trait (specific intelligence, musical, artistic, or athletic ability, and so on), given equal cultural exposure, equal educational opportunity, and an equal denominator of population, would likely be of recent African descent*. Especially if the mean between all groups is insignificantly different.

Why?

Because those of more recent African origin as a population in toto have the greatest variability of genetic allele. Other population groups all suffer to some degree or another from the “founder effect” and represent only a fraction of possible alleles that were present in the African population. Thus their deviation about the mean is less; they are more like each other than Africans as a group are like each other. So the sigma outlier individual for any inate trait is more likely to be recently African in origin.

Just something for the White supremist to ponder upon.

*I say “recently” since we are all African in origin if you go back far enough. I’m talking about a time scale of less than a thousand years or so.

14

I think tomndebb has nailed it right here - people are, in general, far more individuals than group members, so in the end, when you want to know seomthing about any particular person, the only way to go is to get to know this person.
Even if a reputable study were to find that - oh, let’s say that caucasians have, on average, 10 IQ points less than some other “race” (never mind the inherent difficulty in defining race - or in the useability of IQ for that matter) - will that make a difference to you if you need to interview 5 people for a job tomorrow? You’d still want to interview all five, regardless of race, because they are individuals, whose IQ will be taken from a bell curve - and it doesn’t matter that much whether or not all the applicants’ scores come off the exact same curve, as long as these curves are not wildly different. I think we can safely posit that even if some kind of “difference” is ever found, it won’t be all that marked, or we’d all acknowledge it already as self evident. Like we acknowledge the self evident difference in Melanin levels :slight_smile: (and you will still find some so-called “blacks” who are lighter than some so-called “Caucasians”!)

In other words - and back to the quote above - when internal variation inside each population is far larger than the difference detween the means, this difference, even if it were to exist, cannot be used for any meaningful assumptions about individuals. Throw in the difficulty in even identifying the groups you’re talking about, and I’m afraid you have a still interesting but ultimately useless question on your hands.

Dani

15

It’s not a belief, it’s a biological fact.

16

Not one poster on this thread so far has defended the position that there are psychological differences between races – which is very surprising. As we do see racial-difference threads pop up in this forum from time to time, there must be a group of racist or crypto-racist or “racially aware” Dopers who start them, and who obviously have a strong interest in the subject – but they have shied away from this thread, even though I have posed the question in the most broad and general terms possible. I wonder why? Is it because I asked for “hard, scientific evidence”?

17

BG: I don’t think you need to be a crypto-racist to think there might be psychological differences between the races-- you just have to be uninformed of what biologists can actually tell us. To the layman, it can often be unclear what characteristics might be **cultural ** as opposed to racial. It’s unrealistic to think that all the posters on this MB would be fully informed on all subjects. Some of us know a lot about science, some of us know a lot about art, some of us know a lot about history, etc.

18

Like yourself? Just lately YOU seem to be the one broaching these subjects. I’m not accusing you of racism or anything of the sort, but I wonder if you are getting your interests confused with the wider interests of the membership.

You started a slightly similar ( and IMHO extraordinarily ill-advised ) thread before ( http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=244236 ) that produced a number of racist and “crypto-racist” replies, generated mostly or solely by people who were not interested in this community as a whole, but rather were attracted like flies to a corpse from elsewhere to address the topic.

In fact you yourself said:

Might be there is a reason for that.

  • Tamerlane
19

As has been mentioned before, we are left with two difficulties. The first is that it seems that if there is any real innate difference in potentiality between people of different genetic groups (eliminating the effects of culture), it would probably be significantly smaller than the differences within those groups. Secondly, it is impossible in our current world to eliminate the effects of culture, and therfore measure what the OP asks about in any meaningful way. We can say that one group tends to have, say, a higher IQ on average, but we cannot necessarily say why.

In fact, it would be far easier to test if a particular culture is more likely to produce people with given tendencies. Though the results would be interesting, I doubt they would be particularly useful. The only way we might be able to get back to a genetic origin of traits from tests such as this would be if we started getting unexpected results, for example if a culture that places less emphasis on education tends to produce people with higher IQs.

I guess we need to wait a while. When we can better analyze a genome we can test a great deal of people and perhaps start to make direct correlations between genetics and psychology, but until then there really doesn’t seem to be much of a way to this scientifically.

20

Fair comment, but both this thread and my earlier thread were started in response to racist threads of the kind I have mentioned. I do see a real problem here, not within the Doper community but in American society generally: Racism still exists, but it’s mostly not out in the open like it used to be; it hides behind euphemisms and doubletalk and pseudoscience. Even the various threads I’m describing used euphemisms like “genetic branching,” “genetic freedom,” etc. Out in the real world, this makes it much harder to determine how much influence such thinking has, or when discrimination really is or is not taking place. I’m just trying to get some racists to lay all their cards on the table, in plain view. Also, Phillippe Rushton, et al., often play the Galileo card – they play the role of suppressed intellectual martyrs, they complain that their point of view doesn’t get the public attention it deserves because anti-racist pressure groups don’t even want such matters discussed or studied or mentioned publicly. Well, fine. Let’s discuss them, in this nice, civilized, public forum, under the watchful eyes of the moderators, in terms of the general but rigorous question with which I began this thread, and we shall see what we shall see.

And maybe, just maybe, there is something to idea that some genuine scientific evidence in this area has been suppressed or ignored because it is too politically controversial. Not likely. But, as I said above, if there are any inherent psychological differences between groups, that would indeed be a very important thing to know. And studies along these lines, even if they show no such differences, might lay the groundwork for a better understanding of the hereditary psychological characteristics of individuals, a much more important subject.