
Is your personality fixed, or can you change who you are? - BDGC
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/481859662/invisibilia-is-your-personality-fixed-or-can-you-change-who-you-are
======
Pharylon
For most of my life, I was the classic "shy until you get to know him" kind of
guy. I thought that's just how I was. But then ten years ago, I started
LARPing, and I decided to play an extrovert - someone who could walk up to a
stranger and strike up a conversation.

So I did. And even though I was nervous as hell, I did it during the game, in
the guise of my character. For a couple years, I was really into the game. It
was my life every weekend. I probably spent more social time pretending to be
someone else than I did being myself.

And a funny thing happened... I became that guy for real. It's not just that
I'm no longer nervous, I genuinely enjoy talking to new people. I barely
recognize my old introverted self.

So I believe this. Who we are is just a snapshot in time.

~~~
specialist
How you talk changes how you think. That's why propaganda works. In fact, most
people don't even realize they've changed.

I've purposefully changed my personality (behavior?) twice, about to start my
thrice effort.

The first time, nor longer wanting to be angry, and having run out of ideas, I
decided to pretend to be happy. I had read that you can't unlearn a habit,
only replace it. So I played chipper all the time. When asked how I was, I'd
say something like "Phenomenal!" Initially, it was sarcastic.

Then one day I woke up and I felt phenomenal. I was gobsmacked. I didn't even
know the change was taking place. The transition took about three years.

The second time, I ran for office. Deluding oneself is part of the job. A bit
like how sales people can convince themselves the next customer will say
"Yes!"

This book came out after my first change. It jives with my experience.

    
    
      How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
      https://amzn.com/078796378X

~~~
danieltillett
I did something similar. I was going through a hard time personally and I
found myself being negative about everything. I decided to start a "negativity
jar" into which I put 20c everytime I said something negative. I promised my
suffering work colleagues I would spend the proceeds taking out to dinner at
the end of the year. It really work well and a few hundred dollars later I was
out of my reflexive negativity rut. The only downside was the resident junkie
at work stole all the money - at least everyone was understanding on why they
missed out on dinner.

~~~
dasil003
Whoah hold on, are you saying you had an actual known heroin addict at your
place of work long enough for you to deposit hundreds of dollars in quarter
increments? The casual delivery of this left turn is comedy gold.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes. When I started he was on methadone, but I guess like a lot of addicts he
relapsed. The temptation of all that easy money must have been too great.

I have in my mind him paying his dealer in 20c pieces (I live in Australia so
we don't have quarters). 20c pieces are actually quite large (11.2g) so a
couple hundred dollars in 20c pieces is 11.2 x 5 x 200 = ~11kg (25 lbs). This
was not some easy theft!

~~~
dasil003
Ah, Australia, that explains it, I've live in both the US / UK, so I'm used to
25c or 20p, but not 20c.

------
Animats
Some military training is designed to change personalities. The USMC does this
deliberately.[1] They use sleep and food deprivation. This is _not_ done to
"toughen up" recruits; it's done to change their value system. Gen. Krulak,
when Commandant, devised this in the 1990s.[2]

Krulak himself says it best:

 _" We cannot anticipate and train Marines for each situation they may face.
All Marines must, therefore, possess a moral consistency to serve as their
compass. Making the right ethical decisions must be a thing of habit. This is
why we created the Transformation process where we recruit bold, capable, and
intelligent young men and women of character and recast them in the white hot
crucible of recruit training. We immerse them in the highest ideals of
American society -- the time honored values of our Corps -- honor, courage,
and commitment. We place these values on them in a framework of high
institutional standards to which they are held strictly accountable. We
further foster the acceptance of these values through the unit cohesion and
sustainment phases."_

 _" Just as we expect a Marine to employ his weapon under combat duress, we
must likewise demand that he employ his mind. Marines need to be comfortable
with using their intuition under highly stressful circumstances. In short, we
must make intuitive decisionmaking an instinct, and this can only be
accomplished through repetition. Training programs and curricula should
routinely make our Marines decide a course of action under cold, wet, noisy
conditions while they are tired and hungry and as an instructor continually
asks them "what are you going to do now, Marine?!!"_

