Can you measure intelligence? | Introduction to Psychology 10 of 30 | Study Hall
Summary
TLDRThis video from Study Hall's 'Intro to Psychology' explores the complexity of intelligence, examining how the concept has evolved over time. It highlights different theories, from Spearman's general intelligence to Gardner's multiple intelligences. It also delves into the limitations of IQ tests, discussing how they often reflect cultural biases. The video emphasizes that intelligence is not one-dimensional but multifaceted, including reasoning, problem-solving, and creativity. It concludes by suggesting that intelligence can't be easily measured, as it involves various mental abilities that manifest in different ways depending on context.
Takeaways
- 🧠 Intelligence is multifaceted and difficult to define, with various theories proposing different aspects of it.
- 👨🔬 Sir Francis Galton was an early researcher into intelligence, investigating whether it was inherited.
- 📊 Charles Spearman introduced the 'g factor' for general intelligence, suggesting a common factor behind all intellectual abilities.
- 🤔 Raymond Cattell differentiated between fluid and crystallized intelligence, highlighting different ways people can be smart.
- 🎓 Robert Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence includes practical, academic, and creative intelligence.
- 🎨 Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences recognizes at least eight distinct types of intelligence, including emotional and musical.
- 📉 IQ tests, like the Stanford-Binet scale, measure intelligence but have flaws and biases.
- 🚫 IQ tests can disadvantage certain groups due to cultural and racial biases in their construction.
- 🗣 Language plays a significant role in measuring intelligence, as it's a primary means of expressing cognitive abilities.
- 🤷♀️ Code-switching is an example of intelligence in action, showing adaptability in communication based on context.
- 🧩 Schemas and heuristics are cognitive tools that influence decision-making and illustrate the complexity of intelligence.
Q & A
What is intelligence according to the video?
-Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, understand, and use reasoning skills. It's a general concept that includes various forms of mental abilities.
How did Sir Francis Galton contribute to the study of intelligence?
-Sir Francis Galton was one of the first scholars to try and figure out if intelligence was inherited, starting the scientific study of intelligence in the mid-19th century.
What is the 'g factor' proposed by Charles Spearman?
-The 'g factor' is a theory proposed by Charles Spearman, which refers to general intelligence. It suggests that intelligence is like athletic ability, where someone good at one thing may be good at others as well.
What is the difference between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence?
-Fluid intelligence involves quick thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving, while crystallized intelligence involves knowledge, memory, and experience that have been stored over time.
What is Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences?
-Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences proposes that there are at least eight different forms of intelligence, including artistic, musical, emotional, and interpersonal intelligence.
Why are IQ tests considered flawed?
-IQ tests are flawed because they often include culturally biased questions, favoring certain groups while disadvantaging others, and intelligence is too complex to be fully captured by a single number.
What is code-switching, and how does it relate to intelligence?
-Code-switching is the ability to adjust the way we speak based on the context or audience. It demonstrates intelligence by showing an understanding of social norms and communication strategies.
What is bounded rationality in decision-making?
-Bounded rationality refers to the idea that decision-making is not always perfectly logical due to limitations like schemas, time constraints, and the information available.
What are heuristics in decision-making?
-Heuristics are mental shortcuts we use to make decisions quickly. While they can be helpful, they aren't always accurate and can lead to biases or incorrect assumptions.
What are schemas, and how do they influence cognition?
-Schemas are mental templates or simplified concepts that help us understand and categorize the world around us. They influence how we make decisions and reason about the world.
Outlines
🧠 The Complexity of Intelligence
Intelligence is a multifaceted concept that is hard to define and measure. People tend to associate intelligence with famous individuals like Stephen Hawking or Hermione Granger. However, intelligence varies from person to person and is challenging to quantify. Psychologists have studied intelligence for over a century, revealing its complexity. Theories like the g factor, proposed by Charles Spearman, and others demonstrate that intelligence encompasses various skills and is similar to physical athleticism in that strengths in one area may translate to others.
📚 The Evolution of Intelligence Theories
Over time, psychologists have developed multiple theories to explain intelligence. Raymond Cattell proposed fluid and crystallized intelligence, while Robert Sternberg introduced the triarchic theory, which includes practical, analytical, and creative intelligence. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences suggests at least eight distinct types, such as musical and emotional intelligence. Despite these efforts, a clear definition of intelligence remains elusive, and modern definitions tend to focus on the general ability to learn, understand, and reason.
