Peter Schönemann

Peter Schönemann
Born
Peter Hans Schönemann

(1929-07-15)July 15, 1929
DiedApril 7, 2010(2010-04-07) (aged 80)
NationalityGerman
American
EducationUniversity of Munich
University of Göttingen
University of Illinois
Known forCriticism of IQ testing
Scientific career
FieldsPsychometrics
Statistics
InstitutionsPurdue University
ThesisA Solution of the Orthogonal Procrustes Problem With Applications to Orthogonal and Oblique Rotation (1964)
Doctoral advisorsK.W. Dickman
Ledyard Tucker
Other academic advisorsRaymond Cattell

Peter Hans Schönemann (July 15, 1929 – April 7, 2010) was a German-born psychometrician and statistical expert. He was professor emeritus in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. His research interests included multivariate statistics, multidimensional scaling and measurement, quantitative behavior genetics, test theory and mathematical tools for social scientists. He published around 90 papers dealing mainly with the subjects of psychometrics and mathematical scaling. Schönemann's influences included Louis Guttman, Lee Cronbach, Oscar Kempthorne and Henry Kaiser.

Schönemann was a persistent critic of what he considered to be scientifically sanctioned racism in psychology. In particular, he claimed that (1) Arthur Jensen and others routinely confuse the first principal component (PC1) with g as Charles Spearman defined it, and that (2) the high IQ heritability estimates reported in the literature derive from restrictive formal models whose underlying assumptions are rarely tested and usually violated by the data.

Schönemann died on April 7, 2010.