Ch.9

Question 1

What is Intelligence?

9.1

Answer 1

intelligence consists of the following abilities:

• Reason abstractly

• Learn to adapt to novel environmental circumstances

• Acquire knowledge

• Benefit from experience

• intelligence is related to efficiency or speed of information processing

• We all possess different intellectual strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not clear that they’re as independent of each other as Gardner and Sternberg assert. — So there may still be a general intelligence dimension after all

Question 2

Why is Intelligence hard to define?

9.1

Question 3

Galton’s sensory capacity

9.1

Answer 3

• that most knowledge first comes through the senses, especially vision and hearing.

• Therefore, he assumed, people with superior sensory capacities, like better eyesight, should acquire more knowledge than other people.

• Whatever intelligence is, it’s more than just good eyesight, hearing, smell, and taste.

Question 4

Abstract Thinking

9.1

Answer 4

• capacity to understand hypothetical concepts rather than concepts in the here and now

Higher mental processes: These processes included reasoning, understanding, and judgment

Question 5

Spearman’s general vs. specific

9.1

Answer 5

• hypothesized the existence of a single shared factor across all of these aspects g, or general intelligence — that accounted for the overall differences in intellect among people.
— not sure what produces diffs but assumed may be linked with mental energy
— g corresponds to strength of our “mental engines”
- some might possess more powerful ones (effective and efficient) brains
— didn’t believe told whole story of intelligence that’s where (s) comes in

• (s) particular ability level in a narrow domain.
— how well we perform on a given mental task depends not only on our general smarts (g), but also on our particular skills in narrow domains (s).

Question 6

fluid vs. crystallized

9.1

Answer 6

Fluid:
- capacity to learn new ways of solving problems
- more likely to decline with age than crystallized abilities
- more highly related to g than crystallized abilities
- intelligence may better capture the power of the “mental engine” to which Spearman referred.

Crystallized:
- accumulated knowledge of the world acquired over time
- increase with age, including into old age
- moderately and positively associated with a personality trait known as openness to experience.

• knowledge from newly learned tasks “flows” into our long term memories, “crystallizing” into lasting knowledge

Question 7

Sternberg’s Triarchic model (the 3 types)

9.1

Answer 7

• Model of intelligence proposed by Robert Sternberg positing three distinct types of intelligence: analytical, practical, and creative

1. ANALYTICAL INTELLIGENCE: THE ABILITY TO REASON LOGICALLY.
   — “book smarts.” It’s the kind of intelligence we need to do well on traditional intelligence tests and school exams.
   — this form closely related to g.
2. PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE, ALSO CALLED “TACIT INTELLIGENCE,” THE ABILITY TO SOLVE REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS, ESPECIALLY THOSE INVOLVING OTHER PEOPLE.
   — akin to “street smarts.”
   — some call social intelligence or capacity to understand others
3. ** CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE ALSO CALLED “CREATIVITY,” OUR ABILITY TO COME UP WITH NOVEL AND EFFECTIVE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS.**
   — to find new and effective solutions to problems

• practical and creative intelligences predict outcomes, like job performance, that analytical intelligence doesn’t.

Cons
• Sternberg hasn’t demonstrated convincingly that practical intelligence is independent of g
•

Question 8

Gardner’s multiple intelligences (the 9 types)

9.1

Answer 8

1. Linguistic
   — Speak and write well
2. Logico-mathematical
   — Use logic and mathematical skills to solve problems, such as scientific questions
3. Spatial
   — Think and reason about objects in three-dimensional space
4. Musical
   — Perform, understand, and enjoy music
5. Bodily-kinesthetic
   — Manipulate the body in sports, dance, or other physical endeavours
6. Interpersonal
   — Understand and interact effectively with others
7. Intrapersonal
   — Understand and possess insight into self
8. Naturalistic
   — Recognize, identify, and understand animals, plants, and other living things
9. Existential intelligence
   — the ability to grasp deep philosophical ideas, like the meaning of life.

Guidelines:
• Researchers must demonstrate that different intelligences can be isolated from one another in studies of people with brain damage.
• Different intelligences should be especially pronounced in people with exceptional talents.
• Different intelligences should make sense from an evolutionary standpoint: They should help organisms survive or make it easier for them to meet future mates.

