PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 101Just being made to feel inferior in a class structure— feeling that others
might think you are inferior, or that a test is about to expose you as
inferior— has devastating eff ects on per for mance. Th is is known as ste-
reo type threat and is now known to aff ect lower social class and ethnic
groups, women, older people, and other groups. For example, being asked
to take an IQ test under evaluative conditions, compared with taking it
under nonevaluative conditions— treating it as a game— makes a huge
diff erence in per for mance.^35 Again, why mystify the situation with an
intangible concept like g?
On another front, it has been shown that biological eff ects of stress on
parents, as in future response and avoidance tendencies, can alter gene
expressions by a kind of molecular tagging or silencing of specifi c sec-
tions of their DNA (see chapters 4 and 5). Th ese tags are then transmitted
to children along with parental DNA, aff ecting the children’s physiologi-
cal stress management pro cesses. Th e consequence is that off spring will
tend to underperform in stressful situations: an eff ect that appears to be
ge ne tic but is really environmental in origin.
SOCIAL DIS- INTEGRITY, NOT BODILY INTEGRITYIQ scores, then, are merely a kind of redescription of the distribution of
social power, with its consequences for people’s thoughts, feelings, self-
confi dence and so on. Th is reproduction in minds of circumstances in
socie ties also explains well- known correlations between IQ and many
other consequences of that power structure. Th ese include, not just so-
cial class per se, but also health, life expectancy, involvement in crime,
and just about any other consequence of social in equality.
IQ testers like Linda Gottfredson, Ian Deary, and colleagues have
made much of such correlations. For one thing, they have suggested,
without any causal evidence, that they validate IQ tests (i.e., that they
really do mea sure human potential). But they have gone beyond that to
suggest that IQ refl ects bodily system integrity or “general biological
fi tness.”^36
Of course, such suggestions refl ect a constant strand in the IQ testing
movement: the reduction of social class to immutable biological forces.
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