[1]
[http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?46546-%91Tu...](http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?46546-%91Turning-
the-heat-up%92-on-the-Crucible) [2]
[http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cultivating_intuiti...](http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cultivating_intuitive_d-m.htm)

~~~
secfirstmd
I can see that. Myself and a number of my friends would probably have been
considered to be quite shy and introverted when joining the military. But it
really brings out the social aspect in you, you spend so much time just alone
talking and joking with your friends (far more than you ever would in civilian
life - e.g on guard duty or something, it's often your only source of moral).
Often the old sweats called it the art of conversation, we call it the art of
"shite talking". It's strange because every military persons friendships with
each other that are completely different to civilians and I don't just mean
because of the nature of the role. In civilian life, if you don't see a friend
for 5 years, the dynamic of meeting them again is often quite distant. In the
military it's like they never left and you just pick up from where you left
off. I can say that I feel closer to some people who I went through basic
training to than people I've known since school - you learn so much more about
each other.

Similarly extreme extroverts tend to be toned down a bit in military training,
til they reach about the same level.

Myself and any one of those introverts would now probably be regarded as
fairly confident extroverts compared to civilians, and so much of that is
thanks to military training.

------
aab0
Kind of weaksauce. One review 50 years ago doesn't override all the work done
since, particularly on OCEAN, showing high longitudinal stability of
personality traits when measurement error is considered. (What's more
interesting is the behavioral genetics of that; it seems that this stability
is at least in part due to the stability of genetic influences on
personality.) It's also kind of silly to point to prisoners as an example:
violent crime always declines with age.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Just because personality doesn't frequently change doesn't mean it is
impossible, it is just really hard. If it happens with one in a few hundred
individuals, most researchers are going to view it as an anomalous outlier and
discard or ignore it. I can assure you with complete confidence that your
personality is incredibly malleable.

I could go on at length about my personal experience (which is quite dramatic)
but since I enjoy my privacy I'll just pass along a funny story about massive
personality change induced by brain injury:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2130900/Chris-
Birc...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2130900/Chris-Birch-Rugby-
player-woke-gay-stroke-says-hes-happiest-hes-been.html)

~~~
api_or_ipa
> Just because personality doesn't frequently change doesn't mean it is
> impossible, it is just really hard. If it happens with one in a few hundred
> individuals, most researchers are going to view it as an anomalous outlier
> and discard or ignore it.

I view this as a failure of modern statistically driven social sciences. Just
because it happens to only a few in a hundred people, doesn't mean it's an
anomalous behaviour. People are messy. When put in differing circumstances,
people show amazing plasticity in their behaviour. And controlling for all
those social and biological pressures is very hard to do.

~~~
threatofrain
I think researchers have a clear distinction that populations are an
altogether different phenomena than individuals. This is something that the
public often confuses, as demonstrated when somebody rebuts a statement about
population attributes with a personal refutation. This is a failure to argue
on the same phenomena.

Researchers are also aware that personality changes population-wise with age,
and also that individuals also experience personality changes -- but generally
not in a medically interesting way in the sense of a reliable and precise
intervention to effect positive changes.

I'm also reminded of studies on the transferability of personality traits with
adopted children (no significant correlation! amazing! same correlation with
biological parents compared to those children raised by their biological
parents), or reared-apart monozygotic twin studies, or reared-apart dizygotic
twin studies, and so on. The collective portrait of many data points suggests
a set of stable biological factors to personality, as opposed to personal
experience.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Think of your personality a barren landscape, which starts out with very, very
minor depressions and irregularities. These depressions and irregularities
might so so small they're not even be perceptible to the average person
walking across it. Over many years, rain will erode these minor features into
gullies, and if conditions are right, you can even end up with canyons. The
course of a mighty river can be entirely determined by minor irregularities in
the starting landscape.

Of course, if you took a decent sized plow and cut a channel through the
landscape early enough, you could direct the development of the river to
exactly where you wanted it. If you wait too long, redirecting the river
becomes a major engineering task; involved, but still entirely doable.

