Reading - Quintessential Example of the Matthew Effect (Why Background Knowledge Matters)

Robert Pondiscio:

"Reading comprehension is not a skill you teach but a condition you create. Teaching content is teaching reading. Reading comprehension is not improved through teaching “metacognitive skills”.

Daniel T. Willingham:

"It's true that knowledge gives students something to think about, but a reading of the research literature from cognitive science shows that knowledge does much more than just help students hone their thinking skills: It actually makes learning easier. Knowledge is not only cumulative, it grows exponentially. Those with a rich base of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more—the rich get richer. In addition, factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning. The richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly and effectively these cognitive processes—the very ones that teachers target—operate. So, the more knowledge students accumulate, the smarter they become. The more you know, the easier it will be for you to learn new things.”

Inferences: 

"Comprehension demands background knowledge because language is full of semantic breaks in which knowledge is assumed and, therefore, comprehension depends on making correct inferences. An obvious way in which knowledge aids the acquisition of more knowledge lies in the greater power it affords in making correct inferences. If the writer assumes that you have some background knowledge that you lack, you'll be confused. If you know more, you're a better reader.

Most of the time you are unaware of making inferences when you read. Those conscious inferences are unnecessary because the cognitive processes that interpret what you read automatically access not just the literal words that you read, but also ideas associated with those words. All of these associations and inferences happen outside of awareness. Only the outcome of this cognitive process—that John is concerned his tux won't fit anymore—enters consciousness."

Faster reading, less rereading:

"People with more general knowledge have richer associations among the concepts in memory; and when associations are strong, they become available to the reading process automatically. That means the person with rich general knowledge rarely has to interrupt reading in order to consciously search for connections. Rich background knowledge means that you will rarely need to reread a text in an effort to consciously search for connections in the text."

Chunking:

"Most of the time when we are listening or reading, it's not enough to understand each sentence on its own—we need to understand a series of sentences or paragraphs and hold them in mind simultaneously so that they can be integrated or compared. Doing so is easier if the material can be chunked because it will occupy less of the limited space in working memory. But, chunking relies on background knowledge."

Freeing up working memory:

"Knowledge enhances thinking in two ways. First, it helps you solve problems by freeing up space in your working memory. Second, it helps you circumvent thinking by acting as a ready supply of things you've already thought about. If you don't have sufficient background knowledge, simply understanding the problem can consume most of your working memory, leaving no space for you to consider solutions. Experts don't just know more than novices—they actually see problems differently. For many problems, the expert does not need to reason, but rather, can rely on memory of prior solutions."

Robert Pondiscio again:

Every teacher is a literacy teacher:

“It’s a bit of an education cliché to say “every teacher is a literacy teacher.” Since background knowledge is a fundamental building block of language proficiency, it’s technically true: A teacher in any subject can’t help but be a literacy teacher, even if the effects are diffuse. If all of this sounds obvious or anodyne, consider that “literacy” tends to be viewed as the exclusive concern of English teachers if not elementary school teachers long before students showed up in secondary school classrooms—this view of literacy as not my job is almost certainly as common among subject-specific middle and high school teachers in the U.S. as the U.K.”

Vocab tiers:

“The emphasis on disciplinary literacy makes clear that every teacher communicates their subject through academic language, and that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are at the heart of knowing and doing Science, Art, History, and every other subject in secondary school. Here the authors invoke Isabel Beck’s helpful and clarifying “tiers of vocabulary.” So-called “Tier 1” words are the simplest, the kinds of words children often come to their first days of school already commanding—desk, ball, baby, etc. “Tier 3” words tend to be discipline-specific terms like “photosynthesis” or “isotope” that are seldom used outside of particular fields of study. The richness of language tends to reside in high-frequency “Tier 2” words that may occur across disciplines, but that take on different meanings in different contexts. “It is easy to see how confusion for students can occur,” the authors write, in mathematical words like value, prime, area, mean, fraction, and improper, which mean entirely different things in math class and everywhere else.” 

Is it possible for someone to be so smart that they overthink everything on an IQ test (and life) and score poorly?

Bruno Campello de Souza: 

A hilarious example is provided by Neal Stephenson:

They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the “average” speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?

Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.

Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

-Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon (1999)

More on “Speed Reading”, Scrabble, Spelling Bees, Parafoveal Magnification (Can your perceptual system take in more words?) - Mark Seidenberg

“Language at the Speed of Sight” (Mark Seidenberg):

"The number of people who understand the relevant research—which now includes you—is far smaller than the number of people who would like to read a lot faster.

The deeper problem common to all such methods is that they have the relationship between eye movements and reading skill backward. They assume that reading skill results from efficient eye movements. Train your eyes to take in more information or read without having to move the eyes at all, and you will be a better, faster reader. However, efficient eye movements are the result of becoming a proficient reader, not the cause. People who acquire the knowledge and experience that underlie skilled reading do indeed move their eyes with greater efficiency, producing increases in reading speed. But we don’t achieve this by practicing how to move our eyes.

A championship Scrabble player’s orthographic expertise has a different character from a skilled reader’s. Readers pick up orthographic statistics incidentally as a by-product of reading, whereas Scrabble expertise results from extended deliberate practice, like other specialized talents such as eating the most hot dogs in ten minutes. Readers need to know the meanings of words; Scrabble players do not. Knowing that ninety-five legal Scrabble words can be formed from the letters APTYKLI is helpful in playing the game; readers, in contrast, have to recognize patterns as particular words, not discover words in randomly ordered strings. Elite Scrabble players’ expertise is a function of the amount of Scrabble-specific practice (studying word lists, analyzing previous games, time spent in competitive play) rather than general factors such as vocabulary size or verbal ability. Scrabble skills do not carry over to reading, but expert players are better at making lexical decisions for words presented vertically, as they can be in the game.

The other orthographic experts are children who compete in spelling tournaments: “bees.” They too engage in thousands of hours of deliberate practice memorizing the spellings of words. I have not found any studies of the impact of this knowledge on the children’s reading or academic performance. The effects could be a little weird. Winning turns on knowledge of obscure words in the very long tail of the frequency distribution, such as STICHOMYTHIA and NUNATAK. Many of these are technical terms or borrowed from other languages, which certainly alters the statistics of the contestants’ Big Orthographic Data. Unlike Scrabblists, spelling champions reportedly know the meanings of many of the words and have studied etymology and word formation (morphology). They read dictionaries, not lists of six-letter words containing J, K, or Q, suggesting that the knowledge they acquire has greater utility.”

Can your perceptual system take in more words?

Parafoveal magnification.png

The narrowness of the perceptual span seems like a vision problem that should be fixable. Corrective lenses allow people to see letters more clearly in the fovea. What about correcting the poor acuity outside the fovea? Some masters of the eye-tracking methodology have tried it. The technique is called parafoveal magnification (parafovea refers to areas adjacent to the fovea). The trick is to compensate for the decrease in acuity by increasing letter sizes in proportion to distance from the current fixation. The displays they used are illustrated in Figure 4.3. The arrow indicates the current fixation. The lines represent how the display changed on each fixation as one line of text was read. The researchers also varied window size from seven to twenty-one slots using the letter-replacement method from Figure 4.1. The main question was whether the perceptual window would be wider when the letters in the parafovea were larger than normal.

The subjects, who were college students, rapidly adapted to reading with parafoveal magnification. Surprisingly, the manipulation had very little impact, positive or negative. Reading times with magnification closely matched those for normal text, and comprehension was equally good. Again it was window size that had the big effect: with the window reduced to only seven normally displayed letters, reading times were seriously slowed. 

This finding confirms that information outside the fovea is useful even though it is imprecise. This experiment shows that the limits on the width of the span are cognitive as well as visual. Under normal conditions, the drop-off in retinal acuity is the major limiting factor. That is the reality of everyday reading. Technology can’t compensate much because only a few of those bigger letters fit within the perceptual span. Moreover, the magnified letters have little impact because of limitations on how much information can be processed at a time. Reading is a demanding task. The amount that we can see on a fixation seems pretty well matched to how rapidly we can make sense of it. Magnifying letters in the periphery is ineffective because we’re already wrapping chocolates as fast as we can.”

