IQ is not intelligence. IQ is a number determined by a culturally biased test.
The most likely reason scores are dropping, is that test-makers are not keeping up with changes in culture. People are 2019-smart and getting lower scores because they're not 1970-smart.
"I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased"
I think a lot of newcomers from very poor countries may not be exposed to some things as often, they might not be thinking about shapes and geometry in the same way - more importantly, the notion of tests and test taking.
Solving little abstract problems in a test format as we understand them ... I think is something that's only normalized in certain countries.
I think there's enough potential variance in those things to make a difference.
It's not like people can't grasp what a 3D cube is ... but some cultures just may have that much more exposure to things, more familiarity. Enough to move the needle.
I went to a French immersion school as a kid, in an English city. I studied mostly in French for most of the day until high school. When they did some kinds of testing, there were 'word tests' which depended on some degree of vocabulary.
Though my peers were basically 'a cut above' in almost everything (French immersion was basically public school's version of private school) ... we did noticeably more poorly on that test, granted the lexical nature of it makes 'cultural bias' more obvious.
I think it's 'a thing' though maybe a small thing.
Word tests are used as part of good, high quality IQ tests (e.g. WAIS and Stanford-Binet, though obviously not Raven’s). They are in fact one of the most useful and predictive parts (I.e. they are most g-loaded). They are biased (i.e. not measurement invariant) if you compare subjects from different countries/cultures, but they are not biased if you compare subjects from the same country/culture. For example, the score on word analogies sections has exact same predictive validity for white Americans as it does for black Americans. See Arthur Jensen’s “Bias in mental testing” for a very comprehensive treatise on the issue.
> Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".
For "name the next number in the series" questions there literally are no wrong answers unless you place further restrictions.
IQ tests typically use shapes and not numbers, but that doesn't solve this specific question. Finding the answer is more about finding the same answer as the official solution, which is culture dependant
When given the task "What is the next number in this sequence: 3, 5, 7" my first thought would be 9, since we are counting odd numbers. But that's kind of dumb, nobody would ask something this simple. So maybe the answer is 11, since we might be counting prime numbers. That's probably good enough for an IQ test, but if this was an interview question at Google the better answer might be 13 (counting Mersenne exponents, integers so that 2^n - 1 is prime, a well known method to find large primes). On the other hand 23 is the next prime whose digits are also prime. 9 is also the next Columbian Number, but 13 is the next fortunate number.
Now a good question would give me only one of these as possible answer, but in practise having multiple viable answers happens and I have to judge how complicated the question was supposed to be, what the test's expectations are etc. If you ask a Japanese you might get a different answer than if you ask a French simply because of how different their academic cultures are.
What does a carefully chosen straw man IQ question (may never have appeared in an IQ test in history, afaik) have to do with the fact that no sub saharan african society had developed the wheel before colonialism?
>Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.
No, but whether that is a meaningful measure of intelligence is where the bias creeps in. In our times having high mathematical aptitude is considered to be a sign of intelligence and intelligence is associated with success, so the very same people who like mathy things design IQ tests and hand out credentials and make the most money, so the entire process is largely circular.
What constitutes intelligence is dependent on what environment you're in. If in 100 years all the technical things have been automated it's conceivable that people with high degrees of social intelligence or creativity who can leverage technology rather than implement it will get to define what intelligence means.
IQ predicts those as well, not just mathematical ability. The theory of "multiple intelligences" has serious weaknesses which have not been addressed by its proponents, chief among those is that the "different intelligences" are highly correlated.
That's not the point. Nobody denies that mathematics is involved in bridge-building. What is malleable is the perception whether bridge-building is a feat of intellect, and the position in the social hierarchy people with that ability occupy.
I had to take an IQ test as part of my adhd diagnosis. I was asked about sherlock holmes, I have never read sherlock holmes, I haven't seen the series, and I mentioned that when the test administrator asked me questions related to it.
Are you sure that question was related to IQ specifically? I suspect it wasn’t. Neuropsychological assessments usually administered to diagnose ADHD include a lot of things that aren’t related to IQ and many things that are just there to guide the person administering the test on the subjects capabilities in ways that don’t show up in results but to influence what further tests they’ll administer.
Different communities use different variants of the English language - different words, different grammar, and different meanings for the same words. The standard English on most English IQ tests is not going to be as accessible or understandable to somebody who speaks a different dialect and isn't as familiar with standard English.
