9 - Intelligence and its Measurement p1 Flashcards
Herrnstein and Murray on Intelligence
Analysed IQ scores and admissions to universities and colleges in the US
Found:
- the most important factor in college attendance was IQ, not social class or wealth
- Intelligence is the best predictor of Job performance
- There is a cognitive elite in the US based on a separation of society through education and the workplace, based on intelligence
- Warned that intelligence would soon become the basis of the US class system, those with highest IQs at the top
- Low IQ scores are a strong precursor to poverty, more than any socioeconomic condition
Low IQ:
> predicts students dropping out of education
> related to unemployment
> associated with higher rates of divorce, lower rates of marriage, and higher rates of illegitimate births - IQ scores are a better predictor of economic and social welfare than Socio-economic status
Harrnstein and Murray on Race and IQ
On the Wechsler intelligence test, White Americans score 15 IQ points higher than black Americans
Thus they concluded:
- blacks are less intelligent than whites
- immigration is pushing down the IQ of the US
- Education can not reverse the problem of low intelligence
- programmes of affirmative action lead to a decrease of intelligence in the workplace
What does the Wechsler Intelligence test measure?
Verbal and non-verbal reasoning
6 Premises of the Herrnstein and Murray Argument
- there is a general factor of cognitive ability (g) on which humans differ
- all standardised tests of academic aptitude measure this general factor (g) to some extent, but IQ tests measure intelligence the most accurately
- IQ scores reflect what most people mean by the word intelligence
- IQ scores are stable over a person’s life
- IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against any social, economic, ethnic or racial groups
- there is a genetic heritability of intelligence between 40% and 80%
Sternberg on intelligence
The capacity to learn from experience and adapt to one’s environment
Thorndike on intelligence
Intelligent people should be defined as highly intelligent, and stupid people should be defined as lowly intelligent
Ternman on intelligence
The ability to carry on abstract thinking
Gardner on intelligence
Suggested that there are multiple different types of intelligence (physical prowess, chess ability), and that IQ tests are limited in measuring these types
Binet and Simon on intelligence
Interested in the ability to use common sense, practical sense, adapt to circumstances, comprehend well and reason well
defined this as intelligence
What 3 factors did Sternberg find that the population rated important for intelligence?
Practical Problem Solving
- the ability to be logical in regard to problems we face in various situations
Verbal Ability
- the ability to express yourself and converse with others confidently and with some eloquence
Social Competence
- the skills necessary to be accepted and fulfilled socially
Cattell on intelligence and reaction time and Wissler’s criticisms
Cattell
‘intellectual ability could be assessed by measures of sensory acuity and reaction time’
Tested:
- two-point tactile threshold
- just noticeable difference for weights
- judgement of temporal intervale
- reaction time
- letter span
- pitch perception
Wissler
- there was no correlation between any of Cattell’s mental tests
> a student could be good in one area but not in another
*therefore these tests cannot all be a general measure of intelligence (g)
Wechsler on IQ score and his equation for IQ
IQ = (actual test score x 100) / Expected score
- where the Expected score is the average score obtained by a large representative sample
- IQ score is a reflection of an individual’s relative standing with respect to others of the same age
> IQ is not an absolute score
Ternman’s equation for IQ
IQ = (Mental age / Chronological age) x 100
Mackintosh on IQ and Reaction Time
‘the size of the correlation between choice reaction time and IQ is sufficiently small that no one could seriously argue that reaction time alone provides an explanation of intelligence’
Cattell on intelligence
Two different kinds of intelligence:
- Crystallised intelligence (gc)
- Fluid intelligence (gf)
What is crystallised intelligence?
- acquired knowledge and skills, such as factual knowledge
- increases through life
- e.g:
> vocabulary size
> verbal fluency (as many words as you can think of that start with F)
> working memory (reading span - recall the last word of each sentance)
> numerical ability
What is fluid intelligence?
Primary reasoning ability
- the ability to solve abstract relational problems
- no cultural influence
- does not improve with age, slightly decreases
E.g
- analogical reasoning (coding, mapping and application)
- working memory
- executive control (intentional functions)
Central Executive Function
Carpenter
- the ability to select appropriate strategies to tackle a problem
- to deploy and manage the components and resources to address the problem
Sternberg
- 8 stages of problem solving
Thurstone’s 7 Primary mental abilities
- Associative Memory (rote memory)
- Number (mathematical operations)
- Perceptual Speed (perceiving details, anomalies and similarities in visual stimuli)
- Reasoning (inductive and deductive reasoning)
- Space (ability to transform spatial figures mentally)
- Verbal Comprehension (reading, comprehension and verbal analogies)
- Word Fluency (generate and use a large number of words effectively)
Gardner’s Multiple intelligences (9)
- Linguistic
- Logical-mathematical
- Spatial
- Musical
- Bodily Kinaesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Naturalist (ability to interact with nature)
- Existentialist (linked to spiritual theory)
Stanford-Binet IQ Test
Binet was Tasked with figuring out whether children would perform well in school or not
- so tried to determine their mental age via his IQ test
- focussed on a series of 30 short tasks related to everyday life
Stanford adapted Binet’s test and added 40 items
Wechsler IQ Test
Commonly used here
Subsets:
- Arithmetic (addition of even numbers)
- Block design
- Comprehension (advantage of keeping money in the bank?)
- Digit Span (recall a string of numbers)
- Digit Symbol (copy across coded symbols)
- Information (general knowledge)
- Object arrangement (jigsaw puzzle)
- Picture Rearrangement (arrange cards to tell a simple story {cartoon})
- Picture completion (what’s missing from the picture)
- Similarities (in what way are a lion and tiger alike / art is to a wall as cup is to a (cupboard) )
- Vocabulary (definition test)
Ravens Progressive Matrices
- supposedly pure tests of problem solving
- study the environment to determine the ‘rule’ that needs to be applied to solve the problem
Mackintosh on General Intelligence (g)
Where different tasks that measure intelligence show a positive correlation between them all, factor analysis will yield a general factor that accounts for this positive manifold
Spearman:
- this general factor (g) provides a complete and sufficient explanation of the correlation between tests
- abilities on different factors within this test can cluster together
