Richard Haier

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Richard Haier (1949–) is an American psychologist, Professor Emeritus in the Pediatric Neurology Division of the School of Medicine at University of California, Irvine.

Haier is an hereditarian: heis a disciple of Arthur Jensen, a supportive colleague of Bo Winegard^[1] a former editor of Intelligence and an author for Quillette.^[2]

Haier and Jensen

Richard Haier and Arthur Jensen 1988

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Arthur Jensen a white nationalist.^[3] Richard Haier is one of his most devoted disciples.

During his Distinguished Contributor Interview with David Lubinski at the 2012 ISIR conference, Haier was asked who his heroes were. He mentioned Hans Eysenck a supporter of Arthur Jensen^[4] and Jensen.^[5]

For his 2021 Lifetime Achievement Address Haier said: "In 1988, Arthur Jensen actually arranged for me to get private funding for a small conference of about a dozen people, to discuss the impact that this kind of PET scanning would be having on intelligence research."^[6]

In his interview with Lex Fridman, Haier said:^[7]

HAIER

I want to say one more thing about Jensen. He was once asked by a journalist straight out, are you a racist? His answer was very interesting. His answer was. "I thought about that a lot. And I've concluded it doesn't matter." Now I know what he meant by this… he was a very unusual person. I think he had a touch of Asperger's syndrome to tell you the truth… with respect to group differences, he called it the default hypothesis.

Jensenism

Haier often refers to Jensen's paper How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?.^[8][9] and he apparently considers this, more than anything else, the most convincing evidence that Black Americans as a group have had lower test scores due to genetic deficiencies. The paper was a review of some government-funded "compensatory education programs" and since they did not succeed in improving test scores, Jensen concluded that "Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is about 80 percent heritable."

Social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett discussed the problem with the term "heritability":

The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.

In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).^[10]

The article also discusses the Flynn effect.

That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.

In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years, a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.

Remove all the history

The tests that Jensen examined were administered to Black children during the era of Jim Crow laws which lasted until 1965, a mere four years before Jensen's paper was published. In 1967 the Loving v. Virginia decision ruled laws against "inter-racial" marriage were unconstitutional, which was only two years before Jensen's paper.

During the time period that Jensen reviewed, the United States was such a hostile environment for Black children's educational prospects that a librarian called the police on astronaut Ronald McNair when he was nine years old and tried to check out books from the library:

"Well, this old librarian, she says, 'This library is not for coloreds.' He said, 'Well, I would like to check out these books.'

"She says, 'Young man, if you don't leave this library right now, I'm gonna call the police.'^[11]

This was in 1959, only ten years before Arthur Jensen (and his disciples like Richard Haier) decided Black children are hopeless.

This historical context is ignored or denied by hereditarians, evidence of the hereditarian political strategy to remove all the history.

Jensenism in the twenty-first century

Jensen's beliefs, called Jensenism were carried on directly through the "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences"^[12] and under that name received at least $337,500 from the Pioneer Fund.^[13] Its name was changed to "Institute of Mental Chronometry." The organization is closely tied to ISIR, which Haier has been involved in during most of its history

Hereditarians and libertarians

As a professor at University of California, Irvine, Haier was a signatory to Linda Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" which was an effort by hereditarians to defend The Bell Curve.

Among its claims:

• "Heritability estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8 … indicating genetics plays a bigger role than environment in creating IQ differences".
• "Although the environment is important in creating IQ differences, we do not know yet how to manipulate it".

Studies indicate that poverty has a large impact on IQ test results^[14] and IQ is related to family income.^[15] These studies demonstrate that we do know how to manipulate the environment, but the method would require the large-scale reduction of poverty, as in the case of government action.^[16].

Libertarian organizations have a history of both defending hereditarians, as when The Atlas Society defended James Watson's racist claims.^[17]

Haier gave an invited paper to the American Enterprise Institute in 2007 on "Brain imaging studies of intelligence in men and women."^[18] It was part of the "Women and Science" event that included Christina Hoff Sommers and Amy Wax.

The hereditarian equation

Federal Reserve: Household net worth and income, by race and ethnicity.^[19]

In spite of the many studies that demonstrate the influence of poverty on IQ test results, hereditarians believe that low intelligence causes poverty.

