Gli italiani del sud sono meno intelligenti degli italiani del nord? Una replica a Lynn

An article by Richard Lynn was published recently in the journal Intelligence. In this article Lynn claimed that the lower average income of Italians living in the southern part of Italy was due to southern Italians having lower intelligence than northern Italians. Lynn based this claim on regional differences in results obtained for students performance on scholastic tests of achievement in language, mathematics and science in the OECD PISA 2006 study (OECD, 2007). In the present article we have identified serious errors in the data analyses carried out by Lynn. In addition, we describe new data, first reported in the INVALSI 2005 study (Caputo, 2005), that contradicts the data on which Lynn’s claims are based. The INVALSI data show that southern Italian students, within a certain age range, perform better on tests of scholastic achievement than northern Italian students. This reversal of the North-South performance gradient cannot be attributed to genetically determined IQ differences since relative differences in regional IQ could not alter as a function of age. These apparently conflicting results can be attributed to the fact that Lynn’s claims concerning IQ are based on tests of scholastic achievement, rather than actual IQ tests. This is the most fundamental flaw in Lynn’s report since it is well known in the field of intelligence research that environmental factors have a strong influence on achievement test performance whereas in the case of IQ tests everything possible must be done to reduce environmental influence In conclusion, Lynn’s article is flawed at every level with many data processing and analysis errors and fatal conceptual and procedural errors His report does not support his claim that southern Italians have lower IQs than northern Italians.