Vegan and Vegetarian Diets

I don’t agree with Layne on many topics (e.g. NEAT, metabolic damage)  but he does a good job here:

"The fallacy being that plant protein and animal protein are really no different and if anything, plant protein is better. That is a flat out misrepresentation of scientific data. There are several reasons why plant protein may be inferior to animal protein. The first being that most plant proteins are far less bioavailable than animals proteins on the average of about 10-40% depending upon the source. [21] Further, most plant proteins are limiting in various essential (meaning we need to get them from the diet) amino acids. Rice protein is deficient in lysine, pea contains about half of the minimum methionine content, and soy, while low in methionine, has just enough not to be considered deficient. [22] Further, most plant proteins are low in leucine, the essential amino acid responsible for stimulating muscle protein synthesis. [23] Now, if you eat enough total protein from a variety of plant sources you can make up for these limitations. For example, in my PhD thesis, we found that consuming a diet containing 30% of calories from wheat protein was sufficient to maximize protein synthesis, whereas at 10% & 20% of calories from wheat protein, animal protein was superior compared to wheat. [24][25] So you CAN get maximal anabolism from vegan protein sources, but you will need more total protein, and a much more well thought out diet to do so. However, keep in mind that on average, vegans only get about 14% of their calories from protein. At these low levels of protein, the quality of protein becomes even more important. Do we need animal protein? No. But is it a superior source of essential amino acids? No question, especially when total protein in the diet is low.”

As we have already established, meat eaters tend to eat more calories, gain more weight, and be more prone to heart disease, but as we demonstrated with the data on inflammation, this is a problem of excess energy intake and its associated weight gain, not because animal protein is somehow inherently inflammatory. What about CVD? While fatty meats are associated with increases in total cholesterol and LDL, lean meats do not have the same effect of increasing blood lipids. [44] There is also evidence that fish, even fatty sources of fish such as salmon which contain the essential fatty acid omega 3, may decrease CVD risk. [45] Further, consumption of lean beef (113g per day) as part of a healthy overall diet has been demonstrated to decrease cardiovascular risk and improve blood lipids.”

Menno Henselmans also wrote a nice review here:

"While plants offer certain health benefits and nutrients, animal foods do too. While plants shine in terms of vitamins, anti-oxidants and phytochemicals, animal foods have a higher protein quality and are typically richer in bioavailable minerals, especially iron, beneficial fatty acids like omega-3s (EPA and DHA specifically) and B-vitamins.

Plant protein sources are not as high quality as animal protein sources and vegan diets are not optimal for our health. So if you’re not a vegetarian for ethical reasons, there’s absolutely no incentive to turn vegetarian for your health or physique.

If you’re an ethical vegetarian, you’ll have to put in a bit more work than omnivores to get the same results from your efforts in the gym. It’s a sacrifice you’ll have to make to stand up for your beliefs. Lacto-ovo vegetarian diets and pescatarians have it much easier. However, with meticulous attention to the diet and strategic supplementation, you can likely achieve equivalent results as meat eaters."

Birth Order and Bilingualism — Judith Rich Harris

Pages 330-end:

"There are certain qualities parents would like to see in all their children—kindness, conscientiousness, intelligence—and other qualities they are willing to let vary within reasonable limits. But the findings for the universally desired qualities are the same as for the optional ones: no evidence of a long-term effect of the home environment.

One thing that could have worked in favor of the nurture assumption, but didn’t, is birth order. Parents treat firstborns and laterborns differently, and the differential treatment isn’t just a response to characteristics the kids were born with. But researchers have been trying for more than half a century to find convincing proof that birth order leaves lasting marks on personality, and their efforts have not panned out. Nor have efforts to show differences in personality between only children and children with siblings. If parents have major effects on their children, how come they don’t mess up the personality of the only child? These two disappointments—no birth order effects, no only child effects—should knock the last remaining prop from under the nurture assumption.

If the peer group’s culture differs from the parents’, the peer group’s always wins. The child of immigrant parents or deaf parents invariably learns the language of her peers and favors it over the language her parents taught her. It becomes her native language. You can see it happening as early as nursery school, when three-year-olds start bringing home the accents of their peers. Perhaps it begins even earlier than that.

Experiences in childhood and adolescent peer groups modify children’s personalities in ways they will carry with them to adulthood. Group socialization socialization theory makes this prediction: that children would develop into the same sort of adults if we left their lives outside the home unchanged—left them in their schools and their neighborhoods—but switched all the parents around.

Personality generally does not change much in adulthood.

My theory predicts that low status in the group, especially if it persists for years, will leave permanent marks on a child’s personality.

What about birth order effects on intelligence? Claims of a firstborn advantage in IQ are periodically made and receive a lot of publicity, but I remain unconvinced. If firstborns really were smarter, we would expect them to make better grades than their younger siblings, and they do not. Nor are they more likely to go to college.

