Rejection massively reduces IQ | Hacker News Reader

Rejection massively reduces IQ

newscientist.com

103 pointsknown57 comments

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "rejection reduces short-term performance"? It makes sense that someone who has just been rejected would have a hard time focusing on an immediate task- their brain is still stuck trying to understand and ameliorate the rejection.

My question is, what are the long-term effects of a single rejection? Or even the effect of multiple episodes of rejection which aren't due to being poor or some other variable? I can think of many people who face a lot of rejection but thrive anyway, sometimes even because of rejection (i.e. they become more experienced, or they use rejection to motivate themselves). Entrepreneurs, for example.

The original paper is behind a paywall but I found the 4-page article "Rejected and alone" by Roy Baumeister -- one of the researchers -- to be an interesting read.

http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/v...

* Rejection affects behavior, but has generally no or little effect on emotion: "Thus, social exclusion does have powerful effects on people, but these effects do not depend on emotional distress. This has been something of a shock to many of us and has even led us to question some widely held assumptions about the purpose of emotion and its relationship to behaviour."

* Social exclusion results in a higher pain threshold and a higher tolerance for pain. "Further studies indicated that the numbness to physical pain can explain the emotional numbness that we had observed over and over."

Thank you! I was really disappointed with the comments here - mostly mindless IQ bashing. The real revolution in psychology is happening right now, and I fear the people who should be most interested and in a position to benefit the most are exactly the ones who'll ignore it as more freudian bullshit.

This is interesting I would have suspected that exclusion would have resulted in a lower pain threshold and higher sensitivity.

The idea of IQ, or intelligence quotient, was originally formulated as measure of a person's innate intelligence. It was supposed to be something you were born with, and not something that would change with the environment. This is just the latest study that shows that IQ is, in fact, sensitive to one's environment, and can change. I hope people will someday learn to avoid taking IQ tests as these unquestionable measures of how smart someone is, or ever will be.

"Test-Score-Differences Fallacy 1: Nonfixedness Proves Malleability

This fallacy uses evidence of any fluctuation or growth in the mental functioning of individuals as if it were proof that their rates of growth can be changed intentionally. IQ level is not made malleable by any means yet devised (Brody, 1996), ..."

- Linda Gottfredson, Logical fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.... (PDF page 24)

I have read much of what Linda Gottfredson (and Nathan Brody, her cited authority on this issue) have written on IQ testing. But Gottfredson's statement doesn't prove that IQ scores can't change for an individual, but merely says that we aren't sure yet how consistently to bring about changes in individual IQ scores. IQ score changes are a consistently replicated observation by many researchers, and a curious psychologist might well apply some research to the issue of how those changes happen.

IQ scores are sufficiently stable from one time of taking an IQ test to the next that most psychologists conclude that what is estimated by an IQ test can be regarded as a "trait" rather than a "state" of an individual test-taker. And yet IQ scores, especially in childhood, do vary over the course of a test-taker’s life, sometimes varying radically. Deviation IQ scoring was originally developed to make for more stability of scores over the course of childhood. Nonetheless, deviation IQs for children can also change considerably over the course of childhood (Pinneau 1961; Truch 1993, page 78; Howe 1998; Deary 2000, table 1.3). "Correlation studies of test scores provide actuarial data, applicable to group predictions. . . . Studies of individuals, on the other hand, may reveal large upward or downward shifts in test scores." (Anastasi & Urbina 1997 p. 326).

For example, young people in the famous Lewis Terman longitudinal Genetic Studies of Genius (initial n=1,444 with n=643 in main study group) when tested at high school age (n=503) were found to have dropped 9 IQ points on average in Stanford-Binet IQ. More than two dozen children dropped by 15 IQ points and six by 25 points or more. Parents of those children reported no changes in their children or even that their children were getting brighter (Shurkin 1992, pp. 89-90). Terman observed a similar drop in IQ scores in his study group upon adult IQ testing (Shurkin 1992, pp. 147-150). Samuel R. Pinneau conducted a thorough review of the Berkeley Growth Study (1928-1946; initial n=61, n after eighteen years =40). Alice Moriarty was a Ph.D. researcher at the Menninger Foundation and describes in her book (1966) a number of case studies of longitudinal observations of children's IQ. She observed several subjects whose childhood IQ varied markedly over the course of childhood, and develops hypotheses about why those IQ changes occurred. Anastasi and Urbina (1997, p. 328) point out that childhood IQ scores are poorest at predicting subsequent IQ scores when taken at preschool age. Change in scores over the course of childhood shows that there are powerful environmental effects on IQ (Anastasi & Urbina 1997, p. 327) or perhaps that IQ scores in childhood are not reliable estimates of a child’s scholastic ability.

