How Much Does Jewish Psychology Explain Jewish Genius?
definitely not 0% of the variance, but probably not 100%
Inspired by my article on whether greater male variance in intelligence explains greater male variance in intelligence explains greater male genius, I decided to do a similar article but for American Jews. Despite making up 2.3% of the American population, Jews are about 30% of their nobelists and 36% of their uber-wealthy.
The figures from the second chart that are titled ‘Eminent x (timerange)’ are taken from Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, where Murray himself admits that the figures are underestimates because some Jews will not be labelled as Jewish in their biographies. That said, Jewish representation in significant figures in the 20th century (18-33% depending on the field) is still consistent with their representation in top finance people in 20th Century Germany (25%) and American billionaires (17%). For now, I’ll estimate that 17-36% of American geniuses are Jews.
For now, I will model ‘latent eminence’ as a function of four traits:
Eminence = intelligence + conscientiousness + mental_instability + error
This is based on the Galton-Jensen model of eminence, where eminence is the product of an interaction between intelligence, conscientiousness, and creativity (trait psychotism) and some error variance (e.g. location, culture, luck). Intuitively, it makes sense that high achievement is determined by work ethic and intelligence, but the link between outlier achievement and mental disorder is not as obvious. Fortunately, there is data on this: people with siblings who have certain psychiatric disorders are more likely to be in creative professions.
Psychologically, Jews are more intelligent than White gentiles. When samples that don’t use White control groups or high quality measurements of IQ are excluded (or ones that are not online), the following effect sizes are left:
NLSY79: 110 (n = 109) (using sampling weights and ASVAB factor scores)
NLSY97: 107.1 (n = 99) (using sampling weights and ASVAB factor scores)
Project Talent: 106.83 (n = 6944) (my estimate is slightly different from Dunkel’s, who found 106.7)
ABCD: 106.5 (relative to the White mean)
Hirsch 1926: 104.23 (n = 75, Polish Jews)
Hirsch 1926: 101.23 (n = 627 Russian Jews)
Seaqo and Koldin: 108.73 (n = 800)
Rigg: 98.4 (n = 445)
MIDUS: 104.5 (n = 96)
The meta-analytic average of these Jewish samples is 105.3 (95% CI: [102.9, 107.7], I^2 = 99.99%). If the two outliers are removed (Hirsch and Rigg) the average rises to 107.3 (95% CI: [105.8, 108.8], I^2 = 99.94%).
The abnormally high scores that were found in the NLSY datasets are due to the fact that Jews score disproportionately well on tests of crystalized ability, which is what the ASVAB tests the most. The SAT, another test of crystalized ability, has a Jewish advantage of 8 points, which is in line with the prior samples. The low score on the MIDUS is probably because MIDUS mostly tested executive function and memory, which Jews do not score that well on. The samples that have balanced measurements of intelligence (Talent, ABCD) converge to a Jewish IQ of roughly 106.8.
Jews do have higher levels of general factor of personality, but looking closely at the results, there is no difference between Jews and gentiles in conscientiousness. The main differences seem to be that Jews are more extraverted and open than gentiles, and some datasets suggest they have an advantage in emotional stability and agreeableness as well, though the numbers are not consistent between datasets.
There is, of course, the problem of using self-reported personality, which suffers from reference group effects and other biases. For now, I think it would be safe to assume that gentiles and Jews have roughly the same levels of conscientiousness.
Jews are more mentally unstable than White gentiles, though the difference between them in mental stability isn’t clear from Kirkegaard’s analysis. Assuming that mental instability is roughly normally distributed, and that after a certain threshold people will see a therapist, Jews are about 0.47 SD more mentally ill than White gentiles. This is roughly equivalent to the Jewish advantage in general factor of personality and IQ, which leads me to believe the estimate is accurate.
The error component of the eminence independent of intelligence, conscientiousness, and creativity is probably close enough to the environmentality of the trait, as the other three traits are highly heritable. While the environmentality of eminence has not been estimated before, it most likely lies in between the environmentality of economic status (~30% for general social status) and the environmentality of personality traits/intelligence (~20%).
The correlation between intelligence and eminence must also be determined - if the average IQ of a genius is roughly 145, and a genius is roughly 5 SD above the mean in emience, this implies a correlation between the two traits of roughly 0.6. This leaves roughly ~40% (0.6^2+0.25 = .61) of variation in eminence as unexplained, meaning that it must be accounted for by heritable factors independent of intelligence.
One problem with these estimations is that they are highly sensitive to changes in assumptions. For example, using the upper bound of the IQ of a genius (155) implies a correlation between genius and IQ of .73 (assuming genius = +5 SD in eminence), while using the lower bound (135) implies a correlation of 0.47. Likewise, an environmentality of 20% would imply a regression coefficient of 0.45, while an environmentality of 30% would imply a regression coefficient 0.55. Besides that, there is no guarantee that the environmentality of eminence and the residual of this trait independent of the triple event are even similar - they could differ substantially.