It depends on what you use them for. If you want to compare the intelligence of people from different cultures, you need a culturally neutral test (whether such a thing exists is another question). For clinical diagnosis, when what you want to test is whether an individual is retarded or if there are suspicious patterns in their test results – like a large difference between their score at different subtests – I don't think it matters.
There are (or were) actually tests used by psychologists that include testing one's vocabulary. Which is knowledge, not intelligence.
From my experience of IQ tests administered in Germany the tests have multiple parts, among others one about reasoning about abstract shapes, one about spatial reasoning, and one about language (naming related words under time pressure and similar).
Because children who spend their time looking at screens will probably find it harder to understand spatial dimensions. Perhaps they gain something else, like heightened social awareness, but not physically actively playing with 3D objects will surely take its toll.
But, the trend of increased screen time in my opinion is a bad one and would probably lead to lowered IQ. There's no reason to get stuck on a problem or spend time being bored. As children playing with Lego, Mechano, K'nex, etc, we taught ourselves to solve problems with no shortcuts. We were bored, we found a problem, we got stuck, we troubleshooted and we overcame. It seems like the younger generations of today are losing this Scientific process.
Probably the most concerning issue is that the reward system doesn't require pushing your mental abilities. You can see interesting output without having to put the work in. Because many of the websites/apps measure success in engagement, they literally want you to do as little work as possible to see as much interesting content as possible. Contrast that to pre-screen time, where if you wanted to play with the Lego model on the box you had to build it. Mechano would even actively put mistakes into the instructions to allow kids to problem solve.
> Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.
Really? You can't think of any factors other than innate genetic intelligence that would influence your success in answering questions like this?
Let me give you the first example that springs to mind. I can come up with many more.
I used to know someone who had anxiety issues about their intellectual ability and would clam up when they felt they were being tested. Anything that seemed "test-like" to them would make them stressed and confused. I would bet any attempt to measure their IQ that triggered this behaviour would produce a lower score than if they didn't suffer from this.
Is that a measure of innate intelligence?
Like I said I can think of many similar scenarios although they would be more hypothetical.
I feel like you'd have to content with test reliability, correlation with other measures of intelligence, and the general multi-decade upward trend (not specific to 1970s, the Flynn effect).
What does 2019-smart mean though? People's brains are optimized for better handing of super-stimulating entertainment? Does that translate into better problem solving and other important skills? Have the importance of those smarts related to those skills changed in 50 years? If not, adjusting the IQ tests to match these doesn't make sense.
I think it's more that "problem-solving skills" are only defined in terms of a set of problems, and the set of problems that are encountered in everyday life changes over time.
"What does <year>-smart mean though?" is the question you have to answer to make an IQ test. And it's impossible to answer. IQ test-makers have been getting it wrong in various ways since they started. All an IQ test can tell you is how well you do on IQ tests. If IQ correlates to other outcomes, that's because the test was designed (intentionally or not) to correlate with those other outcomes, not because IQ test-makers are meta-geniuses who know the answer to "What does <year>-smart mean though?"
US military uses an IQ test (ASVAB) for personnel assignment. It doesn’t matter what intelligence “actually” is, or how well IQ tests measure it. What is important is that IQ tests are extremely useful in predicting education success, doing effective job assignment, explaining various socioeconomic variables, which is why we use them.
I remember reading somewhere that people raised in modern housing and cities could cultivate a better affinity for thinking about geometric shapes. That could give a cultural bias against the global rural south.
> It was all finding patterns in shapes... What about this would be culturally biased?
Well, a culture that doesn't stress pattern finding in schooling would be at a disadvantage, for example.
You can also practice pattern finding, and get better at it. That indicates it's not a very effective test of intelligence, which you're supposed to just either have or not have. You're testing a learned skill, not raw intelligence.
IQ is probably one of the closest tools we have to measuring intelligence, at least in terms of a person's ability to process information and reason about it.
IQ is not intelligence, but it's the closest thing to approximate it for certain cognitive aspects.
I agree it's a measurement and does not encompass every aspect of intelligence, but I thought they developed tests which had no cultural component, using symbols and patterns.
We can increase the FLOPs of a CPU by reducing resistance, increasing the size of cache, reducing distance between I/O devices.
Might IQ be a measure of the aggregate of the benefit of equivalent measures of neurons?
