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."

IQ is bullshit ... so?

[goodmanj]

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?

Motivation

[timeOday]

Wow, so IQ measures motivation and intelligence? It's an even more useful test than we thought!

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:

Duckworth suggests that admissions to programs for "gifted and talented" children should not be based on IQ scores alone, but also on "who wants to do the work."

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.

This is a great result for IQ testing

[Dr. Spork]

Ever since that stupid book "The Bell Curve", talking about IQ has been considered to be in bad taste, because to many it sounds like a step away from outright racism. And in general, society doesn't feel comfortable with discriminating between people based simply on native intelligence.

However, we are perfectly comfortable with rewarding people for effort, motivation and concentration. So if this is what IQ tests largely measure, it becomes politically OK for, say, an employer to use an IQ test as a part of an application screening. Pretty understandably, every employer will prefer employees capable of higher levels of effort, motivation and concentration (for a fixed reward).

So let's get away from thinking of the IQ test as an intelligence test and start thinking of it as a motivation/concentration test. That will make its relevance much broader.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Your Intelligence Quotient.

[Culture20]

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.

Re:In my opinion

[Kjella]

Heh, that's what I get for swapping order after I started typing out the sentence. Another reason not to go around bragging, some variation of Murphy's law will make sure you end up with egg on your face.

Re:IQ is bullshit ... so?

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

If you couple this with the research that shows a high correlation between self-control and success (much higher correlation than IQ), then an inescapable conclusion results. It is not the brilliant mind that is destined for success, but rather the motivated well-disciplined mind. So how does one achieve such a mind? The research suggests that having parents who provide routine and discipline, a stable environment, and have a loving relationship. This is why social problems are so difficult to resolve; the child needs certain things from the parents, but the parents cannot provide. Consequently, the child grows into a poor parent and the cycle repeats. This cycle is very hard to break (even with the state system designed for this purpose, schooling). On a related note; the increasing gap between rich and poor globally is of grave concern. Increased financial pressures lead to an increase in the number of problem home environments, and the problems take such a long time to resolve. Here is where you end up with different philosophical views. Social conservatives will suggest that we must focus on unchanging structured social environments (e.g. No gay marriage, a support community via religious involvement, if religious etc). Socialists and left leaning will suggest a government provided support network is essential. The politically right will focus more on options to enable individuals to break free of the cycle. Personally, I think we as a society in the west have lost our way. Reducing economic stress was key to relieving a primary cause of social problems, however economic growth is only one component. As we now place economic growth as higher importance than societal health, we neglect that which is fundamental to the health and success of our societies. We risk letting greed destroy us, I can't put it more plainly than that.

Re:Problem Solving

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:IQ is bullshit ... so?

[goodmanj]

I'd say "IQ tests don't measure intelligence" has risen beyond conventional wisdom to a point of religious zeal here on Slashdot.

Not really, it's just misnamed.

[Gordo_1]

IQ is highly correlated to conventional measures of success in life. My father's a psychologist and he says that IQ tests are instrumental in identifying learning problems (e.g. if you score high on an IQ test, but have poor grades, this can be an indicator that there's a deficiency that needs to be investigated) among other things.

I think the main problem is what it's called. "Intelligence Quotient" is an unfortunate vestige of the bygone era in which its standard testing methodology was devised. The average Joe (like the AC above) assumes that IQ is treated as a comprehensive, innate label of the inner workings of your brain and that's just not how it's treated today.