Most criminologists and developmentalists believe that the right sort of parenting can keep a kid from joining the wrong sort of peer group.

This time the researchers used behavioral genetic methods (the subjects were twins) to assess the genetic contribution to adolescents’ membership in antisocial peer groups. They found a sizable genetic contribution to membership in such groups, and no influence of parenting practices. Neither parental behaviors shared by both twins, nor parental behaviors applied differentially, could account for the twins’ peer group affiliations or antisocial behavior. How do genes influence the kind of peer group a teenager will join? Indirectly, by their influence on the teenager’s personality, intelligence, and talents. Kids whose genes predispose them to be intelligent and conscientious are more likely to become members of academically oriented peer groups. Those whose genes predispose them to be risk-takers or sensation-seekers are more likely to end up in the kind of group that their parents don’t want them to join. As I said in Chapter 12, “As birds of a feather flock together, aggressive teens and those who are attracted to excitement and danger find others like themselves. Such personality characteristics are partly genetic, so when kids seek out other kids who are similar to themselves, to some extent they are seeking out those with similar genes.”

As you’ve no doubt noticed, my favorite method for eliminating the effects of genes is by looking at language and accent. Children are not genetically predisposed to acquire one language or accent rather than another: it is entirely a function of their social environment—specifically, the environment they share with peers. The evidence I presented in Chapter 9 comes from observations of the offspring of immigrants, the hearing offspring of deaf parents, and the deaf offspring of hearing parents. In all cases, the offsprings’ primary language in adulthood is the language they used to communicate with their peers in childhood and adolescence. But don’t misunderstand me. Sometimes the offspring of immigrants do speak with a “foreign” accent in adulthood. There are several reasons why this might happen. Rarely, it might be due to some sort of social impairment. Children with autism retain their parents’ accent, evidently because they do not identify with peers. Far more commonly, it simply means that the speaker grew up in a neighborhood, or attended a school, where there were many immigrants from the same part of the world. In such places, children often remain bilingual—they share both their languages with their peers. They retain the accent because their peers speak that way, too. The other common reason for retaining an accent is age. People who were in their teens when they immigrated will probably never entirely lose the accent of the country they came from. But the cutoff age varies and no one seems to know why."

IQ, Therapists, Good Schools, Good Neighborhoods, Parenting Overrated - Judith Rich Harris

Pages 300-330:

"Good things tend to go together. So do bad things. These are correlations. Educational psychologist Howard Gardner would have us believe that there are several different “intelligences” and that someone who was stinted on one might have gotten a generous helping of another. But the fact is that people who score low on tests of one kind of intelligence are also likely to score low on tests of other kinds. We are pleased when we hear about a child who is mentally retarded in most respects but who is a whiz at drawing or calculating: it appeals to our sense of fairness. But such cases are uncommon. Far more commonly, nature is unfair to mentally retarded children by giving them no talents and making them physically clumsy as well. That is why they compete in the Special Olympics instead of the regular Olympics. Good things tend to go together. People who score high on tests of one kind of intelligence are also likely to score high on tests of other kinds. The high score on one test doesn’t cause the high test on the others but there is a correlation between them."

"Typically, a patient comes into the psychotherapist’s office and complains that she (it’s more often a woman) is miserable. She talks to the therapist for a while and he decides it’s all the fault of the patient’s parents. They belittled her or smothered her or didn’t give her enough autonomy or made her feel guilty or sexually abused her. The therapist convinces the patient that whatever is wrong with her is not her fault, it’s the fault of her parents, and after a while she says, “Thank you very much, Doctor, I feel much better now.” The question that interests me is not the one about why the patient got better or if she really did get better; I’ll leave that to other writers. The question for me is: Why is the therapist so convinced it’s the parents’ fault? What does he see that makes him so sure?

First is the possibility that dysfunctional parents pass on their dysfunctional traits genetically. Psychotherapists don’t like this idea, perhaps because they think it means their patients’ problems are incurable.

Things that cause us distress or pleasure do not necessarily have the power to change our personalities or to make us mentally ill. Relationships mean a lot to us; parents are, without a doubt, important people in our lives. We care what they think of us. But that doesn’t make us putty in their hands. The fact that the patient feels strong emotions when she thinks about her parents is not evidence that they are responsible for whatever’s wrong with her."

