Links between Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Measured Cognition in Diverse Samples of UK Adults

Abstract

In the UK, immigrant groups frequently have lower mean socioeconomic status (SES) than do White British, which is a source of concern for the British government. Group-level SES tends to show positive relationships with cognitive ability scores. Thus, the authors estimate the mean cognitive and SES scores of various ethnic groups and test empirically if they correlate. They compute SES and cognitive ability scores using high-quality representative samples of adults. They then computed correlations between the two measures. General SES and group-cognitive ability correlated strongly at r = .59 to r = .79 (N = 18 groups). Finally, the authors computed cognitive scores predicted by the nation or region-of-origin of the ethnic groups and calculated correlations between these expected scores and the measured scores. The predicted and measured scores correlated strongly at r = .93 (N = 16 groups). The authors conclude that ethnic differences in SES are partly linked to differences in cognitive ability.