Some thirty-five years ago, I began my periodic visits to the field of psychology. Over time, I became uneasy about something that seemed both odd and crippling: the isolation of the study of intelligence from an awareness of the social context within which all human behavior occurs. Many psychologists are happy to infer the social consequences of what they learn about intelligence. But all the causal arrows tend to run one way: they do not infuse their study of intelligence with social awareness.

Over 50 years ago, C. Wright Mills (1959) published The Sociological Imagination. The sociological imagination is the ability to see people socially and take into account how they interact and influence each other. I will emphasize a facet of the sociological imagination: always asking what social behavior lies behind measurements and models. To illustrate what happens when social awareness recedes into the background, I will offer 14 examples.

The mystique of the brain

Students of intelligence look forward to the day when all cognitive behavior can be explained in terms of brain physiology. But if they become obsessed by that task, they forget that understanding brains is only part of understanding human intelligence. Jensen (2011) is worth quoting at some length.