The guise of the gentleman scholar: Criticism and conduct around J. Philippe Rushton’s general factor of personality

Abstract

I examine the reception of British-Canadian psychologist and race scientist J. Philippe Rushton’s late-career project: the general factor of personality (GFP). Proposed as a domain of personality at the apex of all other psychometric personality factors, Rushton argued that the GFP was an evolutionarily important feature of human development. Unlike Rushton’s research and public communications on race, sexuality, and intelligence, his GFP research did not receive the same ethical derision. Building on recent approaches to understanding the processes and persistence of psychological race science, I argue that Rushton’s GFP was largely critically assessed on its internal merits (like methodology) rather than on external ones considering social context. With recent work on the legacy keeping of intelligence researcher Arthur Jensen in mind, I explore the image and conduct of the gentleman scholar both as a way that Rushton is remembered and in relation to how certain types of criticism can allegedly be precluded from consideration. I conclude that limiting our criticism to the traditional boundaries of gentlemanly conduct is insufficient when scrutinizing psychological research, and that the wider context of Rushton’s bad science (badly constructed and bad for society) ought to have been a part of the GFP’s reception.

Eugenics, race science, and other poisonous gardens within which psychology grew as a discipline are often looked at in the reverse view: strictly regrettable mistakes or fringe notions of scholars in the grave. After the expansion of antiracist social activism and academic work, especially since 2020, disciplinary psychology has also reckoned with colonial, racist, and other hegemonic misuses of its social capital: such as the APA’s “apology to people of color” (American Psychological Association, 2021), special issues in major journals (e.g., Awad et al., 2024), article retractions, and statements from universities about the uncomfortable legacy of deceased faculty. Aside from the motivations of historical figures who pursued a racist form of psychological science to achieve, from their skewed perspective on human nature, an improved world, we are left to continue investigating other reasons for how scientific racism found a home within psychology. Even more pressingly, we must also look at the present-day landscape of research and researchers to see how such a past has shaped psychology today.

In a recent attempt to investigate the process of knowledge making and unmaking in psychology, Teo (2022b) applied the notion of a “White epistemology” to psychological science. In that paper, whiteness is not a literal racial category, and by extension White epistemology is a process of knowledge (and ignorance) production that any person or group of persons can knowingly or unknowingly adopt (p. 2). While “White” is used to reflect the racialized realities, alternative terminology could justifiably be used, such as dominant epistemology or Euro-American indigenous epistemology (see also Teo, 2022a). ¹ For Teo (2022b), labelling the knowledge-creation processes in psychological science as White epistemology is “justified when knowledge benefits one ethno-cultural group to the detriment of another” (p. 2). Teo (2022b) builds on Hans Reichenbach’s old distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Following Teo, the context of justification has to do with internal, methodological logic while the context of discovery contains the external influences (such as a scientist’s psychology or culture) on the formation of ideas, theorizations, and speculations. Teo (2022b) adds two other components of research: the contexts of interpretation and of translation (pp. 3–4). This expansion is in keeping with Elliott’s (2017) synthesis of more contemporary philosophical work indicating the interwovenness of values and all aspects of scientific practice, from choosing topics and models to decisions about communication (p. 165). He views values, whether beneficial or harmful, as “essential and unavoidable” in scientific reasoning (Elliott, 2017, p. 8). For Teo (2022b), a White epistemology attenuates contexts other than that of justification. An extreme emphasis on methodological concerns when judging the value of knowledge is a well-known marker of scientific psychology (Bakan, 1967; Danziger, 1985; Gao, 2014).

Other recent analyses of race science in psychology have also focused on the external—specifically communal aspects of researchers—framing the work as community projects with tentpole charismatic figures (Dasgupta et al., 2022; Winston, 2020b). In this article, with the framings of expected boundaries among communities of researchers, I explore the British-Canadian race and trait psychologist J. Philippe Rushton. ² Within the historiography of scientific racism, Rushton is a widely recognized flashpoint in the 1990s controversies over race and intelligence. However, this analysis will focus on a less controversial topic within Rushton’s later career: his and his colleagues’ work on the general factor of personality (GFP).

The GFP is a psychological concept that represents all aspects of a human’s personality. The language of this concept stems from the psychometric tradition of trait psychology that has long made extensive use of factor analytic and related methods in discovering/creating taxonomies of intelligence/ability, personality, and other psychological concepts. A different kind of controversy, bounded within the appropriate bounds of the context of justification, ensued during the reception of GFP research. Crucially, what was missing but what should have been part of the discussion around the GFP are the basic facts about the contexts of discovery: the external sources of knowledge deemed out of bounds. In addition to the partialness of White epistemology and the civilizing legacies of charismatic, controversial figures within communal projects of race science, I offer the imago of the gentleman scholar to understand the processes of reception, critique, and especially remembrance, in the case of Rushton and the GFP.

