{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020749665327978582, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.98, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Chapter XII: Mind as a Cultural Achievement: Implications for IQ Testing

For almost as long as there have been IQ tests, there have been psychologists who believe that it is possible to construct "culture free" tests. The desire for such tests springs directly out of the purposes for which tests of general intellectual ability were constructed in the first place: to provide a valid, objective, and socially unbiased measure of individual ability. Our society, founded upon the principle that all men are created equal, has never lived easily with the recognition of enormous de facto social inequality. We need a rationale for such inequality and our traditions strongly bias us to seek the causes of inequality, in properties of the individual, not society. At the same time, we realize that social and economic inequality can be the causes of individual intellectual inequalities, as well as their consequences. What would be more ideal, then, than a psychological test that could measure intellectual potential that is based equally on the experience of people from all cultures. Can't we find universals in human experience and construct a test on this basis? Some psychologists have claimed not only that such tests are possible in principle, but have been applied in practice. In this chapter I will argue that culture-free intelligence is a contradiction in terms. After working through a "thought experiment" to help clarify the issues, I will turn to some implications for teaching