Because of this, I must estimate the expected Jewish representation in geniuses using a range of assumptions: the correlation between IQ and eminence is assumed to be anywhere between 0.4 and 0.8, and the correlation between the error variance of eminence and real eminence is assumed to be anywhere between 0.4 and 0.7.
Every possible combination was iterated through regardless of the plausibility, while assuming the influence of both conscientiousness and mental instability were the same. Then, under each assumption, the percent of the simulated population that scored 4 SD above the mean in eminence that was Jewish was calculated (note: the average eminence of people who score above this threshold is roughly 4.5). Unexpectedly, the expected percentage of geniuses who are Jewish varied quite a depending on changes made in assumptions - about 9 to 16%. Even if unrealistic assumptions are made - the model’s estimate is still outside the expected range of 17-36%.
II.
You may be wondering why I’m confident that Jewish psychology cannot explain 100% of the variance in Jewish achievement at an individual level if I admitted myself that the modeling I conducted is very sensitive to the assumptions that are made, and have mostly disowned it.
First, let me take off the kid gloves: the reasons why Jews are smarter than White gentiles is because of evolution. This is because of three evolutionary pressures: one where illiterate Jews are selected out of the religion, another where poor Jews converted to Islam to avoid the Jizya, and a hypothesized (but not proven) one that occured due to economic specialization.
The first pressure (selection against illiteracy) selects for cognitive ability, crystalized ability in particular, which is consistent with Jews scoring higher on mathematical/verbal abilities than what would be expect from intelligence alone. The second pressure (avoiding Jizya) selects for both cognitive ability and personality as the selection is done on income. The third is that the fact that Jews were more likely to be in certain economic professions (e.g. banking), which accelerated selection for genes that cause social status. This means that it is most likely that Jews were selected for cognitive ability more than personality, as the selection pressures are disproportionately acting on cognitive ability.
In terms of observed psychological traits, Jews score 0.45 SD above White gentiles in cognitive ability, 0.35 SD higher in general factor of personality (GFP), and about 0.47 SD above White gentiles in mental instability (though the accuracy of this estimate is questionable). Strangely, this advantage in GFP doesn’t extend to conscientiousness. I’m not sure why this is the case; perhaps this is due to genetic drift, confounding with Southern European/Levantine ancestry, or an unknown selection pressure.
The measurements of personality/mental instability are potentially biased, as self-reports were used as measurements of personality and “admitting to seeing a therapist” was used as a proxy for mental illness. Nevertheless, both the theoretical and empirical evidence converges to the Jewish advantages in cognitive ability being either larger or of the same magnitude as the Jewish advantage in noncognitive ability.
Another concern is that I am not considering ancestry - Jews vary in how much Ashkenazi ancestry they have, so the cognitive/noncognitive advantages that the pure Ashkenazi have may be responsible for their disproportionate eminence.
This theory falls fairly flat on its face, surprisingly hard. I collected the Jewish standard deviations in intelligence when I was collecting the effect sizes, and I found the difference did not reach statistical significance, and was not in the predicted direction.
Standard deviations don’t take into consideration the distribution, and there might be far right tail of Jews - the problem is that there is no observable Jewish right tail in the Project Talent.
The Jewish distribution does have greater kurtosis (number of outliers) than the White one, but it also has a lower standard deviation.
I also plotted the Jewish advantage in ability at each percentile, and found that the Jewish advantage in IQ decreased as ability increased within the sample, which is evidence in favor of a smaller, not larger, Jewish cognitive elite relative to White Americans.
I tried the same analysis with general factor of personality, and was able to replicate this paper that found that Jews had higher levels of general factor of personality than Whites (d = 0.35), and but no evidence of a Jewish noncognitive elite either.
The empirical evidence suggests there is no Jewish cognitive or noncognitive elite, even if it should exist in theory. This leads me to believe that either:
Jewish advantages in intelligence are not due to genes (press x to doubt)
Jews have lower levels assortative mating for intelligence and/or personality
Jewish advantages in IQ/personality are due to Ashkenazi ancestry, but their White admixture is relatively high in cognitive ability.
Whites also have substantial variance in ancestry that is causal for intelligence and personality.
Even though I thought it was a stupid idea, I tested whether assortative mating for education differed by race, and Jews have the lowest levels of assortative mating for years of education of all ethnic groups. Honestly, I laughed hysterically when I saw my R code. I couldn’t believe it.
I computed the formal correlation test, and the difference between Whites and Jews was statistically significant by any reasonable measure.
Because years of education is not perfect measurement of “true educational attainment”, I tried computing the latent correlation in assortative mating to see if this was a source of bias between races, and it barely changed the differences.