Richard Haier is a firm believer in the hereditarian equation (intelligence = money) as shown in his interview with Scott Barry Kaufman in 2020:

HAIER

You wanna talk about serious social problems? Yeah, you got 51 million people doesn't matter, race you know, doesn't, religion doesn't, voting preferences doesn't matter. You got 51 million people who do not have the mental abilities to hold high paying jobs and possibly even care for themselves. This is a very large number of people. Now. These people -

KAUFMAN

...that seems like a pretty deterministic statement though that you just said -

HAIER

no, I'm just,

KAUFMAN

you mean probabilistically.

HAIER

It's probabilistic that look, in the United States there are about 43 million people living below the poverty line is determined. By some government agency that does this. So think of a Venn diagram. You got 43 million people living in poverty. You got 51 million people with IQ's. That are low enough to make it everyday life difficult for them. There's got to be overlap between those two universes, those two sets of people. So if you could tweak IQ by just a little bit and move people from 85 to 90 or from 80 to 85. This is going to have a gigantic ripple effect on many, many social problems.^[20]

The error of the hereditarian equation can be quickly found in statistics from the Federal Reserve. The net worth of Whites over Blacks has increased enormously in the past thirty years.^[19] It seems doubtful that even Richard Haier would claim White intelligence increased genetically compared to Black intelligence in only thirty years.

Haier repeats the claims about low IQ Americans in an interview with Lex Fridman.^[21][22] During the interview Fridman lists for Haier four critiques of The Bell Curve by Stephen Jay Gould. Instead of addressing Gould's critiques directly, Haier launches into an attack on Gould for his political views, a standard response by hereditarians to the mention of Gould's name.^[23] Nor does Fridman ask Haier about studies used in The Bell Curve funded by the Pioneer Fund or the use of work by J. Philippe Rushton.

Haier's recommendation

Haier is a fervent believer in the American hereditarian assumption, so when Fridman asks him for a solution to improve Black Americans' prospects, he recommends altering their defective genes:^[24]

HAIER

…you also asked me what is the science after The Bell Curve. And the short answer is there's not much new work, but whatever work there is supports the idea that there still are group differences. It's arguable whether those differences have diminished at all or not. And there is still a major problem in underperformance for school achievement. For many disadvantaged and minority students, and there's so far is no way to fix it…

FRIDMAN

What do we do with this information?

Then finally…

HAIER

...And what I think we should do with this information is. Unusual. Because I think what we need to do is fund more neuroscience research on the molecular biology of learning and memory…

The white nationalists at American Renaissance liked the interview so much that they shared it on their website.^[25]

Haier is spending his emeritus years appearing on podcasts to promote that "unusual" policy approach.

International Society for Intelligence Research

Mainstream Science on Intelligence

The Southern Poverty Law Center said of the paper:

The only thing linking many of Gottfredson’s co-signers to the field of IQ research at all was a commitment to the idea of innate racial differences in intelligence. While only 10 of these scientists were actual experts in the field, at least 20 were recipients of money from the Pioneer Fund, including one director of the Fund, R. Travis Osborne, and two future presidents, J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn.^[26]

Mainstream Science on Intelligence is a sort of founding document for the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). Not only is it featured on the ISIR website, described as "a classic"^[27] but many of the signatories went on to participate in ISIR governance and conferences. These include Gottfedson, Jensen, Haier, David Lubinski, Eysenck, Rushton, Lynn, Douglas K. Detterman, Robert Plomin and Thomas Bouchard.^[28] Several of these are also recipients of money from the Pioneer Fund.

The Bell Curve and papers by Plomin, Bouchard, Rushton and Lynn were cited in the manifesto of the 2022 Buffalo mass-murderer — see Bouchard, Plomin, Deary, and the 2022 Buffalo shooter manifesto.

Organization roles

Haier was Secretary/Treasurer of the organization in 2012-2014, and President in 2016.^[29]

ISIR Conferences

ISIR has been holding conferences since 2000, except 2020. The conference locations alternate typically between the United States one year, and outside of the United States the next year, usually in Europe. In 2021 the conference was held online.

ISIR conferences are a who's who of white nationalists, race pseudoscience promoters, and right-wing political operatives.

