Even today in many parts of the world formal schooling is inaccessible to many people; being more of a privilege than an expectation in some places. Therefore, the best measures of intelligence should be unrelated to literary pencil and paper multiple-choice tasks. Skills like Quick decision making, cooperativeness, orienting efficacy, the capacity to represent features on a vast scale, and short-term strategic considerations are certainly abilities that would have been vital for our hunter-gatherer relatives in the past, and are still highly relevant in today’s modern environments. These abilities are also critical for successful athletic competitive performance, and particularly within the realm of team sports (Horgan and Tienson, 1992).
rofessional athletes and especially those involved in team sports must operate within highly dynamic and multi-dimensional situational contexts (Vickers, 2007) requiring a very complex set of cognitive skills (see Kioumourtzoglou et al, 1998; Horgan and Tienson, 1992). Often these skills are close in relationship with the kinds of skills that, in the ‘not so distant’ past, helped to make our ancestors successful hunter and gathers. Why is this relevant, one might ask? Well, hunting is assumed to have been in practice for 99% of human prehistory and is thus believed to have provided the ‘master behavior pattern’ of the human species (Herlin, 2003). Intelligence in the past was never a measure of one’s academic aptitude or potential for formal schooling, but was instead a measure of one’s potential for real life survival, and often this survival depended on the same kind intelligences and abilities employed by athletes during competition. Formal schooling of the kind familiar to most living in the West today did not become a part of people’s everyday lives until the early 20th century.
Studies of reaction time in athletes and non athletes generally find athletes to out perform non athletes in these tasks. Reaction time is believed to be a good indicator of performance in sports (Kaur et al, 2006). This may explain why Blacks athletes can be found overrepresented in many of the world’s most highly selective high performance sports (e.g. Football and Basketball). Kaur et al (2006), found quicker reaction times in athletes as compared to control groups, and attributed this to improved concentration, alertness, better muscular co-ordination and improved performance in speed and accuracy tasks among athletes (Kaur et al, 2006). Kamin (1995) reported that in tasks of choice reaction time, blacks in 3 out of three studies out performed white individuals and Asian indivuiduals.
I have more statistics to back it up.
African-born blacks comprise about 16 percent of the U.S. foreign-born black population (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000), and are “considerably” more educated than other immigrants. The vast majority of these immigrants come from minority white countries in East and West Africa (e.g. Kenya and Nigeria). While less than 2 percent originate from North or South Africa (CIA World Factbook, 2004; Yearbook of immigration Statistics, 2003). In an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Journal of Blacks in higher education, African immigrants to the United States were found more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group, which included those from Europe, North America and Asia (see also Nisbett, 2002; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). African immigrants have also been shown to be more highly educated than any native-born ethnic group including white and Asian Americans (Logan & Deane, 2003; Williams, 2005; The Economist, 1996; Arthur, 2000; Selassie, 1998; Nisbett, 2002).
Crawford-Nutt (1976) found that African black students enrolled in westernized schools scored higher on progressive matrix tests than did American white students.
1981) showed Ghanaian adults in another study to score higher on the same supposedly ‘culture fair’ intelligence test, than did Irish adults; scores were 80 (Ghanaian) and 78 (Irish), respectively.
1981) showed Ghanaian adults in another study to score higher on the same supposedly ‘culture fair’ intelligence test, than did Irish adults; scores were 80 (Ghanaian) and 78 (Irish), respectively.
the United States, when matched for IQ with Whites, American Blacks have been shown to demonstrate superior “Working Memory” (Nijenhuis et al., 2004). This is an interesting finding, as African Americans are typically taught by less qualified teachers (e.g. non-certified teachers and teachers with limited experience) than their white counterparts, and are provided with less challenging school work (Hallinan 1994; Diamond et al., 2004; Uhlenberg and Brown 2004). In Chicago, for example, the vast majority of schools placed on academic probation as part of the district accountability efforts were majority African-American and low-income (Diamond and Spillane 2004). Thus, it is somewhat surprising that African Americans should outperform white Americans on any portion of a paper and pencil test designed to mimic the structures of western style schooling (Richardson, 2000, 2002).
