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| - Is the average IQ in Haiti 67? No, that's not true: A Harvard expert contacted by Lead Stories said, "I cannot take this claim seriously." The estimate from a decades-old book overlooks important factors like cultural differences, poverty and education, which can affect test results and don't accurately reflect a country's intelligence.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly Twitter, on September 9, 2024, under the on-screen title "WHAT IS THE AVERAGE IQ IN HAITI?" It said:
Haiti has an average IQ of 67.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Sep 12 17:32:24 2024 UTC)
The post provided nothing to support its statement that Haiti's average IQ is 67.
Lead Stories found the number in a controversial 2002 book by the late psychologist Richard Lynn and the late political scientist Tatu Vanhanen called "IQ and the Wealth of Nations." The IQ figure appears on page 23 in Table 2.1.
Expert
Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, said in a September 12, 2024, email to Lead Stories, "I cannot take this claim seriously" when asked about the social media post and Haiti's 67 IQ average. He continued:
First of all, while IQ tests are useful for some purposes (predicting who may have trouble in a certain kind of school), they are not predictive of life chances or successes, particularly for those outside of a conventional Western schooling system. And indeed, in an AI era, they may not be predictive at all.
Second, and I have been a leader here, views of intelligence have expanded greatly since the original IQ tests were developed in France over a century ago. My own work is on 'multiple intelligences' but there are many other scholars who challenge the standard IQ view.
Third, all tests are culturally sensitive.
For an IQ test to be "culturally sensitive," it must be designed to be fair to everyone, no matter where they come from or their culture. To do this, the people who create the tests make sure they don't favor any particular group and that they measure what they are supposed to for everyone equally. They consider different languages, customs and experiences so that everyone has a fair chance to show what they know.
A November 24, 2023, article in Medium called "The Impact of Cultural Factors on IQ Testing" had this to say about it:
This cultural bias can create a disparity in how individuals from non-Western or different socioeconomic backgrounds comprehend and solve test problems, leading to potentially misleading interpretations of their intellectual abilities.
Reviews
The European Sociological Review (archived here) took the findings, which included Haiti's low average IQ, to task. In a September 1, 2003, critique of the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations," author Thomas Volken said:
[T]heir findings must be considered as highly problematic. The authors neither make use of state‐of‐the‐art methodological techniques nor can they substantiate their theoretical claims. More precisely the authors confuse IQ with human capital and fail to adequately discuss the causal sequence of their argument.
In a September 2008 review of the book (archived here), Professor Stephen Morse, then at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom and now at the University of Surrey, said this about the book's findings:
To me the danger of the Lynn and Vanhanen hypothesis is two-fold. Poor science all too easily highlighted by the assumptions made of IQ and its supposed link to race is the most obvious and easily decried element of the exercise; it's the one that holds the attention and calls out to be challenged. But their model also illustrates an assumption that is all too pernicious and hidden - the potential tyranny of indicators and indices in development geography.
Final word
In the conclusion of his email, Gardner added this about the claims in the social media post and the book. He said:
[T]hose who promote the view that you cited have a political agenda -- and it is not oriented toward helping Haitians, who live in wretched conditions. As I said for many years, the purpose of testing should not be to rank people, it should be to help them.
Read more
Additional Lead Stories fact checks of claims about Haiti or Haitian immigrants can be found here.
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