Richard Herrnstein

Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994) was a prominent researcher in comparative psychology who did pioneering work on pigeon intelligence. Herrnstein was closely associated with the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, and worked with Skinner in the Harvard pigeon lab, where he did research on choice and other topics in behavioral psychology.

The Matching Law

Perhaps Herrnstein's most notable accomplishment in this field was the formulation of the matching law. According to the matching law, choices are distributed according to rates of reinforcement for making those choices. An instance of this for two choices can be stated mathematically as R1 / (R1 + R2) = r1 / (r1 + r2), where R1 and R2 are rates of response for two alternative responses, and r1 and r2 are rates of reinforcement for the same two responses. Behavior conforming to this law is 'matching,' and explanations of matching and departures from matching constitute a large and important part of the literature on behavioral choice.

The Bell Curve

Herrnstein became controversial and more broadly known for his work with Charles Murray on the correlation between race and intelligence, discussed in their book The Bell Curve. While the idea of innate racial differences in intellectual abilities cannot be dismissed out of hand, and while some of the attempted refutations of The Bell Curve were politically motivated, critics uncovered serious flaws in the statistical techniques utilized in the book, most notably by the economist Thomas Sowell and the Nobel-prize winning econometrician James Heckman. In addition, the in-group heritability estimate of 0.60 promoted by Murray and Herrnstein seems far too high, as a 1997 meta-analysis by B. Devlin, M. Daniels and K. Roeder of 212 studies in the field argued for a much less compelling narrow-sense heritability figure of 0.34.

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