Rushton

J. Philippe Rushton was a British-Canadian race psychologist who spent most of his career at what was then called the University of Western Ontario. Born in England in late 1943, his “small-business-oriented family” emigrated to Apartheid-era South Africa in 1948 due to the “socialist” government nationalizing industries at home (Nyborg, 2013a, p. 206). After a family detour in Canada and having been impressed by the writings of Hans Eysenck while still a teenager, he returned to England and earned a PhD in social psychology at the London School of Economics in 1973—ultimately finding academic work back in Canada (p. 207). Seemingly doing uncontroversial research on altruism and other topics, Rushton did not garner notoriety until (in his view) a presentation on his application of the evolutionary r/K selection theory to racialized human differences given at a 1989 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; Rushton, 1989a). ³

Rushton’s sociobiology-influenced work looked at psychological differences among the arbitrary racial groups sometimes labelled “Caucasoids,” “Mongoloids,” and “Negroids” (e.g., Rushton, 1985). The work of Rushton and others repackaged long-standing stereotypes of the hypersexual and criminal Black male. As historian of race psychology Graham Richards put it, Rushton’s research presented a “kind of Goldilocks story,” with the “Caucasoid” group achieving a balance in brain size, genitalia size, and reproductive strategies (Richards, 2012, p. 333—see also pp. 425–428 for a precise critique of Rushton’s oft-reproduced table of racial rankings). Rushton’s 1989 AAAS conference talk gained negative public attention. According to Rushton: “social activist groups organized sit-ins and demonstrations” insinuating his support of South African Apartheid; many of his colleagues tried to avoid speaking to him, “averting their eyes as they passed in the hall” (Rushton, 1989a); four of his graduate students found new advisors; he was bought out of being a continuing co-author on an introductory psychology textbook series; and the Ontario Provincial Police was investigating him (Rushton, 1989a). Locally, several members of the London, Ontario community had already become suspicious of the university’s department of psychology, given race psychologist Arthur Jensen’s then recent visit and the renewed interest in and popularity of his work (Gray, 1991, pp. 12–13).

Criticisms of Rushton’s evolutionary framed race differences research ranged from fellow psychologists with expertise in developmental and biological psychology (e.g., Weizmann et al., 1990; Zuckerman & Brody, 1988), to later vivisections of Rushton’s ideas by biologists and anthropologists (e.g., Graves, 2002; Lieberman, 2001). All to say that, in the case of Rushton’s foray into an evolutionary psychology of races, various scientists and scholars took no issue in rejecting his ideas as void of scientific meaning and ethical responsibility.

In 1989, Rushton agreed to participate in a debate with well-known Canadian geneticist, broadcaster, and activist David Suzuki (CBC, 1989). Their encounter, organized by the University of Western Ontario’s student council, was held in front of a crowd of 2,000, and aired live on television and radio for 2 hours. Suzuki viewed Rushton’s work as emblematic of a bygone era of science, stating “This is not science” (Gray, 1991, pp. 42–44). By the time Rushton agreed to appear on The Geraldo Rivera Show—as Rushton recalled, alongside others like Stanford scientist and eugenicist William Shockley and noted anti-eugenicist psychologist and behavior geneticist Jerry Hirsch (Rushton, 1989a)—colleagues were becoming critical of his public pronouncements. Five Behavior Genetics Association officers wrote an open letter to their membership about Rushton’s “dubious” theories that only “fuel the fires of prejudice” (Behavioral Genetics Association Officers, 1989). Rushton felt this was incongruous with their respectable, hardnosed reputation: “One expects it from ‘social activists’ and ‘social anthropologists’ but not from those supposedly committed to scientific values of truth above those of ‘compassion’ and ‘social justice’ and other catch-phrases often used nowadays” (Rushton, 1989a, p. 4). In the era of Herrnstein and Murray’s (1996) incendiary book The Bell Curve, which made use of Rushton’s research, and perhaps also due to Richard Herrnstein’s untimely death, the press often turned to Rushton as the scientific defender of race science (Panofsky, 2014, pp. 2–4). Any more recent attempts at softening or aggrandizing Rushton’s image cannot change the facts of Rushton’s intellectual and financial connections to White supremacist and eugenicist organizations—whether that be the Pioneer Fund, or Jared Taylor and American Renaissance, or former KKK grand wizard David Duke, or anti-immigration groups like Occidental Quarterly (see, e.g., Tucker, 2002; Winston, 2020a).

More recently, in a 2020 meeting of Rushton’s longtime department of psychology at Western University, a statement was approved that denounced Rushton’s research as both “racist” and “flawed,” adding that he sometimes conducted research “without appropriate ethics approval” (Western University Department of Psychology, 2020, para. 4). Briefly recapping the lowlights of Rushton’s career, the department’s statement adds to such “ethical concerns” the problems of Rushton’s work from a “scientific standpoint,” such as his apparent misunderstandings of basic population genetics. The statement ends with what feels like a defence of the department’s daring venture outside of a strictly “scientific standpoint”: “Rushton’s work and other so-called ‘race science’ . . . continues to be misused by white supremacists and promoted by eugenic organizations . . . Scientists have an obligation to society to speak loudly and actively in opposition of such abuse” (Western University Department of Psychology, 2020, paras. 4–6). In that same year, Psychological Reports retracted two of Rushton’s papers published in the early 1990s, explaining that the research was “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda” (“Retraction Notice,” 2020, para. 4; Rushton, 1990, 1991). While skepticism of Rushton’s work has become more commonplace than ever, the focus tends towards his most controversial era of work on race, sexual selection, and intelligence. Rushton’s final major project, promoting the GFP as a second pillar alongside the long-established g (general intelligence), is not as immediately recognized as another canard within his uncredible worldview.

