A tale of two rejections

So far this year, I have submitted 4 articles to respected peer-reviewed journals: 2 to Intelligence, 1 to the Journal of Criminal Justice (JCJ), and 1 to Crime & Delinquency (CD). Of these 4 articles, 2 of them (1 submitted to Intelligence and the one submitted to the JCJ) have been rejected,* and it is these articles whose story I want to tell in this post (why am I saying "whose" when I'm talking about academic papers, not people? It sounds weird, but I can't think of a less awkward way to word this sentence, so whatever.)

Let's start with the paper I submitted to Intelligence, which was actually based in large part on this post (which I posted here in December 2017). I actually copied and pasted the post into the Word document I submitted to the journal (but of course, I modified it a lot before submitting it--what, do you think I'm that stupid? Hah!). Anyway, I submitted it in March of this year--while writing this post I actually dug back into my emails and discovered that this paper was submitted on March 4. I also discovered that the title of the submission was "A scientific critique of four arguments made in support of hereditarianism".

It was rejected without opportunity for improvement the next day, which of course was depressing and discouraging, but not nearly as much as it would've been if I'd had a lot more experience with this entire process. Weirdly, though I could find the email confirming that they'd received my submission, I couldn't find the email saying they rejected it. But I do remember the gist of the reasons it was rejected: the editor-in-chief of Intelligence, Richard Haier, said that he thought my review of the literature was too selective. He had some other criticisms that I don't remember off the top of my head. So of course after getting this news I just gave up on this particular submission and tried to move on, and I have done so since then without any major obstacles.

So what about the second paper? The one submitted to the JCJ? Well, that one was submitted later this March and was based largely on my previous post criticizing the paper by Walsh & Yun published in the JCJ last year. This paper was submitted at night, before I went to bed, and the morning after, once I woke up and had time to check my email, I discovered that it had already been rejected within less than 12 hours! The journal's editor, Matt DeLisi, said that it was "out of scope"--which I think is BS, since the original Walsh/Yun paper was no less out of scope than any of the content in my critique was. I actually briefly tried to get this decision appealed but gave up after failing to find a remotely effective way to do so.

So I will end this post by answering another obvious question: what about the other 2 papers that I mentioned at the start of the post? Well, they are both still under review: the CD one was submitted almost 2 weeks ago and nothing seems to have happened since then** (which is certainly weird), and the other Intelligence one is also still under review* (less surprising since I just submitted it last night). The subject of the CD one is whether the % of suicides committed with guns is a valid proxy for gun ownership over time, and the Intelligence paper is a meta-analysis of the black-white (mean) IQ gap in the US. Another obvious contrast between these submissions is that the CD one still says "awaiting reviewer selection" 12 days after I submitted it (on May 13), and the Intelligence one has already assigned a reviewer! Certainly this is not the kind of experience that will make me enthusiastic about submitting something to another SAGE journal in the future, to say the least.

*Update 5/25/18: the other Intelligence submission was just rejected as well.
**Update 6/20/18: the CD one has also been rejected.

Me and OpenPsych

OK, I feel like this is important enough to address here. I had been wondering whether I should or not and now I am convinced that people deserve to know what happened with regard to this subject.

So let's start from the beginning: despite the fact that I was very suspicious of many aspects of the OpenPsych journals (which I have criticized on this blog before), and of Emil Kirkegaard, the grad-school dropout who founded them, I still decided to submit a paper to one of these journals. Why? Why would I choose to associate myself with someone with views such as his (mainly because of his alleged support for child rape, as discussed in detail elsewhere)? The answer, basically, is that I thought I would be able to turn the journal around and get it to be taken seriously as a legitimate outlet for peer-reviewed research if I could get a well-designed paper published in it which did not conform to the hereditarian ideology of Kirkegaard and many other members of the journals' "editorial boards". I also hoped that there were other ways I could offer advice to make the journals more legitimate as peer-reviewed outlets should be, and allow Kirkegaard to respond to criticisms of the way they work.

As time went on, however, I decided that it was very unlikely that I would be able to move this journal from the category of scientific-racism echo chamber to that of respected new (albeit unusual) journal, and I didn't want my own reputation to suffer unnecessarily. Eventually I decided I should try to publish my paper (which can be viewed on OSF here) in a better journal: one that doesn't require me to come up with desperate justifications for associating myself with it. I haven't submitted it yet but I hope to do so soon.

I hope this is an adequate explanation of why I would associate myself with someone like this and with their ideological ilk. I certainly never agreed with the hereditarians behind this journal on almost any issues, but I was hoping to help them advance scientific inquiry in an unbiased manner; I no longer believe this to be possible enough to justify me working with them.

