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Comment by swores | Hacker News Reader

Is it particularly surprising? I've never looked into any research on the subject, but it would seem fairly common sense to me that in a huge number of tests, ranging from IQ tests to History exams at school, people who care will try harder and therefore do better.

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Many psychological findings are remarkably un-surprising in retrospect. And I agree with you, this seems stupidly obvious once I know the answer. But I took an undergraduate course basically dedicated to the history of IQ testing and this gem never came up. A lot of things seem obvious if you know the answer. But I guarantee you, this never occurred to many, many people who have devoted their lives to studying IQ. Also, a lot of things that seem fairly common sense turn out to be wrong when you subject them to empirical testing, so be careful about the applying the 'common sense' filter.

Many people think that IQ tests will measure accurately even if the participant doesn't try hard, kind of like how psych tests work.

It's not true, though. The questions are -hard- and if you don't try, you won't get the right answer and you'll do worse.

So while it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's taken one, not everyone understands how the test works.

> A lot of things seem obvious if you know the answer. [...] Also, a lot of things that seem fairly common sense turn out to be wrong when you subject them to empirical testing, so be careful about the applying the 'common sense' filter.

A Yahoo researcher wrote a book about this very thing:

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Once-Know-Answer/dp...

The first part of their finding, that motivated people or those with an incentive will do better on IQ tests, does seem common sense.

The second part of their finding is more interesting to me, although I'm still trying to fully understand it. I think they are suggesting that innate heritable intelligence isn't as predictive of life outcomes as previously thought because part of what was being measured was motivation to do well on IQ tests.

In other words, two people could be born with the same innate intelligence, but one of the two could be more motivated and do better in both IQ tests and life outcomes. Previously people would've attributed the difference in life outcomes to a difference in innate intelligence. It still seems like IQ would be an interesting number to look at, but it isn't quite measuring what people believed it was measuring.

  Previously people would've attributed the difference in life outcomes to a difference in innate intelligence

What? I mean, sure there are some people who think that, but surely clever people realise it's not the case? Even as a ~14 year old at school I could tell just from my class mates that some hadn't been born amazingly bright but worked their asses off and would end up doing better than the lazy people who found stuff easy instead.

Surprising today, or 100 years ago when people thought IQ tests measured some immutable property of the human brain :) today of course we know it's possible to change your IQ in all sorts of ways.

Apart from underfeeding children or hitting people on the head, I'm not aware of any ways to significantly change IQ. Could you elaborate?

Spatial navigation and logical reasoning improved by higher levels of testosterone, for example.

I don't understand - injecting a person with testosterone increases their logical reasoning ability? I hate to be that guy, but [citation needed].

http://books.google.com/books?id=IHGdmrKlVl0C&pg=PA57...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3067252

This relates to women, but this applicable to mens too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypogonadism#In_men

   Difficulty concentrating
   Memory Loss-difficulty in choosing words in language

How about a caffeinated coffee? Or a poor sleep?

Indeed.

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=raise+IQ&as_epq=&...

I don't have academic access to the actual article. A commonsensical result may not be surprising but I want to know how they did their metastudy. Anyone care to elaborate?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

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