A prominent U.S. educational psychologist who has made important contributions to the study of intelligence from his graduate student days to the present. He maintained in an article published in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969 that there is an hereditary difference in the average Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of U.S. whites and blacks that blacks are of inferior intelligence on average. He has researched this subject ever since, and though his thesis is hotly contested, has continued to insist on the validity and applicability of his Endings. In 1979 Jensen rein¬ forced his earlier article with the book Bias in Mental Testing (Free Press). Jensen extends his intelligence scale to include every form of living being from amoeba to man and even posits that higher extraterrestrial intelligence is in his hierarchy.
Jensen joins a long line of intelligence measurers Francis Galton, Alfred Binet, and Sir Cyril Burt and picks up where they left off. Their shared and evolving belief is that intelligence can be measured on a simple unidimensional scale and that it is both a measure and a predictor of performance. In the development of intelligence testing, it became apparent that people perform differently in different areas artistic, mathematical, literary and so specific tests were devised. Jensen believes that from these different measures, a general measure, for which the symbol g is adopted, can be derived. This is overriding and universal: general intelligence, which can be measured and used as a scale on which to rank humans and groups of humans. Jensen extends his theory to include life forms that are supposedly less or greater than human.