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in the received wisdom regarding equality. This was most evident in the
political arena, where the civil rights movement and then the War on
Poverty raised Americans’ consciousness about the nature of the
inequalities in American society. But the changes in outlook ran deeper
and broader than politics. Assumptions about the very origins of social
problems changed profoundly. Nowhere was the shift more pervasive than
in the field of psychology.
Psychometricians of the 1930s had debated whether intelligence is almost
entirely produced by genes or whether the environment also plays a role.
By the 1960s and 1970s the point of contention had shifted dramatically. It had
somehow become controversial to claim, especially in public, that genes had any
effect at all on intelligence. Ironically, the evidence for genetic factors in
intelligence had greatly strengthened during the very period when the terms of
the debate were moving in the other direction.
In the psychological laboratory, there was a similar shift. Psychological
experimenters early in the century were, if anything, more likely to concentrate on
the inborn patterns of human and animal behavior than on how the learning
process could change behavior.” But from the 1930s to the 1960s, the leading
behaviorists, as they were called, and their students and disciples were almost all
specialists in learning theory. They filled the technical journals with the results of
learning experiments on rats and pigeons, the tacit implication being that genetic
endowment mattered so little that we could ignore the differences among
species, let alone among human individuals, and still discover enough about the
learning process to make it useful and relevant to human concerns.”9 There are,
indeed, aspects of the learning process that cross the lines between species, but
there are also enormous differences, and these differences were sometimes
ignored or minimized when psychologists explained their findings to the lay
public. B. E Skinner, at Harvard University, more than any other of the leading
behaviorists, broke out of the academic world into public attention with books that
applied the findings of laboratory research on animals to human society at large.
To those who held the behaviorist view, human potential was almost
perfectly malleable, shaped by the environment. The causes of human
deficiencies in intelligence-or parenting, or social behavior, or work
behavior-lay outside the individual. They were caused by flaws in
society. Sometimes capitalism was blamed, sometimes an uncaring or
incompetent
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government. Further, the causes of these deficiencies could be fixed by the right
public policies-redistribution of wealth, better education, better housing and
medical care. Once these environmental causes were removed, the deficiencies
should vanish as well, it was argued.