Heiner Rindermann

Heiner Rindermann

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“”Unfortunately, the effects of unrestricted borders can be observed 600 meters away from our University main building in Chemnitz where a German father (with half-Cuban background) was stabbed to death by Arabian refugees. Official statistics show higher crime rates among these immigrant groups. In 2017 thirteen Germans were killed by immigrants, but no German killed an immigrant.

—Heiner Rindermann

Heiner Rindermann (1966–) is a German hereditarian psychologist and advocate of race realism pseudoscience who currently sits on the Editorial Board of the controversial journal Intelligence. His research "is often cited by racists seeking to prove that immigrants have low IQs". Rindermann is associated with the far-right; for example, he spoke at a Property and Freedom Society conference in 2016, delivering an anti-immigration talk: "Cognitive and Cultural 'Enrichment' of Europe by Immigration". Annual conferences by the PFS have been described as "serious academic racist events" by the SPLC. He also attended the London Conference on Intelligence with white supremacists such as Emil Kirkegaard, with whom he reviews papers for OpenPsych. Rindermann identifies as a racialist; for example, in his book Cognitive Capitalism, he argues for the existence of racial differences.

Rindermann is a writer for the anti-Semitic website The Unz Review. In 2021 and 2024, Rindermann was interviewed by Holocaust denier Lipton Matthews.

Background

Rindermann obtained a PhD in psychology from University of Heidelberg in 1995. He is currently a Professor of Educational and Developmental Psychology at Chemnitz University of Technology.

Race and IQ pseudoscience

Rindermann's racialist pseudoscience is popular among white nationalists, since he argues that immigrants from the Middle East and Africa have lower IQs than native ethnic groups from Europe and that these mean group differences (that he overestimates to begin with) are significantly the result of genetics.

Rindermann (2018) presents his study on the cognitive ability of people in Africa versus the African diaspora as a comparative analysis on “national IQ” to avoid a direct discussion of racial differences in IQ. Although social and environmental factors were referenced, he deemed them as highly improbable and showed a fondness to ‘evolution genetic theories’ to explain the tiresome conclusion that Black African people were genetically determined to have a lower IQ.

His writings on race and intelligence are for example promoted on the white nationalist American Renaissance, VDARE, The Unz Review, and the far-right The New Observer:

Nonwhite invaders tested at Chemnitz University in Germany have average IQs of around 93 and this is going to cause "cognitive errors" with enormous consequences for the rest of society, one of that country's leading psychology professors has warned… Professor Heiner Rindermann, chair of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz, has penned a penetrating article in the Focus Online German news service where he has spelled out the importance of IQ, culture, achievement, and its relationship to race.

Titled "Secondary School Level Engineers," the article states unequivocally that the mass importation of low IQ nonwhite immigrants is going to lead to the destruction of Germany. "The standard of education of most immigrants from Western Asia and Africa is low, and their capabilities are limited. The consequences of this will be bitter," Professor Rindermann wrote.

Professor Rindermann made two further important points:

…the majority of these "immigrants" have no qualifications at all. Even if they did… they would still be useless: All international university studies have shown that the average results obtained at the institutes of higher education in these countries average around 110 points less than similar institutions in Germany…

"Even in an elite group, engineering students from the Gulf states, a great difference can be seen: Their skills are two to four school years behind those of comparable German engineering students."

Rindermann has also written papers for the racist journal Mankind Quarterly. In 2020, he co-authored a paper with Michael A. Woodley of Menie on an alleged "Erasing Race" effect in the United States.

London Conference on Intelligence

Heiner Rindermann in 2024 on Lipton Matthews podcast

See the main article on this topic: London Conference on Intelligence

Rindermann was a speaker at the London Conference on Intelligence.

2015

Evolution vs. culture as background factors for international intelligence differences

Speaker: Heiner Rindermann

Why are international differences in cognitive test results large and stable? This talk examines the contributions of two paradigmatic background factors: evolution (as indicated by cranial capacity, skin brightness, genetic distances, haplogroups, and consanguinity) and culture (education, rationality, thinking and meritocracy weighted religions).

2016

Evolutionary indicators for explaining cross-country differences in cognitive ability

Speaker: Heiner Rindermann

Until now all genetic explanations of international intelligence differences suffer from hard and replicated evidence on cognitive ability coding genes and their biological mechanism. However, there is first direct (based on coding genes) and broad indirect evidence. The paper will summarise the findings: Genomewide association studies have detected first candidate genes coding intelligence and differences in intelligence at the individual as well as at the cross-country level. Differences in cognitive ability vary with genetic markers standing for a different evolutionary history. Genetically more similar nations are also more similar in intelligence also if further factors are controlled. Morphological features and indicators of evolution (cranial capacity, skin brightness) highly correlate with results in international intelligence and student assessment studies. Bigger brains lead to higher intelligence. Evolutionary theories explain the development of differences between peoples in psychological traits. There is evidence for recently accelerated evolution among humans. Deleterious effects of consanguineous marriages underscore the effect of genes on cognitive ability at the level of individuals and nations and also show that genetic effects depend on culture. Current humans can be distinguished in different evolutionary branches usually named for living beings subspecies. The total evidence indicates that recent evolution, in the last 20,000 to 100 years, is more important for current human macrosocial differences than former evolution.

Population genetics in intelligence research: How much can it help to retrace the evolution of intelligence?

Speaker: David Becker

Co-authors: Heiner Rindermann

The inequality of national, ethnical, cultural or racial defined human populations in intelligence was tried to explain in different ways. Although, inside this issue, we are facing a multi-causal problem, genetic factors are taken into account of many researchers as a more or less important factor. Several theories (cold winter, evolutionary novelty, Neolithic revolution, differential K) about influences of environmental conditions on the evolution of intelligence have been proposed, however, no genes have been found to explain bigger parts of intelligence variations on the individual level hitherto, thus the empirical tests of these theories is difficult. In our talk we want to communicate our ideas and results from the use of methods from population genetics. In the first part, we want to show to the audience how genetic variations, called genetic "distances" between today's populations can partly explain their differences in intelligence, also by taking into account geography, climate and social development variables. Part two includes a look behind these genetic distances and on prehistoric human migration. There we found a pattern we called "cold Siberia hypothesis" which should be demonstrated, explained and brought up for discussion. This also includes an outlook on planned future work and research.

Incorrect statements about RationalWiki

In 2023, Rindermann authored a book chapter "The Advantages of Having a Minority Viewpoint in Politicized Psychology: A Case Study of Intelligence Research" which criticizes RationalWiki's negative stance on race and intelligence (hereditarianism). Rindermann cites two articles on Robert Plomin and Richard Haier; however, these articles had originally been written by Emil Kirkegaard as a parody to discredit RationalWiki and have since been entirely re-written.

Paper retraction

Rindermann had a peer-reviewed article retracted in September 2024 for methodological issues and other flaws:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. After publication, concerns were raised about the methodology and dataset used in this research. Independent post-publication peer review has confirmed fundamental flaws in the use of student assessment studies as a measure of IQ or cognitive ability, and in the prominence of individual examples taken from the author's life.

See also

• Gerhard Meisenberg
• James Thompson