Con:
• Model is virtually impossible to falsify.
• doesn’t have ways to tests these different intelligences’ to see if they are independent of one another or not

Question 9

Correlations between brain activation and reaction time and intelligence

9.1

Answer 9

• highly “g-loaded” - substantially related to general intelligence all activated the prefrontal cortex
— plays key roles in planning, impulse control, and short-term memory

• parietal lobe, also appear to be associated with intelligence
— intimately involved in spatial abilities.

• Intelligence is related to efficiency or speed of information processing
—** intelligence is more than quickness of thinking.**

• suggest that the capacity to retrieve short-term information is related to intelligence

Question 10

Original purpose of IQ tests

9.2

Answer 10

• Originally developed for children but since extended to adults

• Terman’s great achievement was to establish a set of norms, baseline scores in the general population from which we can compare each individual’s score. (Of intelligences)
— Using norms, we can ask whether a given person’s score on intelligence test items is above or below those of similar-aged people, and by how much.

Question 11

who developed the first IQ tests

9.2

Answer 11

Stanford and Binet

Question 12

Stern’s formula for
calculating IQ (how to calculate it)

9.2

Answer 12

• Divide mental age by chronological age and multiply the resulting number by 100.

• mental age: Age corresponding to the average individual’s performance on an intelligence test

Con:
• Once we hit age 16 or so, performance on IQ test items doesn’t increase by much.
— > mental age levels off but our chronological age increases with time
—> result in everyone’s IQ getting lower and lower as they get older.

Question 13

deviation IQ (what it means)

9.2

Answer 13

• expression of a person’s IQ relative to their same-aged peers.

• IQ of 100: average, means that a person’s 10 is exactly typical of people in their age group.

• IQ of 80: is a standard amount below average for any age group.

• IQ of 120: is a standard amount above.

Question 14

the WAIS (what it is, the 4 main subscales, types of questions from each subscale)

9.2

Answer 14

• Most widely used intelligence test for adults today, consisting of 15 subtests to assess different types of mental abilities.

• Main: an overall IQ score

Subscale 1: verbal comprehension
Ex: vocabulary, similarities, information

Subscale 2: perceptual reasoning
Ex: block design, matrix reasoning, visual puzzles

Subscale 3: working memory
Ex: arithmetic, digit span

Subscale 4: processing speed
Ex: symbol search, coding

Bias rating
1. Most biased: verbal
2. Medium biased: working memory
3. Least biased: perceptual reasoning and processing speed

Question 15

Army Alpha and Beta test

9.2

Answer 15

Alpha: verbal test, measuring such skills as ability to follow directions.

Beta: presented nonverbal problems to illiterate subjects and recent immigrants who were not proficient in English.

Question 16

bias in IQ test questions

9.2

Answer 16

• Their heavy reliance on language. Test takers who aren’t fluent in the native language may do poorly on IQ tests largely because they don’t comprehend the test instructions or the questions themselves.
• cultural factors can affect people’s familiarity with test materials, and in turn their performance on intellectual task

Question 17

misuses of IQ
testing

9.2

Answer 17

• no longer merely a vehicle for targeting schoolchildren in need of special help, however, but a means of identifying adults deemed intellectually inferior, which could lend itself to justifying withholding resources and opportunities to people believed to be.
• Eugenics: Movement in the early 20th century to improve a population’s genetic stock by encouraging those with good genes to reproduce (positive eugenics), discouraging those with bad genes from reproducing (negative eugenics), or both
  —> associated with at least two disturbing practices.

1. Beginning in the 1920s, both the U.S. Congress and the Canadian House of Commons passed laws designed to restrict immigration from other countries supposedly marked by low intelligence, especially those in Eastern and Southern Europe
2. Many provinces in Canada passed laws requiring the sterilization of low-1Q individuals.
   —> forced sterilization. Many were tricked being told they needed emergency appendectomies.

Question 18

reliability and validity (including concurrent and predictive) of IQ test scores

9.2

Answer 18

• reliability refers to consistency of measurement.

— One important type of reliability is test-retest reliability, which refers to the extent to which scores on a measure administered several times are roughly identical.

• validity refers to the extent to which a test measures what it purports to measure.

— One important indicator of a test’s validity is its ability to relate to outcomes measured at about the same time the test is administered, or what psychologists call “concurrent” validity.

— Another important indicator is a test’s capacity to forecast future outcomes, or what psychologists call “predictive” validity.

Question 19

bell curve (what it is, what
percentage of scores fall in the mid

9.2

Answer 19

• Distribution of scores in which the bulk of the scores fall toward the middle, with progressively fewer scores toward the “tails” or extremes.

