Bogus research paper about blacks “acting white”

A research paper (link to PDF file of paper) proclaims to show that school aged (grades 7 to 12) blacks who “act white” (interpreted as having high grades) have less popularity because they are shunned by their peers. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.)

While this sounds reasonable, after reading the paper it’s clear to me that the authors have completely misinterpreted their findings. I guess you can be stupid but still be a Harvard professor.

We learn from the paper that for white students at public schools, there is a positive correlation between grade point average and popularity, but it’s a weak correlation.

Blacks also experience a positive correlation between GPA and popularity. But when blacks comprise 20% or less of the students, then at those schools blacks with GPAs higher than 3.5 have a drop-off in same-race popularity. But there is no such drop-off in schools where blacks comprise 80% or more of the student body.

But I think that the really interesting finding, which was hardly discussed at all, is that at private schools the most popular white students have a GPA of 2.0, and as GPA increases above 2.0 popularity drops.

What’s going on here? My take is that high GPA has a negative effect on popularity for students of all races at all schools. High grades are not valued at all in the school aged community. But there exists another factor, one which causes both higher GPAs and higher popularity. This other factor is the student’s family’s social and economic status (SES). The kid from the high SES family is more popular because he or she has better clothes, better electronic gadgets, and just has an overall higher "class" that the other kids are able to sense.

The primary factor in how well a student does in school is the student’s genetic intelligence. Students from higher SES families, on average, inherit higher intelligence. Higher SES families also place a higher value on high grades, but I believe this to be weaker than the genetic influence.

At private schools, all the students likely come from a similar SES background, so at these schools GPA is not very highly correlated with SES. Removing the polluting SES background factor allows us to see the true nature of GPA and popularity. High GPA students are shunned.

I'm sure that if the researchers went back to their data and did a multiple regression analysis which includes both the kids' GPAs and their families' SES, then the real truth would emerge.

Going back to the issue of why blacks have a drop-off in same-race popularity when their GPA exceeds 3.5, it should be obvious that such high ability blacks have little in common with the other blacks in their school and more in common with the whites (who score a standard deviation higher in most measures of academic achievement), so they will have more white friends and less black friends. There is no evidence from the statistics in the paper that this has anything to do with being shunned for “acting white.”

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Other bloggers mentioning this paper: Scott Scheule, The Everlasting Phelps, Lockjaw.

Comments

[Phelps]

The problem that I have is that linking the popularity drop to dissimilar SES is that it directly contradicts my personal anecdotal experience. My experience is that the "acting white" problem is very real, but hasn't been effectively quanified before (and, if this paper doesn't do the job, still hasn't.)

[Half Sigma]

Actually, my hypothesis is that students of all races suffer in popularity when they get high grades. It's not unique to blacks.

It's the football players, not the nerds with high grades, who get the girls! In Happy Days, the cool guy was The Fonz who was a semi-delinquent.

I agree that this rampant anti-intellectualism is a bad thing, but it's bigger than just being a black issue. And it doesn't explain the black/white achievement gap.

[Michael H.]

Hi Half Sigma
Maybe Jewish girls think that smart guys are attractive. That would explain why the Ashkenazim Jews have higher IQs.

[Michael H.]

Hi Half Sigma
I agree that it makes no sense that white students would be more popular because they have higher grades. That's completely counterintuitive. My guess would be that for all groups, the popular students are the ones who put the most effort into social skills, and, if anything, this would be negatively correlated with the amount of effort that student puts into academics.

[Ervin Matthew]

The problem with this debate is that high academic achievement does not mandate low social status at all. Note Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998), Downey and Ainsworth-Darnell (2002), and Tyson et al. (2005), which indicate that this presumed drop in popularity actually is not demonstrable by the data. Furthermore, the hypothesis was first introduced by Fordham and Ogbu (1986) as an explanation for the black/white achievement gap. Neither quantitative nor qualitative data has highlighted any heightened reluctance to succeed academically based on fears of "acting white". Rather, as Tyson et al. discover, students are more likely to avoid rigorous courses out of concern that their GPAs will be lowered. Since the Acting White Hypothesis fails to establish any correlation between racialized ridicule (on those occasions when it is present) and withholding of effort or refusal to enroll in advanced courses, then this argument makes little sense at the moment.