🧩 IQ Tests: Strengths and Limitations
IQ tests, often associated with measuring intelligence, were pioneered by Alfred Binet in the early 20th century. While helpful in some contexts, these tests have significant flaws, especially in their cultural biases. Historically, IQ tests favored privileged groups, often marginalizing minorities and people from diverse backgrounds. Even Binet himself cautioned against reducing intelligence to a single number, noting that intelligence can change over time. As a result, IQ tests are considered flawed and not fully representative of a person’s cognitive abilities.
🗣️ The Role of Language in Intelligence
Language plays a critical role in how intelligence is expressed and measured. Different languages shape thought processes, as shown in examples like the Hopi language’s unique way of expressing time. Intelligence can also manifest in diverse forms of language use, such as code-switching, which involves adapting language based on social context. These variations make it difficult to capture intelligence through standardized tests, which often fail to account for such complexity.
💡 Cognition and Decision Making
Cognition, which involves mental processes like attention and reasoning, is closely tied to intelligence. People rely on schemas, or simplified mental templates, to make sense of the world and make decisions. However, decision-making is often limited by ‘bounded rationality,’ where cognitive limitations, such as time or incomplete information, prevent perfectly logical decisions. This applies in real-world scenarios, such as choosing a kickball team in gym class, where strategies like elimination or heuristics (mental shortcuts) are used to make quick, but sometimes flawed, decisions.
🧠 Intelligence, Context, and Decision Making
Intelligence is expressed through decision-making, which is influenced by the context and cognitive strategies a person uses. Mental shortcuts, or heuristics, play a role in quick decisions, but they may not always be accurate. This highlights how context affects both cognition and the expression of intelligence. Whether it's making decisions in everyday situations or solving puzzles under pressure, intelligence is shaped by the environment and limitations people face.
🏆 The Challenge of Measuring Intelligence
Measuring intelligence is a complex task. IQ tests and other measures struggle to capture the diverse ways intelligence is expressed, particularly given the influence of context, language, and cultural factors. Theories of intelligence have evolved to become more inclusive, recognizing that there are many forms of intelligence. A truly comprehensive test would have to assess a wide range of skills and mental abilities, something no single test can accomplish. As a result, appreciating intelligence means valuing its many forms and expressions.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Intelligence
💡Fluid Intelligence
💡Crystallized Intelligence
💡IQ Test
💡g factor
💡Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
💡Multiple Intelligences
💡Bounded Rationality
💡Schema
💡Code-switching
Highlights
Intelligence is a complex and multifaceted concept, difficult to define and measure.
Early attempts to study intelligence began with Sir Francis Galton in the mid-19th century.
Charles Spearman introduced the idea of general intelligence (g factor) in the 20th century.
Raymond Cattell proposed two types of intelligence: fluid intelligence (quick thinking) and crystallized intelligence (knowledge and experience).
Robert Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence (1988) included analytical, creative, and practical intelligence.
Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences proposed at least eight forms, including musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligence.
The concept of intelligence has evolved over time, becoming more inclusive to encompass different types of mental abilities.
IQ tests, like the Stanford-Binet, are often used to measure intelligence but have limitations and biases, especially against marginalized groups.
Psychologists like Alfred Binet warned that intelligence cannot be reduced to a single number and may change over time.
Measuring intelligence is difficult because it often relies on language, which varies greatly between cultures and individuals.
Code-switching, the ability to adjust language based on context, is a form of intelligence that is hard to capture in tests.
Schemas, mental templates that help us categorize the world, play a role in how we reason and make decisions.
Bounded rationality explains that decision-making is limited by factors such as time, information, and mental shortcuts like heuristics.
Heuristics, or mental shortcuts, are used in decision-making but are not always accurate and can lead to errors.
Intelligence is expressed in many forms, and its measurement must be flexible to accommodate different cognitive abilities and cultural contexts.
Transcripts
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Take a moment to think of someone who’s really smart. A friend, a relative, heck,
even a fictional character! I bet someone came to mind pretty quickly. Maybe Stephen Hawking,
Ursula K. LeGuin, me, Enola Holmes, or Barack Obama. Or my all-time favorites,
Wade from Kim Possible and Hermione Granger.
What makes them intelligent? Is it their command of a particular
kind of knowledge? Razor-sharp reasoning skills? Resourcefulness?
Now think about another person who is also really smart. Are they intelligent in the same way?
We all have an idea of what intelligence is, but when we really think about it,
intelligence is difficult to really pin down.
Even for psychologists! Because it turns out that intelligence is as multifaceted
as humans are. It’s not easy to describe, and it’s even harder to quantify. That makes
intelligence a fascinating subject of research. As intelligent beings, we love a good puzzle.
Hi, I’m Deja Fitzgerald, and this is Study Hall: Intro to Psychology.
