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.
Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".
You can claim bias against blind people, but cultural bias is nonsense.
There are (or were) actually tests used by psychologists that include testing one's vocabulary. Which is knowledge, not intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
Things like 'bear is to dog as fish is to: a) flower b) whale c) door d) donkey' ... kind of thing.
It's not supposed to test language proficiency, but it can have an effect.
Black and (a) white, (b) blue, (c) proud, (d) decker.
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.
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
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.
It's possible there is something to this.
What about this would be culturally biased? The test could literally be administered in any language or even orally to someone who couldn’t read.
not everyone has. I don't think these are as unbiased as we like to think they are.
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 not intelligence, but it's the closest thing to approximate it for certain cognitive aspects.
"What is intelligence?" is a broad enough question that you could write your dissertation on it.
Do you not think in general, people who score higher on IQ tests are in fact "more intelligent" than people who score lower on IQ tests?
Even the ones that just have shapes in them and you have to find the correct next matching one for the position? How can those be culturally biased?
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.
That's basically saying "there's a systemic trend in this data. Let's hope it's not correlated with other trends in this data".
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - but until we know the whole dataset is suspect.
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.
That being said, IQ is highly predictive one's ability to perform a broad range of cognitive tasks (along with many other important life outcomes).
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.
- 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.
Also what does it mean to be 1970/2019-smart?
2019 smart is to know how to browse Instagram while on your way to work without running headfirst into a wall.
/jk
People in 2019 do not, so they don't get the same amount of spatial reasoning exercise from that activity.
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.
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?
And having a specialized ability to memorize numbers is quite useless.
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.
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.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Pract...