Psychologists Admit to Making Racial Distinctions

The American Psychological Association confesses:

During this devastating global health crisis, the country also witnessed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May of 2020. ...

In 2020, APA launched a series of efforts aimed at dismantling racism in psychology, in APA, and in society more generally. As part of this effort, the Association sought a historical review of how psychology and APA have harmed people of color since the formal institutionalization of U.S. psychology in the late 1800s. ...

1892: The American Psychological Association is founded, with G. Stanley Hall as president and 31 White males elected to membership. ...

1913: A 70-page psychological monograph reports inferiority of school performance among Black children in integrated schools in New York, a finding the author attributes to “race heredity” (Mayo, 1913). ...

1933: Psychologist Raymond Cattell argues against the “mixture of blood between racial groups” (Cattell, 1933, p. 155). A few years later, he declared that Black individuals have “contributed practically nothing to social progress and culture” and argued against their full citizenship (Cattell, 1937, p. 56). Cattell argued that these individuals should “be brought to euthanasia” for this inferiority. In 1972, he again argued that such “race mixing” would result in “the intelligent maintainers of the culture being completely replaced by lower intelligences” (Cattell, 1972, p. 154). He continued to maintain the dangers of race-mixing through the early 1990s. ...

1954: Brown v. Board of Education is decided, ending legal segregation in the United States. The work and testimony of psychologists Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark, along with other social science research, was used to support desegregation and cited in the final decision (Kluger, 1975, Jackson, 2001).

That research was that Black children preferred White dolls over Black dolls. Supposedly forced racial school busing was going to solve that problem. It did not.

Everyone praised that Supreme Court decision, but it was based on some very dubious and demeaning ideas about Blacks. Namely, that Blacks kids need to be in classes with White kids or else they will find White dolls preferable. Why is it the business of the court to decide what color dolls kids should be playing with?

It is disgraceful that today's psychologists support this pseudoscience.

Here is another big Supreme Court decision, based on bogus social science, as explained by Amy L. Wax:

Disparate Impact Realism

In Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the doctrine, first articulated by the Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that employers can be held liable under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for neutral personnel practices with a disparate impact on minority workers. The Griggs Court further held that employers can escape liability by showing that their staffing practices are job related or consistent with business necessity.

In the interim since Griggs, social scientists have generated evidence undermining two key assumptions behind that decision and its progeny. First, the Court in Griggs noted the absence of evidence that the selection criteria in that case (a high school diploma and an aptitude test) were related to subsequent performance of the service jobs at issue, and expressed doubt about the existence of such a link. But research in industrial and organization psychology (IOP) has repeatedly documented that tests and criteria such as those at issue in Griggs (which are heavily “g”-loaded and thus dependent on cognitive ability) remain the best predictors of performance for jobs at all levels of complexity. Second, Griggs and its progeny rest on the implicit assumption, reflected in the so-called 4/5 rule, that fair and valid hiring criteria will result in a workforce that roughly reflects the representation of each group in the background population. Work in psychometrics and labor economics shows that this assumption is unjustified. Because blacks lag significantly behind whites on measures of cognitive ability, most valid job selection criteria will have a substantial adverse impact on this group. The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.

This decision has limited the ability of companies to hire competent workers, and probably cost us billions or maybe trillions in productivity.