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Linda Gottfredson
Linda Gottfredson interviewed in 2016
Born	Linda Susanne Howarth (1947-06-24) June 24, 1947 (age 77) San Francisco
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University
Known for	Mainstream Science on Intelligence
Scientific career
Fields	Educational psychology
Institutions	University of Delaware, editorial boards of Intelligence, Learning and Individual Differences, and Society
Thesis	The relation of situs of work to occupational achievement (1977)

Linda Susanne Gottfredson (née Howarth; born June 24, 1947) is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S. public and private policies regarding affirmative action, hiring quotas, and "race-norming" on aptitude tests.

She is on the boards of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID), the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and the editorial boards of the scientific journals Intelligence, Learning and Individual Differences, and Society. Gottfredson has received research grants worth $267,000 from the Pioneer Fund, an organization which has been described as racist and white supremacist.

Life and work

Gottfredson was born in San Francisco on June 24, 1947. She is a third generation university faculty member. Her father, Jack A. Howarth (died 2006), was a faculty at U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, as was his father. Gottfredson initially majored in biology, but later transferred to psychology with her first husband, Gary Don Gottfredson. They received bachelor's degrees in psychology in 1969 from University of California, Berkeley. She worked in the Peace Corps in Malaysia. Gottfredson and her husband went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1977.

Gottfredson took a position at Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of Schools and investigated issues of occupational segregation and typology based on skill sets and intellectual capacity. She married Robert A. Gordon, who worked in a related area at Hopkins, and they divorced by the mid-90s.

In 1985, Gottfredson participated in a conference called "The g Factor in Employment Testing". The papers presented were published in the December 1986 issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, which she edited. In 1986, Gottfredson was appointed Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark.

In 1989, The Washington Post reported that one of Gottfredson's presentations was cited favorably by an article in the National Association for the Advancement of White People's magazine.

That year, she presented a series of papers on general intelligence factor and employment. Gottfredson has said:

We now have out there what I call the egalitarian fiction that all groups are equal in intelligence. We have social policy based on that fiction. For example, the 1991 Civil Rights Act codified Griggs vs. Duke Power, which said that if you have disproportionate hiring by race, you are prima facie -- that's prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. ...Differences in intelligence have real world effects, whether we think they're there or not, whether we want to wish them away or not. And we don't do anybody any good, certainly not the low-IQ people, by denying that those problems exist.

While an assistant professor of Educational Studies in the late 1980s, Gottfredson applied for and received three grants from the Pioneer Fund, which supported Gottfredson's research into the implications of differences in ability for employment policy. She was promoted to full professor at the University of Delaware in 1990. That year, her fourth grant application to the Pioneer Fund was rejected by the board of the University, which said the funding would undermine the university's affirmative action. Gottfredson challenged the ruling with assistance from the Center for Individual Rights. In 1992, after two and a half years of debate and protest, the University administration reached a settlement that once again allowed Gottfredson and Jan Blits to continue receiving research funding from the Pioneer Fund. The arbitrator of the case held that the University's research committee had violated its own standards of review by looking at the content of Gottfredson's research and that Gottfredson had a right to academic freedom that public perceptions alone did not suffice to overcome.

In 1994, in response to the controversy over the publication of the book The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, she wrote the editorial "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," which had 52 signatories (including Gottfredson herself) and was published in the Wall Street Journal. The purpose of the editorial was to showcase the academic consensus of intelligence research, in the wake of what Gottfredson and the authors viewed as inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media. Of the 131 invitations sent to researchers, 100 responses were obtained by the deadline, and of those 100 responses, 48 declined to sign -- 7 because they thought the statement did not represent the mainstream, 11 because they did not know whether it did, and 30 for other reasons.

Gottfredson has been very critical of psychologist Robert Sternberg's work on the triarchic theory of intelligence, arguing that Sternberg has not demonstrated a distinction between practical intelligence and the analytical intelligence measured by IQ tests.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole."

Honors

• George A Miller Award (for outstanding journal article across specialty areas), Society for General Psychology, American Psychological Association, 2008
• Fellow, Association for Psychological Science, elected 1998
• Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars, elected 1995
• Fellow, American Psychological Association, elected 1994
• Fellow, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, elected 1994

Selected articles and papers

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (March–April 1994). "Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud" (PDF). Society. 31 (3): 53–59. doi:10.1007/bf02693231. Retrieved 2 November 2014. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). "Mainstream Science on Intelligence (editorial)" (PDF). Intelligence. 24: 13–23. doi:10.1016/s0160-2896(97)90011-8. ISSN 0160-2896. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). "Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life" (PDF). Intelligence. 24 (1): 79–132. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.535.4596. doi:10.1016/S0160-2896(97)90014-3. ISSN 0160-2896. Retrieved 7 July 2014. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (1998). "The general intelligence factor" (PDF). Scientific American Presents. 9 (4): 24–29. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Circumscription and compromise (2006), Encyclopedia of Career Development. (Based on her much cited work on the subject.)
• Intelligence: Is It the Epidemiologists' Elusive "Fundamental Cause" of Social Class Inequalities in Health? (2004), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (11 March 2005). "Chapter 9: Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help" (PDF). In Wright, Rogers H.; Cummings, Nicholas A. (eds.). Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well Intentioned Path to Harm. Taylor & Francis. pp. 155–186. ISBN 978-0-203-95622-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |lay-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-summary= ignored (help)