REFERENCES

Anastasi, Anne & Urbina, Susana (1997). Psychological Testing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Deary, Ian J. (2000) Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Howe, Michael J. A. (1998). Can IQ Change?. The Psychologist, February 1998 pages 69-72.

Moriarty, Alice E. (1966). Constancy and IQ Change: A Clinical View of Relationships between Tested IQ and Personality. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Pinneau, Samuel R. (1961). Changes in Intelligence Quotient Infancy to Maturity: New Insights from the Berkeley Growth Study with Implications for the Stanford-Binet Scales and Applications to Professional Practice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

Truch, Steve (1993). The WISC-III(R) Companion: A Guide to Interpretation and Educational Intervention. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

So you are saying that iodine deficiency does not cause a decrease in IQ?

The traditional view is similar to IQ as an empty glass. You can fill it up to the top, but once you're there, you've maxed out on IQ itself. Different people have differently sized glasses, and there are many things that clearly affect the rate or amount of fill, just as there are many things that affect height. However, there are few things that indicate that they are increasing the potential IQ.

Losing a tire in my car won't make me lose any horsepower, but it's not going to be the same ride.

The traditional view is similar to IQ as an empty glass.

Actually, the view of behavioral geneticists, including those with whom I have a weekly discussion of current research,

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

is that each individual has a "reaction surface," a range of possible behavioral responses genetically endowed for that individual depending on what environmental influences that individual encounters. NO ONE active in the field of behavorial genetics claims to have proved that many individuals today have maxed out their potential for intelligent behavior. There may be (as yet unknown) interventions that could massively change IQ at the individual level.

No one has proved that technology won't one day make everyone grow to 6 feet and live 200 years. In fact that could quite plausibly happen. But you'd still be a fool to count on it.

No, the fact that IQ can change does not prove that it can be intentionally changed. Head start, the increases in IQ that African Americans experienced when they moved out the segregated South, the Flynn effect, etc. also do not definitively prove that IQ can be intentionally changed. All they do is strongly suggest it. However, I have yet to see any evidence that would strongly suggest that IQ is impervious to change that is anywhere near as convincing as the above. Even identical twin studies (which have inherent problems with them) suggest that a large percentage of IQ is determined by the environment. Definitive proof is very hard to come by when it comes to human behavior. Just because something has not been definitively proved does not mean it is wrong.

Even identical twin studies (which have inherent problems with them) suggest that a large percentage of IQ is determined by the environment.

Yes, this is a correct statement. The design of studies to determine a numerical figure for the pre-Mendelian concept of "heritability" can only show a MINIMUM influence of environment, and the minimum influence of environment on IQ is fairly large. Most heritability studies are, by their nature, naturalistic rather than experimental studies and prove nothing about what degree of malleability (a separate issue anyway) might be found if an experimenter tried targeted environmental interventions. And, yes, there are monozygotic twins who are discordant for IQ, so there must be influences other than genes on IQ.

Head start only raises scores on IQ tests in early childhood. The effect vanishes by the end of the first grade.

This is most likely because children in Head Start become more familiar with IQ test style problems and a testing environment. In short, Head Start (presumably unintentionally) teaches the test.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_st...

(Scroll to page 65)

The best example of this is the Flynn Effect - IQs have dramatically risen over time. Either our ancestors were dullards, or the IQ test measures something other than innate intelligence.

