Intelligence
- It is hard to get explicit about what we mean by intelligence.
- There was a poll of 1,000 experts asking them what intelligence meant to them. And just about all of them mentioned abstract, reasoning, problem-solving, and ability to acquire knowledge. And then other things kept coming up memory, mental speed, language, math, knowledge, creativity, etc.
- Classic tests by Spearman break down intelligence into two parts, S and G.
- Imagine there are 6 separate tests, separate components of an intelligence test and you’ll do them and you’ll get 6 scores.
- Spearman points out that you could break this up
- S: people’s skill at each individual test
- G: a common factor spanning all of these tasks
- The success of IQ tests is, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think about skin color. Where skin color is powerfully related to how well you do in life. At least in part, because people take skin color very seriously when making decisions, both consciously and unconsciously.
- It seems not very debatable that IQ captures something of meaningful relevance. So there’s actually research that finds that your score on a test correlates with your mental speed and the span of your working memory (short-term memory). People with high IQs as measure by IQ tests are able to think in some way faster and better. And it does make a difference in everyday life.