Peter Schönemann

Who was Peter Schönemann?

Peter H. Schönemann 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 Arthur Jensen and others routinely confuse the first principal component with g as Charles Spearman defined it, and that 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.