Otto Klineberg

Otto Klineberg, a Canadian-born American psychologist, was trained as a psychiatrist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, before he earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University in 1927. There he became a research associate of Franz Boas, and his first fieldwork was among Indian mehr anzeigen children. Klineberg was very much an international social scientist, both substantively through his work on race and international tensions and organizationally through his long association with UNESCO. He helped organize the World Federation for Mental Health and later served as its president, and he was an unofficial ambassador for the social sciences in many countries. But probably his most enduring research is contained in Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (1935), which demonstrated through carefully controlled studies that the I.Q. scores of southern African American children improved when they moved to the North, and hence that environment, not race, is the determinant of lower I.Q. scores among African American children. This research was introduced to the Supreme Court in the deliberations that led to the famous 1954 decision on school desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education. (Bowker Author Biography) weniger anzeigen