It’s possible that the scores for 2 and 3 above may be reversed. If an intelligent person is sufficiently unmotivated, he may score lower than a motivated but unintelligent person.
This is a stupid article. For one thing, it says squat about general motivation. What it says is that people who are smart are less likely to resent and be unhappy about taking IQ tests. Gosh! Who would have thought?
And then you can also go further — such is the power of modern social “science” — and assert that an unhappiness with taking an IQ test is correlated with low scores and therefore with all the things with which a low score is correlated. Which says absolutely nothing about the degree of correlation per se between IQ and life achievements, et cetera.
These people would all flunk IQ tests. It’s no wonder they have a negatiev attitude about them, and fail at life, ending up as journalists, whores, social scientists, repo men, and other such riff-raff. Or am I unjust to repo men and whores here?
Intelligence is often talked about as if it were an absolute good, yet there are some monumental stupidities of which only genius is capable.
I believe the IQ test was originally developed to measure the aptitude of mentally challenged people. In this they were able to make distinctions between being a: moron, idiot, dolt, nimrod, finger smeller, or just simply stupid. So having a higher score than someone else shouldn’t be taken as I’m smarter than you but rather, I tend to not be quite as stupid as you.
Standard IQ tests do not work if the subject is uncooperative or unmotivated. A typical case is a “behaviorally challenged” child who does not cooperate with the examiner. Even a verbally administered IQ test will not work. The only way to assess IQ in such cases is to perform prolonged observations and repeated interactions to see what the child is capable of doing. If the child does nothing, then measuring IQ is irrelevant. The attitude, mood, and behavior problems must be corrected before reassessing IQ.
IQ testing, like most attempts to better understand human beings, is of some value and apparently does say something meaningful about certain human intellectual activities. That said, things have changed considerably in the past few decades. Back when I took things like college boards and GREs, there wasn’t much in the way of coaching available. That can really skew the results.
If you spend much time with people in high IQ societies, e.g. Mensa, you will notice that the people there are actually more intelligent than most. You can find the same sort of thing in other groups as well. For instance, National Space Society members, members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill, DC, and other groups tend to attract people of significantly higher than normal intelligence. Why, yes, I am a member of all these groups.
How your life turns out can be affected by IQ. It can also be affected by other personality traits and the kinds of groups/organizations/whatever in which you participate. I, for example, have a highly open, democratic personality. I work better in more open, democratic settings. Bullies really anger me. We have some very interesting conflicts.
That’s enough for now.
An unsurprising result. Superior motivation produces superior results in pretty much every field of human endeavor. There is no obvious reason why IQ testing should be an exception.
Re: Chuck’s comment,
IQ tests are not the same kind of beast as things like the SAT and GRE. Quite a sizable chunk of most IQ tests, for example, consists of questions involving small pictures or diagrams that aim to test one’s ability to mentally rotate or otherwise systematically transform one “view” to another. One can argue about just what it is IQ tests measure, but my experience has been that they measure me pretty consistently. I’ve taken a number of them over the years and they all seem to produce an IQ number within plus or minus 2 of what I was told my Stanford-Binet result was back when I was a teenager. If there’s any way to “coach” flexibility and quickness of mind, I have yet to encounter it – worse luck.
SAT’s, GRE’s and all their relatives, on the other hand, are supposed to be objective measures of educational attainment – what you’ve learned, as opposed to how damned clever and quick you were in learning it. In their early days, the vendors of these tests asserted that, as they measured learning accumulated over a long period of prior formal education, they could not be “coached” in a short period prior to testing. This was quickly proven a false assumption and the growth of the coaching industry proceeded from there. It is quite possible for someone sufficiently – now wait for it – motivated to make up for a surprising amount of previous academic indifference and underperformance in just a few weeks of concentrated effort. I have some personal experience of this as I worked in SAT coaching for a time. Incoming students take an SAT-clone test and then a second one after the coaching is complete. The difference in scores is sometimes extreme. The best result I ever saw with one of my pupils was a gain of 280 points. I suspect that even more extreme results are quite possible.
Dick,
I can say that Mensa did accept my GRE score as evidence supporting admission way back in 1982 based upon results that were over 10 years old. I don’t think Mensa is accepting SATs or GREs anymore. The coaching industry might have something to do with that.
I do know my general intellectual ability and personality was shaped in important ways by my parents and, particularly, my father’s ancestors. On my father’s side my family has been going to college for centuries. I grew up in a home filled with books. My mother told me they started teaching me to read at age 3 because I wanted to do what Mommy and Daddy did. I grew up reading all sorts of books and having all sorts of experiences that few people have had. That contributed to a more open, democratic personality than most people have.
