Bell Curve Tolls Book Review

In Robert Sternberg’s, “For Whom The Bell Curve Tolls: A Review of The Bell Curve” he starts by noting that this books has attracted more attention than any other psychological-scientific work. The goal of the review is to look at this book as a psychological work then as a popular work in general. He goes on to state that through his review he found a multitude of problems ranging from the nature of intelligence to understanding IQ itself. The authors of the book begin to analyze intelligence itself and in doing so realize there is a general factor of cognitive ability where humans differ. This general idea comprises two factors which can be seen as statistical or psychological. When pertaining to statistical it is noted that certain factors …show more content…
It details that how people perceive competence shape how society is designed and this in turn effects how we correlate scores and job performance. Job performance is usually gauged by Tacit knowledge which ascertains their problem solving capabilities. In the long run though this method does just as well as an IQ test in predicting performance so in other words this was a factually incorrect gauge. They went on to view intelligence as a modifiable agent where test scores would represent a starting line rather than an ending. This however was also seen as incorrect due to disappointing results. There was an argument for heritability playing a role in cognitive abilities but this was seen as a false assumption due to there being no conclusive data that supported the notion that intelligence was another trait that could be passed down. The authors of the book came to the conclusion that IQ was still poorly understood and it had no real relation to the data collected. As for the review of the book it could be seen as a scapegoat to those with lower IQs. It is warned to be careful when doing so this can be inheritably unfair to make assumptions under inconclusive