23 Facts About Arthur Jensen

Arthur Robert Jensen was an American psychologist and writer.

Arthur Jensen was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Arthur Jensen was a major proponent of the hereditarian position in the nature and nurture debate, the position that genetics play a significant role in behavioral traits, such as intelligence and personality.

Arthur Jensen was the author of over 400 scientific papers published in refereed journals and sat on the editorial boards of the scientific journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences.

Arthur Jensen was controversial, largely for his conclusions regarding the causes of race-based differences in IQ.

Arthur Jensen concentrated on the learning difficulties of culturally disadvantaged students.

Arthur Jensen had a lifelong interest in classical music and was, early in his life, attracted by the idea of becoming a conductor himself.

Arthur Jensen was deeply interested in the life and example of Gandhi, producing an unpublished book-length manuscript on his life.

Later, Arthur Jensen was an important advocate in the mainstream acceptance of the general factor of intelligence, a concept which was essentially synonymous with his Level II conceptual learning.

Arthur Jensen claimed, on the basis of his research, that general cognitive ability is essentially an inherited trait, determined predominantly by genetic factors rather than by environmental conditions.

Arthur Jensen contended that while associative learning, or memorizing ability, is equally distributed among the races, conceptual learning, or synthesizing ability, occurs with significantly greater frequency in some races than in others.

Arthur Jensen was among the most frequent contributors to the German journal Neue Anthropologie, a publication founded by the neo-Nazi Jurgen Rieger, and served alongside Rieger on this journal's editorial board.

Arthur Jensen received $1.1 million from the Pioneer Fund, an organization frequently described as racist and white supremacist in nature.

The fund contributed a total of $3.5 million to researchers cited in The Bell Curve's most controversial chapter "that suggests some races are naturally smarter than others" with Arthur Jensen's works being cited twenty-three times in the book's bibliography.

Arthur Jensen died on October 22,2012, at his home in Kelseyville, California, at age 89.

Psychologist Sandra Scarr wrote in the journal Intelligence in 1998 that Arthur Jensen possessed an "uncompromising personal integrity" and set the standard for "honest psychological science".

In 1980 Arthur Jensen published a book in defense of the tests used to measure mental abilities, titled Bias in Mental Testing.

Lisa Suzuki and Joshua Aronson of New York University wrote that Arthur Jensen had largely ignored evidence which failed to support his position that IQ test score gaps represent genetic racial differences.

Gould criticizes Arthur Jensen's sources including his use of Catharine Cox's 1926 Genetic Studies of Genius, which examines historiometrically the IQs of historic intellectuals after their deaths.

Arthur Jensen published a summary of the book the same year which was a target article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences to which 27 commentaries were printed along with the author's reply.

Arthur Jensen argues mental chronometry represents a true natural science of mental ability, which is in contrast to IQ, which merely represents an interval scale and thus possesses no true ratio scale properties.

Arthur Jensen was on the editorial board of Intelligence when these reviews were published.

In 2003, Arthur Jensen was awarded the Kistler Prize for original contributions to the understanding of the connection between the human genome and human society.