Jensen received his PhD in psychology from Teachers College at Columbia in 1956 (Brace 2005). He had once believed that environmental factors were more important in explaining differences in intelligence than genetic factors. However, he spent a year (1966–1967) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where he met the physicist and Nobel laureate William Shockley (1910–1989). The two men became very close friends and Shockley converted Jensen to his own beliefs about race.