A roundup of criticisms of Richard Lynn's controversial intelligence "research"

You know that guy Richard Lynn, former emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster (in Northern Ireland) who had his "emeritus" title revoked by the University last month? The guy whose website says that he has found that "the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70" and that "men have a higher average IQ than women by about 5 IQs [sic] points"? The guy who is one of only a few academics both able and willing to argue in favor of eugenics (seriously, I am not making this up)? Who once said that it is “inevitable that whites will become a minority in the US sometime in the middle decades of the next century and this will entail a considerable deterioration in the quality of social, cultural and economic life"? 

Well, he has published a large number of articles in peer-reviewed journals (some reputable, others not), as well as a bunch of books. These books contain arguments about putative race/sex differences in intelligence and other traits that Lynn claims are based on strong empirical evidence. But are they really? Many researchers say "no!" This post will compile examples of researchers criticizing Lynn's work on controversial topics. Note: I previously did something similar with J. Philippe Rushton's "research" in this post.

1. Kamin (1995), in his review of the Bell Curve (which includes citations to several of Lynn's articles), had this to say about Lynn's 1991 article in the racist journal Mankind Quarterly (full text here): "Lynn's 1991 paper describes a 1989 publication by Ken Owen as "the best single study of the Negroid intelligence." The study compared white, Indian and black pupils on the Junior Aptitude Tests; no coloured pupils were included. The mean "Negroid" IQ in that study, according to Lynn, was 69. But Owen did not in fact assign IQs to any of the groups he tested; he merely reported test-score differences between groups, expressed in terms of standard deviation units. The IQ figure was concocted by Lynn out of those data. There is, as Owen made clear, no reason to suppose that low scores of blacks had much to do with genetics: "the knowledge of English of the majority of black testees was so poor that certain [of the] tests... proved to be virtually unusable." Further, the tests assumed that Zulu pupils were familiar with electrical appliances, microscopes and "Western type of ladies' accessories."...The test's developer, John Raven, repeatedly insisted that results on the Progressive Matrices tests cannot be converted into IQs. Matrices scores, unlike IQs, are not symmetrical around their mean (no "bell curve" here). There is thus no meaningful way to convert an average of raw Matrices scores into an IQ...A. L. Pons did test 1,011 Zambian copper miners, whose average number of correct responses was 34. Pons reported on this work orally; his data were summarized in tabular form in a paper by D. H. Crawford-Nutt. Lynn took the Pons data from Crawford-Nutt's paper and converted the number of correct responses into a bogus average "IQ" of 75. Lynn chose to ignore the substance of Crawford-Nutt's paper, which reported that 228 black high school students in Soweto scored an average of 45 correct responses on the Matrices--HIGHER than the mean of 44 achieved by the same-age white sample on whom the test's norms had been established and well above the mean of Owen's coloured pupils." [Emphasis mine.]
2. Wicherts et al. (2010a): "On the basis of the samples he deemed representative, Lynn concluded that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans stands at 67 when compared to UK norms after a correction of the Flynn Effect. We criticize his methods for being unsystematic...Lynn's methods in selecting samples remain unsystematic; he is inconsistent in his reasons to exclude samples, and too unspecific to allow replication by independent raters...Lynn asserts that his conversion method from CPM scores to SPM norms is unproblematic, because ceiling effects are absent. This assertion is untenable." [Emphasis mine.]
3. Zuckerman (2003): "Lynn's claim that certain races or ethnic groups have a higher incidence of psychopathic personality is not substantiated by large scale community studies in America that show no differences between these groups in the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. No consistent racial differences are found in traits closely associated with psychopathy, sensation seeking and psychoticism, and, Lynn to the contrary, the Psychopathic Deviate scale of the MMPI." (There's a lot more criticism of Lynn in the rest of this paper, which makes sense since its title describes it as a "critique of Lynn (2002)", which is a paper on race and psychopathic personality. Anyway, read the rest of it if you want to hear more of Zuckerman's criticisms of Lynn (2002), and the rest of Lynn's work as well.)
4. Hill (2002): "Finding a modest yet statistically significant correlation between skin tone and vocabulary test scores among African Americans, Lynn (2002) concludes that “intelligence in African Americans is significantly determined by the proportion of Caucasian genes” (p. 365). In this reanalysis of Lynn's data, I demonstrate that his bivariate association disappears once childhood environmental factors are considered. Therefore, a genetic link between skin color and intelligence among African Americans cannot be supported in his data."
5. Wicherts et al. (2010b): "On the basis of several reviews of the literature, Lynn [Lynn, R., (2006). Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers.] and Lynn and Vanhanen [Lynn, R., & Vanhanen, T., (2006). IQ and global inequality. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers.] concluded that the average IQ of the Black population of sub-Saharan Africa lies below 70...The assertion that the average IQ of [Black Sub-Saharan] Africans is below 70 is not tenable, even under the most lenient of inclusion criteria...our extensive search for relevant studies resulted in additional studies of IQ in Africa that Lynn (and Vanhanen) missed. This was partly caused by the fact that we had access to African journals that did not show up in Lynn (and Vanhanen)'s work. Because Lynn (and Vanhanen) missed a sizeable portion of the relevant literature, their estimate of average IQ of Africans is clearly too low [sic]." [Emphasis mine.]