"The Power of Parents to Choose Their Child’s Peers. It is the one power that nearly all parents have—the one way that they can determine the course of their child’s life. At least in the early years, they can determine who their child’s peers are.

You don’t have to do anything quite that drastic to have an effect on your child’s life. Just by moving to a different neighborhood, just by choosing your child’s school, you can change the course of a life. It’s a little scary, isn’t it?

On the whole, children learn more in schools that contain a higher proportion of smart kids; on the whole, children are less likely to get into trouble in neighborhoods where delinquency rates are low. But a kid with below-average intelligence might be rejected by his peers in a school where everyone else is above average. A kid from a poor home might be shunned in a place where everyone else is well-off.

If it were up to me, I would take the risk that my child might be rejected and put her or him into the best school I could find—a school with smart, hardworking kids. A school where no one makes fun of the one who reads books and makes A’s. Such schools do exist."

"The experiences of babies in traditional societies give us clues about what sort of environment the developing human brain was programmed to expect. Babies in these societies are not read to; they are not even talked to very much. They have plenty to look at and listen to, but every baby does. Although these babies learn very little during their two years in their mothers’ arms, that does not keep them from learning, when the time is ripe, all the things they need to know to become successful adults.

The reason why parents who read to their children have smarter children is that these are smarter parents. Their children are smarter because intelligence is partly inherited. If there were an environmental reason why parents who read to their children have smarter children, then we wouldn’t find a zero correlation in IQ between adult adoptive siblings reared by the same parents. There is no scientific basis for the belief that it is possible to make babies smarter by giving them fancy things to listen to or look at.

As for what you can do to influence your child’s personality, behavior, attitudes, and knowledge, I recognize that you might not be satisfied with my answer. Some people are not relieved to hear that they can stop blaming themselves for whatever they don’t like about their children. Some people find the news upsetting, especially if their kids are young. They want to feel that they can make a difference as parents. They want to feel that there is still something they can do to improve their child’s chances, some way they can change the things they don’t like about their child. If they work at it hard enough, surely there is something they can do! They have been sold a bill of goods. They have a right to feel cheated. Parenting does not match its widely publicized job description.

The idea that we can make our children turn out any way we want is an illusion. Give it up. Children are not empty canvases on which parents can paint their dreams. Don’t worry about what the advice-givers tell you. Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. Enjoy them."

Spot Reduction

Q: How do I get rid of my lower abdominal fat?

A: Get leaner (Mostly diet. More abdominal exercises is not your answer)

Q: My face is fat. I would like a more chiseled jawline 

A: Get leaner (Mostly diet. FACEGYM is not your answer)

Q: But I’m not overweight

A: You are skinny fat. Need to put on muscle so that you can actually sport a low body fat% at your current weight

Heritability, Psychopathology, Criminality, Divorce - Judith Rich Harris

Pages 250-300:

"Behavioral genetic studies have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that heredity is responsible for a sizable portion of the variations in people’s personalities.

A child can have characteristics seen in neither of her parents. But there is a statistical connection—a greater-than-chance likelihood that a person with psychological problems has a biological parent or a biological child with similar problems. Heredity is one of the reasons that parents with problems often have children with problems. It is a simple, obvious, undeniable fact; and yet it is the most ignored fact in all of psychology. Judging from the lack of attention paid to heredity by developmental and clinical psychologists, you would think we were still in the days when John Watson was promising to turn a dozen babies into doctors, lawyers, beggarmen, and thieves.

The evidence shows that the environment has an effect on criminality but it doesn’t show that the relevant environment is the home; in fact, it suggests a different explanation. When both twins or both siblings get into trouble, it is due to their influence on each other and to the influence of the peer group they belong to.

Are some people born bad? A better way of putting it is that some people are born with characteristics that make them poor fits for most of the honest jobs available in most societies, and so far we haven’t learned how to deal with them. We are at risk of becoming their victims but they are victims, too—victims of the evolutionary history of our species. No process is perfect, not even evolution. Evolution gave us big heads, but sometimes a baby has a head so big it can’t fit through the birth canal. In earlier times these babies invariably died, as did their mothers. In the same way, evolution selected for other characteristics that sometimes overshoot their mark and become liabilities rather than assets. Almost all the characteristics of the “born criminal” would be, in slightly watered-down form, useful to a male in a hunter-gatherer society and useful to his group. His lack of fear, desire for excitement, and impulsiveness make him a formidable weapon against rival groups. His aggressiveness, strength, and lack of compassion enable him to dominate his groupmates and give him first shot at hunter-gatherer perks. Unlike the successful hunter-gatherer, however, the career criminal tends to be below average in intelligence. 