For example, we know that MS patients have autoimmune diseases that attack the myelin sheath on neurons which slows their neuronal processing speed. Perhaps higher IQ people might have more Schwann cells to speed neuronal transmission more than lower IQ people.
Maybe the diameter of neurons or the width of the gap between the synapses. Or the sheer number of neurons and synapses might be different.
IQ could be an indirect measurement through test taking, that approximates a combined measure of all the physical properties of neurons and their arrangements that contribute to higher intelligence.
That seems a reasonable approximation from my perspective as a layman. A couple of things (that I am sadly lacking sources for right now) that might suggest this interpretation include:
- there is a meaningful (albeit small) correlation between IQ and reaction times
- people with higher IQs show lower brain activation when performing cognitive tasks compared to people with lower IQs. That is, their brain has to do less work to perform the same task.
Sure. For example, we know that IQ is correlated quite substantially (though far from perfectly) with the brain volume within all populations for which such measurement was made. There is a huge confounded here however, which is women having significantly smaller brains than men, but not scoring any worse on IQ tests, or being any less intelligent than men, even though smaller brained men tend to be less intelligent than larger brained men, and also smaller brained women tend to be less intelligent than larger brained women. It is thought that this apparent disparity is can be explained by increased “density” of neurons in some sections of women’s brains, compared to the same sections of men’s brains. I’m quite sure you can find references for it in Jensen’s “The g factor”.
The density difference is due to physical support for impact resistance. The jawline difference also relates to impact resistance. It seems that evolution accounts for men getting punched more often.
I'd say all of Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix, LeBron James, Martin Luther King (keep on going if you like) have a form of extreme intelligence not measured well by IQ tests. The kinds of problems in IQ tests are one thing our brain can adapt to solve but humans are so incredibly neuroplastic that IQ is much too narrow a concept to be definitive.
We are talking about general civilization's aggregate IQ though. Sure, there are people too smart or exotic to measure, but that's true on both ends of the spectrum, so might they balance out?
Perhaps, you know, in the past, it was more difficult for those with lower IQ's to survive. Now people with lower IQ's can survive for longer, which is good for them -- absolutely! -- however, it would reduce average IQ's.
That would also suggest, this isn't something bad for civilization like the article suggests. Perhaps the same number of incredibly intelligent people like the ones you mention are better able now in this modern age to get their solutions to more people to make it easier to live.
This is mostly a definition game using "intelligence" to mean "reaching the peak of a narrow skill." That sort of peak takes a tricky-to-nail-down combination of innate ability, practice, and environment to reach. When people are talking about IQ, they use the word intelligence to describe, essentially, fluid problem-solving and reasoning aptitude. A lot of disagreement in this domain can and should be resolved with clearer terminology.
IQ says little about the specific skills someone has trained, so more specific tests are useful for that, but it provides a lot of information on the general aptitude it is intended to assess.
1970 smart is being able to diagnose and repair a problem with your own car or maybe having hobbies that require some form of creative thinking and problem solving.
2019 smart is to know how to browse Instagram while on your way to work without running headfirst into a wall.
2019 smart is figuring out how to build webapps, hacking on microcontrollers or other hobbies that require some form of creative thinking and problem solving.
How does “culture” play a biasing role? Is there an example of a question that someone 1970-smart will answer correctly but someone 2019-smart will get wrong? Curious.
Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a large number of phone numbers memorized for friends, family, businesses I needed to contact regularly, etc. Presumably, memorizing dozens of seven- and ten- digit numbers regularly improved my ability to memorize long strings of digits.
Today, I no longer know any phone numbers besides my own and my wife's. And I know hers only because it's just one digit different than my own. I'm sure children are not getting any practice at this sort of thing.
So, does memorizing strings of digits have anything to do with how smart you are? If this is still part of IQ tests, then I'm not surprised raw scores are decreasing.
Working memory is tremendously useful for a wide range of intellectual tasks.
Imagine a CPU with an eternal spinning-rust hard drive and no cache, vs a computer with a 10x slower CPU and a 4MB cache. Which do you thing is more powerful at solving problems?
Of course working memory is important and should be tested in an IQ test. But so is being able to use tools to augment yourself and work around your weaknesses.
And having a specialized ability to memorize numbers is quite useless.