Intelligence might seem like it should be a simple concept to get a handle on – I mean, we talk about
how smart people are all the time! But like many things in psychology, intelligence is complex,
and our concept of it has changed over time. That change shows how difficult it is to pin down.
People have been pondering intelligence for ages, but it wasn’t until the mid 19th
century that scientists really began to study it. That’s when the English scholar
Sir Francis Galton tried to figure out if intelligence, as he defined it, was inherited.
And, in the 20th century, the British psychologist Charles Spearman proposed
something called the g factor, which is short for general intelligence—and coincidentally
the name of my next mixtape. General intelligence wasn’t exactly a new concept,
but Spearman was the first to express it in statistical terms.
The idea is that intelligence is like being athletic. An olympic
sprinter is probably not going to be the star player in the World Cup,
but they’re probably going to be better than, well, me.
So maybe the same thing applies to intelligence. Someone who’s really
good at one thing, like computer programming, might also be better
than a random person at something else brainy, like learning a second language.
But then, in the 1940s, psychologist Raymond Cattell theorized that no,
wait, we don’t have one g, we have two kinds of intelligence.
There’s fluid intelligence, which is all about being able to reason and solve problems
abstractly – basically quick thinking. And then there’s crystalized intelligence,
which is about knowledge that’s been stored or crystallized in your brain and involves facts,
memory, and experiences. This is more like expertise.
This idea of 2 different kinds of intelligence opened up new perspectives on how people are
intelligent in different ways. But it didn’t explain some key things, like creativity.
In 1988, psychologist Robert Sternburg developed the triarchic theory of intelligence,
which proposed that we have 3 kinds of intelligence that cover our common sense,
academic abilities, and creativity.
And around the same time, psychologist Howard Gardner argued that there are
at least 8 forms of intelligence in his theory of multiple intelligences.
This theory includes everything from artistic and musical intelligence to
the abilities to understand emotions and values in yourself and others.
So, over time psychologists have been breaking up intelligence
into more and more kinds as views on what intelligence encompasses continue to evolve.
Each of the theories we’ve discussed has its merits, but none of them is a
definitive explanation of intelligence. And while we still don’t have a precise
idea of what intelligence is, we do have a working definition that smushes together
what we’ve learned by exploring all these theories and more over the last century.
Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, and use your reasoning skills. It’s pretty
general, and that makes it inclusive and allows us to value different forms this ability can take.
These theories about what is and isn’t intelligence all developed because psychologists
first tried to measure intelligence. And when it comes to assessing intelligence,
there’s one number that often comes to mind: the intelligence quotient – aka IQ.
While not the first to develop a test to measure intelligence,
early attempts at a reliable IQ test came from experiments by French psychologist
Alfred Binet and his colleague Henri Simon around the turn of the 20th century. Their
work helped create an IQ test called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. There
are other types of IQ tests out there, but most of them give the same kind of score,
and all were designed to at least partly assess certain aptitudes and weaknesses of students.
These tests follow something called a normal distribution,
or a bell curve. Most people will score around average, which is 100,
with extreme scores on either side occurring with less and less frequency.
Now it seems helpful to have a number for gauging relative intelligence,
but there are some serious issues with IQ tests.
For example, parts of intelligence tests include questions about facts that are
assumed to be common knowledge. Like asking people to identify a historical explorer.
Those questions leave out people who may not have learned the information or for
whom the information is irrelevant to their culture or the area where they live. And
they favor groups who are ideologically or racially similar to the test-makers.
As you may have guessed, most of these test-makers were white men with a certain level of privilege.
Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people born or raised outside the US have
been systematically disadvantaged by these tests which have, at times,
served to further marginalize and perpetuate stereotypes of already minoritized groups.
So we have to wonder what IQ tests are really measuring. And these concerns
aren't new - even Binet was cautious to note that intelligence is too complex of
a thing to be reduced to a number, and that it can change over time.
Bottom line: IQ tests are flawed. Big time.
Does that mean what we need is a test with better questions? Well,
it’s probably going to take a lot more than designing questions to measure intelligence.
To understand why, we’ll need to look at some things related to intelligence.
One reason why measuring intelligence is difficult is because researchers can really only measure how
people show their intelligence. And that’s often done through language.
Language is just a system of socially shared symbols that can be written,
spoken, or physically expressed, as in languages like American Sign Language.
Language requires common rules, called grammar, which dictates how we can express ourselves and
even what we think. Like in Hopi, an Indigenous language from what’s now the Southwestern US,
events that occur in the past or future are given spatial terms.
Basically, instead of adding ‘-ed’ to the end of a word,
a Hopi speaker would say that the event occurred at a great distance
away from them. This is very different from how time is communicated in English!