The general factor of personality

Beginnings

After Rushton gained notoriety for his work on race, sexuality, and intelligence within the overlapping fields of behaviour genetics, evolutionary psychology, and psychometric-trait psychology, he continued his prolific research output. During the last decade or so of his life, he zeroed in on what Slovenian psychologist Janek Musek called the Big One (Musek, 2007). The Big One, now usually called the GFP, is a singular statistical super-factor/component or (if interpreted as such) meta-trait that sits at the apex of taxonomies of personality structure. As Musek pointed out, there was an emerging literature at that time exploring the upper regions of the five-factor model of personality—super-domains that explained the correlation between the domains of personality (e.g., DeYoung, 2006; Digman, 1997; Strus et al., 2014). If there could be meaningful factors higher than the usual five (or 6 or 3 or 16) domains of personality, perhaps there could be a singular zenith in the hierarchy of personality.

Musek (2007) explored the possibility of the Big One using three different samples and a variety of personality measures, such as the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). Although the theoretical import of such a statistical finding was not immediately clear, Musek thought that one possible interpretation of the Big One was as “a blend of all aspects of personality dimensions that are positively valued” (Musek, 2007, p. 1226) that seemed significantly associated with emotionality, well-being, and self-esteem. Musek speculated that, considering the established heritability of the Big Five, the Big One was “deeply embedded in our evolutionary, genetic, and neurological endowment” (Musek, 2007, p. 1228).

With great interest, Rushton published two articles the following year on the GFP (Rushton & Irwing, 2008; Rushton et al., 2008). Though he noted Musek’s contribution, he also noted that Musek “did not cite the work on r-K life history,” even though Rushton considered it a worthwhile explanatory framework for the Big One (Rushton et al., 2008, p. 1174). Rushton also seemed to suggest that the notion of a GFP originated in his own work, opening his 2008 article with a self-quotation that “one basic dimension—K—underlies much of the field of personality” (Rushton, 1985, p. 445). His team hypothesized that “a process of unidirectional selection has operated on a general factor of personality just as it has on one for cognitive ability” (Rushton et al., 2008, p. 1174). They hitched their hypothesis to Darwin and his description of “how moral and inter-personal skills go hand in hand with the greater intelligence modern people possess” (p. 1175).

Expansions

After 2008, Rushton’s publications on the GFP would continue up until the final year of his life (Erdle & Rushton, 2010, 2011; Figueredo & Rushton, 2009; Irwing et al., 2012; Rushton, 2012; Rushton & Irwing, 2009a, 2009b; Rushton et al., 2010). Much of this work would feature in two journals: Personality and Individual Differences (founded by one of Rushton’s mentors, Hans Eysenck) and Twin Research and Human Genetics. Some were co-authored with Paul Irwing, who currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Intelligence (not to be confused with the separate journal simply titled Intelligence) and who has also collaborated with intelligence researcher and race scientist Richard Lynn. Even after Rushton’s death, Irwing would continue to defend the GFP from criticisms (Irwing, 2013). Some of the work on GFP was also pursued by fellow intelligence researcher Philip A. Vernon, focusing on the heritability of GFP and its relationship with g or intelligence (Schermer & Vernon, 2010; Veselka et al., 2009, 2012).

GFP and g

For Rushton, the structure of personality was now “directly analogous to that of g, the well-established general factor of mental ability” (Rushton et al., 2008, p. 1181). Through similar, evolutionary processes of selection for intelligence, he argued “those at the high end of the GFP likely enjoyed greater reproductive success” (p. 1181). Although personality had long been studied in the same methodological ways as how intelligence was studied (i.e., evolutionary-genetic framings of psychometric-trait research), Rushton recognized the potential of organizing this work under the domain of GFP: a unifying, Ur-concept analogous to the g of intelligence research.

Much as g and IQ were psychological concepts that allowed psychologists and others to boil down ability into a singular index of worth, a GFP would allow a similar claim to be justifiably made about virtually all other aspects of being a person. The evolutionary and present-day success of individuals and groups could now be explained in a way that complemented both Rushton’s dubious applications of r-K theory to arbitrarily circumscribed human populations, as well as generations of controversial work on intelligence. Complementing intelligence with personality as another way to distinguish human groups echoes Raymond Cattell’s arguments against equality of races when intellectual abilities were similar but, in his view, a non-White race’s temperament was still radically different (and, implicitly, less civilized) than the White/Euro races (Cattell, 1933; Tucker, 2009, pp. 81–82).

During his later career, Rushton had not shied away from promoting scientific racism. Just a few years before his first article on the GFP, he had co-authored a piece with fellow trait psychologist and noted scientific racist Arthur Jensen titled “Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic Fallacy” (Rushton & Jensen, 2005b). In their cowritten article, Rushton and Jensen argued that intelligence research had continued to demonstrate for nearly a century that there was an unbridgeable IQ gap between Black and White persons. Additionally, they argued that the literature’s “totality of evidence” (Rushton & Jensen, 2005b, p. 334) meant the alleged intelligence gap between White and Black persons was attributable to heritable and physical explanations more than any other possible cause. They would also point to brain size differences in race research—much of it their own (Jensen, 1998; Rushton, 2000; Rushton & Jensen, 2005a)—as “repeatedly replicated” evidence that “our critics completely ignore” (Rushton & Jensen, 2005b, p. 333).

