This is common knowledge to people who are into computer games. I don't play games but know a lot of people who do. And if you just look at the demographics of esports, you can clearly see that this is basically an East Asian and European men category. Blacks rarely appear.
You mentioned several tests of 9 year old children. Did those studies break down the results by sex? 9 year old is pre-puberty. I'm going to guess that reaction time for women is a lot higher than men post puberty. Curious what the data says.
Backward digit span is heavily g-loaded. That I think is the best proxy for IQ that is racism-proof I believe.
The NHANES data is public, so you can examine the age x sex patterns if you like. I didn't look closer, since I just wanted to remove age and sex variation to see race variation more clearly.
I've been thinking for years about how to check whether race differences in reaction times extend to sports performance.
It seems like a mixed bag.
Baseball:
Baseball hitters and infielders need quick reflexes.
I don't see much evidence that blacks are slower to react than whites. There aren't as many African-Americans in baseball as there used to be, but that seems mostly due to cultural changes: African-Americans got less interested in baseball as they got more interested in basketball and football. There are, however, a lot of Caribbean big league ballplayers, especially from the Dominican Republic. A large fraction of them are quite black.
Latin American players used to get fewer walks than whites or African-Americans, but that seemed cultural and has faded as baseball scouts put more emphasis on not getting on base on walks and Latin players have gotten more muscular due to better nutrition and PEDs. For example, Juan Soto, a blackish Dominican, usually leads baseball in getting walks.
The one white-black difference in baseball that might suggest that whites have better reflexes is playing third base, which is called "the hot corner" due to the number of balls smashed down the right field line by righthanded pull hitters. Strong armed white sluggers tend to wind up at third and strong armed black sluggers in right field, where footspeed is more important.
Soccer
Goalie tends to be a white position.
Ice hockey
The NHL is quite white. I can recall a part black goalie on Wayne Gretzky's great 1980s teams, Grant Fehr.
In The Sports Gene, there is some discussion of this. As I recall, sports performance is not that well predicted by reaction times, e.g. baseball. What matters is actually visual acuity. The ball is moving too fast to react to it, so players have to infer likely future ball position based on the movement of the player (the thrower in case of baseball). Aggregate performance by sport and race is quite context sensitive. I don't think Europeans are particularly bad at Go in theory, just that they don't play it much, so rank poorly. Between country data is quite suspect but aggregating over many sports one can see more clearly.
Perhaps the Spanish-administered tests were administered by different personnel with a slightly different procedure, or in different locations with different equipment, which somehow shifted the RTs? Or maybe the Mexican-American subjects who had Spanish administration were somehow negatively selected relative to those with English administration?
Right. Were the Mexican-Americans who were selected for Spanish instruction negatively selected because their language learning ability was lower than the Mexican-Americans selected for English instruction?
As far as I know average reaction time or test performance can be systematically changed within a short period by improving sleep, nutrition, test familiarity, or stress levels,... So, how can you justify assuming that baseline millisecond differences between broad social groups are hardwired in their DNA rather than just reflections of their environmental and developmental history?
I didn't say that, but in any case, most people don't practice on these obscure tests, so there won't be much difference that can be explained between races by such factors.
Why do people not analyze the logs of the reaction times? The distributions certainly call for it, and relations with other variables seem more likely to be multiplicative than additive.
Why would you? Surely, they are non-normal, skewed to the slower end, but that's part of the signal. Do you think results would materially change using log transformations? In general, if you want to get more fancy, you can fit drift diffusion models. However, they require more assumptions and more data, so aren't that great here with only 50 trials and no possibility of error (simple reaction time, not choice reaction time). NHANES is public, so you can download the data and try any log transformations you wish.
Why wouldn't you? I would expect logging to be almost a patellar-tendon-level reflex to reaction times. And who knows -- the Cohen ds might show a more easily interpreted pattern.
I've published several studies on Brazil, including the race differences. In general, controlling for social metrics will not entirely remove race gaps in intelligence because social metrics are downstream of intelligence (caused by), but not perfectly. Thus, no such control can remove intelligence gaps.