~~~
threatofrain
I mentioned a few studies, but worded them poorly, but I wonder what you think
about the fact that there's no significant correlation in personality traits
between foster parents and their adopted children (fascinating, no?), and that
these children have the same correlation with their biological parents
regardless if they are raised in the same household or with foster parents.

Shouldn't the unique experience of an entirely different household have some
effect on personality?

~~~
CuriouslyC
Our genes do influence the development of brain structures that strongly
influence general happiness level, sociability, and a variety of other traits.
Under normal circumstances, the wiring of those neural structures tends to be
reinforced. For example, friends and family members might observe a loved one
who is not by nature sociable and say "you are an introvert" or "you are shy"
which is a reinforcing stimuli. When that person has heard this enough times,
whenever they behave in an unsocial manner, they will tend to explain it by
thinking "I'm shy/an introvert" thus perpetuating the neural structure. If
instead, sociability is treated as a skill, and correct behavior is reinforced
while incorrect behavior is punished, over time those neural structures will
be re-wired.

This pattern is observed all the time for tastes. We have genetically
predetermined preferences, but overwhelmingly what we end up liking is the
result of social conditioning.

~~~
mercer
That doesn't really seem to address the issue of adopted children though. If I
understand you correctly, the social environment (and conditioning) of the
children should override the biological aspects of their personality. Or at
the very least it should have a very significant effect.

It seems to me that certain aspects of a person are very malleable, taste
being one of them. But many other things apparently are not (IQ, or various
other measures of 'intelligence', if I recall correctly).

From my experience in the social sciences, we tend to underestimate the role
of genetics more often than not.

~~~
CuriouslyC
It does address the issue of adopted children - we as a culture have a fixed
mindset for things like introversion and intelligence, and genetics do
strongly influence our default level of both of those. Thus, adoptive parents
observe the child and say "you're an introvert" or "you're not clever" and the
default pattern is reinforced.

On the other hand, when a child displays an initial dislike for like Taylor
Swift, her friends might say "you're crazy, Taylor Swift is awesome."

It's all just neural networks being reinforced or inhibited, the primary
contribution of genetics is the default state of the network. In the case
"fixed" personality characteristics, our culture is to reinforce the default
networks, while for things we view as mutable, we have no qualms about
training away default behavior.

~~~
mike4ty4
Why should "introversion" be changed or punished, necessarily? Developing
intellect is something to be encouraged, but I don't understand the anti-
introversion bias in your post.

And I suspect that the genetics does also set a limit as to how far one can
bend, too. This too, will vary between persons.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I wonder where this comes from? A lot of our culture is based on stories about
people changing personality. [1]

Those stories have so much appeal and longevity _exactly_ because the
spectator can see someone like himself changing. The underlying motif is that
anyone can go from weakling to hero, under the right circumstances.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth)

~~~
mercer
I think what complicates this discussion is the meaning of 'personality'.
Someone here mentions 'taste', and you talk about weakling/hero. I'd never
have considered these part of personality.

I'd consider taste to be a cultural thing and rather changeable. And 'heroism'
strikes me as something that I'd call 'character' rather than 'personality'.

------
yngccc
Personality is deeply ingrained and hard to change but not impossible. Off the
top of my head things that can change personality include going to jail,
military service and long term unemployment.

~~~
JamesSwift
I noticed a shift in my personality pre-military vs post-military. Before the
military I was excessively patient, but now I find that I'm more irritable and
slightly less forgiving of others.

------
sixo
Supposedly people who speak multiple languages can have dramatically different
personalities in each.

~~~
tikhonj
Hah, I've found this in myself. It feels like I'm a bit more of a jerk in
Russian than in English—at least I'm more likely to let irritation show. I'm
less visibly irritable in English.

But it might also be a difference in contexts: I mostly speak Russian with my
immediate family and English with other people.

~~~
therein
I am definitely more outgoing, sociable and assertive in English but not so
much so in Turkish.

------
ldehaan
change is inevitable. I like to think of the different stages in my life as
other people, because those people were so different.