At the 2012 ISIR conference, Richard Haier expressed his appreciation for ISIR:

I'm also proud to be associated with people in this association, because we all share, not only an interest in intelligence research. but we're all dedicated to work in a field that is not regarded as mainstream, that has many difficulties associated with it, but we all persevere nonetheless. And so I'm very proud that there's a whole group of people that I can kind of hang out with and and talk to about this stuff.^[5]

2002

ISIR conference regular J. Philippe Rushton speaking at an American Renaissance conference

Haier first participated in an ISIR conference in 2002^[30] which featured Arthur Jensen presenting an invited address on "Mental Chronometry." Although Mental chronometry^{[note 1]} has since been proven a dead-end for hereditarianism,^[31] the term lives on in the name of an organization founded by Jensen and other members of the ISIR, called the Institute of Mental Chronometry.^[12] In 2023 the Institute gave a grant of over half a million dollars to two individuals associated with the ISIR, Emily Willoughby and James Lee.^[32]

Also featured at the 2002 conference was J. Philippe Rushton, giving presentations on "African and non-African Students" and "Black White Differences." The same year, Rushton became president of the Pioneer Fund.^[33]

2002 was also the year that Rushton and Richard Lynn appeared at an American Renaissance conference^[34] along with people like Jared Taylor. They presented a speech "In Search of the African IQ."

The association of Rushton and Lynn with an extremist racist organization had no negative impact on future invitations to participate in ISIR conferences for Rushton or Lynn. Given the other extreme racists and white supremacists who have appeared at ISIR conferences, it likely had a positive impact on future ISIR invitations.

2003-2011

Haier gave presentations at the 2005 conference, and chaired a symposium.^[35] Rushton and Jensen also participated in the conference as did Kevin MacDonald, a white nationalist who was influential in the development of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

Haier gave presentations at the 2006 conference.^[36] Rushton participated in the conference as well as Richard Lynn.

In addition to Haier, the 2007 conference included Rushton, Jensen, MacDonald, Lynn, Heiner Rindermann and Donald Templer^[37] who would go on to co-author a paper with Rushton that was later retracted,^[38] but still found its way into the 2022 Buffalo shooter's manifesto.

Haier participated in a session called "Gray Matter and Intelligence Factors: Is There a Neuro-g?" at the 2008 conference.^[39] Rushton, Lynn, Rindemann and Gottfredson were among the conference participants.

Haier participated in the 2009 conference which included a session by Rushton and Jensen called "The Rise and Fall of the Flynn Effect as a Reason to Expect a Narrowing of the Black-White IQ Gap." Kathryn Paige Harden also participated, who gave a presentation entitled "Why Don’t Smart Kids Have Sex? A Twin-Control Study."^[40]

The 2010 conference featured, in addition to Haier, a talk by Arthur Jensen called "Ratio Scale Measurement of Mental Processes by Means of Mental Chronometry" and Rushton and Templer gave a talk on "IQ, Pigmentocracy, Crime, and Income in 50 U.S. States."^[41]

2012-2021

Richard Haier at the 2012 ISIR conference, predicting the future of brain imaging

Steven Pinker at the 2015 ISIR conference expounding on his belief that opponents of race pseudoscience are simply more articulate than proponents

David Lubinski and Linda Gottfredson enjoying themselves at Gottfredsons's Distinguished Contributor Interview at the 2016 ISIR conference

The program for the 2012 conference featured Francis Galton on the cover and inside noted the deaths of Jensen and Rushton. Haier received "Distinguished Contributor Award." The conference included participation from Aurelio J. Figueredo.^[42]

At the end of the program, Haier affirmed his devotion to the hereditarian belief that intelligence equals money and mentions Jensen's "mental chronometry."

…if you took all the money in the world and divided it equally in six months, the same people would have it back. And I think that's a a very cynical statement with an element of truth about intelligence in it though. So right now, I'll just say one more thing about that. Right now, all our measures of intelligence by and large are relative to other people. And I believe that Art Jensen was on the right path when he said we have to move beyond that, that G is a fact of nature, and to make it, and to make intelligence research a natural science, we need to have a way to measure G that's not limited to our relative measures, that we need that we need something like what he called mental chronometry and the actual timing of information processing around the brain. And we now have the technology to do that. And I'm going to show you, I'm going to show some of that actually on Saturday. So I think that we're moving in a very nice direction — at some point, the phenomenon that we're studying, you know, one of the professors at Hopkins used to say Warren Torgeson, I went to Warren Torgeson once with a question about significance levels. Warren Torguson helped develop multidimensional scaling. He was a preeminent mathematical psychologist. And he listened and he said, well, you know. If what you're studying is big enough to be important, it's big enough for you to find without a significance test.