I even checked if I messed up the race coding by testing for race differences in WORDSUM scores, and it turns that I coded the race variable correctly.
Now, onto the other theories about why Jewish variance in IQ is not higher than the White one. The White admixture within Jews is probably selected for intelligence because people assortatively mate for IQ, and because assortative mating extends to races as well. So, Whites who date Blacks and Hispanics tend to have lower IQs, while the opposite is true for Blacks and Hispanics. It’s unlikely, based on priors, that this dynamic doesn’t apply to Jews/Whites.
Besides assortative mating between races it is possible that Whites compete with Jews in terms of cognitive elite due to variance in genetic admixture within Whites. White Americans come from a wide range of nations - Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and whatnot. All of these countries have different levels of intelligence, and some of that variance is bound to be due to heredity.
![IQ map of Europe [1167x1222] : r/MapPorn](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42e7027f-7705-4768-a9de-da86cf6f161f_1167x1222.png "IQ map of Europe [1167x1222] : r/MapPorn")
The variance within the main ethnic groups Americans come from doesn’t vary much in intelligence (from 100.4 in Dutch to 96.1 in Poles), so this probably is not a large contributing factor. Instead, I think that it is due to assortment within informal ethnic groups (e.g. borderers, WASPs) within the United States is more to blame. Based on estimates from the ABCD dataset, Mormons, Protestants, Unitarian, and non-religious people have IQs that are competitive with the Jewish average. If Whites breed within these communities to a similar degree that Jews do, then there should be outliers that come out of these communities that compensate for the low White average.
So, to summarize, even if Ashkenazi ancestry causes the Jewish IQ to vary beyond what you would expect for a normal religious group, there are multiple factors that are likely to pull it down towards the White average. The first is that they have lower levels of assortative mating for educational attainment, and IQ/education correlate at about 0.6-0.65 (don’t trust the effect size from the meta-analysis, it’s biased downwards by measurement error), so Jews also are likely to have lower assortative mating for intelligence, as lower levels of assortative mating will cause lower levels of variation in a given trait (see here for an explanation).
The second possibility is that assortative mating between races will cause the gentile ancestry within Jews to be selected for cognitive ability. This is almost certainly true, though the magnitude of this effect is uncertain. The third possibility is that American Whites also have substantial variance in ancestry that covaries with cognitive ability which is competitive with the variance in Ashkenazi admixture. It’s unlikely that the former is as powerful as the latter, but it’s at least worth considering.
III.
So, for those who doubted the first attempt to estimate the percentage of geniuses that should be Jews because of the assumptions/complexity involved (including myself) I’m doing a second one, where I steelman (steelmann?) the case for innate Jewish psychological genius as honestly as possible.
In this 2nd simulation, I will assume that:
Jews are 0.45 SD more cognitively able than White gentiles. This is an extremely precise estimate, and I see no reason to change it.
Jews have a 0.4 SD advantage in noncognitive ability (personality) over White gentiles. There is almost no way that the Jewish advantage in noncognitive ability is larger than the cognitive one, because a historical account of the Jewish population clearly suggests that it was selected the most for cognitive ability.
Cognitive, noncognitive factors, and all other factors combined ((meaning the model is cognitive + noncognitive + residual variance) all contribute equally to eminence. This is probably close to the truth - note this means that IQ and eminence are hypothesized to correlate at 0.57 in this simulation. The math involved is complex, but arguing that one set of abilities is the primary determinant of eminence makes the case for Jewish psychological genius weaker because eminence will rely less on the raw sum of the two abilities, which will be higher in Jews relative to their advantage in the individual abilities.
People are labelled as “geniuses” when latent eminence reaches 4 SD above the mean, which corresponds to a 1 in 31,574.
Racial minorities will join our simulation for the purpose of maximum accuracy. Black people will be assumed to have a cognitive disadvantage of 1.2 SD, and “others” will have a cognitive disadvantage of 0.5 SD.
No differences in variance in cognitive/noncognitive abilities between races will be assumed. A tenuous assumption, but seems to be supported to a limited extent, based on behind the scenes statistical data.
The world is assumed to be 81.5% White, 3.5% Jewish, 11% Black, and 4% “other”. Odd numbers, but I wanted to make them close to historical 20th Century America.
According to the results of the 2nd simulation, Jews should be expected to be about 20% of all American geniuses (n = 3810 in the simulation). This is within the range of the likely percentage of geniuses that are Jewish (17-36%).
No Rpub. Sorry. This code takes way too long to run.