That might be part of the overall testing you did in which more than just IQ was being testing. In a normal barrage you might get tests for working memory, attention, etc. which are not IQ. This sounds like it’s testing working memory.
I don't have domain expertise here, but I suspect one example would be simple numerical calculation: electronic devices are so widely available today that hardly anyone can do long division in their head, or by hand for that matter, whereas relatively many more people in 1970 probably could, and had no ready electronic alternative. Whether people in 2019 could learn this skill as well as people in 1970 if it were deemed a priority, I don't know, but I think it's fair to say that the skill was much more valued in 1970, and considered a more integral aspect of "intelligence." (And of course, numeracy only became so important relatively recently in history -- centuries ago, the ability to successfully hunt and forage was much more essential to most people's definition of "smart" than anything involving numbers.)
I’ve not seen any numerical calculation in an IQ test I’ve done that isn’t in some form just a puzzle and that doesn’t get more advanced than basic arithmetic. Being able to reason about numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication etc. is perfectly in line with measuring intelligence.
I'm surprised how many people here don't understand the inherit biases IQ tests have.
In order for something to test intelligence you shouldn't be able to improve your score by learning, practicing, or studying. Scores should be reproducible. I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.
They also assume knowledge. For example, the IQ test I had when I was young included word comparisons. This tested vocabulary more than intelligence. Someone who didn't have a formal education or didn't know English well would score lower regardless of their intelligence.
IQ is not highly regarded in psychology. It's more reliable than garbage like Meyers-Briggs but is not a true test of intelligence.
In order for something to test intelligence you shouldn't be able to improve your score by learning, practicing, or studying.
You cannot really improve your IQ score by any significant margin by studying in general, unless you memorize the answers on a particular test. This doesn’t make the IQ tests any less useful or valid than SAT or MCAT.
Scores should be reproducible.
They are. Test-retest correlation on high quality IQ tests are well north of 0.9
I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.
If you practice (I.e. memorize the answers) for a specific test, e.g. Wechsler, you won’t get any gain on Stanford Binet, for example.
They also assume knowledge. For example, the IQ test I had when I was young included word comparisons. This tested vocabulary more than intelligence. Someone who didn't have a formal education or didn't know English well would score lower regardless of their intelligence.
Yes, because intelligent people tend to have more knowledge. People don’t attain vocabulary simply by being taught the words at school. Vocabulary is learned by experiencing contact with words, and intelligent people tend to seek these experiences more. But yes, comparing an Englishman and Korean on an English-language analogies section of WAIS makes no sense. Fortunately, there almost always is measurement invariance within same country/culture, meaning that the tests measure the same latent ability.
They're not infinitely adaptable, though. The further you go from whatever baseline you're working with, the harder it will be to make significant progress. What's more, people with higher base scores will tend to progress faster. These repeat effects also tend to fade over time (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED076675). Finally and most importantly, virtually all types of skill training are extraordinarily domain-specific. In the digit span example above, the individual who trained up to a digit span of 79 was tested on chains of alphabetic characters instead and went right back down to the standard 7 +/- 2.
What does all this mean for IQ tests? Well, the goal is to identify broad baselines, not specific trained skills. The best ones will test a broad range of specific cognitive skills (like the Stanford-Binet) or a specific g-loaded skill that an individual hasn't practiced (like Raven's Progressive Matrices). It's fine for them to assume knowledge if they are directed towards specific cultures (for example, English vocabulary is fair game in an IQ test aimed at teen/adult native English speakers), but tests like Raven's should be used for broader contexts. If someone really needs an accurate idea, comparing several tests is worthwhile: A determined individual can practice some specific skills on one test, but those skills won't transfer.
IQ isn't perfect, but it's a useful proxy for intelligence that correlates meaningfully with quite a bit. Specific IQ tests can be trained for in limited ways, but such training only reflects narrow skills and so can easily be avoided by testing a variety of skills in thoughtful ways.
So are you saying that you can’t improve your intelligence and you’ll always have the same intelligence level, predetermined at birth, for the whole of your life?
I don’t really think this is the case.
I’m pretty sure that is widely known that you can improve your intelligence by training / practicing.
If the IQ test results are improved with training then it is something that attests their value beside other bullshit tests that don’t improve with practice.
The most likely reason scores are dropping, is that test-makers are not keeping up with changes in culture. People are 2019-smart and getting lower scores because they're not 1970-smart.