Doug gave this audio interview to a non-academic lay person in May 2020, in which he answers questions about how and why he set up ISIR and about intelligence in general.


Douglas K. Detterman is an American psychologist who researches intelligence and mental retardation. He earned his B.A. from Boston University in 1967, his M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Alabama in 1972 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in 1972.

Detterman taught at University of Dayton from 1970–1972, then took a position at Case Western Reserve University, where he has remained since.

Among his many achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016. He then founded the International Society for Intelligence Research in 2000 and was its President until 2011. He has also been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association from 1978–1998, a Fellow and charter member of the American Psychological Society from 1990–1998, and received a Mensa Research Award in 1991.

Click HERE to download Doug's extensive CV.

And now for some fun facts about the real Doug Detterman that you didn't already know, as described by Doug himself:

Cooking - My mother taught her three sons to cook but not her daughter.  She told us that if we learned to cook, women could not take advantage of us.  So we did a lot of cooking.  It is ironic that I did not figure out that it was my mother that was taking advantage of us until after she died.  In any event, since I like to eat I kept cooking and have gotten better over the years.  I generally do all the holiday meals and, since I have retired, much of the daily cooking.  Though my wife also likes to cook so unlike many families we sometimes fight to be able to cook.  By the way, from the beginning my mother insisted that whoever cooks must clean up and that is what we do.

Poker – I learned to play poker in the Navy in which I enlisted in 1960 and served through 1963.  I paid for lessons but got pretty good by the time I was getting out of the Navy and in the last game I played in in the Navy I won what would be about $2,500.  This allowed me to buy an engagement ring and propose to my wife so I guess you could say that I won my wife in a poker game.  We were married in 1965 while I was in college at BU. I have continued to play weekly or at least a couple times a month.  My wife never complains about my playing poker. You will also find on my vita a study done with Mike Dedono that shows poker is a skill not pure luck.

I also taught my son to play poker when he was 11 or 12.  My wife was in nursing school so I took my son with me to Anaheim, California the home of Disney Land.  To add interest to the trip we took Amtrak to Seattle, Washington and down the west coast to Anaheim.  This was a 3 night trip and I had never considered that a kid would get bored.  So to keep him amused, I taught him to play poker.  Over the years he became an exceptional player and still plays very well.

Traveling – one nice part of my job is that it has given me a chance to travel widely.  I always wanted to travel but was quite shocked to find out my wife hated traveling.  I was surprised to find such people but they are much more common than one would expect.  But she has not objected to the trips I have taken as long as she did not have to go along.