#(Warning: requires 30-50GB of RAM and an extremely powerful computer)
#START OF THE FIRST SIMULATION
#simulating the numbers for jews and gentiles
jiq <- rnorm(3000000, mean = 0.453, sd = 1)
jc <- rnorm(3000000, mean = 0, sd = 1)
jment <- rnorm(3000000, mean = 0.47, sd = 1)
giq <- rnorm(3000000*49, mean = 0, sd = 1)
gc <- rnorm(3000000*49, mean = 0, sd = 1)
gment <- rnorm(3000000*49, mean = 0, sd = 1)
#combining them into one dataframe
xiye <- c(jiq, giq)
xiy2 <- data.frame(g = xiye, jew = c(rep(1, 3000000), rep(0, 3000000*49)))
xiy2$c = c(jc, gc)
xiy2$ment = c(jment, gment)
xiy2$g <- normalise(xiy2$g)
xiy2$c <- normalise(xiy2$c)
xiy2$ment <- normalise(xiy2$ment)
xiy2$er <- rnorm(150000000, 0, 1)
#testing some things quickly
testset <- xiy2[1:20000, ]
posiq <- seq(from = 0.6, to = 2, by = 0.1)
posem <- seq(from = 0.6, to = 1.5, by = 0.1)
kaka <- data.frame(iqreg = rep(0, length(posiq)*length(posem)), erreg = rep(0, length(posiq)*length(posem)))
count <- 0
kaka$coriq <- 0
kaka$corer <- 0
for(i in 1:length(posiq)) {
for(j in 1:length(posem)) {
count = count + 1
testset$Eminence = testset$er*posem[j] + testset$g*posiq[i] + testset$c + testset$ment
kaka$coriq[count] <- cor.test(testset$Eminence, testset$g)$estimate
kaka$corer[count] <- cor.test(testset$Eminence, testset$er)$estimate
}
}
plot(kaka$coriq, kaka$corer)
min(kaka$coriq)
max(kaka$coriq)
min(kaka$corer)
max(kaka$corer)
#ONTO THE REAL WORK
posiq <- seq(from = 0.6, to = 2, by = 0.1)
posem <- seq(from = 0.6, to = 1.5, by = 0.1)
kaka <- data.frame(iqreg = rep(0, length(posiq)*length(posem)), erreg = rep(0, length(posiq)*length(posem)))
count <- 0
kaka$pjew <- 0
#LOOPING THROUGH THE VARIOUS POSSIBILITIES
for(i in 1:length(posiq)) {
for(j in 1:length(posem)) {
count = count + 1
xiy2$Eminence = xiy2$er*posem[j] + xiy2$g*posiq[i] + xiy2$c + xiy2$ment
xiy2$Eminence <- normalise(xiy2$Eminence)
genius <- xiy2 %>% filter(Eminence > 4)
kaka$pjew[count] <- mean(genius$jew)
kaka$iqreg[count] <- cor.test(xiy2$Eminence, xiy2$g)$estimate
kaka$erreg[count] <- cor.test(xiy2$Eminence, xiy2$er)$estimate
kaka$njew[count] <- nrow(genius)*mean(genius$jew)
kaka$ntot[count] <- nrow(genius)
}
}
#Plotting the estimates, roughly n = 900 Jews in every cell
plot(kaka$iqreg, kaka$pjew, xlab = 'Correlation between IQ and Eminence', ylab = 'Expected Proportion of Geniuses that are Jewish', cex.lab = 1.5)
plot(kaka$erreg, kaka$pjew)
kaka
#END OF THE FIRST SIMULATION THAT WAS TOTAL GARBAGE
########################
#START OF THE 2ND SIMULATION
#starting up the numbers
jiq <- rnorm(4000000, mean = 0.45, sd = 1)
jc <- rnorm(4000000, mean = 0.4, sd = 1)
giq <- rnorm(4000000*28, mean = 0, sd = 1)
gc <- rnorm(4000000*28, mean = 0, sd = 1)
biq <- rnorm(4000000*3, mean = -1.2, sd = 1)
bc <- rnorm(4000000*3, mean = 0, sd = 1)
oiq <- rnorm(5000000, mean = -0.5, sd = 1)
oc <- rnorm(5000000, mean = 0, sd = 1)
#combining them into one dataframe
xiye <- c(jiq, giq, biq, oiq)
xiy2 <- data.frame(g = xiye, jew = c(rep(1, 4000000), rep(0, 4000000*28 + 4000000*3 + 5000000)))
xiy2$c = c(jc, gc, bc, oc)
xiy2$g <- normalise(xiy2$g)
xiy2$c <- normalise(xiy2$c)
xiy2$er <- rnorm(nrow(xiy2), 0, 1)
#making the eminence variable
xiy2$Eminence = xiy2$g + xiy2$c + xiy2$er
xiy2$Eminence = normalise(xiy2$Eminence)
#calculating the average number of jews
genius <- xiy2 %>% filter(Eminence > 4)
mean(genius$jew)
#if you make the cutoff 4.5 SD it's 23% Jewish at n = 300 or so
genius <- xiy2 %>% filter(Eminence > 4.5)
mean(genius$jew)
mean(genius$Eminence)