The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve

Cover of the first edition
Author	Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray
Subject	Intelligence
Published	1994 (Free Press)
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	845
ISBN
OCLC	30913157
Dewey Decimal	305.9/082 20
LC Class	BF431 .H398 1994

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status, or education level. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence. The book was controversial, especially where the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed the implications of those differences.

Shortly after publication, many people rallied both in criticism and defense of the book. A number of critical texts were written in response to the work.

The Bell Curve, published in 1994, was written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to explain the variations in intelligence in American society, warn of some consequences of that variation, and propose social policies for mitigating the worst of the consequences. The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in a population.

Many of the arguments put forth by the authors were controversial, ranging from the relationships between low measured intelligence and anti-social behavior, to a genetic component of the low observed test scores for African-American (compared to whites). The book was heavily publicized as it was released, just after the death of Herrnstein. In the first several months of its release, 400,000 copies of the book were sold around the world. The Bell Curve argues that:

The book's argument is based on the authors' analysis of data compiled in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), a study conducted by the United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics tracking thousands of Americans starting in the 1980s. All participants in the NLSY took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a battery of ten tests taken by all who apply for entry into the armed services. (Some had taken an IQ test in high school, and the median correlation of the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores and those IQ test scores was .81). Participants were later evaluated for social and economic outcomes. In general, IQ/AFQT scores were a better predictor of life outcomes than social class background. Similarly, after statistically controlling for differences in IQ, many outcome differences between racial-ethnic groups disappeared.