"If American children of 1932 could take an IQ test normed in 1997 their average IQ would have been only about 80.[2] In other words, half of the children in 1932 would be classified as having borderline mental retardation or worse in 1997." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)

No, mental retardation is defined by poor functioning in everyday life due to widespread mental deficiencies, or due to profound focal deficiencies. A focal deficiency in IQ alone has to be quite severe before it substantially impairs life skills. Living well mostly requires talents like working well with other people, procedural memory of how to gather and cook food, manual dexterity, learning and ignoring extraneous stimuli, episodic memory, and so forth. These talents do not depend strongly on the symbolic reasoning skills measured by IQ tests.

Your confusion arises from treating correlation as causation. Mental retardation is commonly caused by genetic or developmental problems that cause global brain changes, producing deficits in many or all talents. This usually includes the specialized brain circuits involved in symbolic reasoning, lowering the IQ. So in a population with shared genes and environment, low IQ is strongly correlated with mental retardation, but neither is caused by the other.

"Either our ancestors were dullards, or the IQ test measures something other than innate intelligence."

The Flynn effect proves what we already knew, that human development is partially driven by the environment. Few serious scientists thought that each human is born with a exact fixed amount of smarts, like every atom of iron-56 has 55.93 AMUs of mass.

A CPU can slow down dramatically when it gets hot. That doesn't mean CPU maximum speeds are unimportant.

True, that. Now if only we had a valid metric for one's mind's maximum speed. IQ ain't it.

Very well put @rauljara -- The argument about SATs and IQ tests seems to come up almost weekly on here.

To add to that fire, I also don't believe that GPA has much to tell about someone's performance and capabilities (don't get me wrong, in some ways it does, but now how companies like Google use it to "weed" out applicants).

The core part of the article:

"To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. [..]"

I'm going to go along with this. I'd say it's part of the reason teen crime is sky high in the UK right now. We've failed to interact as local communities in the last 10-15 years and we're paying the price in people being selfish and aggressive seeking only their own ends (teenagers don't beat up 2 year old kids in healthy communities - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8348130.stm)

You know, I have to say that London was the most violent place I've ever been. 9 out of 10 times that I'd go out in the city, there were muggings, very aggressive fights, people thrown out of bars, guys running into the street kicking cars right in front of the cops, buses that smelled and left one feeling tense and threatened.

And this wasn't just at night. At three in the afternoon, I saw a bar brawl flow out onto the street.

On one of my trips to Amsterdam, a local commented on how aggressive the brits were who would visit for stag parties, get drunk and start fights.

There really is something unhealthy going on there. It's worrisome really. There were lots of articles at the time about the youths. I can't remember what they called them, some kind of acronym. YAGs or something like that. It's a real tragedy.

I have to say that London was the most violent place I've ever been.

As a point of comparison, have you ever been anywhere in China? That's where I have seen the most open public violence, much more so than in any part of the United States (I have been to all fifty states, including some very tough parts of inner cities.)

Chavs? Or, possibly, feral youth: http://www.google.com/search?q=feral+youth

Great... so every time you guys down-vote me I get stupider.

Edit: fixed grammar after being upvoted.

Great, so every time I apply to YC I'm getting stupider.

Remember, correlation does not imply causation! (jk) Maybe this is why sales guys are the way they are? Again, correlation doesn't imply causation.

I hypothize that the counter - control mechanism that they claim absent is actually depression. You are rejected, you then either become aggressive or fall into a depression which has been shown to cause dwelling on issues and analying a problem endlessly, hopefuly allowing a solution to be found.

That's what I suspected too. The thoughts of rejection occupy brainwaves that are otherwise spent thinking about and answering questions correctly.

I just finished reading "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer. It discusses a number of similar experiments where scientists observe what parts of the brain are activated during different types of situations. According to some experiments dealing with feelings seems to draw resources away from the part of the brain used to solve problems that require analytical thought.

A similar experiment involved having people perform analytical tasks while being exposed to situations that require self-restraint. The harder the tasks, the less people are able to resist temptation.

IQ tests come with a lot of social and cultural bias. So, for example, immigrants tend to do more poorly and members of an outclass tend to do more poorly (for example, historically this meant Black Americans tended to test poorly). I would think one thing going on here is a kind of harm to the social orientation of the test-taker. If everyone "hates" you, what's your motivation for being "agreeable"? And if your answers stop "agreeing" with what is socially valued, your test score can be hurt.

