What Are The Criticisms For The Bell Curve

Criticisms for “The Bell Curve”
As the book breeches many controversial subjects about race and intelligence, there have been many people who have said that the findings in Herrnstein and Murray’s joint publication are not only filled with bias, but also fail to represent common testing errors that may leave the minority at a disadvantage. In an article entitled “Bias in mental testing since Bias in Mental Testing”, Robert Brown and his colleague Cecil Reynolds refute the use of cognitive assessment tests to show cultural and ethnic differences in intelligence. They make the statement that differences in mean scores of ethnic groups has nothing to do with actual differences in ability but rather “problems in the construction, design, administration,
The idea of these problems in construction of tests goes on to help form the cultural test bias hypothesis, or CTBH.
Claims of the cultural test bias hypothesis can be divided into seven different categories due to research by Reynolds, Lowe, and Saenz in 1999. The first category of the cultural test bias hypothesis is that cognitive tests are given in an inappropriate context (Brown, 1999). Since cognitive tests are designed for the typical middle-class White children, the non-white children who are subjected to the tests will be at an automatic disadvantage due to their “lack of exposure to test questions or test-related stimulus materials” (Brown,1999). Next, due to inappropriate standardization samples, people from minority groups are “underrepresented in standardization samples relative to their proportions in the overall population on whom the test will be used” (Brown, 1999). Third, those who examine the subjects of the cognitive tests speak English while many minority participants either do not speak English, or have English as their second language. Minority group members are also subjects to labeling due to their
Further research and studies need to be enacted using 21st century data to support the findings in an unbiased manner. I do agree with the thought proposed that due to social behavior, the black culture is at a disadvantage intelligence wise due to the never ending cycle of poverty. Children born in poverty are less likely to become successful like their white counterparts due to lack of educational funding in poorer cities and a lack of proper role models for the children to look up towards. The ideas and errors found by Brown and Reynolds show the gaps in the original Bell Curve theory. If these holes would be patched up to make the results less biased and more full of actual, reliable information, I believe that the whole theory would be more