I maintain the same kind of drive I've always had, consuming every piece of
data I can get my hands on, but that consumption has changed me.

I remember clearly the first major change to another person I ever
experienced. it was after reading the giver when I was a child. I can't even
recall who I was before I read that book, but I know he was a lesser mortal
than I.

the next major change was after my parents split and I got a new abusive step
mother. before that I would cry at a whim, every time I watched fern gully I
cried, but after that woman I rarely showed emotion. I was hard and thought
hard thoughts, I was a total gangsta, a white suburban gangsta but after a
long time trying I finally got street cred. spent time in the kiddie can and
all that.

my next major change was actually in military school after gaining too much
street cred. something changed in me on the long drive through the desert of
Nevada to a large training camp called rite of passage. I kicked ass there, no
idea why, but I changed, and became a leader. moved up the ranks and got
posted to the cross country cycling team.

and that's where we come to the change that stuck for so many years. In ROP I
became captain of my cycling team and we got the opportunity to ride across
America. that ride changed me in so many ways. I used to think I couldn't
attain my dreams, now I was in a dream.

the next time I changed fundamentally was when I became a father. not in your
usual lets get married and have a family way, no, it was as unplanned and
crazy as you can get, but I still changed, stepped up to the plate and
reflected on my past lives and Knew I could do it.

now I'm an older man, and I am changing at a more observable pace, I can see
my views solidifying and it's a little scary, I don't want to be stuck in my
ways. but I am comforted by the fact that any day, I can change, at least for
now.

------
mendelsd
Personality is influenced by hormone levels, and hormone levels are an aspect
of health. Here's a specific example [1] which may be of particular interest
to those of a nervous disposition.

[1]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520819/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520819/)

~~~
cylinder
What should one do if they have long suspected their hormone levels are quite
low due to heredity and it adversely limits their energy levels and outlook?

~~~
mendelsd
I'm no expert but I'd suggest:

1) make a list of _all_ your chronic symptoms over time

2) speak to a doctor about your particular concerns re: hormone levels, and
get blood tests taken

3) if your doctor reckons, based on the results, that treatment is justified,
I guess you're on your way; if not:

4) study the literature - if you disagree with your doctor about your results,
you should be able to find literature that quantitatively supports your
position based on your test results and symptoms

5) if you can find supporting literature, ask your doctor for treatment (don't
be confrontational when dealing with your doctor, treat them as a resource and
a partner, and respect their opinion even if you disagree with them based on
what you've learned)

6) find another doctor if your doctor won't agree with a reasoned opinion

If you need help with this stuff, there may be practitioners out there more in
tune with chronic illness than your bog-standard GP. I'm partial to the
ancestral health movement and paleo diet therefore I'd look here: [1].

Finally, I'd recommend the work of Paul Jaminet - I found his book [2] and his
Retreat (which includes personalised health coaching based on blood test
results) [3] both to be incredibly helpful in dealing with my own long-term
health issues.

[1] [http://primaldocs.com/](http://primaldocs.com/)

[2] [http://perfecthealthdiet.com/buy-our-
book/](http://perfecthealthdiet.com/buy-our-book/)

[3] [http://perfecthealthdiet.com/perfect-health-
retreat/](http://perfecthealthdiet.com/perfect-health-retreat/)

~~~
cylinder
Thank you for taking the time to write this response, I appreciate it. I don't
want to write too much publicly for privacy reasons, but I did have a
blood/hormone test today, and I do have prior experience w/ this issue. I
think my issue is more with low neurotransmitter levels making me susceptible
to depression, although, there's a lot of psuedoscience on this topic.

~~~
mendelsd
You're welcome. Feel free to get in touch (I added an email address to my
profile). I am happy to share my experience and (rather limited) knowledge.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Does it go the other way? Are there people who spend their life as good (a
more or less model citizen) becoming bad? Perhaps not, because it seems more
natural for humans to want to contribute, so even criminals may have a voice
in them urging them to do better. But humans do have thoughts of envy, lust,
self-righteousness and unfairness that can whittle away the self control and
cause them to cross over and, let's say, murder someone in the first degree.