You think about this. Global climate change. Think about climate change. Does this really depend on a P of .05 on some variable? No. You look out your window and you see the ocean coming into your house. That's what convinced people of climate change almost overnight. And I think we are on the verge of having brain measures that are real racial measures in terms of milliseconds where you can see millisecond by millisecond what the brain is doing throughout the brain as person is solving G-loaded problems and I think this gives us the opportunity for a new kind of definition of intelligence. And moves us more toward making the study of intelligence more like a natural science, just like the study of black holes.^[5]

The 2014 conference program was a minimalist two-page "overview." It indicated that Haier chaired a talk on "Individual differences vs group averages: Time to choose one and abandon the other for brain imaging studies?" Susan Pinker, and Richard Lynn were conference participants.^[43]

At the 2015 conference,^[44] Haier introduced Steven Pinker's "President’s Invited Address: Intelligence Research and the Craft of Writing" available on YouTube.^[45] During the speech Pinker suggested that opponents of race pseudoscience claims, like Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Jay Gould, have an advantage over proponents of race pseudoscience because they are better writers. Also participating in the conference: Quillette author Alice Dreger,^[46] and Rindermann.

Haier participated in the 2017 conference along with Willoughby, Lee and Toby Youngof the Ulster Institute for Social Research.^[47] Steven Pinker was interviewed by David Lubinski for the "ISIR Distinguished Contributor Interview, 2017" available on YouTube.^[48] During the interview Lubinski asked Pinker how he became so interested in "human psychological diversity" when previously he had "found individual differences 'uninteresting'." It seemed that what changed his mind were people who would eventually be ISIR conference participants:

PINKER:

…You can compare humans to chimpanzees, there are a number of ways of getting at it. But one of them has to be well, let's look at the differences in the genes and see how they correlate with differences in psychological abilities. Another was the fact that — I didn't appreciate until reading an article by Tom Bouchard and his colleagues in the late 80s in Science, that pointed out a problem that I had a deepening appreciation of, that behavioral genetics isn't just the study of the genetic influences but it leads to surprising discoveries about environmental influences, mainly the small contribution of the so-called shared environment, which I think came as a surprise to everyone, pointed out by Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr, David Rowe and later Judith Harris.^[48]

At the online conference in 2021 Haier received the "Lifetime Achievement Award."^[49] Other conference participants included the "23andMe Research Team," Quillette author Damien Morris,^[50] Rindermann, Emily Willoughby, James Lee and Gregory Clark an economist, whose work, according to a review in The Economist of his book The Son Also Rises, "…implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups."^[51][52]

2022

Haier was not listed as a participant in 2022, but Pinker was an invited speaker at the conference and gave a speech titled "Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters."^[53]

Bouchard, Plomin, Deary, and the 2022 Buffalo shooter manifesto

The Buffalo mass-murderer's 180-page manifesto cites many race pseudoscience sources. Some of them have been participants at International Society for Intelligence Research conferences:

• "Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits: A Survey" by Thomas Bouchard, Jr.:^[54] Bouchard is associated with ISIR and has received money from the Pioneer Fund.^[28]

The shooter's comment for the citation: "Most if not all psychological traits are substantially influenced by genetics."

• "Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings" by Robert Plomin and Ian Deary:^[55] Both Plomin and Deary are ISIR conference participants.

The shooter's comment: "All behavioral traits are substantially heritable. Evidence for this is ubiquitous."

• The retracted article, "Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?" by J. Philippe Rushton and Donald I. Templar^[38]

The shooter's comment: "Darker pigmented people average higher levels of aggression and sexual activity, and lower IQ."

• "Racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality" by Richard Lynn:^[56] Lynn was an ISIR conference regular.

The shooter's comment: "Blacks are 50% more likely to cheat on their spouses than Whites. Blacks have less perseverance than other races."

• The Limits of Democratization: Climate, Intelligence, and Resource Distribution by Tatu Vanhanen:^[57] Vanhanen also co-authored a book with Richard Lynn called IQ and the Wealth of Nations.^[58]

The shooter's comment: "The world’s thirty least intelligent countries (except for Haiti) are all in sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to ISIR conference participants, the shooter also cited an article by journalist Nicholas Wade in The New York Times^[59] Wade is a promoter of race pseudoscience and the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

The shooter's comment: "Over 2000 genes have been subject to recent (post out-of-Africa) evolution. Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans."

