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A CRITICAL REVIEW OF RICHARD LYNN'S REPORTS ON REACTION TIME AND RACE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2010

DREW M. THOMAS
DREW M. THOMAS
Affiliation:
Imperial College London, UK
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Summary

In the early 1990s, psychologist Richard Lynn published papers documenting average reaction times and decision times in samples of nine-year-olds taken from across the world. After summarizing these data, Lynn interpreted his results as evidence of national and racial differences in decision time and general intelligence. Others have also interpreted Lynn's data as evidence of racial differences in decision time and intelligence. However, comparing Lynn's summaries with his original reports shows that Lynn misreported and omitted some of his own data. Once these errors are fixed the rankings of nations in Lynn's datasets are unstable across different decision time measures. This instability, as well as within-race heterogeneity and between-race overlap in decision times, implies that Lynn's reaction time data do not permit generalizations about the decision times and intelligence of people of different races.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 113 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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