Of course, the study of brain size as a key marker of differences in intra-human intelligence also has clear roots in the earlier traditions of scientific racism that focused on craniometry to determine the relative worth of different individuals and peoples. Though its uses have varied, the term “race realism” and race science continues today to provide ammunition among the far right and White supremacists as a way of justifying racism, segregation, and eugenicist practices on the grounds of the scientific reality of race categories (Breland, 2024; Hochman, 2021; Lentin, 2020). Rushton had previously complained about the “coordinated political campaign” (Rushton, 1998, p. 231) against race as a biological concept in the far-right outlet Mankind Quarterly that published the work of (or had on its editorial board) White supremacists and Nazi sympathizers (Rushton, 1998; see Winston, 1998). Recent historical research has also clearly demonstrated Arthur Jensen’s own long-term associations with scientific racism stemming from 19th-century race science and later Nazi science, as well as support of White supremacist literature, and his concerns about the collapse of Western civilization (Jackson, 2023).

Critical reception of Rushton’s GFP

Psychologist Steven Muncer produced one of the strongest, earlier critiques of Rushton and colleagues’ GFP research program (Muncer, 2011). Muncer’s criticism was twofold: the GFP was statistically unimpressive and theoretically unwarranted. Homing in on Rushton and Irwing’s (2008) article, Muncer pointed out a simple yet devastating flaw in their data: meta-analyses require comparable (“homogenous”) effect sizes before they are concatenated. There was a high rate of heterogeneity across Rushton and Irwing’s chosen studies for their meta-analysis, to which they offered the possibility of using a random effects model but did not use. Muncer (2011) also remarked that “[a]nother possibility is not performing a meta-analysis” (p. 775). Upon examining the 14 studies they used, Muncer found little statistical reason or advantage for including the GFP in different types of psychometric models. Muncer also explored the theoretical, interpretive underpinnings of the GFP. He argued that given strong enough relationships between high-order factors, a more general factor is necessarily discoverable—the caveat was how “the search for it must be justified by an a priori theoretical rationale” (Muncer, 2011, p. 777).

Muncer proceeded to explain how Rushton’s evolutionary interpretation was at odds with the research of evolutionary psychologists. Rushton’s singular domain of personality necessarily presumed a consistent, selecting environment along all human history. Muncer also contrasted evolutionary theories of intelligence that held more water: “While the adaptive value of a personality trait may vary across ecological niches, the same is not true for intelligence. With respect to intelligence, more is better” (Muncer, 2011, p. 777). To Muncer, comparisons between GFP and g were unreasonable within the theoretical framework of evolutionary reasoning.

Rushton was quick to rebut, pointing to Muncer’s reliance on analyzing studies used within a single article whereas there had been dozens of articles since demonstrating the GFP in different ways (Rushton, 2012). To Rushton, a preferred explanation was that “the evolution of both g and the GFP is that they arose in part through social and sexual selection for socially desirable traits that facilitate performance across a wide range of contexts” (Rushton, 2012, p. 237). He saw the development of the GFP as consistent with his life’s work: “the fast-slow life-history theory dubbed Differential K theory” (p. 236). Like intelligence, groups (implying races) adopting r-strategies of high propagation and low parenting would result in lower rates of GFP, while those who adopt low propagation and high parenting would result in higher rates of GFP. Rushton (2012) claimed Francis Galton had been the “first to describe a General Factor of Personality, just as [Galton] had earlier . . . been the first to identify a general factor of cognitive ability” (p. 237). With the GFP nestled in the r-K life history framework he viewed as consistent with the viewpoints of Darwin and E. O. Wilson, Rushton appeared resolute in the unambiguity of his latest uncovering of humanity’s essence.

Despite Rushton’s confidence in the GFP, another notable critique still saw the growing literature as containing a “plethora of conflicting viewpoints . . . due in part to a lack of clarity about the conceptual and statistical issues regarding what constitutes a general factor” (Revelle & Wilt, 2013, p. 494). Preferring the use of the omega-hierarchical estimate of reliability, ⁴ they did not find the kind of undeniable results that Rushton claimed. In addition to looking at several sets of data on varied personality measures, they compared their findings to further analyses on tests of mental ability. Similar to Muncer’s distinction between the evolutionarily reasonable unity of intelligence and the unreasonable unity of personality, Revelle and Wilt (2013) found much stronger indicators of a general factor solution for five classic data sets across several different cognitive tests: “It is clear from all five of these classic data sets that the general factor saturation of cognitive tests is much higher than the general factor saturation of non-cognitive measures” (p. 501).

While confirming that it was certainly possible to discover a GFP, Revelle and Wilt (2013) had a similar sentiment to Muncer: Why do so? Given the paltry evidence found in the shared variance within various personality measures to support the GFP, they found it “hard to justify the conclusion that Rushton and others advocate” (p. 502). Further contesting Rushton’s consistent pairing of his emerging GFP and the well-established g, they ended their critique reiterating that “it is apparent what is a clear g in ability is much muddier in personality” (p. 502).