6. Wicherts et al. (2010c) (note: this is a response to a response by Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg to the conclusions of Wicherts et al. (2010b)): "Lynn and Meisenberg's assessment of the samples' representativeness is not associated with any of the objective sampling characteristics, but rather with the average IQ in the sample. This suggests that Lynn and Meisenberg excluded samples of Africans who average IQs above 75 because they deemed these samples unrepresentative on the basis of the samples' relatively high IQs. We conclude that Lynn and Meisenberg's unsystematic methods are questionable and their results untrustworthy."
7. Volken (2003) (note: this is a review of IQ and the Wealth of Nations, a 2002 book co-authored by Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen): "Recently Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have presented evidence that differences in national IQ account for the substantial variation in national per capita income and growth. However, their findings must be considered as highly problematic. The authors neither make use of state‐of‐the‐art methodological techniques nor can they substantiate their theoretical claims. More precisely the authors confuse IQ with human capital and fail to adequately discuss the causal sequence of their argument."
8. Lichten (2008): "In a recent article in this journal [i.e. the Journal of Biosocial Science], Lynn et al. (2007) found a high correlation between average national IQs and achievement test scores in 67 countries and concluded ‘The correlation is so high that national IQs and educational achievement appear to be measures of the same construct.’ The author finds here the data do not support this conclusion."
9. Skeem et al. (2003) (note: this is a critique of Lynn (2002)): "Lynn's analysis is problematic on three primary counts. First, he equates psychopathy with generalized antisocial behavior and social deviance and fails to distinguish longstanding personality-based from behavior-based conceptions of this syndrome. Second, Lynn presumes rather than demonstrates that genetic factors explain race differences in antisocial behavior and social deviance, neglecting such potential alternative explanations as socioeconomic status and measured verbal intelligence. Third, Lynn presents an evolutionary explanation for putative racial and ethnic group differences in psychopathy that fails to reflect current methods and practices of evolutionary biology and genetics."
10. Beraldo (2010) was one of many articles published in Intelligence critiquing the conclusions of Lynn (2010), a study which claimed to find a strong positive correlation between regional IQ, income, mortality, stature, and other variables. Beraldo specifically focuses on the putative IQ-income correlation found in Lynn's paper, arguing that "Lynn's analysis is not sufficiently robust to support its conclusions." Later, he says: "A critical point which makes the results of Lynn unconvincing, is that they are not grounded on a clear distinction between correlation and causation."
11. Cornoldi et al. (2010) was another article in the same category as 10). It focuses on the validity of the school assessment data that Lynn used to calculate his "IQ" scores for various areas of Italy, making the following 4 points: "1) school measures should be used for deriving IQ indices only in cases where contextual variables are not crucial: there is evidence that partialling out the role of contextual variables may lead to reduction or even elimination of PISA differences; in particular, schooling effects are shown through different sets of data obtained for younger grades; 2) in the case of South Italy, the PISA data may have exaggerated the differences, since data obtained with tasks similar to the PISA tasks (MT-advanced) show smaller differences; 3) national official data, obtained by INVALSI (2009a) on large numbers of primary school children, support these conclusions, suggesting that schooling may have a critical role; 4) purer measures of IQ obtained during the standardisation of Raven's Progressive Coloured Matrices also show no significant differences in IQ between children from South and North Italy."
12. Cornoldi et al. (2013) is a response to some of Lynn's responses to criticisms of his 2010 paper on the IQ in Italy. It states: "...the use of PISA data to make inferences about regional differences in intelligence is questionable, and in any case, both PISA and other recent surveys on achievement of North and South Italy students offer some results that do not support Lynn's conclusions."
13. Moreale & Levendis (2014): "We re-examine Lynn and Vanhanen's argument that gross domestic product (GDP) depends upon IQ...education has a stronger impact on GDP than does IQ, whose effect we find to be insignificant. In other words, it is a country's actual human capital, rather than its potential human capital, which determines its GDP. In short, we are unable to replicate their results."
14. Parker (2004) was a paper written by Macon Paul Parker, who was then an undergraduate in his senior year at the College of Charleston. It is dedicated largely to critiquing and reanalyzing Lynn (1999), a study claiming a statistically significant correlation between higher intelligence and a lower number of children and siblings. Parker incorrectly talks about this paper as though it was published in 2000, for whatever reason. Anyway, Parker concludes that "Lynn argues that his analysis provides evidence of dysgenic fertility for the first two generations in the twentieth century in the United States (Lynn). However, a substantial body of evidence exists to refute such claims. The re-specification and reanalysis reveals that the lack of control for other variables which influence fertility reveals that education and socioeconomic status are not merely proxies for intelligence, but play an important, spurious role in relating intelligence and fertility...education plays a more important role in determining number of children, before race, age, sex, socioeconomic status and intelligence."
