There is no such thing as culture-free intelligence
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Updated: Aug 29, 2025

Problem-Solving Before Instruction PS-I: A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities
Published on: September 11, 2021
1Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. lupyan@wisc.edu; http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu.
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.
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