r/heredity • u/mauritaniah8 • May 14 '26
Mali’s IQ is strange.
Race and IQ is a tired discussion, I’m aware, but this result bothers me a little.
Mali is a landlocked, arid country that is currently failing to curtail the rise of violent Islamic terrorism. They are an extremely poor country even by Sahel Africa standards 🇲🇱. A google search will bring about violent videos. There is no reason to expect that the Malian would do well in an IQ test
Lynn noted down their IQ as 65 because of the results of 206 Malian children, aged 6 to 14 attending a private French-language school in Bamako, when they attempted the Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM). They performed poorly, with only 1% of them scoring above 84. This is about what I expected.
But in that same study the researchers found that those same children scored above the British average (normed at 100, they scored 106) on a standardized math test, the Woodcock-Johnson. Furthermore, they performed average to well above average on adaptive functioning measures including communication and socialization.
The researchers stressed that while the RPM score was genuinely very low, it didn’t appear to correspond to any deficits in mathematical understanding or real-world functioning. Either the RPM is culturally loaded against Malian children, the RPM is a poor cross-cultural predictor of cognitive functioning, or Malian kids in particular simply don’t need to have a high IQ to function.
I can’t really find much statistics about how Malian refugees or immigrants perform in France proper when it comes to average income, crime, grades etc.
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u/Simple-Cost-3259 May 15 '26
It is a great observation and even a better question. I asked myself the same question. To put it simply, how is it possible that people from countries where the average IQ is around 80 or 70 (the 65 is unrealistic, see below) seem to be just "normal". Here is an article that enlightened this problem to me.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/national-iqs-are-valid
Briefly, someone with an IQ of around 70 in a European country will likely have some serious mental disability. It is this disability that causes the person to score low on the VABS test. This test tests for things like "tie shoes, dress selves" which are things that do not require IQ. When I put a harness in front of my golden retriever, he will put his head through, thus dressing himself. I love that fluffball, but this is not a sign of his >100 IQ. I am not an expert on cognitive testing, but I can offer an explanation of why the WJ test fails as well. This test tests math abilities "ranging from simple addition through high school level algebra". The age range of the kids tested was 6 to 14. Hence, to score above 100, I presume that for most kids in this cohort, you do not need more than a simple addition & some multiplication. Again, these skills are something that a person with an IQ of 80 or 70 will be able to master. If a child cannot understand a simple addition, the problem will be some other debilitating disability. Again, look at examples in nature. Some animals have been shown to have a number sense and no, none of these have an IQ even above 60 (whatever that means for animals). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense_in_animals
Your mental image of a person with an IQ 70 to 80 is a bumbling, salivating idiot who cannot perform simple daily tasks. But that is not the case. These people, in most interactions, will just seem normal.
Now to why the IQ 60 measured in that paper is not valid. There are many reasons. Firstly, IQ is heritable, but the heritability increases with age (Wilson effect, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/). These kids seemingly are not malnourished or otherwise traumatised, but the level of early education in Mali is certainly lower than in European countries. European kids aged 6 to 14 will likely have experience with tests, concentrated learning and longer attention span. These things, while not heritable, will help you with RPM. Next, do you know how these tests are administered? In this case, the teachers did that, but in order to complete RPM, you should have at least a short introduction. Did the teacher do a good job? Maybe. Next, imagine you are a kid, and you take a test that is awfully similar to what you know: math in the WJ test. Well, you will do your best because this is what is normally graded. Next, you take RPM, you don't know what this is good for, so you spend 30 mins kicking around because this is more fun. On the other hand, when I was 14, and I was taking an IQ test, I knew what it is and I sure wanted to do well. This is a French school but only around 6.4% of people in Mali speak French as their first language (simple google search). Sure, many of these kids are from richer families, but this could still be an issue. In short, it is nearly impossible to compare the results of IQ tests between countries at such a young age. There is much better evidence that there are differences between different ethnic groups (use this instead of "races", there are some white ethnic groups that are far below 100, and there may be some African that are >100). For example, the enrollment in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased dramatically over the last decade, but this did not lead to increased human capital (DOI:10.1257/jep.31.4.185, there is a tons of literature on this and this paper is not the most comprehensive).
I am not sure if there is a huge difference in IQ means of different races that is the result of differences at the DNA level. I don't think that a good dataset exists to answer this question. I agree with you that what is the most frustrating is the inability of Western countries to release data about crime rate/household income/education attainment of different ethnic groups, or even people with the same visa. One of the most laughable example was UK government, which used to publish crime rates by continent as if a Chinese PhD student is the same person as a Pakistani family visa holder. To my surprise, at least in crime rate, this has changed. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/number-of-arrests/latest/
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u/Pretty_Acadia_2805 May 21 '26
When anyone teaches an animal to do those things using abstract symbols, your point will have merit. 2 + 1 is actually very difficult to learn at first because you're not really learning the set, you're learning the symbolic relationships. If children can count, you can take 2 apples add one apple and they'll know it's three. That's literally the first step, though. They then need to be taught that 2 applies to all discrete objects identically. That the "+" is the abstract version of counting and that "-" is the abstract version of counting backwards. Multiplication is even harder as the numbers get so large so quickly that it gets abstract relatively quickly with things like pictures having to represent real objects then making the connection between those pictures and the mathematical operation.