15. Huang & Hauser (2000): "Using aggregate data from the General Social Survey (GSS), 1974-1996, Lynn (1998) claims that the Black-White intelligence difference in the United States has not been narrowing over time. We replicate Lynn’s analysis and challenge his conclusion by identifying several methodological problems. By analyzing changes in Black-White differences in the GSS vocabulary test across survey years, rather than birth cohorts, Lynn overlooks both the duration and the significance of the Black-White convergence."
16. Thomas (2011): "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."
17. Robinson et al. (2011): "...data on Italian regional differences in educational achievement obtained in a much larger INVALSI study of 2,089,829 Italian schoolchildren provide unequivocal evidence that Lynn's educational achievement measure [based on OECD tests] is not a valid index of IQ differences. More generally, the lengthy literature review in Lynn's article reveals uncritical acceptance of reported correlations between any putative index of IQ and socio‐economic variables. Any measure of cognitive performance that is correlated with IQ is considered a measure of IQ, even if there is only a weak correlation. All correlations between such measures and socio‐economic or public health variables are viewed as evidence of direct causal relationships. In all cases, causality is assumed to be in the direction that supports Lynn's doctrine when it would be equally valid to argue that socio‐economic and public health differences cause differences in the performance of IQ tests." [Emphasis mine.]
18. Felice & Giugliano (2011): "...the evidence presented by the author [i.e. Lynn] is not sufficient to say that the IQ of Southern Italians is lower than the one of Northern Italians...his analysis does not prove that there is any causal link between what he defines as IQ and any of the variables mentioned...there is no evidence that the alleged differences in IQ are persistent in time and, therefore, attributable to genetic factors."
19. Daniele (2015): "This paper has examined Lynn's (2010a) hypothesis that socio-economic inequalities between the Italian regions are explained by genetically-rooted differences in average intelligence...Results show how both IQ and math test scores are strongly related to current socio-economic development of Italian regions. But, when historical data on income, infant mortality or life expectancy are used, a different picture emerges: the correlations are insignificant, weak, or, as in the case of infant mortality, do not support the suggested link between “regional intelligence” and socio-economic development at all." [Bolded emphasis mine.]
20. Daniele & Malamina (2011): "Socioeconomic disparity between North and South Italy has been recently explained by Lynn (2010) as the result of a lower intelligence quotient (IQ) of the Southern population. The present article discusses the procedure followed by Lynn, supplementing his data with new information on school assessments and per head regional income. Genetic North–South differences are then discussed on the basis of the most recent literature on the subject. The results do not confirm the suggested IQ-economy causal link." [Emphasis mine.]
21. D'Amico et al. (2012): "Our examination of intelligence test score differences between the north and south of Italy led to results that are very different from those reached by Lynn (2010). Our results demonstrate that by using intelligence tests to assess differences in ability rather than using achievement scores as a proxy for intelligence, children from the south of Italy did not earn lower scores than those from the north of Italy." [Emphasis in original.]
22. Berhanu 2007: "I review the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, written by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen...The essay exposes the racist, sexist, and antihuman nature of the research tradition in which the authors anchored their studies and the deep methodological flaws and theoretical assumptions that appear in their book. The low standards of scholarship evident in the book render it largely irrelevant for modern science.  This essay specifically deals with the IQ value of Ethiopian immigrants that came from Israel, used by the authors as representing the National Average IQ of Ethiopia. Most of these immigrants had rudimentary knowledge of literacy, and experienced an abrupt transition from rural Ethiopia to Israel with all the accompanying effects that it entails such as trauma, dislocation, and cultural shock. The test was conducted a few months after their arrival. That specific study, conducted by two Israelis, that assigns low IQ to the immigrants is also replete with technical and statistical errors."
23. Berhanu 2011: "Lynn‘s central thesis in Chapter 2 [of his 2006 book Race Differences in Intelligence] is that aspects of physical appearance—phenotype—are outward manifestations of heritable traits such as abilities, propensities for certain behaviours, diseases, and other sociocultural characteristics. He attempts to demonstrate that in Chapters 3-17. These are all futile attempts, however, given the state of the art and current genetic research...Not only are the relevant genetic data absent, but the distribution of polygenic phenotypes does not suggest that race is a useful category. On this very shaky ground, American society has created social arrangements and public policies that assume that race is a real phenomenon and that distinct racial populations exist. And still worse, in the name of science, Lynn advances his continued essentialist position that race is real."