• about 95 percent of people have IQs between 70 and 130.

• curve contains a small bump on the left, indicating that there are more very low IQ scores than we’d expect from a perfect bell curve.

— Extreme scores are probably the result of assortative mating: the tendency of individuals with similar genes to have children.

Question 20

aptitude vs achievement tests

9.2

Answer 20

• Aptitude: used to predict how people will perform in the future on specific domains.
  –> potential to learn
• Achievement: measure a person’s level of current skill in a certain area.
  –> already learned

Question 21

Genetic and Environmental Influences on IQ: Family

9.3

Answer 21

• family studies allow us to examine the extent to which a trait “runs” or goes together in intact families (those in which all family members live together in the same home).

• Studies of intact families don’t allow us to distinguish the effects of genes from those of the environment.

• IO runs in families: The correlation of IQ for brothers and sisters raised in the same family is about 0.5, whereas for cousins it’s about 0.15

Question 22

Genetic and Environmental Influences on IQ: Twin

9.3

Answer 22

• compare correlations in a trait in two types of twins: identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic).

• higher identical twin than fraternal twin correlations tell us that IQ is influenced by genetic factors.

• twin findings provide even more convincing evidence for environmental influences on IQ, because the identical twin correlations for IQ are less than perfect. Given that identical twins share 100 percent of their genes, they would correlate 1.0 if genetic influences alone were operative. The fact that they correlate less than 1.0 tells us that environmental influences also play a role.

• identical twin correlations have been in the 0.7 to 0.8 range

• fraternal twin correlations have been in the 0.3 to 0.4 range.

Question 23

Adoption studies (what they are and
what they suggest about genes influencing intelligence)

9.3

Answer 23

• examine the extent to which children adopted into ne w homes resemble their adoptive versus biological parents.

• established a clear contribution of the environment to IQ.

• allow us to separate environmental from genetic effects on IQ, because adoptees are raised by parents with whom they share an environment, but not genes.

• results of adoption studies indicate that the IQs of adopted children tend to be similar to the IOs of their biological parents, offering evidence of genetic influence.

• selective placement: Adoption agencies frequently place children in homes similar to those of the biological parents.

— can lead investigators to mistakenly interpret the similarity between adoptive children and adoptive parents as an environmental effect.

Question 24

Growth mindset

9.3

Answer 24

• people who believe that intelligence is a flexible process that can increase over time tend to take more academic risks.
— “If I do really poorly in a class, I can still do better next time.”

• tend to persist after failing on a problem, probably because they believe that effort can pay off.

• Consequently, they may perform better in the long run on challenging intellectual tasks.

Question 25

family size

9.3

Answer 25

• more accurate way to state the correlation is that children who come from larger families have slightly lower IQs than children who come from smaller families.

• Parents with lower IQs are slightly more likely to have many children than parents with higher IQs.

• Look across families, birth order is associated with 1Q, but only because low-IQ families have a larger number of later-born children than high-IQ families.

• Look within families, the relationship between birth order and IQ becomes smaller and may even vanish

Question 26

expectancy effects

9.3

Answer 26

• refers to the tendency of researchers to unintentionally influence the outcome of studies.

• Effects of expectancy on IQ have their limits.

Ex: Teacher tricked into thinking a student is more intelligent than average.

— These effects are substantial only when teachers don’t know their students well; when teachers have worked with students for at least a few weeks, the effects often disappear.
— Once teachers form definite impressions of how smart their students are, it’s hard to persuade them that their impressions are off base.

Question 27

poverty

9.3

Answer 27

•exhibited a cumulative deficit, a difference that grows over time.

• Older siblings consistently had lower IQs than younger siblings, with a steady decrease of about 1.5 IQ points per year.

• social and economic deprivation can adverselv affect IQ.

• poverty often comes inadequate diet.

Question 28

nutrition

9.3

Answer 28

• malnutrition in childhood, especially if prolonged, can lower IQ.

• breastfed babies end up with a little bit of higher IQs than bottlefed babies.

— breastfed babies higher IQ could be explained by mothers who breastfeed tend to be somewhat higher in social class than mothers who bottlefeed.

— mothers’ milk contains about 100 ingredients absent from milk formula, including several that speed up the myelinization of neurons

• Investigation:
— Researchers gave nutritional (protein) supplements to preschool children from an impoverished region of Guatemala. These children’s school-related test scores were significantly higher than those of similar children who didn’t receive supplements

Question 29

lead

9.3

Answer 29

• Poor children are also likely to be exposed to lead as a result of drinking lead-contaminated water, breathing lead contaminated dust, or eating lead paint chips.