Does this mean you are dumber? Not necessarily. It's common for extremely intelligent children to test poorly because they are unable to gear their answers towards the test's expectations. One simple example: A child may fail to classify the picture of a "whale" as a "W" word because they know the type of whale it is (such as "Blue Whale") and aren't sophisticated enough to know that the test makes the assumption that children of a certain age won't have such specific information. A very socially savvy child may do better on such a test than a child whose interests are more "technical" (so to speak). Anecdotally, very socially savvy and socially oriented kids of high IQ often do a wonderful job of hiding how smart they are in order to fit in better. They may routinely shoot for roughly average even though they may be capable of substantially better performance than all their classmates. If no one likes you or accepts you and there is no fixing that, why bother? And if not bothering means you classify the "blue whale" as a B word instead of a W word because you feel that is more accurate and precise, your score may suffer.

So, for example, immigrants tend to do more poorly and members of an outclass tend to do more poorly (for example, historically this meant Black Americans tended to test poorly).

And that's why Californian Japanese-Americans are well known for their "shifty, work-shy attitude, and tendency to drift into crime"

The same basic thing has been said about many immigrant groups and IQ tests were at one time used as a means to try to back up the assertion that immigrants were inherently "retarded" and thus well-suited to menial labor and should basically quit their bitchin and be grateful to have a job as a servant.

"It's common for extremely intelligent children to test poorly because they are unable to gear their answers towards the tests expectations."

That's so weird. I distinctly remember this happening to me in third grade, but I never knew that it was an established phenomenon.

I know that from participating on email lists for many years. I don't know how much of that type of information is in the standard literature. Tests are only a tool. The conclusions drawn from them are only as wise as the person(s) administering and interpreting them.

I don't know how much of that type of information is in the standard literature.

There is a HUGE standard literature on IQ testing. What email lists are you talking about? My experience after reading much of the scholarly literature on IQ testing is that most participants on email lists about IQ testing never visit academic libraries and never seem to change their default Google searching over to Google Scholar or Google Books where they might have a chance to sift through the online chaff to find some grains of careful research.

The problem is that unless you already know the name of that specific phenomenon then Google scholar is useless.

I have no doubt that most email list participants do not read the scholarly literature. I also have no reason to believe that most "professionals" are that well versed in it. Email lists have been a source of personal stories about bright kids. Kids that are 2e may only be recognized by the school system as having handicaps and learning disabilities and never get recognized as also being very intelligent. The anecdotal evidence indicates that the brightest kids are often a poor fit for the public school system and are often not recognized as "the best and brightest" while in school. One of the most famous examples of this is that Edison's mother pulled him out of school and homeschooled him after the teacher pronounced him addle-brained.

ObCryptonomicon: The scene where our code-breaking genius spends the entire time devoted to taking the Armed Forces IQ equivalent test to one question on a boat floating one way while you pass in the other direction on a train. He proceeds to attempt to account for turbulence and many, many other complex things and completely fails the test.

Citations, please? What is the source of the spelling example you mention? That's not (DEFINITELY not) an IQ test item, although it might possibly be an achievement test item for lower age levels.

Anecdotal story. It does not surprise me that it's not a question on an IQ test. I chose it because it is shorter than the other story I remember, which I think was from IQ testing. A child was asked who discovered America and was unable to answer the question because "America" did not exist to be discovered by Columbus. The child launched into a long, detailed history of how Columbus discovered the New World in X year but it wasn't called America until Y year after Amerigo Vespucci...etc. The story ended with the child asking "Um, what was the question again?"

For a very bright child, the questions asked on various standardized tests often sound like bogus questions, kind of like the court scene in My Cousin Vinny where the prosecution tries to voir dire the witness played by Marisa Tomei and she says the question cannot be answered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvotE-beoaI&feature=relat...

"15 March 2002"

Where is the follow-up on this? Has this result ever been replicated?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

The guidelines for this site

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

which is, after all, called "Hacker NEWS," define "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" as on-topic, but I sure am curious if it is news to report one result from 2002 that didn't seem to result in any meaningful research follow-up. Is there any current news on this same issue?

