The American Psychological Association (APA) tried to set the record straight in 1996 with a report written by a committee of experts. Among the specific conclusions drawn by the APA were that IQ tests reliably measure a real human trait, that ethnic differences in average IQ exist, that good tests of IQ are not culturally biased against minority groups, and that IQ is a product of both genetic inheritance and early childhood environment. Another report signed by 52 experts, entitled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” stated similar facts and was printed in the Wall Street Journal.
“These may be harbingers of a shift in the media’s treatment of intelligence,” an optimistic Charles Murray wrote at the time. “There is now a real chance that the press will begin to discover that it has been missing the story.”
He was wrong. The APA report fell down the memory hole, and the media’s understanding of IQ again fell back to that state of comfortable misinformation that Snyderman and Rothman had observed years earlier.
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Opinion: Why can’t we talk about IQ? – Jason Richwine
“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than…
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Yes. IQ tests reliably measure the human trait of "how well you do on IQ tests". Researchers have shown since the 70s, consistently, reliably, and repeatedly, that there is no such beast as the "culturally unbiased IQ test", but there's lotsa money in the old IQ industry, and the sorts of provably wrong assertions in the summary keep floating to the surface like turds in a swimming pool.
So you're saying the APA is in the IQ-testing industry's pocket?
Every 5 years the APA tries to resurrect "The Bell Curve". I've no idea why, as it is heroically bad science, but if you go back and look at this coming up again, and again, and look at the people involved, the names are always the same. It's actually sad.