I'd propose that a complete set of research would learn that there are some
personality traits that are malleable and there are some that are not.
Moreover, those two sets would not be the same for everyone, and there is
likely a great deal of diversity.

~~~
coldtea
> _Are there people who spend their life as good (a more or less model
> citizen) becoming bad?_

Of course. You think all of the Nazi officials were rotten from their
childhood, teenage years, early career, etc?

Some were -- most not. They were "model citizens" as you say. It was the
circumstances and belief in Fuhrer etc. that led them to become bad, but after
some threshold we can say they were bad.

~~~
miopa
In this case, I'll argue that they didn't change. They continued being 'model
citizens', but the model became bad.

------
chongli
How do you define "personality"? Does the fact that you're capable of changing
not get included in that? Is the "new" personality the _true_ you? Or the old
one?

~~~
1stop
This is similar to the alternate reality counter proof: If alternate realities
exist, and we can get to them from this reality, then they are no longer an
alternate reality. If we cannot get to them, then they cannot "exist" as our
reality is a prerequisite for existence.

You can say the same for a changed personality :p

~~~
colordrops
That argument is getting hung up on semantics. It's like saying north and
south America are the same continent because they are connected. It is
implicitly choosing a very specific definition of reality amongst many
possible definitions.

~~~
chongli
Getting hung up on semantics is all anyone can manage when a concept is so
poorly defined as this one.

~~~
TeMPOraL
So screw that concept and talk about ones that are useful - ones that can
allow us to make predictions. Can a person who is now bigoted and prone to
violence become a Gandhi? I'd say yes, I've seen similar thing happen. Call it
"personality change" or call it something else, but the phenomenon seems to be
real.

------
gadders
I have always liked this quote:

“Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity and movement
and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies
within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he
wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of
good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say
this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be
implemented by deeds.” - Louis L'Amour

------
unabst
For the most part we are all unabstractable, and if anything, we should strive
to be.

What I means is, we can give ourselves names, but who we are is mostly a black
box. Any black swan event can change our definition, and the shock doctrine
also applies here, in that we are affected by spikes of greatest impressions,
not ongoing consistency.

For the most part, we are remembered for our best or worst, but are judged by
our last. So in the case of this article, if you commit a horrific crime, that
will be what people remember and define you by. And we can do everything in
our power to be judged with forgiveness based on our latest actions. But for
the most part, it's not until we do something more extreme (shocking) than
what has defined us so far that most of us will feel naturally inclined to
update our definitions.

But the key takeaway is that even if this is how we define one another, none
of it truly predicts what anyone will do next, good or evil, brilliant or
lame. Ultimately, we are all much like computer programs that must run their
course to know precisely if any of us will halt or not, which leaves
personality a mere impossible analysis, much in the spirit of Gödel's
incompleteness theorem. We are incomputable, and our inconsistency is what is
consistent. The only option is execution -- to let life run its course.

------
jokoon
Of course, until you know about the brain plasticity and how it decreases with
age. So it becomes more "fixed" with the years.

It's true, there is no such thing as personality. But then, why do recruiters
want to know about the "profile" of a candidate? What do they talk about when
they want someone who is "at harmony with the group"?

If we could really change as we liked, we would not talk about personality.
People will always carry a baggage of learned behaviors with them. The sum of
this is called personality. It can change of course, but in the "brave new
world" that we live in, the incentives to do so never appear.

------
afarrell
The question isn't "can you change who you are?", it is "How young do you have
to be who you are?"

I haven't thrown a temper tantrum in the middle of a grocery store in 22
years.

------
rdl
I used to be really bad about time/punctuality. Since doing a startup where
the tides were relevant, and missing a rendezvous by 10 minutes could mean a
12h wait (not just for me, but for a lot of other people), I made a serious
effort to be punctual -- the big change being focusing in advance on "we must
leave no later than X to be there on time" vs. "we need to be there at X+Y" is
90% of it.