Having a father or not having one: How much difference does it make for an ordinary child in a developed society? I will not deny that children are generally happier if they have two parents; I will not deny that they are happier if they have evidence that both parents care about them and think well of them. sequelae. This book is about the long-term consequences of what happens while you’re growing up. Do children with fathers turn out better in the long run than children without fathers? And if they do turn out better, is it because they had a father? Most people think so.

But the graphs and tables in McLanahan and Sandefur’s book contain some curious findings: a lot of things you’d think would matter turn out not to matter. The presence of a stepfather in the home doesn’t improve the kids’ chances at all. Nor does contact with the biological father outside the home: “Studies based on large nationally representative surveys indicate that frequent father contact has no detectable benefits for children.” Nor does having another biological relative living in the home: the presence of a grandmother doesn’t help. In homes with live-in grandmothers, kids are left alone less often than in homes with two biological parents, yet that doesn’t stop them from dropping out of school or getting pregnant. In homes with stepfathers, kids are given as much supervision as in homes with biological fathers—they are as likely to have their whereabouts monitored or their homework checked—yet that doesn’t stop them from dropping out of school or getting pregnant. The number of years the kids spend in a single-parent family also doesn’t matter: those whose fathers stuck around until they were on the brink of adolescence are no better off than the ones whose fathers went bye-bye when they were babies or, for that matter, fetuses.

Let me show you how it might be possible to account for the unfavorable outcomes without reference to the children’s experiences in the home or to the quality of parenting they receive there.

Most single mothers are nothing like Murphy Brown: most of them are poor. Half of all homes headed by women are below the poverty level. Divorce usually leads to a drastic decline in a family’s standard of living—that is, in the standard of living of the ex-wife and the children in her custody.

But by far the most important thing that money can do for kids is to determine the neighborhood they grow up in and the school they attend. Most single mothers cannot afford to rear their children in the kind of neighborhood where my husband and I reared ours—the kind where almost all the kids graduate from high school and hardly any have babies. Poverty forces many single mothers to rear their children in neighborhoods where there are many other single mothers and where there are high rates of unemployment, school dropout, teen pregnancy, and crime.

Neighborhoods have different cultures and the cultures tend to be self-perpetuating; they are passed down from the parents’ peer group to the children’s peer group.

The analysis churned out by the researchers’ computer was boringly similar to those of other behavioral genetic studies: about half of the variation in the risk of divorce could be attributed to genetic influences—to genes shared with twins or parents. The other half was due to environmental causes. But none of the variation could be blamed on the home the twins grew up in. Any similarities in their marital histories could be fully accounted for by the genes they share. Their shared experiences—experienced at the same age, since they were twins—of parental harmony or conflict, of parental togetherness or apartness, had no detectable effect.

When life at home is disrupted, the child’s behavior at home is of course disrupted, and so are the emotions associated with the home. These are the changes the researchers are seeing. If they want to find out how the child’s life outside the home is affected by the parents’ divorce, the researchers will have to collect their data outside the home, and if they want to do it right they will have to use unbiased observers—observers who are unaware of the child’s family situation. What the researchers will find under these conditions, judging from the behavioral genetic data I mentioned earlier, is that parental divorce has no lasting effects on the way children behave when they’re not at home, and no lasting effects on their personalities."

Just How Important Are Peers? - Judith Rich Harris

Pages 100-250:

"No circle is more vicious than the one having to do with intelligence. Children who may be only a little behind their peers to begin with tend to avoid doing those things that could have made them smarter. As a result they fall further and further behind. Meanwhile, the kids who started out a little ahead are doing push-ups with their brains.

Behavioral geneticists have found that the heritability of IQ increases across the lifespan—estimates for older adults are as high as .80, which seems to say that 80 percent of the variation in intelligence among the elderly can be chalked up to their genes.

The increase in the heritability of IQ over the lifespan is due mostly to indirect genetic effects—the effects of the effects of the genes. What starts out as a small difference can balloon into a large one.

