The Bell Curve
1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by the psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime, than is an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this separation is a source of social division within the United States.
The book has been, and remains, highly controversial, especially where the authors discussed purported connections between race and intelligence and suggested policy implications based on these purported connections. The authors claimed that average intelligence quotient (IQ) differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, a view that is now considered discredited by science. Many of the references and sources used in the book were advocates for racial hygiene, whose research was funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund and published in its affiliated journal Mankind Quarterly. Because of this, many critics have dismissed the book and its purported findings as pseudoscience.
Shortly after its publication, many people rallied both in criticism and in defense of the book. A large number of critical texts by psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists were written in response to it. Several criticisms were collected in the book The Bell Curve Debate.
Synopsis
The Bell Curve, published in 1994, was written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to explain the variations in intelligence in American society, warn of some consequences of that variation, and propose social policies for mitigating the worst of the consequences.
“The Bell Curve” enters the record as 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bell, Curve and book can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q575800. The first chronological checks are 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Bell Curve” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.