IQ, and Mental Testing More Generally
08 Dec 2023 12:21
I think these have been dead ends, of almost no scientific value. Having written about this at inordinate length, I won't repeat myself here. I will however permit myself to re-iterate that while IQ may be uniquely obnoxious in the uses to which it is put, the same methodological flaws undermine many other parts of psychology, and indeed other areas of social science. (Glymour more or less speaks for me on this point.)
--- One of the sidelights to this literature which I find hilarious is that there is a well-established negative correlation between political conservatism and IQ. (I find the fact that this paper was published in Intelligence especially amusing, but more sedate meta-analyses back it up.) This is, of course, ironic, given the political valences the debate over IQ has acquired. But it also poses the puzzle of why an intelligence test shouldn't, in fact, add a battery where subjects are asked to agree or disagree with various political shibboleths, and more conservative answers depress the estimate of \( g \).
- See also:
- Cognitive Science
- Factor Models
- Measurement, Especially in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Race and Racism;
- Social Science Methodology
- The Thomson Ability-Sampling Model
- Recommended (big picture):
- Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Fienberg, Daniel P. Resnick and Kathryn Roeder (eds.), Intelligence, Genes, and Success; Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve
- James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect [Review: The Domestication of the Savage Mind]
- Clark Glymour, "What Went Wrong? Reflections on Science by Observation and The Bell Curve", Philosophy of Science 65 (1998): 1--32 [PDF reprint via Clark]
- Recommended, close-ups (very misc.):
- Lee J. Cronbach and Paul E. Meehl, "Construct Validity in Psychological Tests", Psychological Bulletin 52 (1955): 281--302 [PDF reprint
- Angela Lee Duckworth, Patrick D. Quinn, Donald R. Lynam, Rolf Loeber, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, "Role of test motivation in intelligence testing", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 108 (2011): 7716--7720
- Walter Lippmann, "Debunking Intelligence Experts", The New Republic 1922 [Reprinted. Basically nothing has improved.]
- Michael J. Lovaglia, Jeffrey W. Lucas, Shane R. Thye, and Barry Markovsky, "Status Processes and Mental Ability Test Scores", American Journal of Sociology 104 (1998): 195--228 [How to induce a 7 IQ point difference between randomly assigned sub-groups with about a quarter of an hour of prioming in a psych lab.]
- Ashley Montagu (ed.), Race and IQ
- Richard E. Nisbett, Joshua Aronson, Clancy Blair, William Dickens, James Flynn, Diane F. Halpern, and Eric Turkheimer, "Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments", American Psychologist 67 (2012): 130--159 [PDF reprint]
- Cristina D. Rabaglia, Gary F. Marcus and Sean P. Lane, "What can individual differences tell us about the specialization of function?", Cognitive Neuropsychology 28 (2011): 288--303 [PDF reprint via Prof. Marcus. See comments elsewhere]
- Godfrey H. Thomson, The Factorial Analysis of Human Ability [Deserves separate discussion]
- Jelte M. Wicherts, Denny Borsboom and Conor V. Dolan, "Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of intelligence", Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010): 91--96
- OK but not great:
- James R. Flynn, Race, IQ, and Jensen
- Russell Jacoby (ed.), The Bell Curve Debate
- John C. Loehlin, Race Differences in Intelligence
- Stephen Murdoch, IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea
- Ken Richardson, The Making of Intelligence
- Dis-recommended:
- Hans J. Eysenck
- Arthur Jensen
- Richard Herrnstein [Herrnstein is however almost unique among modern advocates of IQ in the public sphere in having done valuable science, namely his experimental work on learning in animals, and especially the "matching law". This has, of course, no material or even methodological bearing on his writings about IQ.]
- Charles Murray
- J. Philippe Rushton
- Not recommended, but not for the usual reasons:
- Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man [I do not recommend this for the simple reason that I read it in 1988, when I was fourteen. I remember it as a very good book, for whatever that's worth.]
- To read:
- Michael Beenstock, Heredity, Family, and Inequality: A Critique of Social Sciences
- Daniel Calhoun, The Intelligence of a People
- Magnus Carlsson, Gordon B. Dahl, Björn Öckert and Dan-Olof Rooth, "The Effect of Schooling on Cognitive Skills", The Review of Economics and Statistics 97 (2015): 533--547
- John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750--1940
- Gary Collier, Social Origins of Mental Ability
- Thomas R. Coyle and David R. Pillow, "SAT and ACT predict college GPA after removing \( g \)", Intelligence 36 (2008): 719--729
- Ian J. Deary, Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain
- Ian J. Deary, Lawrence J. Whalley and John M. Starr, A Lifetime of Intelligence: Follow-Up Studies of the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947
- Claude S. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth
- James R. Flynn, Are We Getting Smarter?
- Adam Hampshire, Roger R. Highfield, Beth L. Parkin, Adrian M. Owen, "Fractionating Human Intelligence", Neuron 76 (2012): 1225--1237
- Brink Lindsey, Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter--and More Unequal
- Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains
- Janek Musek, "A general factor of personality: Evidence for the Big One in the five-factor model", Journal of Research in Personality 41 (2007): 1213--1233
- Richard Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It
- David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong
- Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought
- Howard Francis Taylor, The IQ Game: A Methodological Inquiry into the Heredity-Environment Controversy
- Jelte M. Wicherts, Conor V. Dolan, David J. Hessen, Paul Oosterveld, G. Caroline M. van Baal, Dorret I. Boomsma and Mark M. Span, "Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect", Intelligence 32 (2004): 509--537
- Oliver Wilhelm, Andrea Hildebrandt and Klaus Oberauer, "What is working memory capacity, and how can we measure it?", Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 433--453
- To write:
- CRS, "General Factors in Correlational Psychology: Artifacts or Myths?"
