The guise of the gentleman scholar: Criticism and conduct around J. Philippe Rushton’s general factor of personality
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".