This is common knowledge to people who are into computer games. I don't play games but know a lot of people who do. And if you just look at the demographics of esports, you can clearly see that this is basically an East Asian and European men category. Blacks rarely appear.
You mentioned several tests of 9 year old children. Did those studies break down the results by sex? 9 year old is pre-puberty. I'm going to guess that reaction time for women is a lot higher than men post puberty. Curious what the data says.
Backward digit span is heavily g-loaded. That I think is the best proxy for IQ that is racism-proof I believe.
The NHANES data is public, so you can examine the age x sex patterns if you like. I didn't look closer, since I just wanted to remove age and sex variation to see race variation more clearly.
I've been thinking for years about how to check whether race differences in reaction times extend to sports performance.
It seems like a mixed bag.
Baseball:
Baseball hitters and infielders need quick reflexes.
I don't see much evidence that blacks are slower to react than whites. There aren't as many African-Americans in baseball as there used to be, but that seems mostly due to cultural changes: African-Americans got less interested in baseball as they got more interested in basketball and football. There are, however, a lot of Caribbean big league ballplayers, especially from the Dominican Republic. A large fraction of them are quite black.
Latin American players used to get fewer walks than whites or African-Americans, but that seemed cultural and has faded as baseball scouts put more emphasis on not getting on base on walks and Latin players have gotten more muscular due to better nutrition and PEDs. For example, Juan Soto, a blackish Dominican, usually leads baseball in getting walks.
The one white-black difference in baseball that might suggest that whites have better reflexes is playing third base, which is called "the hot corner" due to the number of balls smashed down the right field line by righthanded pull hitters. Strong armed white sluggers tend to wind up at third and strong armed black sluggers in right field, where footspeed is more important.
Soccer
Goalie tends to be a white position.
Ice hockey
The NHL is quite white. I can recall a part black goalie on Wayne Gretzky's great 1980s teams, Grant Fehr.
In The Sports Gene, there is some discussion of this. As I recall, sports performance is not that well predicted by reaction times, e.g. baseball. What matters is actually visual acuity. The ball is moving too fast to react to it, so players have to infer likely future ball position based on the movement of the player (the thrower in case of baseball). Aggregate performance by sport and race is quite context sensitive. I don't think Europeans are particularly bad at Go in theory, just that they don't play it much, so rank poorly. Between country data is quite suspect but aggregating over many sports one can see more clearly.
What about quarter backs in American football?
Perhaps the Spanish-administered tests were administered by different personnel with a slightly different procedure, or in different locations with different equipment, which somehow shifted the RTs? Or maybe the Mexican-American subjects who had Spanish administration were somehow negatively selected relative to those with English administration?
Right. Were the Mexican-Americans who were selected for Spanish instruction negatively selected because their language learning ability was lower than the Mexican-Americans selected for English instruction?
As far as I know average reaction time or test performance can be systematically changed within a short period by improving sleep, nutrition, test familiarity, or stress levels,... So, how can you justify assuming that baseline millisecond differences between broad social groups are hardwired in their DNA rather than just reflections of their environmental and developmental history?
I didn't say that, but in any case, most people don't practice on these obscure tests, so there won't be much difference that can be explained between races by such factors.
Why do people not analyze the logs of the reaction times? The distributions certainly call for it, and relations with other variables seem more likely to be multiplicative than additive.
Why would you? Surely, they are non-normal, skewed to the slower end, but that's part of the signal. Do you think results would materially change using log transformations? In general, if you want to get more fancy, you can fit drift diffusion models. However, they require more assumptions and more data, so aren't that great here with only 50 trials and no possibility of error (simple reaction time, not choice reaction time). NHANES is public, so you can download the data and try any log transformations you wish.
Why wouldn't you? I would expect logging to be almost a patellar-tendon-level reflex to reaction times. And who knows -- the Cohen ds might show a more easily interpreted pattern.
An in-depth look at this type of testing.
I knew about these tests, but not to this extent. Thanks.
I've published several studies on Brazil, including the race differences. In general, controlling for social metrics will not entirely remove race gaps in intelligence because social metrics are downstream of intelligence (caused by), but not perfectly. Thus, no such control can remove intelligence gaps.
I don't have any research funding to do original data collection.