There is no such thing as culture-free intelligence

Abstract

Cognitive scientists and psychometricians are unaccustomed to thinking about culture, often treating their measures - memory, vocabulary, intelligence - as natural kinds. Relying on these measures, behavioral geneticists likewise seem to not wonder about their origin and cultural provenance. I argue that complex human traits - the sort we are most interested in measuring - are cultural products. We can measure them and their heritability, but to conclude that what we have measured is unbound to a time and place is hubris.