The moralistic fallacy

Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic Fallacy

Despite repeated claims to the contrary, there has been no narrowing of the 15to 18-point average IQ difference between Blacks and Whites (1.1 standard deviations); the differences are as large today as they were when first measured nearly 100 years ago. They, and the concomitant difference in standard of living, level of education, and related phenomena, lie in factors that are largely heritab...

James Watson's most inconvenient truth: race realism and the moralistic fallacy.

Recent editorials in this journal have defended the right of eminent biologist James Watson to raise the unpopular hypothesis that people of sub-Saharan African descent score lower, on average, than people of European or East Asian descent on tests of general intelligence. As those editorials imply, the scientific evidence is substantial in showing a genetic contribution to these differences. T...

The “banzhaf Fallacy” Fallacy

Audience Effects on Moralistic Punishment

Punishment has been proposed as being central to two distinctively human phenomena: cooperation in groups and morality. Here we investigate moralistic punishment, a behavior designed to inflict costs on another individual in response to a perceived moral violation. There is currently no consensus on which evolutionary model best accounts for this phenomenon in humans. Models that turn on indivi...

The Risk-return Fallacy

We assume that in the world of business, higher risks are only taken when rewarded with higher expected returns. This supposition has been confirmed empirically using capital market data. However, accounting measures have yielded puzzling results: using the mean and variance of ROE as measures of return and risk, respectively, Bowman (1980) and other researchers find a negative relationship bet...