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More Evidence of an Association between European Ancestry and g among African Americans: An Analysis of a Nationally Representative Sample of American Youth
Meng Hu
Published: 2022/03/01
Abstract
This report examines the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 data. Self-reported European ancestry among Black Americans is found to have a positive yet moderate correlation with cognitive ability. Of the 2935 screener-identified African Americans, 53 had self-reported ancestry from a specific European ethnicity. This group had an advantage of .41d over African Americans who did not report any European ancestry. Consistent with previous results, the effect of European ancestry exhibited a positive correlation with subtest g-loadings. The findings were corroborated by results from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which used genetically assessed ancestry. In both cases, African Americans with more European ancestry were overrepresented, by a factor of two, in the right tail of the cognitive distribution. Key Words: Ancestry, Cognitive ability, Race, African-American, USA
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