Linda Gottfredson

Linda Susanne Gottfredson (née Howarth; born June 24, 1947) is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S. public and private policies regarding affirmative action, hiring quotas, and "race-norming" on aptitude tests.^[1]

She is on the boards of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID), the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and the editorial boards of the scientific journals Intelligence, Learning and Individual Differences, and Society. Gottfredson has received research grants worth $267,000 from the Pioneer Fund, an organization which has been described as "racist" and "white supremacist".^[2][3][4]

Life and work

Gottfredson was born in San Francisco on June 24th, 1947. She is a third generation university faculty member. Her father, Jack A. Howarth (died 2006), was a faculty at U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, as was his father.^[5][6] Gottfredson initially majored in biology, but later transferred to psychology with her first husband, Gary Don Gottfredson. They received bachelor's degrees in psychology in 1969 from University of California, Berkeley, then worked in the Peace Corps in Malaysia until 1972. She also taught in schools for the disadvantaged for a time when she was young.^[7] They both went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1977.

Gottfredson took a position at Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of Schools and investigated issues of occupational segregation and typology based on skill sets and intellectual capacity. She married Robert A. Gordon, who worked in a related area at Hopkins, and they divorced by the mid-90s.^[8]

In 1985, Gottfredson participated in a conference called "The g Factor in Employment Testing". The papers presented were published in the December 1986 issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, which she edited. In 1986, Gottfredson was appointed Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark.

In 1989, The Washington Post reported that one of Gottfredson's presentations was cited favorably by an article in the National Association for the Advancement of White People's magazine.^[9]

That year, she presented a series of papers on general intelligence factor and employment. Gottfredson has said:

We now have out there what I call the egalitarian fiction that all groups are equal in intelligence. We have social policy based on that fiction. For example, the 1991 Civil Rights Act codified Griggs vs. Duke Power, which said that if you have disproportionate hiring by race, you are prima facie -- that's prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. ...Differences in intelligence have real world effects, whether we think they're there or not, whether we want to wish them away or not. And we don't do anybody any good, certainly not the low-IQ people, by denying that those problems exist.^[10]

She was promoted to full professor at the University of Delaware in 1990.

In 1992, after two and a half years of debate and protest, the University of Delaware's administration reached a settlement that once again allowed Gottfredson and Jan Blits to continue receiving research funding from the Pioneer Fund.^[11]

Gottfredson's research and views have stirred considerable controversy, especially her testimony on public affirmative action policy and her defense of The Bell Curve, in particular a statement she wrote, Mainstream Science on Intelligence, which was signed by 51 colleagues and published in The Wall Street Journal.^[12] Since then, she has written a number of articles on race and intelligence, especially as it applies to occupational qualification.

Gottfredson has been very critical of psychologist Robert Sternberg, arguing against his position that there is a "practical intelligence" that is separate from the "analytical intelligence" measured by IQ tests.^[13]

Honors

• George A Miller Award (for outstanding journal article across specialty areas), Society for General Psychology, American Psychological Association, 2008^[14]
• Fellow, Association for Psychological Science, elected 1998^[15]
• Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars, elected 1995^[16]
• Fellow, American Psychological Association, elected 1994
• Fellow, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, elected 1994

Selected articles and papers

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (March–April 1994). "Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud" (PDF). Society. 31 (3): 53–59. doi:10.1007/bf02693231. Retrieved 2 November 2014.

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). "Mainstream Science on Intelligence (editorial)" (PDF). Intelligence. 24: 13–23. doi:10.1016/s0160-2896(97)90011-8. ISSN 0160-2896.

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). "Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life" (PDF). Intelligence. 24 (1): 79–132. doi:10.1016/S0160-2896(97)90014-3. ISSN 0160-2896. Retrieved 7 July 2014.

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (1998). "The general intelligence factor" (PDF). Scientific American Presents. 9 (4): 24–29.
• Circumscription and compromise (2006), Encyclopedia of Career Development. (Based on her much cited work on the subject.)^[17]
• Intelligence: Is It the Epidemiologists' Elusive "Fundamental Cause" of Social Class Inequalities in Health? (2004), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (11 March 2005). "Chapter 9: Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help" (PDF). In Wright, Rogers H.; Cummings, Nicholas A. Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well Intentioned Path to Harm. Taylor & Francis. pp. 155–186. ISBN 978-0-203-95622-9. Lay summary (7 July 2014).

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (2006). "Chapter 20: Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Conseqüências sociais das diferenças de grupo na capacidade cognitiva)" (PDF). In Flores-Mendoza, Carmen E.; Colom, Roberto. Introdução à Psicologia das Diferenças Individuais. Porto Alegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers. pp. 155–186. ISBN 978-85-363-1418-1.

• Flynn, Ceci, and Turkheimer on Race and Intelligence: Opening Moves (2007) Cato Unbound
• What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis Is True? (2003)

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (2009). "Chapter 1: Logical Fallacies Used to Dismiss the Evidence on Intelligence Testing". In Phelps, Richard P. Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington (DC): American Psychological Association. ISBN 978-1-4338-0392-5. Lay summary (9 July 2013).

References

External links

• Egalitarian Fiction
• Linda S. Gottfredson homepage (with online prints of publications)
• Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography - published in Intelligence in 1997
• "Linda Gottfredson". Hatewatch. Southern Poverty Law Center.