2023

The 2023 conference included Haier, Gregory Clark, Willoughby, and Steven Pinker.^[60]

Intelligence

As the editor of Intelligence, the publication of the International Society for Intelligence Research, Haier is an important figure in the quest to promote impactful hereditarianism:

Another signatory was a less well-known figure: Richard Haier, a psychologist and now emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine. Haier is the editor of Intelligence, a journal belonging to the major international scientific publishing group Elsevier, which also publishes the highly prestigious journals Cell and The Lancet. Unlike The Mankind Quarterly, Intelligence is considered a reputable mainstream publication, with bona fide academics on its editorial board. Yet many Pioneer Fund grantees — Gottfredson, Bouchard, and Rushton among them — have had dozens of papers published in the journal. After Rushton died in 2012, the journal printed a gushing obituary comparing him to the 18^th-century English social economist Thomas Malthus, whose memorial in Bath praised him for his “spotless integrity.” ‍ It is with people like Haier at the respectable end of academia that this story reaches out of the fringes of science and into its core.^[28]

Resignation

In December 2024 Aporia reported that Haier was stepping down as editor-in-chief of Intelligence. Haier's X/Twitter account confirms his status as the former editor of Ingelligence as of January 2025.^[61]

Richard Haier and "race differences"

Denial of racism

In his interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, Haier claims that he has avoided commenting on race differences, while speculating that Arthur Jensen had "a touch of Asperger syndrome." He claims that there was "no racism" in private conversations with "players in that (race difference) space."

HAIER

In fact I never commented on the race difference thing up until I did this lecture in the end. I recorded at the end of 2013. So I literally went decades without any public discussion of this. I mean I know or have met most of the players in that space. It's a relatively small space compared to the rest of intelligence. And so. You know, just from a historical point of view, I had many, many private conversations with most of the key people. And in private conversation there was no racism. There was just kind of an interest in explaining away these these test differences or it's not. Necessarily explaining them away, but explaining where they came from.^[20]

Alliances with racists and white nationalists

Like Steven Pinker,^[62] Haier's approach is to deny hereditarian racism while aligning with racists and other promoters of race pseudoscience.

Stefan Molyneux

Haier on white supremacist Molyneux's podcast, 2018

Haier had a friendly visit on white supremacist Stefan Molyneux's podcast in March 2018.

Haier and Molyneux were in agreement about virtually everything, especially their belief that environment counts for nothing and the only way to improve intelligence test scores is genetic manipulation. Haier was very sad that the American government has not hopped on board the eugenics train yet:

HAIER:

Well, unfortunately now in our country we're living in a time that's profoundly anti-science. We have many government heads and important agencies who are overtly anti-science. I don't understand it, but it's not good. And it's not good in general for for many scientific things and for the kind of things we're talking about here, which are kind of far out. Not many people are talking about manipulating genes that raise IQ. This is not really a public conversation, and to the extent it is, it's usually framed in some negative context of eugenics or or racism or or or or something like that.^[63]

But Haier and Molyneux are wrong. An October 2023 article in The New York Times finds that:

Research shows that the more funding schools get, the better students do. Instead of schools being financed with varying amounts of money based on property taxes, most states now spend the same amount per student, or more for students in low-income schools. The bigger disparities are now among states.

But as differences in school funding have shrunk, differences in other resources in children’s lives have grown. Children are increasingly likely to live and attend schools in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty or affluence. Since the mid-1990s, neighborhoods have become more segregated by income — but only for families raising children, Professor Owens found. As school districts become more segregated, achievement gaps grow larger, she found.^[64]

Haier is unlikely to ever be confronted by findings that are contrary to his beliefs because he will only talk to the utterly clueless such as Lex Fridman, or white nationalists and racists. Meanwhile he promotes genetic engineering over improving children's lives.

See also

• Hereditarianism
• Sociobiology

External links

• It might be a pseudo science, but students take the threat of eugenics seriously Ben van der Merwe (February 19, 2018) The New Statesman
• Racism is creeping back into mainstream science – we have to stop it Angela Saini (January 22, 2018) The Guardian
• Bankrolling racism: “science” and the Pioneer Fund William H. Tucker (2001) Race and Society Volume 4, Issue 2
• The Heritability Fallacy David S. Moore and David Shenk (2016) WIREs Cognitive Science
• RACE SCIENCE REARS ITS UGLY HEAD Gavin Evans (March 1, 2015) New Internationalist

Notes

References