The Intelligence of Yakuts and Ethnic Russians in Yakutia

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to report a study of the intelligence of Yakuts and ethnic Russians in Yakutia. The samples were drawn from Yakutsk, the capital of the Yakutia region containing almost one third of the population of the province, and from Viluysk, a town with the population of approximately 10 600, which is situated 592 km north-west of Yakutsk. The sample from Yakutsk consisted of 52 ethnic Russian and 128 ethnic Yakut school students with a mean age of 12.0 years attending a typical secondary school. The sample from Viluysk consisted of 7 ethnic Russian and 236 ethnic Yakut school students with a mean age of 12.7 years attending two typical secondary schools. The samples were tested in November 2015 with Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices Plus administered by the first author with a time limit of one hour. The British IQs of the participants were obtained from the norms of the 2008 British standardization. The main results were as follows. First, the British IQ of the Russians averaged from the two samples weighted by sample size was 101.7. However, because both samples were urban the true IQ of Russians in Yakutia is probably about by 3 to 5 IQ points lower. Second, the IQ of the Yakuts was 1.8 IQ points lower than that of the Russians but the difference is not statistically significant (t = .76). The results therefore indicate that the Yakuts and the Russians in Yakutia have approximately the same IQ.