Alongside defences such as Irwing’s (2013), other work extending the GFP would suggest reframing it either as a self-evaluative trait or as representing a response set on a personality measure. One team found evidence for both of these interpretations of the GFP, explaining that it “appears to be partially a stable, self-evaluative trait consistent across inventories and partly a set of response tendencies specific to a particular personality inventory” (Davies et al., 2015, p. 21). In other words, looking at responses from a particular personality measure or across several personality measures made a difference as to the statistical properties of varied, possible psychometric models all aimed at accounting for the GFP.

Justification and interpretation without discovery

At the time of writing, the GFP’s impact seems limited and likely on the decline. An all-text search on APA PsycINFO of the exact phrase “general factor personality” yields 197 results, ⁵ with 25 of those published within the most recent 4 years. Interestingly, Rushton’s work on the GFP is sometimes cited in recent research on what has been dubbed the general factor of psychopathology (e.g., Smith et al., 2020). Some have used the GFP to compare Jewish and non-Jewish persons, and have speculated on using the GFP to predict apparently important variables like income—a thinly veiled racial cue (Dunkel et al., 2015, p. 66). That research also cites notorious proponents of antisemitism like evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald and blogger Ron Unz.

Extensions and critiques of GFP research largely remained within a context of justification, where one deals with knowledge and problems of knowledge at the level of the internal logic of the scientific work at hand. Though, as is common for psychometric work, disagreements also operated within the context of interpretation. As seen in the critical reception of the GFP, there is frequently ambiguity inherent to several procedures. Within the unique space of factor analytic modelling of possible (or unobservable or latent) psychological concepts, it has long been understood that the ongoing interpretation of factor structures and labels is inherent to the process, with improving a model’s interpretability being a goal of the process itself (e.g., Flora & Flake, 2017; Mulaik, 1987; Revelle, 1983). But how the contexts of justification and interpretation overlap with the context of discovery was not a prominent feature of the reception to Rushton’s GFP. The main concern was an ontic concern about the emerging pattern: is it the apex-trait of personality, a self-evaluative trait, or (as in their title) “a methodological gnat that won’t go away?” (Davies et al., 2015). Ethical concerns about Rushton’s own life history were not raised, including his misuses of psychological and other sciences.

Although GFP research seemed to mainly shy away from considerations of race, it was not as though Rushton had abandoned his earlier race science pursuits. In a now-retracted article, Rushton and co-author Donald Templer suggested, without data, that darker pigmentation in humans was associated with higher rates of aggression and sexuality, as well as lower IQ rates (Rushton & Templer, 2012). Templer is an American psychologist who, like Rushton, had his own controversial research record on race, intelligence, and penis size, and has also been associated with the White supremacist outlet and website American Renaissance. At the time of their now retracted article, Rushton and Templer had also just published in Intelligence on the relationship between skin colour, crime, and HIV/AIDS (Templer & Rushton, 2011).

In their now retracted article in Personality and Individual Difference (hereafter PAID), Rushton and Templer (2012) drew on refuted work by race scientist and intelligence researcher Richard Lynn on pigmentocracy (societies where hierarchies are based on skin colour, with lighter being preferred), offering a genetic explanation of anti-Black racism: “Although [pigmentocracies] are typically explained by the legacy of slavery and imperialism . . . we have focused on genetic pleiotropy to explain the much less known relationship between skin color and behavior” (Rushton & Templer, 2012, p. 7). Much like the GFP, they argued that this relationship could be best explained when framed within Rushton’s life history theory in explaining why “darker individuals are more aggressive and sexually active and why these traits covary with longevity, birth rate, infant mortality, speed of maturation, and many other characteristics” (p. 7). The classification and ranking of humans were always integral features of Rushton’s work, as well as the work of many in his research community.

Another gentleman scholar, remembered

The endurance or return of scientific racism, like its core notion of biological race, is a widely recognized issue. In Winston’s view, scientific racism “must be treated as a community project, with its own networks, mentorships, journals, funding, conferences, heroes, origin myths, martyrs, defenders, and historiography” (Winston, 2020b, pp. 427–428). With regards to how racial differences persistently attract psychologists, Winston points to the discipline’s unresolved anxiety around its scientific status. Fitting with the approach to scientific racism as a community project, another recent analysis of debates on race and intelligence suggests a communal attempt to varnish race science as a “civil” science (Dasgupta et al., 2022). In trying to understand “racialized, biodeterminist reasoning” and its “enduring appeal,” the authors focus on the marked admiration for Arthur Jensen (Dasgupta et al., 2022, p. 596).

Confrontations and controversy for a scientist open up the opportunity for character work, with charisma providing an “interpretive prism with which leaders and followers organize and enact a public drama” (Dasgupta et al., 2022, p. 601). Among the many interesting ideas raised in their analysis of Jensen and the keepers of his communal legacy, the authors understand the indefatigable debate around race/intelligence as a way for “participants and onlookers to re-interpret it in terms of a different political conflict, involving the loss of civility and open-mindedness” (p. 603). Looking at Twitter threads and other writings, Jensen’s legacy is used to construct an “icon of civility”—a scientist with whom even those positioned as having opposing views on hereditary/environmental causes can have a civil discourse (such as, as the legacy construction goes, James Flynn). This construction of civility, “recounting the tales of the once civil Jensen–Flynn exchanges” (Dasgupta et al., 2022, p. 616), allows a countering to labels like “racist” as immaterial and uncivil. Lentin (2020) has similarly argued that indignant reactions over the uncouth accusation of racism can eclipse the instance of racism itself. In keeping with the indefatigable portrayal of race science critics as unstable Marxists and thugs (Jackson & Winston, 2021; Panofsky, 2014), critics are portrayed as an uncivilized class who rejoice in dragging a civil icon’s name through the mud.