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (2006). "Chapter 20: Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Conseqüências sociais das diferenças de grupo na capacidade cognitiva)" (PDF). In Flores-Mendoza, Carmen E.; Colom, Roberto (eds.). Introdução à Psicologia das Diferenças Individuais. Porto Alegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers. pp. 155–186. ISBN 978-85-363-1418-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Flynn, Ceci, and Turkheimer on Race and Intelligence: Opening Moves (2007) Cato Unbound
• What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis Is True? (2003)

• Gottfredson, Linda S. (2009). "Chapter 1: Logical Fallacies Used to Dismiss the Evidence on Intelligence Testing". In Phelps, Richard P. (ed.). Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington (DC): American Psychological Association. ISBN 978-1-4338-0392-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |lay-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-summary= ignored (help)

References

1. Kilborn, Peter T. (19 May 1991). "The Nation; 'Race Norming' Tests Becomes a Fiery Issue". The New York Times.
2. Avner Falk. Anti-semitism: a history and psychoanalysis of contemporary hatred. Abc-Clio, 2008, pg. 18
3. Kaufman, Ron (July 6, 1992). "U. Delaware Reaches Accord On Race Studies". The Scientist. 6 (14): 1.
4. Miller, Adam (1994). "The Pioneer Fund: Bankrolling the Professors of Hate". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (6): 58–61. doi:10.2307/2962466. JSTOR 2962466.
5. ^ "Linda Gottfredson". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 24 May 2017.
6. "Jack Howrath". senate.universityofcalifornia.edu. Retrieved 2018-09-23.
7. Wainer, Howard; Robinson, Daniel H. (September 2009). "Linda S. Gottfredson". Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. 34 (3): 395–427. doi:10.3102/1076998609339366. ISSN 1076-9986.
8. Hunt, Morton M. (1999). The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature. Transaction Publishers. pp. 96–99. ISBN 9781412838016. Retrieved 23 December 2018.
9. Rowette, Christine (24 November 1994). "Robert Gordon Draws Student Protest at Homewood". The Gazette (Johns Hopkins University). Retrieved 23 December 2018.
10. ANDERSON, JACK; ATTA, DALE VAN (1989-11-16). "PIONEER FUND'S CONTROVERSIAL PROJECTS". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2017-12-24.
11. "Race, IQ, Success and Charles Murray"
12. Kors, Alan Charles, and Harvey Silverglate. The shadow university: The betrayal of liberty on America's campuses. Simon and Schuster, 1999, pp. 136-146.
13. ^ O'Neil, Robert (2009). Academic Freedom in the Wired World: Political Extremism, Corporate Power, and the University. Harvard University Press. pp. 119–124. ISBN 9780674033726. Retrieved 23 December 2018.
14. Hamilton, David P. (1990). "University Bars Pioneer Grants". Science. 259 (no. 4973): 1103. JSTOR 2878028. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
15. Kaufman, Ron (6 July 1992). "U. Delaware Reaches Accord On Race Studies". The Scientist.
16. Anderson, Craig B. "Political correctness on college campuses: Freedom of speech v. doing the politically correct thing." SMU Law Review 46(1) (1993): 171-224.
17. Gottfredson, Linda S. (December 13, 1994). Mainstream Science on Intelligence. Wall Street Journal, p A18.
18. Gottfredson, Linda S. "Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography." Intelligence 24(1) (1997): 13-23.
19. Goode, Erica (April 3, 2001). "SCIENTIST AT WORK: ROBERT STERNBERG; His Goal: Making Intelligence Tests Smarter". The New York Times. Retrieved December 21, 2018.
20. "University Press Release on Award"
21. "List of Fellows from APS-website"
22. "List of scholars"
23. Gottfredson, L. S. (1981). "Circumscription and Compromise: A Developmental Theory of Occupational Aspirations" (PDF). Journal of Counseling Psychology. 28 (6): 545–579. doi:10.1037/0022-0167.28.6.545.

External links

• Egalitarian Fiction
• Linda S. Gottfredson homepage (with online prints of publications)
• Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography - published in Intelligence in 1997
• "Linda Gottfredson". Hatewatch. Southern Poverty Law Center.

• 1947 births
• Living people
• American women psychologists
• Educational psychologists
• Educators from California
• Intelligence researchers
• Johns Hopkins University alumni
• Race and intelligence controversy
• Scientific racism
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• University of Delaware faculty
• Writers from San Francisco