Filial Intelligence and Family Social Class, 1947 to 2012

Lindsay Paterson

doi:10.15195/v8.a16

Abstract

Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how inequality operates and is reproduced. The present analysis uses social surveys of children aged 10 to 11 years in Britain between 1947 and 2012 to assess whether the social-class distribution of intelligence has changed. The main conclusions are that, although children’s intelligence relative to their peers remains associated with social class, the association may have weakened recently, mainly because the average intelligence in the highest-status classes may have moved closer to the mean.

Highlights

Nash (2001) has proposed that investigators of social inequality should be interested in understanding why measured intelligence correlates strongly with the dimensions on which inequality is often measured, such as social class of upbringing, educational attainment, and social mobility
No previous study has attempted to measure the change in the association of childhood intelligence with parental social class over such a long period
Our analysis has shown that filial relative intelligence was correlated with family social class and parental education in each year, even while the class structure changed from being predominantly working class to the opposite, and as the distribution of parental education shifted upward as a result of a century of educational expansion

Summary

Background

Investigating intelligence has long provoked strong controversy in the study of social inequality. Marks (2014:50) notes that the sociological critique rests on the claims that intelligence is complex, that it is not stable over time, that it is a consequence rather than a cause of educational outcomes, and that intelligence tests reflect differences in socialization. Richardson (2002) exemplifies the strongly sociological view that intelligence is no more than “a nexus of sociocognitive-affective. The beneficial effects of high measured intelligence do not accrue to people who grew up in different social circumstances because intelligence is associated with childhood social class, a finding that is stable across cultures and periods since the early twentieth century and confirmed by a variety of ways of measuring social class (Dickerson and Popli 2016; Duff and Thomson 1923; Feinstein 2003; Haveman and Wolfe 1995; Johnson, Brett, and Deary 2010b; Lawlor et al 2005; Letourneau et al 2011; Marks 2014; McCulloch and Joshi 2001; Rindermann and Ceci 2018; Sullivan, Ketende, and Joshi 2013; von Stumm et al 2010) This association, and the possibility that it might change over time, is the starting point for the present analysis, as it was for Connelly and Gayle (2019). The aim is to investigate whether a common assumption in sociological research, that intelligence is associated with social class and that social class may be used in statistical models as a possibly imperfect surrogate for intelligence, is valid over a long period of time

Methods

Findings

Conclusions