So languages can work in different ways, and that means intelligence can
be expressed in different ways, and it can be hard to decide what to look for.
But even when people share a common language, testing intelligence is hard because people’s
ability to use language can vary. We often associate a large vocabulary with
intelligence. But someone with a more modest vocabulary can also express their intelligence
through language. Their intelligence might just be expressed differently, like with
code-switching. That’s when a person changes the way they speak depending on the situation,
maybe by using a different tone, different words, or even an entirely different language.
Like how I might use a more serious tone if I’m negotiating with a car salesman.
Changing the way we speak is intelligence in action. Code-switching shows that
we understand the context we’re in and reasoning about how we should communicate
in that context. And that’s something an intelligence test can’t easily capture.
Behaviors like code-switching sit at the intersection of language and cognition,
which is the mental process of knowing, which can involve abilities ranging from
attention to reasoning. And cognition is crucial to our intelligence, because our
ways of knowing about the world feed into our understanding and reasoning about the world.
We can see that with code-switching. We adjust our language based on what
we know about the context, like the kind of person we’re talking with.
Our response to context often uses schemas. A schema is our basic idea
about a thing – a simplified concept of that thing. So at a car dealership,
I might have a “car salesman” schema, which is like a mental template or
a set of assumptions for what a car salesman is like and how they behave.
Categories of people are just one kind of schema. And we have schemas for basically
everything we use to imagine the world, especially social norms: like no talking
during movies because I am paying too much to be there already, and I will shush you!.
Schemas also feed into decision making, which is another aspect of cognition.
While we might like to think that we make decisions in a purely rational way,
the human mind is often limited by our schemas and other aspects of cognition.
This is called bounded rationality, the idea that our decision-making
is not perfectly logical because of limitations. Like the accuracy of our
schemas, the amount of information available, and time constraints.
But even if they’re not completely logical, there are a few strategies we can use to
make decisions. And we can explore some of them through everyone’s favorite class… gym.
Let’s pretend you’re in fourth grade. You’re captain of the kickball team
and you want to put together the very best team.
You could use a single-feature strategy and pick one criteria to make decisions. For kickball,
that one criteria might be leg length. Maybe people with long
legs can really knock that ball far out into the field.
Or you could use an additive strategy. That’s when we think of multiple important aspects, and score
each option using these aspects. Then, we choose the option or options with the highest score.
For kickball, you might consider 3 aspects: athletic ability, teamwork,
and gym clothes that also have yellow and blue – I mean,
you’ll for sure perform better if your team has color harmony!
Then you’d do a quick ranking of all your classmates with these criteria
to pick team members. That might mean picking a classmate in a blue t-shirt
who is pretty good at sports and teamwork, and also picking someone
who is OK at athletics but really good at teamwork, even though she’s wearing green.
Then there’s a strategy that’s sort of the opposite: elimination by aspects. This is
when you think of an aspect that’s critical, and then eliminate all options that don’t have this
aspect. Using this strategy, you can eliminate all the kids who just don’t like kickball.
We also have heuristics, which are mental shortcuts we use in decision-making.
Heuristics are interesting because they vary from person to person. If you associate taller
people with athleticism, you’d probably pick all the tallest classmates for your team.
But heuristics aren’t necessarily true. Maybe your very tall friend isn’t very coordinated and
strikes out in the first inning. Thanks, Andrea, for cutting my professional kickball career short.
By looking at decision making and other aspects of cognition, we can better
understand intelligence and why measuring it is challenging. In order to use our intelligence,
we must use our cognition, and how we use our cognition depends on the context.
If we’re pressed for time, like picking all the team members for our kickball
team in just 1 minute, we may resort to heuristics that are fast but could
be inaccurate. Whether we’re in gym class or at work, when we use these mental shortcuts
or other cognitive approaches, our decisions may not be as perfectly logical as we’d like.
And, if our cognition is limited by the situations we’re in, so too is our
expression of intelligence. But we’re always in some kind of situation, whether it’s taking
a test under time pressure or talking with people who have certain expectations of us.
We couldn’t lead the lives we do without our ability to learn,
understand, and use reasoning skills. We use our intelligence every day,
and even after over a century of study, it remains mysterious.
But not for lack of trying. And that effort has expanded our views on intelligence and made them
more inclusive. That allows us to recognize and better value a wide range of mental abilities.
And what would it take to measure those abilities? A lot. In TV show terms,
an intelligence test would be like Jeopardy crossed with Big Brother and Survivor crossed
with some Iron Chef and The Price is Right and... well, you get the picture. It would
be the sort of test none of us would ace. And that says something important about
how we can appreciate intelligence. It takes all kinds to make humanity as rich as it is.
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