Relation Between Intelligence And Race

1929 Words8 Pages

Intelligence is one of the most discussed topics among society. In school, students often compare with each other to see who is more intelligent. Parents have also been paying a lot of attention on the intelligence of their kids such that they are willing to do anything so that their children can be boosted to be genius. Perhaps one of the most discussed issues that are related to intelligence is the relationship between one’s intelligence and his or her races. Since the early period of the twentieth century, it has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research. Scientists have been putting great endeavor to conduct numbers of experiment to find out whether there really exists a genetic relationship between races and …show more content…

Family is one of the important components of one’s sociocultural background. Carol Dweck (1999) and his colleagues have conducted several research into how the mind-set and words of parents will affect on the performance in IQ tests of their children in their future. They have developed two kinds of theory, in which the first is known as “entity theory”. Parents who hold this theory assert that the intelligence is an “intrinsic” quality of a human. They praise their children for their “inherent” smartness, or equivalently in the opposite way, depreciate them for their “innate” foolishness. Their children, who is indoctrinated the “entity theory”, tends to think that it is pointless to try harder on a particular task because if they failed it, it simply implies that they are born to be clumsy. On the other hand, the “incremental theory” claims that one can continuingly improve his or her intelligence with effort. Parent who hold this theory give compliments to their children for their endeavour instead of their result at a task. Children who have faith in this theory are more likely to believe that by challenging themselves, they will attain greater achievement in term of intelligence, in contrast to the children believe in “entity theory”. Children who live under this group of parents are likely to be instilled this incremental theory of intelligence and thus their intelligence will be improved as continuing efforts will be made by them. With the help of these two theories, we are now able to point out that one of the reasons that the Caucasoid child perform better in academics and particularly in IQ tests is the fact that there are more Caucasoid parents indoctrinate their kids the “incremental theory” from the very young age than the Negroid parents (Lee, 2014). This certainly has nothing related to the genetic property of a particular race, thus shows that intelligence is not genetically related to