In looking at the 2013 special issue of PAID devoted to Rushton (Nyborg, 2013c), we can find a continuation of the civility construction. For instance, Helmuth Nyborg’s obituary of Rushton describes the deceased as such in the title: “Eminent Scientist, Pioneer, and Gentleman” (Nyborg, 2013b). For reference, Nyborg is a Danish intelligence researcher concerned with racial differences and the effects of immigration on civilization. He has been accused (and cleared) of academic misconduct, has published in politically far-right outlets such as Mankind Quarterly, was among the race scientists who inspired prominent White supremacist figures such as Jared Taylor, and continues to provide interviews and speeches to various alt-right and neo-Nazi websites and events (e.g., Jackson, 2023, p. 6; McCook, 2016; Minkowitz, 2017; Nyborg, 2011).

Evoking a family tree of scientists of human differences, Nyborg (2013b) bemoaned Rushton’s death as losing “one of their prominent sons” (p. 201). Recalling Rushton’s public storms, Nyborg explained that “Phil always responded to attacks in a manner suitable to a serious scientist,” that he “calmly responded,” and that when the accusation of being a racist was lodged against him, Rushton replied “‘I am an academic’” (p. 202). Being a scientist or an academic seemingly negated the possibility of harboring racist, pseudoscientific, or violent beliefs. Proudly eulogizing Rushton as a “lone gentleman” who could respond to out-of-bounds criticisms with remarks like “[t]hat is not a scientific argument” (p. 202), Nyborg’s obituary makes clear that the gentlemanly and genuine mode of inquiry was strictly within the context of justification. Recalling his early work on altruism, Nyborg positions Rushton as someone with the lifelong aim of promoting “generosity among children thereby improving the human condition in general” (p. 202). Likewise noting Rushton’s early focus on the socially positive trait of altruism and his later “courageousness” in the face of controversy, Richard Lynn wrote in his obituary of Rushton that “Phil was very approachable, gentle, social, warm-hearted, generous [and] often showed much sympathy with Africans” (Hur & Lynn, 2013, p. 498). While I do not wish to contest Rushton’s or anyone else’s personal or workaday characteristics, the qualities highlighted in Rushton’s obituaries are strikingly like the qualities expected of a modern gentleman scholar.

As historian of science Shapin (1991) once observed, hitching the gentleman to the scholar was not an easy marriage. ⁶ Tied to religious and other traditional values, those considered gentlemanly varied throughout early modern Europe. However, the broad conduct of a gentleman was often understood as one who lived for others and society, lived an active life, demonstrated self-control, had a sense of contextually bounded decorum, and marshalled a subtle form of persuasion. The gentleman avoided “visible effort to press his own views on his fellows. If he wished to dominate, he must do so through studied effortlessness and agreeableness” (Shapin, 1991, p. 289). In line with such decorum, a gentleman should never “divide, disrupt, or disturb . . . [and should] uphold social harmony and the presumed equality of gentle society” (p. 289). While the Royal Society’s attempts at fastening the traditional gentleman to a pro-social form of the scholar largely failed—such as Robert Boyle’s idealized image giving way to the argumentative and secluded Isaac Newton—the scholar could still be tolerated among gentlemen in certain forms, such as a solitary genius: “Precisely because he was not as other men . . . what he came to know might have a peculiar standing and worth” (Shapin, 1991, p. 313). Remembered as a “lone gentleman,” and implicitly bearing the familial mark of his brethren, that of extreme intelligence, Rushton contributed to the logics of racially motivated segregation, hatred, and violence, whereas his communal remembrances emphasize the socially minded virtues of his (and Jensen’s) conduct and legacies.

Nyborg’s remembrance of Rushton as a “lone gentleman” seems to blend these historical forms of gentleman and scholar: someone with useful knowledge who was courageous enough to go against the grain and face criticism while maintaining a gentleman’s ease and decorum. While forms of masculinities among far-right groups vary, such as misogyny among the alt-right conflicting with the patriarchal protectionism of White nationalists (Sunderland, 2023), the gentleman scholar within the realm of far-right scholarship and intellectual debate on race seems as paramount an idealized masculinity as it was in much earlier English culture where: “Good manners made good knowledge” (Shapin, 1991, p. 297).

