Since its inception in 1937, the Pioneer Fund has made grants to 64 different institutions, located in eight different countries, including to some of the most prominent universities in the world. The collected works of the Pioneer Fund’s distinguished list of grantees now totals over 200 books and 2,000 articles. The Pioneer fund has focused its resources on supporting cutting-edge research in:

•    Behavioral Genetics

•   Cognitive Ability

•      Social Demography

•    Group Differences – Sex, Social Class, and Race

Some of the most celebrated work by Pioneer grantees is summarized below.

Perhaps the best known of the Pioneer-supported studies is the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart, which reunited separated twins from around the world. Professor Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. and his team at the University of Minnesota flew in sixty-two pairs of genetically identical and forty-three pairs of fraternal twins, many of who had not been together since infancy, for a week of testing. The identical twins turned out to have an extraordinary number of common traits – including eccentricities – while the fraternal twins were not nearly as alike. On quantitative tests of IQ and personality, as well as attitudes such as religiosity and traditionalism, values, vocational aptitudes, and work preferences, identical twins separated at birth grew to be even more similar than did fraternal twins raised together. The results of this research showed that heredity plays a major role in almost every type of human behavior, accounting for 40 to 80% of individual differences. 

Cognitive Ability

One of the most cited psychologists of all time, Professor Hans J. Eysenck (1916-1997) of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, England, also made significant contributions to the study of the nature of intelligence. In 1967, Eysenck proposed that faster neural transmission was the basis of higher IQ scores. Eysenck studied the reaction time and EEG (electroencephalogram or brain waves) correlates of intelligence, which are summarized in his posthumously published book Intelligence: A New Look (1998).

Professor Emeritus Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley is today’s leading exponent of the position that all mental tasks, even simple reaction time tests, reflect a unitary general factor termed g. In studies conducted over two decades, factor analyzing a great number of data sets, using a variety of procedures, he has shown that this large general factor consistently emerges. Some intelligence tests, however, are better measures of g than others. Problem solving and reasoning are the best, or purest measures, while simpler cognitive processes, such as short-term memory still draw on g, but much less so. Jensen has established that the extent to which a test measures g is directly related to how much it is a product of nature, rather than nurture, and is correlated with anatomical and physiological measures such as brain waves.

Professor Philip A. Vernon and his collaborators at the University of Western Ontario used state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques and found that IQ scores are related to brain size. In one study, they reported the results for 40 adult females for whom the correlation between brain size and IQ was 0.40. In a subsequent study, this time of 68 adult males, they again found a 0.40 correlation between brain volume and IQ. They also showed that external head size measures such as head length, head width, and head circumference also correlated with IQ scores, but only about 0.20, and that brain size correlated more highly with the g component of IQ scores.

Professor Linda S. Gottfredson, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has investigated the role IQ plays in vocational aptitudes, health and longevity, and success. Gottfredson has demonstrated that intelligence is the single most important factor in the world of work. IQ predicts job performance better than any other single trait or circumstance, including education or specific aptitudes. While useful in all jobs, IQ becomes critical in the more complex and highly prestigious occupations. Gottfredson concluded that the occupational-prestige hierarchy is essentially a ranking of relative intellectual difficulty.

Professor Robert Gordon, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, examined the role IQ plays in crime and delinquency. His review of the literature and subsequent mathematical models demonstrate that people with lower levels of intelligence are at much greater risk to fall into a life of delinquency. More recently, he has demonstrated that social outcomes such as single parenthood, HIV infection, poverty, and belief in conspiracy rumors are also predicted by lower IQ. 

Social Demography

Professor Garrett Hardin of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is one of the world’s leading ecologists. He has extended his “Tragedy of the Commons” and “Living on a Lifeboat” metaphors to questions of environmental conservation, world population, and immigration, noting that individuals tend to maximize their own advantage even if this entails a net cost to society as a whole. Applying this same analysis to people who have a large number of children and thereby impose a cost on society that they themselves do not have to bear, Hardin has questioned the assumption of many demographers that as people become more affluent they automatically control their fertility. His mathematical models predict that economic and other aid is likely to lead to population increases, not decreases, so that even more aid will be required in the future.

Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster has studied the “social ecology of intelligence,” and the question of whether the intelligence level of a population helps determine its level of economic and cultural achievement. After calculating average IQs for 13 regions in the UK, which ranged from 102 in London, to 97 in Scotland, to 96 in Ireland, he found that per capita income and the number of Fellows of the Royal Society paralleled the mean IQs. Lynn then replicated these findings in a study of regional IQ differences in France. Most recently, he collaborated with Tatu Vanhannen, a political scientist in Finland, to publish IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002). They examined IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries and demonstrated that national differences in prosperity were best explained in terms of the intelligence levels of their respective populations. National IQ correlated more than 0.70 with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The second determinant of national wealth was whether a country had a market or a socialist economy. The widely credited factor of natural resources (such as oil), was only third.

Group Differences – Sex, Social Class, and Race

Sex differences. Professor Lloyd Humphreys of the University of Illinois has long been interested in mathematically gifted youth. In one study of approximately 100,000 tenth graders, he found that at the highly gifted end of the ability range, boys exceeded girls by a ratio of about 10 to 1, which he thought might help to explain the under-representation of women in math and science courses and careers.

Socioeconomic status. Professor Philip E. Vernon (1905-1987) of the University of London in England and the University of Calgary in Canada documented the substantial social class differences in IQ scores found in both the U.S. and the U.K. For example, the analysis of the World War I American military conscripts showed that the average IQ of children born in the professional class was 123, whereas those born to unskilled workers averaged 96. Vernon concluded that these social class differences have some genetic basis. He based this assessment on his review of the evidence that the intelligence of adopted children related more to the social class of their biological parents than to that of their adopting parents. Vernon suggested that social mobility allows those with higher intelligence to rise in the social hierarchy, while those with lower intelligence tend to fall.

Racial variation. Professor Audrey M. Shuey (1910-1977) of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia published the first comprehensive review of all the studies of average Black-White IQ differences in her book, The Testing of Negro Intelligence (1958, 2nd ed., 1966). The standard sourcebook on the topic, it demonstrated that the 15-point Black-White average IQ difference remained constant from the 1910s to the 1960s, across all regions of the U.S., as well as in Canada and Jamaica. It was also constant across all types of tests (verbal or non-verbal, and whether individual or group administered), age groups (primary school, high school, college, and adult), and specific samples (the gifted, the retarded, the delinquent, the military in World Wars I and II, as well as in the Korean and Viet man Wars).

Other Pioneer grantees significantly extended the scope of the debate about racial differences. Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley in his book The g Factor (1998) demonstrated that IQ tests mostly measure the general factor (g) of intelligence, are not culturally biased against minorities, and that even the simplest reaction time measures correlate with IQ and show average race differences. In fact, Jensen has shown that Black-White IQ differences are greatest on the most g-loaded, heritable subtests. Professors Richard Lynn and Philip E. Vernon found that, on average, Pacific Rim Asians in Asia and in the United States averaged higher on tests of mental ability than did Whites. In his book The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America (1982), Vernon also showed that East Asians tended to have a quieter temperament, a more stable family structure, and lower rates of violent crime.