Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - What is IQ?

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

For ages, people have tried to categorize people by intelligence. However, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that attempts were made to provide a quantifiable measure of human intelligence.  In 1912, a German psychologist by the name of William Stern dubbed a method of scoring intelligence tests called an intelligence quotient.  Every since there, there has been controversy surrounding the method of scoring and the very idea of scoring intelligence. Learn more about the intelligence quotient, also known as an IQ score, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For ages, people have tried to categorize humans by intelligence. However, it wasn't until the early 20th century that attempts were made to provide an actual quantifiable measure of intelligence. In 1912, a German psychologist by the name of William Stern dubbed a method of scoring intelligence test called an intelligence quotient. Ever since then, there has been controversy surrounding the method of scoring and the very idea of scoring intelligence. Learn more about the intelligence quotient, also known as an IQ score, on this episode of

everything everywhere daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The concept of intelligence is one that everyone is familiar with.

We all know people who are intelligent. and we know people who are probably not so intelligent. However, while everyone is familiar with it, it is a very slippery concept, and it's one that's hard to nail down. And it's especially hard to quantify. But that fact didn't stop people from trying. In the 19th century,

the English statistician Francis Galton tried to show that intelligence was a hereditary trait, like other physical attributes, but he couldn't really find any statistical evidence for his claim. The first real step towards quantifying intelligence came in 1905, when the French psychologist Alfred Binae and Theodore Simon published the B'nai Simon test. The test was only a test of verbal abilities, and it was primarily targeted towards children to evaluate their development. In particular, it wasn't designed to test for gifted children, but rather for children who were on the extreme other end of the spectrum.

The test took a normalized score for children of different ages, and then compared that to a score from an individual child's test to compare where they were against the average. you would take the intellectual age of the child and divide that by the chronological age to get a quotient, or a score. For example, if a 10-year-old took the test and was found to have the intellectual age of a 15-year-old, you would divide 15 by 10 and multiply by 100 to get a score of 150. As I mentioned in the introduction, the score was dubbed by the German psychologist William Stern as the intelligence quotient, or IQ for short. This name stuck, even though IQ tests today no longer use this method. The point which should be stressed is that early IQ tests were only for children. If you've ever read an article or come across a reference to someone who is supposedly the smartest person in the world,

it usually had to do with an IQ test that they took as a child. If a child is a prodigy, and as an intelligence of a 12-year-old at the age of 6, they would have an IQ of 200, which is incredibly high. If you were average and had the same intellectual age as your chronological age, you would score a 100. However, you can probably see that this system really doesn't work for adults, and nor was it ever intended to work for adults. The concept of mental age doesn't make sense after a point, as test results for adults of all ages will flat line after a certain point. The B'nai-Simon test was eventually adapted for use in the United States by Lewis Terman at Stanford University in 1916, and that version became known as the Stanford-Bennay test. The test has undergone five different revisions over the years, and it is still in use today.

The test developed by Alfred B'nai was, by his own admission, intended to be very limited in scope. It was only designed to test a certain group for a certain purpose. But once the idea of testing and quantifying intelligence came into being, it began being used for darker purposes. One of the earlier proponents of the Stanford Bonae test was the American psychologist Henry Goddard. Goddard developed a version of the test that the United States. Army administered during World War I. It was administered to 1.7 million soldiers, which was the first time a written intelligence test was ever administered en masse. The problem with the test is that the results were pretty much useless. The test itself was more of an American culture test, and there was an

incredible variation in the administration of the test around the country. Goddard, however, was still a big believer, and became one of the lead proponents in the eugenics movement. He believed that if we could identify people that he saw as being, quote, feeble-minded, we could take them out of the breeding pool and their traits wouldn't be passed along. He developed a scale with what we now consider to be pejorative terms, which you've probably heard before but never realized that they were used clinically. Someone with an IQ between 51 and 70, he classified to be a moron. Someone between an IQ of 26, he classified as an imbecile, and anyone with an IQ below 26 would clinically be an idiot. Goddard's intelligence tests were used by eugenesis to forcibly sterilize over 60,000

people in the United States, and his testing was copied for similar purposes in Nazi Germany. Intelligence testing eventually became more sophisticated. American psychologist David Wechler introduced the Wechler Adult Intelligence Scale in 1939. This test did away with the concept of intellectual age that the B'nai Simon test introduced. Weschler simply normalized all scores around an average of 100. which allowed for similar comparisons to the Stanford-Bennay test, which also had an average of 100. The Wechler test actually did away with a quotient, but the term IQ was so ingrained by this point that it stuck, even though the Q in IQ no longer existed.

At this point, you might be thinking that there's something entirely wrong with this system of trying to encapsulate intelligence into a single number. There are different types of intelligence. Someone might be good at math, but not good at playing an instrument. someone might be a good writer, but a poor painter. The theory of intelligence and general human cognition began to incorporate more of these elements. The first person to really tackle this was the psychologist Raymond Cattel, who in 1941 theorized that there were two types of intelligence. Fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence would be your ability to solve a novel problem. Crystallized intelligence would be things you know based on your upbringing, education, and cultural background.

In 1966, one of Catell's students, John Horn, expanded this into even more categories. He outlined aspects of intelligence that covered crystallized, fluid, visual, auditory, quantitative, processing speed, long-term storage and retrieval, and short-term acquisition in retrieval. This theory was further advanced in 1993 by the psychologist John Carroll, who created a three-layer theory of intelligence. On the top level was general intelligence. Below that were horns categories of intelligence, and below those were narrower intelligence aptitudes. That final category encompassed a whole host of things, including spelling, reading comprehension, reading speed, ability to identify musical pitch, and originality.