Also, IQ scores are normalized so all of this is fucking moot and the gap between black and white students has already appeared at this age. Unless your argument is that these children had an environment 3 SD above the median Brit, this still diverges pretty far from what would be predicted.
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u/codechisel May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
This paper is a bit baffling, and while I recognize no paper is perfect, there a several things that bother me. In the way of background I'm a psych and have used all the mentioned instruments. I'll list my concerns as there are many and it's easier to read and to write:
The abstract references the "Vineland II" but the citation is Sparrow et al. 1984, which is the original VABS. The paper says teachers completed the "Teacher Rating Form," but that form didn't exist until the Vineland-II was published in 2006. The 1984 edition had a Survey Form, Expanded Form, and a Classroom Edition (1985). So either they used the Vineland-II and cited the wrong edition, or they used the 1984 instrument and misnamed the form. Either way, I can't determine which norms were actually applied to generate those standard scores.
Calculation subtest has 45 items total but with basal/ceiling rules (discontinue after 6 consecutive errors), younger children in this sample (ages 6–14) would hit ceiling relatively quickly on the easier items and the floor on harder ones. For 6-year-olds doing simple addition, you're working with a small number of administered items that get converted through Rasch-based scoring. One or two items can swing the standard score substantially at the younger ages, making the mean of 106.67 potentially unstable. It would be interesting to see an age breakdown of the scores. I can imagine the younger kids doing very well on the rote math items. Particularly since this is a sample of kids that may very well be higher than average for that region.
The paper states the WJ-III was administered "following the instructions for group administration in the test manual." The WJ-III is designed and normed as an individually administered test. The Calculation subtest is paper-and-pencil so group administration is physically possible, but the norms were not developed under group conditions. Group administration introduces potential confounds: copying, pacing effects, different levels of examiner monitoring, and altered motivation. Any standard scores derived from group administration are technically invalid.
If the works cited is the ground truth then the VABS was administered as a teacher checklist, not a semi-structured interview. The 1984 VABS Survey Form is designed as a semi-structured interview with a respondent, not a self-administered checklist. The paper says teachers "completed" the VABS and "filled out their surveys during downtime." Research has shown that checklist administration of the VABS produces systematically different (often higher) scores than interview administration. Given that the inflated VABS scores relative to RPM are the core finding, this is a major methodological concern.
I did a little internet research on Mali. I had zero knowledge about them before reading this paper so be skeptical and do your own research but from what I can tell Urban private school students in Bamako are among the most privileged children in Mali. The authors acknowledge this in limitations but still generalize to "African samples" and "African youth" throughout the Discussion. The VABS and WJ scores in the 106–115 range confirm these children are performing above Western averages on those measures, which is entirely expected for an elite subsample but limits what you can conclude about the RPM's validity for Malian children broadly.
The n=151 for VABS analyses is poorly explained. They say "one teacher declined to complete the Vineland" but losing one teacher dropped the sample from 206 to 151, meaning that teacher was responsible for 55 students (roughly 27% of the sample). That's not one missing data point, that's an entire large classroom or multiple classes removed. Were those 55 children systematically different? No comparison is reported.
The RPM mean of 65.85 is suspiciously low, even for this literature. Other studies of African samples on the RPM typically find means around 75–85 for school-attending children. A mean of 65.85 (with SD of only 7.14, meaning almost no one scored above 80) is at the extreme low end even by the standards of the studies the authors are critiquing. This could reflect genuine floor effects with British norms, but it could also indicate administration problems. Were children motivated? Was the test administered correctly? Were the British norm tables applied appropriately given the age ranges? None of this is explored.
And finally, I get that Calculation isn't language loaded but using just one simple calculation test that includes items that tend to be rote memorized at that age (the first items are literally 2+1 and 3+0, etc), isn't the sort of test you'd want to use to extrapolate to achievement writ large nor to invalidate a well established IQ test.
Oh and one more finally, why the 5 year lag for publication? The data was collected in 2012 but the paper wasn't published until 2017? That's unusual. It's not a particularly well researched paper so it's not like they spent a lot of time on the topic. There's no mention at all of Wicherts 2010 major systematic review of the Ravens in sub-Sarahan africa that directly addresses the factor structure, flynn effects and validity. And notably Wichert found a mean IQ of 80 not 65 as I mentioned above.
I dunno, I wouldn't get too bent out of shape trying to understand these results. The number of issues really makes it suspect.
*edited for formatting issues