Meta-Analysis of American Race Differences in Intelligence
Blacks didn't catch up.
So our new meta-analysis of the American race gaps in IQ is published!
Kirkegaard, E. & Jensen, S. (2025). Meta-Analysis of American Race Differences in Intelligence. Mankind Quarterly, 66(2), 290-300. https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2025.66.2.5
We present a meta-analysis of 139 U.S. studies (1918–2017; N = 400,000) examining racial differences in intelligence averages and distributions. Studies were included if they used representative U.S. samples, IQ tests with at least 3 subtests, reported White reference groups, and provided sufficient statistics to compute Cohen’s d. Studies were excluded if samples were unrepresentative (e.g., elites, college-only, selective cities), duplicated, lacked general ability differences, lacked within-group SDs, lacked a White comparison group, or relied on scholastic achievement tests. Random- and mixed-effects meta-analytic models were used to estimate racial means. With the White mean set to 100, averages were 82 (Black), 89 (Hispanic/American Indian), 105 (Asian), and 109 (Jewish). Evidence indicates small study effects inflated Black mean IQs. Variances and distributions were similar across races, and there is strong evidence against convergence in intelligence between Blacks and Whites in cohorts born after 1960.
It’s been a long time since Roth et al 2001, the last comprehensive meta-analysis. After that there was only the Dickens and Flynn 2006 vs. Murray 2006 exchange. The issue with DF was that they extrapolated changes, and these extrapolations turned out to be very wrong. There are a newer of more recent studies all of which showed normal gap sizes for Black-White. However, the only way to show that was to do a new comprehensive meta-analysis. Finding someone willing to dig through 1000s of papers to build the database is difficult, but Jensen was up for the task. And so now we can present the newest meta-analysis of American race gaps in IQ. Main table:
Our results are about the same as the earlier studies, which is not surprising because we just added a few studies to an already existing large literature dating back over 100 years. The more interesting point was the funnel plot: