Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a perspective on "Jensenism" and explains how a well-respected and previously noncontroversial educational psychologist gave rise to a controversial word in the dictionary. It discusses how in the late 1960s Arthur R. Jensen's research interest turned from the serial position effect to the importance of general intelligence, as opposed to specific task learning, in education and in life; and then to the important role of heredity in intelligence, a subject that previously had been almost completely neglected. The book presents three lines of argument to support what he calls the Default Hypothesis that both genetic and environmental factors play about the same part in causing the average difference in IQ between Blacks and Whites as they do in causing differences in IQ within either race.