Inductivist

Richard Lynn's new book Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality makes a convincing case that blacks and American Indians score high on exploitativeness (my term) while Asians tend to be the opposite--let's call this "fairness."  Whites are closer to Asians, while Hispanics are what you would expect as a hybrid of white and Native American.

People who accept human biodiversity (HBD) tend to focus on general intelligence, and for good reason: it is very important for individuals, societies, and for all of humanity.  But let me also stress the importance of this exploitativeness-fairness continuum.  Your life will be better if you deal with people who are smart and fair rather than cunning and exploitative.

So this leads to a typology of four kinds of people: 1) smart-fair, 2) smart-exploitative, 3) dumb-fair, and 4) dumb-exploitative.  I don't know about you, but I've known plenty of examples of each, but the situation tends to actually get simpler in the aggregate because at this level smart and fair tend to go together.  Asians as a group not only score low on psychopathy, they are also highly intelligent.  Blacks tend to be exploitative and unintelligent.  So at the macrolevel, there is a tendency toward two types: more contributive and less contributive people.

You might counter that history shows lots of Asian exploitativeness. The Rape of Nanking, etc., etc.  Humans treat each other horribly all the time, but my contention is that the average traits of people have an important impact on the quality of a society.  A key reason why Japan is a better country than Nigeria is that it has a higher prevalence of intelligent, fair people.

 A recent post focused on racial differences in psychopathy, and while people know the obvious connection between being a psychopath and committing crimes, few realize that the correlation between a promiscuous lifestyle and psychopathy is about as strong.  In fact, a lifestyle of casual sex is one criterion for diagnosing psychopathic personality.  Evolutionary psychologists have developed the concept of sociosexuality, which refers to an interest in non-committal sex. The correlation between sociosexuality and psychopathy is roughly 0.4, an impressive number.  It's strong enough that factor analysis would probably reveal one supertrait that underlies psychopathy, criminality, and sociosexuality--a syndrome we could call exploitativeness.

So, are there racial and ethnic differences in sociosexuality or exploitativeness (as indicated by high sociosexuality)?  The General Social Survey does have one item used in sociosexuality inventories--the number of sexual partners since age 18.  Let's pick an arbitrary cutoff--25+ partners--to indicate exploitativeness.  For now, I will focus on men and will limit analysis to ethnic groups with at least 50 respondents (sample size = 10,789):

Percent with 25+ sexual partners since age 18

Black  24.3
Scottish  19.8
Spanish  19.7
Jewish  19.1
American Indian  18.2
Greek  18.2
Italian  16.6
Puerto Rican  15.7
Other Spanish  14.9
Norwegian  14.6
Irish  14.4

Percent for total sample  14.1

Russian  13.9
French  13.5
English/Welsh  12.9
Austrian  11.5
Polish  11.4
German  11.2
French Canadian  10.2
Swedish  10.1
Dutch  9.9
Mexican  8.7
Danish  8.2
Czech  7.8
Asian Indian  4.1
Filipino  3.3
Chinese  0.0

You can see that by selecting a cutoff of 25 partners, this gives us 14.1% of US men being exploitative.  More importantly for this post, we see tremendous diversity in this trait.  Almost one-quarter of black men are exploitative compared to ZERO Chinese men.  Looking at general patterns, Southern Europeans tend to have higher numbers, while Asians fall to the bottom.  These patterns are consistent with numbers presented in Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality.  He found high psychopathy among blacks and American Indians, moderate levels among whites, and low levels among Asians.