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.

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