Scholars Debate Outlook for Closing Black-White Gap in IQ

Washington

The gap in IQ scores between African-Americans and whites narrowed over the 20th century, agreed experts at a debate held here last week. They disagreed, though, on exactly when that narrowing occurred.

In a paper published in October in Psychological Science , William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn suggest that black Americans began to catch up with whites on a variety of intelligence tests between 1972 and 2002.

But Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington think tank that hosted the Nov. 28 forum, said those researchers got the timing wrong. He cited findings from his own study, published last month in the journal Intelligence , which suggest that any shrinking of the black-white gap that occurred in the last century stalled...