Developmentalist Thomas Kindermann studied some cliques in a fifth-grade classroom and found that children who belonged to the same cliques had similar attitudes toward schoolwork. Well, that’s not too surprising: the kids probably belonged to the same cliques because they had similar attitudes. But in fifth grade, cliques haven’t solidified yet—children can still move into them or out of them. This gave Kindermann the opportunity to study what happens when a kid moves into or out of a clique of academic achievers. What he found was that children’s attitudes toward schoolwork change if they switch from one group to another over the course of a school year. If a child moves into a clique of academic achievers, her attitude toward schoolwork is likely to improve; if she moves out of it, her attitude gets worse. Kindermann’s findings demonstrate that children’s attitudes toward achievement are influenced by their group affiliations. The changes he measured could not have been due to changes in the children’s intelligence or in their parents’ attitudes, since neither is likely to reverse direction over the course of a single school year.

Now you can see why ability grouping (or “tracking”) has the effects it does. When teachers divide up children into good readers and not-so-good ones, the good readers tend to get better and the not-so-good ones to get worse. A group contrast effect at work. The two groups develop different group norms—different behaviors, different attitudes.

Attitudes such as those that I’ve posited for the not-so-good reading group—that reading is unimportant, that school sucks—have effects that compound themselves over the years. Being a poor reader may cause a child to categorize himself with the poorer students in the class even if the teacher doesn’t formally acknowledge such groups. The child then adapts to the norms of that group and takes on its attitudes, and the attitudes are likely to be anti-school and anti-reading. The consequences are harmful and they are cumulative. Group contrast effects between quick learners and slow ones result in the slow learners adopting norms that make them dumber—or, more precisely, norms that cause them to avoid doing things that might have made them smarter.

African-American students, for example, who as a group perform less well in school than Americans of European or Asian descent, do not have lower self-esteem than children in other ethnic groups. Forget what you may have thought or read on this subject: on average, the self-esteem of young African Americans is no lower than that of young European Americans. Self-esteem is a function of status within the group. People judge themselves on the basis of how they compare with the other members of their own social category.

An argument for ZERO low IQ delinquents in classrooms:

With no group in the classroom adopting an anti-school, anti-intellectual attitude—with every kid working at maximum capacity—the teacher can go vroooming ahead.

Most programs like Head Start have only temporary effects on the children they serve and some have no measurable effects at all. Interestingly enough, the ones that have no measurable effects at all tend to be those that try to change the parents’ behavior. Programs that rely on visits by professionals to the children’s homes can produce changes in the parents’ behavior—a significant reduction in child abuse, for example. But they have no noticeable effect on how the children behave when they are not at home or on how well they do in school. The programs that get the parents involved produce no better results than the ones that leave the parents out.26 This is just what group socialization theory would predict.

Bilingual programs have been, in the words of one knowledgeable critic, “a dismal failure.”33 Group socialization theory can explain why these programs fail. They fail because they create a group of children with different norms—norms that permit them not to speak English, or not to speak it well. The fact that their teachers might speak grammatical, unaccented English is not enough.

Cultures are passed from the older generation to the younger one via the peer group, not at home. Children acquire the language and culture of their peers, not (if there’s a discrepancy) those of their parents or teachers.

Now you can see why kids who go to private schools and parochial schools do so well. These schools serve homogeneous populations: the children who go to them come from homes where the parents care enough about such things to actually pay for their kids’ education. Throw a few scholarship students into these schools, sink or swim, and they take on the behaviors and attitudes of their classmates. They take on their culture. Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Britain, was a scholarship student at a fancy private school. And now, perhaps, you can see why it might not work to send a large number of kids from low-income neighborhoods to a private or parochial school. They might form a group of their own and retain the attitudes and behaviors they brought with them to the school.

Programs designed to cure delinquents of their delinquency have been notably unsuccessful. Usually the re-arrest rate of the kids who have been through the flavor-of-the-month program is almost as high as that of the kids who haven’t. Sometimes it is higher. It is more likely to be higher when the delinquent kids are treated tough—sent to prison or to a modern version of what used to be called “reform school.”35 In view of what I’ve told you, I hope you can see why putting kids who’ve committed crimes together with a bunch of other kids who’ve committed crimes is not likely to disabuse them of the notion that committing crimes is normal.

In adulthood, when people attempt to exert conscious control over the way they behave or the way they talk, they find it difficult or impossible to change them. These largely unconscious, largely involuntary patterns of behavior are what this book is about. They are what I believe we get from our peers and not from our parents."