Saturday, August 24, 2019

You've got two kinds of people (or perhaps four)

Richard Lynn's new book Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality makes a convincing case that blacks and American Indians score high on exploitativeness (my term) while Asians tend to be the opposite--let's call this "fairness."  Whites are closer to Asians, while Hispanics are what you would expect as a hybrid of white and Native American.

People who accept human biodiversity (HBD) tend to focus on general intelligence, and for good reason: it is very important for individuals, societies, and for all of humanity.  But let me also stress the importance of this exploitativeness-fairness continuum.  Your life will be better if you deal with people who are smart and fair rather than cunning and exploitative.

So this leads to a typology of four kinds of people: 1) smart-fair, 2) smart-exploitative, 3) dumb-fair, and 4) dumb-exploitative.  I don't know about you, but I've known plenty of examples of each, but the situation tends to actually get simpler in the aggregate because at this level smart and fair tend to go together.  Asians as a group not only score low on psychopathy, they are also highly intelligent.  Blacks tend to be exploitative and unintelligent.  So at the macrolevel, there is a tendency toward two types: more contributive and less contributive people.

You might counter that history shows lots of Asian exploitativeness. The Rape of Nanking, etc., etc.  Humans treat each other horribly all the time, but my contention is that the average traits of people have an important impact on the quality of a society.  A key reason why Japan is a better country than Nigeria is that it has a higher prevalence of intelligent, fair people.

1 comment:

  1. The DSM doesn't have "psychopath" or "socipath" but does have "antisocial personality disorder". A more descriptive terminological axis may be "group integral vs group dis-integral", where "group integral" would entail in-group integrity.

    "Fair" is reasonably reserved for "just" dispute processing.

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