Today, this is known as the Cetal Horn-Cary of human cognition. There are an enormous number of IQ tests that are given today. All of them tests for different things, including spatial intelligence, logic, mathematical ability, and verbal intelligence. If you took different tests, the odds are you would get different scores, even if just slightly different, on different tests. What almost all IQ tests have in common is how they're scored. The system of normalizing to 100 that Weschler developed is still in use today. So, an IQ of 100 is, by definition, defined to be average. One standard deviation is 15 IQ points. That means approximately 68% of the population has an IQ between 85,

and 115. At two standard deviations, you encompass approximately 95% of the population. An IQ of 130, or two standard deviations above the mean, is the cutoff for membership in Mensa, which is an international high IQ society. The Triple Nine Society is for those who can score at three standard deviations above the mean, or an IQ of 145. There are also other high IQ societies above that, but, to be honest, they are mostly mutual admiration societies because tests have no meaningful way to measure anything beyond that point.

I mentioned that an IQ score is normalized around 100, so no matter how everyone in society performs on an IQ test, the average is always going to be 100. But what if everyone started doing better on IQ tests? How would we know? Well, that exact thing has been happening. A New Zealand intelligence researcher by the name of James Flynn discovered that when people took the exact same version of older IQ tests,

Raw scores increased over time. For example, a test known as Ravens Progressive Matrices has been given to British children for decades. The raw scores increased by 14 points from 1942 to 2008. This phenomenon has been dubbed the Flynn Effect, and it's been found all over the world in country after country, even with completely different cultures. It's been found on every major IQ test, in every age and ability range. In the United States, it's been going up an average,

of three points per decade. If you were to normalize IQ scores based on 1997 data, the average American in 1932 would have had an IQ of just 80. This has been one of the biggest areas of debate and research in the human cognition community over the last few decades. No one is really sure why this is happening. Theories include better schooling, better nutrition, fewer diseases, and more stimulating environments with computers. And it's also called into question the entire premise behind IQ tests, and that it might not be testing for intelligence at all, but rather a general test-taking ability. There's another thing that some of you might be wondering. What about this emotional intelligence that you've heard about, also known as EQ, even though there's no letter

Q in the words emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence came from a popular science book by the journalist Daniel Goldman in 1995. While the concept of measuring general intelligence is full of problems, it's much more straightforward than the concept of emotional intelligence. which is a very fuzzy thing. Emotional intelligence is usually just defined as being aware of your own emotions and of those around you and being able to react accordingly. There is actually an emotional intelligence test called the Mayor Slovoi-Keruso Emotional Intelligence Test.

However, it's radically different from any general IQ test. In a normal IQ test, you are given a set of questions, and you are tested on how many of them you got correct. In an emotional intelligence test, you are tested on how well your answers fit social norms. There is no right or wrong. The more average you are, the higher your score. So, emotional intelligence is certainly an active field of research, but I don't think I would equate an EQ score as being the same thing as an IQ score. There are, of course, certain types of intelligence that simply cannot be measured with a test. And a great example of this is with

elite athletes. In the 1970s, researchers began studying elite chess players to see how they could memorize so many past games of chess. There are videos online right now where people have presented the world champion Magnus Carlson with positions on a chess board, and he could recall which games those positions came from, even if the games occurred decades ago and he didn't play in them. Sports science researchers took this up and found the same behaviors in athletes. As a homework assignment, go to a search for LeBron James' memory. You will find dozens and dozens of videos of him doing post-game press interviews where he can recall every play of the game that he was just in from memory. Not only that, but he can recall almost every game he has

ever played in in his entire life. Many coaches and teammates have called him a basketball savant. I used to be a very competitive academic debater in college and competed at the top national levels of competition. One of the guys on my team had this ability. He could recall any debate round he had ever had in his life, and I've never met anyone before or since who had that ability. Researchers call this domain-specific intelligence. While Magnus Carlson and LeBron James both certainly have high general intelligence, there's no indication that this particular ability to recall previous games or matches carries over into every other aspect of their lives. Both James and Carlson have basically wired their brains for a very specific task. The enormous database of past

games that they carry around with them is one of the things that makes them great. This sort of intelligence can't really be tested. The only way to test it is through competition. Human intelligence is multifaceted. There is no one type of intelligence, and IQ tests that try to distill everything down to a single number is a very crude measure. But perhaps the last word on IQ tests and IQ scores should be left to one of the greatest minds of the last century, Stephen Hawking. When asked what is IQ scores, was, he replied, quote, I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers. Everything Everywhere Daily is an airwave media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams.

The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I have some more boostograms to share with you. Remember, a boostogram is sending me Satoshi's via a modern podcasting app, which you can find at new podcasting apps.com. Petar sent me two boostograms. He sent me 3,33s for my history of rice episode and said, Gotta beat Dave, which I'll explain in a second. He also sent 2222 sats for the Correlation versus Causation episode and said,

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just for fun, and that's what Petar was referring to. Number one is Dave Jones that has sent 24,557 sats. Number two is Dreb Scott, who sent 22,666s Sats. Pet Har is currently number three at 13,231, and fourth is Marcus Y with 2,217. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.