------
peterkshultz
Carol Dweck's work on the growth mindset says that you can change who you are.

Her ideas have had a tremendous impact on various aspects of business, to the
point where she's covered in the Harvard Business Review:

[https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-
actuall...](https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-
means)

------
mswen
I have a scholar/hermit/coder persona and a leader/teacher/social persona. I
feel like I can switch pretty easily from one into the other depending on the
situation.

If I spend too many months pretty exclusively within one of those personas I
will start to feel the need to express the other.

------
dilemma
Fixed at what point in life? Age 12, 18, 21, 30, 50?

------
brimstedt
Im not native english, but:

"It has to do with Mischel's most famous experiment, called the marshmallow
test, which he first conducted in 1960. You can still find videos of it on
YouTube".

Doesn't it sound like they were put on YouTube in the 60s? :)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
No, it does not.

------
brokenmachine
I love the quote from _Fight Club_ , "If you wake up at a different time, in a
different place, could you wake up as a different person?"

------
known
You are a product of your environment.
[http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm](http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm)

------
rajanchandi
Looks like people here haven't examined MBTI. Your personality may not be
fixed but it takes up to 2 years to change it. 16personalities.com is a good
way to test your personality as being one of the 16 types. It takes 10 mins.

~~~
scribu
Myers Brigs tests are fun, but they're not much more scientifically valid than
your astrological sign.

See [http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-
personalit...](http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-
test-meaningless)

~~~
ymse
The tests are wildly inaccurate, and MBTI itself is not the full story of
cognition and personality, but I think there is enough evidence suggesting
that the cognitive functions as described by Jung[0] are very real.

The article you linked to uses lack of MBTI in psychology journals as an
argument against its validity, but its applications in the field are very
limited. You're more likely to find MBTI references in neuroscience journals
as there are appears to be clear correlations between type preferences and
brain activity patterns[1].

Even so, knowledge of a persons cognitive preferences just isn't very useful.
So the main application of MBTI is indeed "just for fun".

0:
[http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jung/types.htm](http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jung/types.htm)

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfhQTbcqmA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfhQTbcqmA)

~~~
tkxxx7
it's pretty useful for those who have a difficult time understanding and
getting along with people otherwise.

------
gbuk2013
"Who am I?" \- Zen koan.

------
theparanoid
TLDR; Prisoners become less violent over time.

This has less to do with personality and more with testosterone.

~~~
RIMR
I agree. This is exactly the interpretation one would have if they didn't read
the article...

------
superobserver
Short answer: no. Long answer: no.

The supposition that the personality is completely fixed or completely mutable
is simply false. There are fundamental constraints to how the personality can
be manifested. Histrionic personalities are perhaps those most inclined to
believe that their personality is truly self-determined, but they'd also be
mistaken.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Let me guess, you probably also believe that IQ is static, and people's
ability is chiefly dictated by their natural talent?

How are those beliefs working out for you?

~~~
mike4ty4
It seems you are interpreting what is said in black and white terms. He (she?)
said that personality is _neither_ completely _fixed_ _nor_ completely
_mutable_. Things are not either/XOR.

The same goes with IQ. I don't think any average person could ever train their
intelligence to be, say, John von Neumann. Thus it is not _completely_
mutable. He was a genetically superior specimen by every account and evidenced
such from a very young age. But a good 15-20 point boost, especially if we did
not train ourselves to our fullest before? Maybe. I used to process more
slowly, now I process faster, because I pushed to think quicker. Thus it is
not completely _fixed_, either. Definitely we can eradicate racial IQ gaps, I
believe (average Black-White IQ gap in the US is 15 points favoring Whites, by
the way.), Rushton et. al. be damned. If I remember right, in some places it
was actually done, thus proving its possibility. (Interesting tidbit the
racists seem not to address: Bhutan's and China's people are both “Mongoloid
Asian" race by racist theory – but Bhutan has IQ 85, China at 105, at least
using racists' own data sets. I wonder also what the IQ for rural China vs.
urban wealthy China looks like. I suspect the 105 number comes from having a
large proportion of the latter in the sample.)

