Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Pesta, Bryan J.; Kirkegaard, Emil O. W.; Nijenhuis, Jan te; Lasker, Jordan; Fuerst, John

doi:10.1016/j.intell.2019.101408

Cited by 17 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The European-American (EA) and African-American (AA) populations have been found to differ in mean general cognitive ability (or general intelligence, g) by about one standard deviation [1][2][3]. This difference exists even though the heritability of intelligence is both high and virtually identical in the European and African-American populations [4]. Likewise, the shared and unshared environmental components of variance in g are similar in these groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Lasker

Pesta

Fuerst

et al. 2019

Psych

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Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomic status (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we verified that strict factorial invariance held between self-identified African and European-Americans. The differences between these groups, which were equivalent to 14.72 IQ points, were primarily (75.59%) due to difference in general cognitive ability (g), consistent with Spearman's hypothesis. We found a relationship between European admixture and g. This relationship existed in samples of (a) self-identified monoracial African-Americans (B = 0.78, n = 2,179), (b) monoracial African and biracial African-European-Americans, with controls added for self-identified biracial status (B = 0.85, n = 2407), and (c) combined European, African-European, and African-American participants, with controls for self-identified race/ethnicity (B = 0.75, N = 7,273). Controlling for parental SES modestly attenuated these relationships whereas controlling for measures of skin, hair, and eye color did not. Next, we validated four sets of polygenic scores for educational attainment (eduPGS). MTAG, the multi-trait analysis of genome-wide association study (GWAS) eduPGS (based on 8442 overlapping variants) predicted g in both the monoracial African-American (r = 0.111, n = 2179, p < 0.001), and the European-American (r = 0.227, n = 4914, p < 0.001) subsamples. We also found large race differences for the means of eduPGS (d = 1.89). Using the ancestry-adjusted association between MTAG eduPGS and g from the monoracial African-American sample as an estimate of the transracially unbiased validity of eduPGS (B = 0.124), the results suggest that as much as 20%-25% of the race difference in g can be naïvely explained by known cognitive ability-related variants. Moreover, path analysis showed that the eduPGS substantially mediated associations between cognitive ability and European ancestry in the African-American sample. Subtest differences, together with the effects of both ancestry and eduPGS, had near-identity with subtest g-loadings. This finding confirmed a Jensen effect acting on ancestry-related differences. Finally, we confirmed measurement invariance along the full range of European ancestry in the combined sample using local structural equation modeling. Results converge on genetics as a potential partial explanation for group mean differences in intelligence.Psych 2019, 1 433 between ancestry and outcomes or that ancestry is a non-causal correlate of the trait in question that's actually caused by something else if the mediation is not spurious. Ultimately, controls alone cannot establish causality [50].Four studies we know of have related genetically-assessed ancestry to cognitive ability in samples of 25,51,52]. Others have done this for Hispanic Americans [24,25] and various groups in Latin America [53][54][55]. Of these, the earlier ones [51-54] re...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Lasker

Pesta

Fuerst

et al. 2019

Psych

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“…To take the case of differences between selfidentified racial/ethnic groups in the USA, it has led us, in particular, to investigate the degree of trait heritability and the validity of intelligence related polygenic scores within groups, whether admixture predicts outcomes within self-identified groups, whether group differences in intelligence are measurement invariant and g-loaded, etc. [45]. The predictions which guided this research all came from the debate within differential psychology.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Research Practices in Differential Psychology: Comments and a Correction to Winston

Pesta¹,

Fuerst²,

Shibaev³

2021

AOSRPAP

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In a recently-featured commentary, Winston [1] defined scientific racism as "the use of scientific concepts and data to create and justify ideas of an enduring, biologically based hierarchy" [1, p. 425]. Winston further argued that scientific racism persists because of the "social genealogy and history" of the research program, rather than because it is an open empirical question as to whether some inherited behavioral differences exist between ethnic and racial groups. Finally, Winston called out one of us (BJP) for exemplifying scientific racism in a paper concerning Cold Winter's Theory. Specifically, the article [2] tested whether Cold Winter's Theory could account for race differences in intelligence across the 50 U.S. states. Unfortunately, Winston mischaracterized the article's position on this matter. We therefore write here to correct the mischaracterization, and to illustrate that the study of race differences is part of a progressive research program on psychological differences.

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“…for typically reported heritabilities (h 2 = .5; Polderman et al, 2015;Pesta et al, 2020) Related to this point, a reader suggested that we should run analyses to detect polygenic selection as done by Berg et al (2019). However, whether differences are due to drift or selection is not necessarily relevant to whether there are genetic differences between populations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, the cognitive battery is well designed and allows for a robust examination of psychometric bias between ethnic groups. Third, the heritability of cognitive ability has been previously reported for the two largest ethnic groups (African and European Americans; Mollon et al, 2018); this is important as the predictive validity of PGS depends on the trait heritability (Pesta et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…This is a theoretically plausible account, since predictive accuracy is a function of heritability (Daetwyler, Villanueva, & Woolliams, 2008). However, because the heritability of IQ is similar across racial and ethnic groups (for a meta-analytic review, see Pesta, Kirkegaard, te Nijenhuis, Lasker, & Fuerst, 2020), a more likely possibility is decay of linkage disequilibrium (LD), which results in different correlations between SNPs across different ancestry groups (Zanetti & Weale, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intelligence-associated Polygenic Scores Predict g, Independent of Ancestry, Parental Educational Levels, and Color among Hispanics in comparison to European, European- African, and African Americans

Pesta

Fuerst

Piffer³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Polygenic scores for educational attainment and intelligence (eduPGS), genetic ancestry, and cognitive ability have been found to be inter-correlated in some admixed American populations. We argue that this could either be due to causally-relevant genetic differences between ancestral groups or be due to population stratification-related confounding. Moreover, we argue that it is important to determine which scenario is the case so to better assess the validity of eduPGS. We investigate the confounding vs. causal concern by examining, in detail, the relation between eduPGS, ancestry, and general cognitive ability in East Coast Hispanic and non-Hispanic samples. European ancestry was correlated with g in the admixed Hispanic (r = .30, N = 506), European-African (r = .26, N = 228), and African (r = .084, N = 2,179) American samples. Among Hispanics and the combined sample, these associations were robust to controls for racial / ethnic self-identification, genetically predicted color, and parental education. Additionally, eduPGS predicted g among Hispanics (B = 0.175, N = 506) and all other groups (European: B = 0.230, N = 4914; European-African: B = 0.215, N = 228; African: B = 0.126, N = 2179) with controls for ancestry. Path analyses revealed that eduPGS, but not color, partially statistically explained the association between g and European ancestry among both Hispanics and the combined sample. Of additional note, we were unable to account for eduPGS differences between ancestral populations using common tests for ascertainment bias and confounding related to population stratification. Overall, our results suggest that eduPGS derived from European samples can be used to predict g in American populations. However, owing to the uncertain cause of the differences in eduPGS, it is not yet clear how the effect of ancestry should be handled. We argue that more research is needed to determine the source of the relation between eduPGS, genetic ancestry, and cognitive ability.

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Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Cited by 17 publications

References 41 publications

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Research Practices in Differential Psychology: Comments and a Correction to Winston

Intelligence-associated Polygenic Scores Predict g, Independent of Ancestry, Parental Educational Levels, and Color among Hispanics in comparison to European, European- African, and African Americans

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