PSYCH 9C Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Heritability, The Bell Curve, Assortative Mating
Document Summary
In this chapter the authors are talking about purported changes in american society (presumably of the us variety) during the 20th century, and making predictions about future trends. It is filling in some of the details that were mentioned in the introduction to part 1 of the book. The main claim in this chapter is that in the us there is an increasing social separation based on cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities here is equated with intelligence, understood as a single factor g, and measured accurately by iq tests. The authors call this social separation cognitive partitioning, and they say the members of the cognitive elite are becoming increasingly partitioned from the rest of society. With each generation this class structure is getting stronger, and during the 20th century there has been a progressively higher correlation between iq, education, income, and social standing. There is some churning (movement between classes) but this is becoming progressively less.
