House of Wagner

Progress! Not too long ago, 7-in-10 Americans wanted less overall immigration.

Jackson and Winston (“JW;” 2021) recently argued that no real taboos exist regarding the study of potential genetic links between race and IQ test scores. Instead, the authors essentially claimed that researchers in this area have protested too much. JW offered several arguments that presumably supported their claims, which we rebut here first. Empirically, however, we wondered just how “relatively taboo” this topic might be among Americans in general. Via Prolific.com, we surveyed 507 representative Americans on this issue. Our survey comprised 33 “taboo topics” (e.g., whether pedophilia is harmful), wherein each participant subjectively rated “tabooness” on five-point Likert scales. We found that the potential genetic basis of race / IQ gaps was the tabooest item in our survey. In fact, this topic was rated “more taboo” than were items regarding incest and even pedophilia. Further, the rank-ordering of “tabooness” was highly stable across the various demographic groups we looked at in our survey. At least among…

How Heritable Are Political Views? It had been a while since I'd looked at the twin literature on this and I had forgotten what I knew about it, but I was under the impression that political views had a heritability of roughly 60%, with nearly zero shared environment component,…