I am not sure it is evolutionarily useful to become self destructive upon rejection, I imagine rejection has always been fairly common.

I think the researchers' interpretation is very biased. I can easily imagine that the aggressive reaction is in fact useful. Perhaps not in modern high tech. society, but even in modern day we are still an aggressive species and aggression in often sexy, men with a criminal background on average have more children. And today still, aggressive behaviour is a pretty good way to gain social status in high school.

Perhaps it does have an evolutionary purpose. Say you are a male who is constantly rejected by the female. If mate with the female, perhaps even against her will, then you produce offspring.

Also, being rejected is a dominance issue. If rejected from more powerful members of the society produces aggression to the point of killing those more powerful then the aggressive individual rises to power and increases the odds of reproduction.

This also came to me as strange. It came to me that someone who is being rejected may not have good prospects in the future for succesful procreation.

So having such individuals' nature turn self-destructive / aggressive will ensure he/she get further rejected. Increasing the selection process: only the socially/behaviourally fit remains in the community.

I'd introduce another perspective on rejection: having a rejective state of mind significantly reduces one's ability to analyse the situation at hand.

It's about prejudices. We all hold a large amount of prejudices even though we would consider our selves open minded. Prejudices result in cognitive responses where one rejects an idea at hand before one even starts to evaluate the pros and cons of the idea.

Interesting ramifications for the startup that's struggling to make sales. Extrapolating on this finding might indicate that a startup that meets early failure is more less doomed to failure since those failures pile on one another and basically make them dumb and mean.

My read on it is that it only measured a short-term reduction in performance. I saw no indication that it suggests long-term consequences from a single instance of rejection. Some people are inherently more likely to be bitter, grudging, etc and hold onto such negative feelings. Other people are more inclined to get over it and move on. Bill Gates has said that your unhappiest customers are your best source of learning. Some people are inclined to view negative feedback as useful information and not wallow in a negative emotional reaction to it. This behavior can be learned to some degree.

I would think that part of why the examples cited in the article resulted in negative reactions is because it was not constructive feedback: The artificially induced feeling of rejection apparently was delivered with zero feedback as to why they were being rejected. Some real life situations are like that. But other real life situations hold a great deal of information about why people are rejecting something. Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur would be well advised to learn to view negative responses as "constructive feedback" and not take it too personally. Most sources I have seen indicate that entrepreneurs typically experience a lot of rejection (and failure) prior to achieving success.

Correlation is not causation. It's a logical fallacy to state that "rejection reduces IQ" on learning that rejection correlates with a decreased ability to get high scores on IQ tests.

The study purported to have an experimental design.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

It would, however, be a good idea to attempt to replicate this finding.

In the extreme case, it can be argued that it is philosophically impossible to establish causation beyond any doubt.

What I'm trying to say here is "correlation != causation"-type comments are boring. Everyone on this site already knows they aren't the same. It's like someone mentioning in every thread that the Web is not the same as the Internet.

Is this post is a response to Y-Combinator rejections? :) It's a bit pity we've been rejected. But it did not made us angry or less intelligent. (As far as I know :))

This just in: Being aggrevated hurts when taking tests!

Seriously, what did the researchers expect? That frustration wouldn't affect people's focus?

Yeah, it seems to me fairly obvious that if someone implied before a test that I would fail, and I had cause to trust their opinion, I'm not likely to do as well as I would have because of the nagging self doubt etc. No change on my innate ability to do the test, but the level of application and focus would be drastically different.

(On the other hand it can go far enough as to improve focus, sometimes. "I'll show them", "I failed last time but I know I can do it", etc)

I don't know why you guys got downmodded. I agree with both. The article is pretty bad and neglects a very common sense approach to thinking.

I see little evidence that it actually reduces someone's intelligence. Maybe their test results acutely, but I highly doubt it makes someone dumber.

This is just another drop in my bucket of suspicions about aspects of creativity and intelligence. Stress free and confident individuals tend to be more creative and intelligent than those that are constantly angry and stressed out.

So IQ is based on emotions? That doesn't sound right.

Working for New Scientist massively reduces the capacity for critical thinking.

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