Raymond B. Cattell > Quotes

“For example, there are five successive studies of criminal behavior cited in my 1982 book. They show that if a man in prison has an identical twin, it’s likely his cotwin will also be in prison. If the twin is fraternal [with 50 percent shared genes, on average], the likelihood is not nearly as great that he’ll be in prison, too, but it’s greater than chance. How could one possibly account for this difference with environmentalist explanations? The strong genetic component in criminality has already been proven up to the hilt.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“Creativity is closely correlated with personality factors of dominance, introversion, and ego strength. So I wouldn’t try to measure creativity by using a test of creativity per se, but rather by measuring personality factors that correlate highly with it. It has been shown that intelligence is also a precondition for creativity in any socially useful sense. So I would test for creativity with the 16 PF [Personality Factors] Test and a culture-fair intelligence test.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“. I think it might not be a bad idea to remove the inscription from the Statue of Liberty which calls for the “wretched refuse” of the other countries to migrate here. This is not what you want to build a nation of. If we have immigration, we ought to have it from the best sources. At the moment, the sociologists have won out on that issue with their claims that there are no differences among immigrants. But I would maintain that there are most marked differences, in both innate intelligence and personality, among people who enter the U.S.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“Societies in the past that have become too pluralistic, like India, and the old Mediterranean countries like the Roman Empire, didn’t perceive the danger to moral standards that arose from having too many differing moral standards, too many differing religions, too many differing cultures. On the other hand, there are advantages to a country in having some diversity, in that each can be used as an experiment to see in which direction the group as a whole might advantageously go. I think that there’s a happy medium on this matter of diversity, and it has probably been overshot in the U.S. at the present.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“The current decline in educational achievement is, like most things, multiply determined. The evidence points, first, to about 50-100 years of genetic decline in ability. It doesn’t take much–perhaps a one-point decline every 30 years–to reduce substantially the percentage in the upper range of IQ. With our present mean IQ of 100, 1 person in 250 would exceed an IQ of 140. If, however, the average dropped to 85, you’d have only 1 in 8,000 who would exceed an IQ of 140. We must suppose that academic standards are much affected by the percentages of high IQ individuals, and that their becoming more scarce will lower academic performance. So part of the remedy for this problem definitely lies in eugenic practices.

But there are some environmental factors as well, such as the failure to do “streaming” in schools, in which children of much the same ability level are put together. And I think something in the way of general idleness and slackness has gotten into the system since the 1960s which could account for a part of the decline, particularly in the more precise subjects like mathematics.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“There may also be deeper, unconscious sources of opposition to any form of biological determinism. For example, the individual may feel that heredity somehow restrains him, so he will prefer to deny its influence. But obviously the only reasonable way to deal with nature is to accommodate to its laws, as we do to the law of gravity. If one refuses to acknowledge the importance of gravity and blithely jumps off a cliff, one will find himself in serious trouble. Our society may be jumping off a cliff, so to speak, with regard to its denial of the role of genetics in human behavior.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“In Britain, when I was growing up in the ’20s, it was common sense to place considerable importance upon heredity in choosing a person to marry, in choosing the occupation for which one was suited, and so on. I was astonished when I came to America to find that eugenics was almost a bad word. One may trace this situation to the sociologists, to Boas and others, and to pressure from minority groups who oppose anything aristocratic.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“Greatness is something that is surely very different in different areas such as politics, art, music, and science. What I think is fundamental, however, is creativity and an ability to break away from conventional views, a combination of high intelligence with high ego strength. Great people are largely responsible for whatever progress society makes, yet they actually take quite a beating in the process. So qualities of endurance are necessary as well.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“The psychopath may do very well for himself as an individual – it’s only that a group with too many psychopaths wouldn’t survive. Group selection and individual selection work differently. Although individual selection may favor selfishness, for example, it’s caught up and corrected by group selection in the long run–one has to stress that. A society dies if it exceeds a certain degree of individual selfishness.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“Dominance is negatively related to grades in high school and undergraduate work, but the opposite is true in graduate work – with dissertations and theses, the better work is done by high-dominance people who show more creativity and independence of mind. Of course, that dominance isn’t necessarily welcomed, because professors may still find docility in students to be a desirable trait. Incidentally, creative people have a personality profile which is not everybody’s cup of tea. They are often difficult people. Their combination of high dominance and introversion is not always easy to deal with.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“To focus on psychology, in which I’ve been working for the last 50 years, I think the trouble lies in the mediocrity of the researchers and teachers. The whole subject is a very difficult one. McDougall said that the trouble with psychology is that it is too difficult for psychologists. Quite advanced mathematics – actually quite beautiful mathematics, seemingly beyond the comprehension of most psychologists today — is necessary to solve the next issues awaiting us. We’ve got to get more acute selection in psychology, and take it out of the hands of the do-gooders and the social workers and really make a science of it.”
― Raymond B. Cattell