Communicating intelligence research: Media misrepresentation, the Gould Effect, and unexpected forces

Intelligence research has a long history of controversy. Unlike most academics, scientists in this field often find themselves in the court of public opinion merely for carrying out their work, largely or entirely because their findings have a tendency to collide with certain deeply held moral and political beliefs. The controversiatization of the field of intelligence research started in the 1960s, targeting Jensen's (1969) work on population (specifically racial) differences in 1Q and the implications of potentially recalcitrant group differences in general intelligence, in particular, for educational programs aimed at eliminating these differences. More generally, controversialization may have had negative effects on efforts to discuss less controversial issues as they pertain to IQ in the wider media as well (e.g. trade books). To explore this possibility further, we used Google Ngram Viewer (Michel et ah, 2011) to estimate the frequencies of sentences containing either "intelligence" or "IQ" and either "racism" or "racist" and those containing either "intelligence" or "IQ" and either "heritability" or "heritable".