Jensen, having died the same year as Rushton, received similar treatment in his disciplinary obituaries. In American Psychologist, Jensen was remembered as: “Calm, deliberate, brilliant, and encyclopedic in his erudition on differential psychology” (Lubinski, 2013, p. 397). Suggesting an even-keeled pacifism when dealing with “assaults,” Jensen apparently “tried to live by Gandhi’s principle of correspondence between inner thoughts and public pronouncements” (p. 397). Recounting Jensen’s “indifference to group pressure for social conformity” and his “independence of mind,” Richard Lynn remembered Jensen as cooly and singularly rising above assaults and criticisms (Lynn, 2013, pp. 147–148). Likewise noting Jensen as a “great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi,” the aforementioned intelligence researcher James Flynn remembered Jensen as someone “without racial bias” and who once tactfully provided “a kind way of saying that I needed to learn more!” (Flynn, 2013, p. 144; see also Dasgupta et al., 2022, pp. 615–617). In another obituary, criticism of Jensen was noted as going “far beyond what is acceptable debate,” noting the necessary security measures against physical threats, but an equally unacceptable action was that Jensen “was called a racist by people who had never met him” (Detterman, 2013, p. 142). ⁷ Rudeness, such as Jensen’s more recently outlined connections to far-right and racist activism (Jackson, 2023), had no place within scientific and academic discussions, particularly as they stemmed from a zone far beyond the context of justification and allegedly into personal character.

Strikingly similar defences were put to work in defending the legacy of Australian race psychologist Stanley Porteus during the extensive communal deliberations (spanning the 1970s to the 1990s) over commemorating Porteus by naming a University of Hawai’i campus building in his honour. Family members, former students, and colleagues who defended Porteus against accusations of contributing to a network of eugenicist-minded race scientists and scholars, even after WWII, took the accusations of racism as a personal attack on Porteus (Davidson, 2023). For defenders, Porteus was a respectable gentleman scholar who had devoted his life to the community and was undeserving of such treatment. Similarly, during Rushton’s public controversies, letters of defence sent to his university recognized him as a “serious, productive, respect-worthy scientist” (Block, 1990, p. 1) and an “exceptionally productive, original, and conscientious scholar and scientist” (Herrnstein, 1990, p. 1). Raymond Cattell thought Rushton’s difficulties at his university reflected “the general response of the mediocre to any really imaginative, creative work,” adding that “the political enemies of fact are still strong” (Cattell, 1990, p. 1).

As seen in Rushton’s and Jensen’s obituaries, it remains difficult to square an ingenious gentleman scholar with something as egregiously unintellectual and socially destructive as racism. Whereas Porteus wasn’t alive for the bulk of criticisms levelled against him, Rushton, like Jensen, is now remembered as having acted in the fact of accusations like a gentleman in the most literal sense of the word: fighting not with violence and vitriol but with a devoted persistence to work within the arena of research. Even in moments where Rushton did venture towards or beyond the edge of the usual spaces of a gentleman’s conduct, such as in media-chasing moments, his apparent propriety (even if less well-regarded than the charismatic Jensen) assured his already supportive community regarded him as correct in two, inseparable senses of the word: correct in assertions and correct in social conduct. Even more recently, some of the online comments on the televised 1989 Rushton and Suzuki debate (Egalitarianjay02, 2012) focus on Rushton’s relatively gentlemanly demeanour: “On the one hand you have a calm rational person, and on the other an emotional mob lead [sic] by a ranting raving ringleader. Which is more convincing?” (jikkh2x, 2016). As noted elsewhere, Rushton understood the importance of cultivating such an image (Davidson, 2021, p. 9).

Despite substantial criticisms, the GFP largely escaped the issues of racism frequently connected to Rushton’s work on intelligence. Though even in the case of controversies dealing directly with intelligence research and race, such as around the Pioneer Fund, boundaries around inappropriate (ad hominem) arguments were placed. For Jackson (2006), considering the inherently political process of the human sciences as a form of both inquiry and deliberation, the alleged unsuitability of the ad hominem, like the presupposed irrelevance of the context of discovery, doesn’t hold water. While intelligence research is much more quickly associated with problems of racism—though a censoring taboo may also be a communal mythology (Jackson & Winston, 2021)—personality trait research is not as quickly connected to such problems, even when the research is conducted by the exact same researchers. Criticism outside the gentleman’s bounds, or outside the context of justification, is not usually found in the same disciplinary spaces as empirical, methodological, and theoretical critique.

Conclusions

The GFP was Rushton’s latest way for organizing within and across groups of humanity in the spirit of scientific racism that always featured in his ever-expanding and dubious theoretical framework. Rushton was repackaging his differential K theory under the new alphabet of the GFP. It was a new spin of the same yarn: from mental ability to sexuality to, ultimately, all facets that make an evolutionary worthwhile kind of person via an ultimate index of personhood. As shown above, some researchers ran with the GFP as presented, while others proposed alternative interpretations or even speculated on its reality. Whether it had always been a feature of his work on life history as he claimed, or it was another’s idea which he capitalized on, the concept’s existence is inextricably tied to Rushton’s approach. Both Rushton and his legacy’s keepers pitched the GFP as something Rushton had always been working toward, such as in Rushton’s obituary in PAID: “Already in the early phases of discussing r-K life history, Rushton began to suspect that a basic personality dimension . . . might explain socially relevant aspects of personality,” noting that the GFP was “a product of natural selective Darwinian forces” (Nyborg, 2013b, p. 201).