• Such exposure is also associated with intellectual deficits

• it’s unclear how much of this correlation is due to the direct effects of lead itself as opposed to poverty or other factors, like malnutrition.

Question 30

the Flynn effect (what they are and what they suggest about the environment influencing intelligence).

9.3

Answer 30

• finding that average IQ scores have been rising at a rate of approximately three points per decade.

— It suggests that, on average, our IQs are a full 10 to 15 points higher than those of our grandparents

• most agree that this effect is a result of unidentified environmental influences on IQ b/c unlikely that genetic changes could account for such rapid rises in IQ over brief time periods.

• The causes of the apparent end to the Flynn effect are as puzzling as the causes of its beginning.

4 environmental influences:

1. INCREASED TEST SOPHISTICATION:
2. INCREASED COMPLEXITY OF THE MODERN WORLD:
3. BETTER NUTRITION:
4. CHANGES AT HOME AND SCHOOL:

Question 31

Creativity (divergent and convergent thinking)

9.5

Answer 31

• Creative accomplishments consist of two features: They are novel and successful.

• Divergent: capacity to generate many different solutions to a problem.

• Convergent: capacity to generate the single best solution to a problem.

• Shouldn’t confuse intelligence with creativity: Measures of these two capacities are only weakly or moderately associated.
— Many intelligent people aren’t especially creative, and vice versa.

Question 32

Emotional intelligence (EQ)

9.5

Answer 32

• ability to understand our own emotions and those of others, and to apply this information to our daily lives.

• consists of several subcomponents:
— capacities to understand and recognize one’s emotions
— to appreciate others’ emotions
— to control one’s emotions
— to adapt one’s emotions to diverse situations

• Most measures of emotional intelligence assess personality traits, such as extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience.

• The most parsimonious hypothesis is that emotional intelligence isn’t anything new, and that it’s instead a mixture of personality traits that psychologists have studied for decades.

Question 33

Curiosity

9.5

Answer 33

• Extremely interested in understanding how the world works

• Evidence suggests curiosity is a potent predictor of academic achievement, and that it adds considerably to the prediction of such achievement above and beyond IQ.

Question 34

Grit

9.5

Answer 34

• consists of two major elements:

— perseverance (the willingness to persist in efforts despite frustrations and failures)
— a deep-seated passion to achieve one’s goals.

• several studies found that grit predicts academic performance above and beyond IQ.

• scientifically controversial:

— it’s not clear how different grit is from the well-established personality trait of conscientiousness, which is a predictor of school and work performance.

— In addition, grit appeared to stem from most of the same genes as did conscientiousness

Question 35

Wisdom

9.5

Answer 35

• application of intelligence toward a common good

• learned to achieve a delicate balance among three often-competing interests:
— concerns about oneself (self-interest)
— concerns about others
— concerns about the broader society.

• They channel their intelligence into avenues that benefit others.

• They come to appreciate alternative points of view, even as they may disagree with them.

• To a substantial extent, wisdom is marked by an awareness of our biases and cognitive fallibilities.
— In these respects, we can think of wise people as good scientific thinkers in everyday life

Question 36

More in depth about environmental influences on Flynn Effect

Answer 36

1. INCREASED TEST SOPHISTICATION:
   — increase in 1Q scores results not from people becoming smarter, but from people becoming more experienced at taking tests.
   —> Flynn effect is most pronounced on “culture-fair” tests, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, to which people have had the least exposure.
2. INCREASED COMPLEXITY OF THE MODERN WORLD:
   — forced to process far more information far more quickly than our parents and grandparents ever did.
   — modern information explosion may be putting pressure on us to become more intelligent
3. BETTER NUTRITION:
   — People are better fed than ever before
   — affecting primarily the lower, but not the upper, tail of the bell curve.
   —> rates of severe malnutrition in many parts of the world are declining
4. CHANGES AT HOME AND SCHOOL:
   — families have become smaller, allowing parents to devote more time to their children.
   — Parents have more access to intellectual resources than ever before.
   — children and adolescents spend more years in school than in previous generations

Question 37

Bias in IQ tests:

Biased Question vs Biased test

Answer 37

Biased Question
• Measures something other than intelligence (e.g., language or cultural knowledge)

Biased Test
• Good at predicting outcomes for one group, not good at predicting outcomes for another group