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What Does IQ Really Measure?
sciencehabit writes "Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence."
I've always felt that the score from an IQ test was actually the real test. Reason being is that some people get a big score, think they're all that and a bag of chips, and let life beat them into the ground because they thought success was predestined. Other people get a low score, think they are stupid, and let life beat them into the ground because they thought failure was predestined. The most successful people, in my experience, see the score from an IQ test, say, "hmm, that's interesting," and then continue to try to do their best at whatever it is they want to do with their lives.
In other words, I feel that IQ tests are largely curiosities that are frequently harmful and only rarely actually useful.
Lets not even get started on the blatant testing demographic bias (target vs actual demographic/etc) that makes the scores skewed against people based on background.
Lemme be an iconoclast here for a moment.
So IQ doesn't measure intelligence. So what? If IQ score is, as claimed, highly correlated with success in life, and if it's measuring motivation and determination rather than intelligence, and if it's motivation that determines success in life, doesn't that make the IQ test pretty damned useful?
Who even knows what "native intelligence" means, anyway? If I've got a test that tells me whether someone understands problems, can find solutions to them, and is motivated enough to carry through, isn't that as useful a definition of "intelligence" as any?
Or to put it bluntly: of what use to anyone is a brilliant mind who doesn't give a shit?
Granted this distinction may be useful, since the remedies (if any) for lack of motivation vs. lack "native intelligence" may be different - or maybe not. I suppose the assumption is that native intelligence is more genetically determined, whereas motivation is more determined by environment, but I find that questionable. Some people have exceptional drive and energy throughout life, even despite circumstances, and most of us don't.
I also take issue with the article:
Why? If IQ scores measure motivation as well as intelligence, then admissions based on IQ already do favor those who want to do the work.
Oh yeah? I'm fairly certain my high IQ score is the cause of my intelligence.
The problem with those kinds of tests is they are designed to aim straight for the middle of the bell curve
That's why if you're really smart, they make you take further IQ tests that are aimed progressively higher up. Answering interesting questions can eventually become an exercise in tedium though, so they have to spread it out.
Hah, I got 100.
Perfect score, bitches.
Oh yeah? I'm fairly certain my high IQ score is the cause of my intelligence.
I'm fairly certain your intelligence is the cause of your high IQ score.
And all this time I thought my intelligence was the cause of my high IQ score.
Flawless double whoosh.
Well if I show you a drawing depicting a house, and the house is green, and the question asks "how many sides of the house are green?" and you answer 4 (assuming a box shaped house insofar as you can see), and you learn on a test exam that your answer is wrong, and you should have answered "at least three", you learn something about the nature of the test (i.e. make no assumptions). That knowledge will teach you to take IQ tests smarter, and you'd have done better than someone who went in without that learning. Certainly you can say this is a bad question, but in practice, your score depends on your answer to good and bad questions (just like any exam). The more practiced you are and the more you have learned how to think about common problems, the better you are likely going to do.
I think it's probably pretty hard to develop a test with excellent questions, which are also original and have been verified to be "good" by the standards of the IQ judging process. And thus you end up with a test that doesn't measure what we think we want it to measure. That in itself isn't really a bad thing, you can easily argue that the results speak for themselves (those who score high achieve high on other metrics), but you have to be careful. People who do less well all get lumped together, and some of those people may not have been achievers at that point in their life but might change later for a number of reasons. But they're grouped in with people that have ACTUAL mental, emotional or other disorders, as well as people who are brought up poorly and have no actual hope for a variety of reasons. The net result confirms itself: those who were once good performers, on average perform better than the group of people who were not.
For that reason IQ tests should stay as they are, an academic attempt to measure something we can't really define very well in an effort to understand ourselves. They should not be used for any other purpose, particularly education or employment.