Ethics of Research
The 1996 report of the APA had comments on the ethics of research on race and intelligence. Gray & Thompson (2004) as well as Hunt & Carlson (2007) have also discussed different possible ethical guidelines. Nature in 2009 featured two editorials on the ethics of research in race and intelligence by Steven Rose (against) and Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams (for).
According to critics, research will run the risk of simply reproducing the horrendous effects of the social ideologies (such as Nazism or Social Darwinism) justified in part on claimed hereditary racial differences. Steven Rose maintains that the history of eugenics makes this field of research difficult to reconcile with current ethical standards for science.
Linda Gottfredson argues that suggestion of higher ethical standards for research into group differences in intelligence is a double standard applied in order to undermine disliked results. Flynn, a non-hereditarian, has argued that had there been a ban on research on possibly poorly conceived ideas, much valuable research on intelligence testing (including his own discovery of the Flynn effect) would not have occurred.
Read more about this topic: Race And Intelligence
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