There are many findings in psychology more rigorous than IQ. Operant conditioning is the obvious example.
Like the entirity of personel selection for many, many years was based on IQ like measures, and it was the base for all of the work ETS have done on standardised testing (item response theory and all that).
Can you explain why you do not believe IQ to be rigorous?
>Can you explain why you do not believe IQ to be rigorous?
That's a much longer and more complicated argument than what I'm saying, which is simply that IQ is not anywhere near the most essential nor the most studied question in psychology. Classical conditioning is another. Attachment and critical periods in developmental psychology have received a lot of attention. In particular, pretty much any effect which generalizes in a simple and reliable way from humans to animals is easier to experiment on and has a stronger evidence base than IQ: instinctual drift, childhood amnesia, most of the theory of perception, etc.
The actual content and priorities of psychology as a field of scientific research is quite different from the few topics which get debated with unreasonably high frequency on the Internet.
Full disclosure, I have a doctorate in psychology (but have been out of the field almost a decade now), so am well aware of the "actual" psychological research.
Personally, for my money, IQ lead to the development of most of modern psychometrics, which I think is probably psychology's largest contribution to intellectual knowledge, but that's probably my quant bias showing.
Sure, behaviourism has had a bunch of successes, but it's only necessary for psychology, and definitely not sufficient.
Classical conditioning I'll give you, but I definitely didn't hear much about either instinctual drift or childhood amnesia relative to IQ.
> theory of perception, Which one? are you talking about the information processing model or the gestalt models? I'd probably agree with you on Gestalt, but not on IP (which I think is the steam-engine metaphor of the mind of our time).
I'd agree that it's not the most essential question, but it's definitely one of the most studied.