intelligence of refugees in germany
a new study has been published in peter singer's 'journal of controversial ideas.'
singer started the journal about 3 years ago with a few other philosophers who had a knack for wading into topics that tend to get a lot of blowback.
i've been a little disappointed in that i don't think they've published a lot of iq stuff so far, though maybe i've just missed it. i haven't read every paper they've posted.
but a new paper goes right into that territory, publishing the tested intelligence of refugees in germany.
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/4/2/281
there's a pdf to be downloaded with the full study in that link above.
from the abstract.
Two previous German studies with N=29 and N=552 refugees found average intelligence scores of IQ 92 and 86, respectively. A newer study with N=499 refugees and immigrants from N=15 countries conducted in 2017 to 2018 using the BOMAT, a German non-verbal and purely figural matrices test, found an average IQ of 90 (using the norms of the manual, 84 using a recent German comparison sample). Overall (as a result of our “mini-meta-analysis”), refugees’ cognitive abilities are about (5 to) 10 IQ points higher than the average abilities of people in their home countries (measured by student assessments or intelligence tests and compiled by various research groups), but 12 (to 15) IQ points below the German average.
if you go to page 19 of the pdf, you'll find a nice table that shows test results from 15 populations. the results are compared with previous country-level results. for the most part, you see a good amount of consistency. russians test in the new sample at 100, similar to previous studies & equal to the current german population.
one of the results that made me raise an eye was the palestinian iq of 90, but then i saw that they were basing that on a sample size of 5, so i think we can call that a sampling error. previous studies (see pg 19) showed that group as being in the 80 range, which is closer to what you'd expect from that notoriously dim bunch.
unsurprisingly, somalians & eritreans score the lowest.
i'd say the results are in line long running studies showing persistently low results for testing in these groups.
my opinion is that, unless you're pining to have populations that will be government dependent & have many other undesirable qualities, it would probably be good policy to be selective when it comes to taking in refugees. share