A year before writing Rushton’s obituary, Nyborg had provided a demographic analysis that extended Richard Lynn’s ideas of Western population decay in light of low-fertile and high-IQ populations combined with the influx of highly fertile and low-IQ non-Western immigration (Nyborg, 2012). If Lynn’s (and Nyborg’s) arguments sound astoundingly similar to the early-to-mid-20th-century era of eugenics—such as worries of race suicide and replacement-via-immigration—you would be correct. In a review of one of Richard Lynn’s books, an historian considered the work

really little more than a rehashing of the eugenic ideology of a century ago, including its overt racism and xenophobia . . . Lynn’s book more than adequately demonstrates the continued livelihood of the virulent political and social aspirations that drove eugenics throughout the twentieth century. (Valone, 2002, p. 534)

Of course, it is exactly this type of critique, dealing with the context of discovery, that holds little effectiveness or even holds a place within the gentleman’s bounds. Such criticism is spewed only by “the political enemies of fact,” to use Raymond Cattell’s phrasing once more (Cattell, 1990, p. 1). The risk in excluding the impolite is immense. Even if out-of-bounds topics like values were ignored, “science still ends up being value-laden, but the influences of values are not subjected to adequate scrutiny or discussion” (Elliott, 2017, p. 8). ⁸

Even strong criticisms of evolutionary theorizations of GFP that appeared in PAID (Muncer, 2011) only served to legitimate scientific racism and pseudoscience. Instead of adjusting a critical level of analysis to any of the external contexts, even a decisive methodological and logical critique still operates without the context of discovery. Consequently, instead of a principled critique that clearly shows Rushton’s enterprise as bad science (as in, badly constructed and bad for society), a narrower critique can only show Rushton’s GFP research as bad or questionable science that allows room for improvement on an intact foundation of scientific racism. What could be recognized as epistemologically and ethically abhorrent is reduced to a “methodological gnat” (Davies et al., 2015).

Of course, several psychologists, historians of psychology, geneticists, sociologists, journalists, and others—including Rushton’s longtime university department—have come to unmask Rushton’s reputation as a simple scientist and lone gentleman, much as Jensen’s continually cultivated reputation as a charismatic hero of academic freedom is a mask and excuse for scientific racism and political violence. The guise of the reasonable, gentleman scholar is very familiar to anyone under the boots of coloniality, supremacy, and patriarchy. Whether viewing it through Teo’s White/hegemonic boundaries of the context of justification, or Winston’s community project, or Dasgupta and colleagues’ analysis of civilizing race science, or the overlapping gentlemanly expectations I have emphasized here, the guise deflects criticism deemed out of bounds, which certainly includes criticism from below.

Obvious racism documented in the social and financial connections to White supremacist or neo-eugenicist networks has been too often considered impolite or beside the point. In the face of such evidence, such as Rushton’s defence of the Pioneer Fund, the work and institutions are deemed apolitical and their critics are deemed rude propogandists (Jackson, 2006, p. 18; see also Tucker, 2002). Familiarly, the gentleman’s guise darkly reflects dissenters as the inverse of gentlemanliness: emotional, political, unreasonable, and irrational. The rise of European modernity and rationality was coconstituted with colonial domination, cultivating a profitable, hierarchical framing of self and other that made the mission to civilize and exploit allegedly lesser evolved societies itself a rational and ethical imperative (e.g., Quijano, 2007). Reasonableness has also featured in the legal context of expert witnesses in justifying racial discrimination (Gandy, 2001). Accusations of racism in cases such as Rushton’s are often about racism in a larger, sociological sense of the word: consistently and knowingly contributing to a global network of writing and financing that sustains race categories and their inequalities as biologically and economically natural, scientifically validated, and (in the case of the most politically far-right researchers and networks) intensely desirable. Gelling with the long tradition of criticizing Franz Boas’ race-critical school of cultural anthropology as another instance of Jewish-communist-cabalist influence in American life (see Winston, 2021), the deflection/reflection of all others as unreasonable political agents precludes supposedly out-of-bounds criticism.

Scientific reasoning and critique should not be restricted to an ahistorical and apolitical reading of psychological research, with processes such as gentlemanly conduct shielding and separating the work from the person. The criticisms are not to do with the person in the everyday sense. A racist individual can be exceedingly kind, well-spoken, and sport professorial attire. An antiracist individual can be exceptionally uncouth, inarticulate, and dishevelled. The minutely biographical, though not without historical interest (as the personal can and does impact the direction of scientific works), is not the crux of allegedly out-of-bounds criticism. At the heart of the issue is everything to do with the context of discovery. When a race scientist’s next project is a shaky evolutionary theory of a singular, psychometric factor of personality that they liken to the general factor of intelligence, the psychological discipline should be able to immediately understand the intent: to further legitimate arbitrary groupings of peoples so they can be ranked along a new, scientific-seeming index of human quality. Racism, including among the far-right, is now emboldened, especially in online spaces that “reveal the types of open and ugly racist attitudes and actions that many people thought were behind us” (Eschmann, 2023, p. 83). Though disciplinary psychology is beginning to confront its longstanding complicity with coloniality, scientific racism, and the use of its disciplinary tools for oppression, these issues need to also be considered in places less immediately scandalous as research on intelligence. In the case of Rushton’s work on personality, especially his later work on the GFP, the social, political, and ethical contexts should have taken part in disregarding it. Methodological critiques are not enough.