Mainstream Science on Intelligence

Mainstream Science on Intelligence was a public statement issued by a group of academic researchers in fields associated with intelligence testing that claimed to present those findings widely accepted in the expert community. It was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994 as a response to what the authors viewed as the inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media regarding academic consensus on the results of intelligence research in the wake of the appearance of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray earlier the same year. It was drafted by professor of psychology Linda Gottfredson, sent to 131 researchers, and signed by 52 university professors specializing in intelligence and related fields, including around one third of the editorial board of the journal Intelligence, in which it was subsequently reprinted in 1997. The 1997 editorial prefaced a special volume of Intelligence with contributions from a wide array of psychologists.

The letter to the Wall Street Journal set out 25 conclusions:

In an article describing the background of the statement, Linda Gottfredson explains how she was prompted to write it by what she considered to be "outdated, pseudoscientific notions of intelligence" promoted by many critics of The Bell Curve in the controversy that followed the publication of the book. She contacted David Brooks at the Wall Street Journal, who was willing to publish a short statement signed by experts describing what is considered mainstream in the study of intelligence. Gottfredson drafted the statement, had it vetted by several leading researchers, and finally solicited signatures for it from experts in several disciplines, including anthropology, behavior genetics, mental retardation, neuropsychology, sociology, and various specialties in psychology. The experts invited to sign the statement were given no opportunity to revise it, nor was anyone told who else had been invited or who had already given his or her signature.

The invitation to sign was sent to 131 researchers, of whom 100 responded by the deadline. The signature form asked whether the respondent would sign the statement, and if not, why not. 48 did not agree to sign, with 11 explicitly disagreeing that it represented the mainstream (or at least disagreeing with some of the claims in it), another 11 saying they did not know whether it did, 16 more writing various other reasons, including the fear of jeopardizing their position or project, and 10 of whom gave no explanation for their refusal. 52 respondents agreed with and signed the statement.

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