I think it works something like this:
1. Motivated + intelligent = high score
2. Unmotivated + intelligent = lower score
3. Modivated + unintelligent = lower score
4. Unmotivated + unintelligent = lowest score
It’s possible that the scores for 2 and 3 above may be reversed. If an intelligent person is sufficiently unmotivated, he may score lower than a motivated but unintelligent person.
This is a stupid article. For one thing, it says squat about general motivation. What it says is that people who are smart are less likely to resent and be unhappy about taking IQ tests. Gosh! Who would have thought?
And then you can also go further — such is the power of modern social “science” — and assert that an unhappiness with taking an IQ test is correlated with low scores and therefore with all the things with which a low score is correlated. Which says absolutely nothing about the degree of correlation per se between IQ and life achievements, et cetera.
These people would all flunk IQ tests. It’s no wonder they have a negatiev attitude about them, and fail at life, ending up as journalists, whores, social scientists, repo men, and other such riff-raff. Or am I unjust to repo men and whores here?
Intelligence is often talked about as if it were an absolute good, yet there are some monumental stupidities of which only genius is capable.
I believe the IQ test was originally developed to measure the aptitude of mentally challenged people. In this they were able to make distinctions between being a: moron, idiot, dolt, nimrod, finger smeller, or just simply stupid. So having a higher score than someone else shouldn’t be taken as I’m smarter than you but rather, I tend to not be quite as stupid as you.
Standard IQ tests do not work if the subject is uncooperative or unmotivated. A typical case is a “behaviorally challenged” child who does not cooperate with the examiner. Even a verbally administered IQ test will not work. The only way to assess IQ in such cases is to perform prolonged observations and repeated interactions to see what the child is capable of doing. If the child does nothing, then measuring IQ is irrelevant. The attitude, mood, and behavior problems must be corrected before reassessing IQ.
IQ testing, like most attempts to better understand human beings, is of some value and apparently does say something meaningful about certain human intellectual activities. That said, things have changed considerably in the past few decades. Back when I took things like college boards and GREs, there wasn’t much in the way of coaching available. That can really skew the results.
If you spend much time with people in high IQ societies, e.g. Mensa, you will notice that the people there are actually more intelligent than most. You can find the same sort of thing in other groups as well. For instance, National Space Society members, members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill, DC, and other groups tend to attract people of significantly higher than normal intelligence. Why, yes, I am a member of all these groups.
How your life turns out can be affected by IQ. It can also be affected by other personality traits and the kinds of groups/organizations/whatever in which you participate. I, for example, have a highly open, democratic personality. I work better in more open, democratic settings. Bullies really anger me. We have some very interesting conflicts.
That’s enough for now.
An unsurprising result. Superior motivation produces superior results in pretty much every field of human endeavor. There is no obvious reason why IQ testing should be an exception.
Re: Chuck’s comment,
IQ tests are not the same kind of beast as things like the SAT and GRE. Quite a sizable chunk of most IQ tests, for example, consists of questions involving small pictures or diagrams that aim to test one’s ability to mentally rotate or otherwise systematically transform one “view” to another. One can argue about just what it is IQ tests measure, but my experience has been that they measure me pretty consistently. I’ve taken a number of them over the years and they all seem to produce an IQ number within plus or minus 2 of what I was told my Stanford-Binet result was back when I was a teenager. If there’s any way to “coach” flexibility and quickness of mind, I have yet to encounter it – worse luck.
SAT’s, GRE’s and all their relatives, on the other hand, are supposed to be objective measures of educational attainment – what you’ve learned, as opposed to how damned clever and quick you were in learning it. In their early days, the vendors of these tests asserted that, as they measured learning accumulated over a long period of prior formal education, they could not be “coached” in a short period prior to testing. This was quickly proven a false assumption and the growth of the coaching industry proceeded from there. It is quite possible for someone sufficiently – now wait for it – motivated to make up for a surprising amount of previous academic indifference and underperformance in just a few weeks of concentrated effort. I have some personal experience of this as I worked in SAT coaching for a time. Incoming students take an SAT-clone test and then a second one after the coaching is complete. The difference in scores is sometimes extreme. The best result I ever saw with one of my pupils was a gain of 280 points. I suspect that even more extreme results are quite possible.
Dick,
I can say that Mensa did accept my GRE score as evidence supporting admission way back in 1982 based upon results that were over 10 years old. I don’t think Mensa is accepting SATs or GREs anymore. The coaching industry might have something to do with that.
I do know my general intellectual ability and personality was shaped in important ways by my parents and, particularly, my father’s ancestors. On my father’s side my family has been going to college for centuries. I grew up in a home filled with books. My mother told me they started teaching me to read at age 3 because I wanted to do what Mommy and Daddy did. I grew up reading all sorts of books and having all sorts of experiences that few people have had. That contributed to a more open, democratic personality than most people have.