The cultural-distance perspective: an exploratory analysis of its effect on learning and intelligence

The stance of the present investigation is an amalgamation of the environmental, historical, and social-psychological points of view with the addition of current knowledge in rhw fields of socio-biology, clinical and developmental psychology. This view, the Cultural-Distance Approach, briefly stated is that a sub-culture's distance from the major culture, on which test questions of a test are based and validated, will determine that sub-culture’s group sub-score pattern in relation to the sub-score pattern of the norming population. Therefore minority member performance on tests based and validated on the major culture (or even validated according to percentage representation of all sub-cultures in the supra-culture) will show characteristic patterns of group responding which are different from those of the norming sample. These response patterns are indications of what is salient to each minority sub-culture on the tests and within the major culture, and what is not. This paper is an examination of some of the socio-cultural factors which may lead to group performance differences on IQ tests and an attempt to determine empirically if the Cultural-Distance approach is valid in its analysis of test bias. The results suggest that although Blacks and Whites perform equally on learning tasks at either the Level I or Level II dichotomy of intellectual abilities, performance on standardized tests of IQ do not adequately reflect this equality of performance, possibly because of the loading of cultural-bias in the latter measures.