Academic experts criticise Boris Johnson IQ claims (2024)

A world expert on behavioural genetics, recently championed by Conservative education advisers, has said it is wrong to abandon those with the lowest IQs , as Boris Johnson suggested in a highly provocative speech on Wednesday.

The London mayor said those with IQs below 85 were less wealthy and implied that society should be ploughing more resources into helping those with higher IQs.

But Rober Plomin, professor of behavioural genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, said while those with high IQs stood a better chance of being wealthy, this was in no way "fixed" and that Johnson's assertions about resources, "didn't flow from the facts".

Michael Gove's special adviser, Dominic Cummings, recently asked Plomin to give a talk at the Department for Education.

Plomin said there was a "correlation between IQ and educational attainment ... income, occupational status". But he said this was "moderate" . He said: "If Boris actually said, 'We are to therefore put more of our resources into the higher IQ [bracket]', that's wrong ... it's applying values."

Plomin said it was more likely that people with high IQs would be richer than those with low ones, but the correlation was "not all that high".

"It's all probabilistic. The average IQ of people who graduate from university is say 120, the average IQ of those who get PhD' is 130, and it's just the average … [But] there is still a lot of variation around that," he said.

However, Plomin said policies of distributing resources depended on a society's values, and that as a late bloomer himself and was grateful not to have been put through the highly selective old 11+ system as he may not have survived:

"I was very much a late bloomer, developmentally in terms of schools," Plomin said. "I was very lucky we had a public education system in the United States which allowed me to go on. If there had been an 11+ [exam] I might not have been selected for it."

"I don't think my political values mean more than anyone elses but from a scientific point of view I would emphasise really strongly that the fact that there are these differences in cognitive ability... is an incontrovertible fact but the social implications of that depend on your values."

Other academics also stepped into the controversy stoked by Johnson's comments. Dr James Thompson, senior lecturer in psychology at University College London, said Boris had been "inelegant" in his choice of words.

Thompson, co-author of Cognitive Capitalism, said: "What Boris Johnson has done is inelegantly describe things which in fact do seem to be true: intelligence, however you assess it, is predictive. It's predicative of income, life span and of occupational status."

"People are different and have different futures and intelligence seems to be an important part of that."

He said studies showed there seemed to be a correlation between "being bright in youth and doing well in life later".

Asked if inequality was inevitable, he said: "In one way that is true. There's two things, one is that some people are brighter than others and can do more complicated work and that more complicated work is generally more valued." However, he added that how much people should be paid was a decision for society.

Professor Richard Lynn, co-author of IQ and the Wealth of Nations, said that the association between IQ and income was "only modest". "That is because some high IQ people go into jobs that don't have particularly high earnings like university professors, schoolteachers or social workers. Some professions attract very high IQ people but they don't have very high earnings," he said.

"You could say that the IQ is only one determinant of high earnings, the others are ambition and motivation and the third one is luck."

Academic experts criticise Boris Johnson IQ claims (2024)
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