But then what is it we're measuring?
A standardized intelligence test usually measures like I said before
variables that are related
to academic performance. So we had Spearman
who did many things but we'll focus here on Spearman's
two factor theory of intelligence. What we're going to see is there's a lot of
intelligence theories and you could
you could argue for and against various elements, and that's what scientists do.
They try to find evidence to refute or support hypotheses
and as they refute or support them more clearly over time, they refine them.
So one of our original original
theorists, being Spearman, said there's two types
of intelligence. There's general intelligence
and then there's specific abilities that flow from that general intelligence.
So if you think about it hierarchically, he was seeing
that results on different sub tests.
So you have this intelligence score but it's not just one test
with one set of questions. It's made up of lots of different sub-tests
which then aggregate to make one score
and what he saw was that if people did well on one they tended to do well on
others,
right, which would indicate a higher level ability, and if they tended to do poor
on one, they tended to do
more poorly on others which would indicate lower levels of ability.
So what he said is, all these individual tests are specific applications
of your general intellectual ability, where he came up with the notion of G,
G factor as your
general intelligence factor. So, if you see OG,
it ain't Original Gangster,
it's original general intelligence construct as posited by Spearman.
So that gives you a little bit of a mnemonic. If you were to see something like
that on a test, and you're like, what is that,
G, G factor, general intelligence from which
other abilities flow, not necessarily equally.
So I could have a high, let's say, general intelligence
and perform well on a lot of verbal subtests,
maybe I can construct sentences or deconstruct sentences. I might be able
to show evidence of a very powerful vocabulary
or an understanding of passages or logical
analysis, analogies, things of that nature but not do so well on mathematics.
So the idea would be that my specific ability in mathematics is
differentially affected for some reason.
It might have been something that was wrong in my own personal
intelligence abilities which we might consider a learning disability,
something that could be compensated for if we could diagnose it,
right, and give people appropriate interventions to help them bolster
their relative weakness, right, or it could be that maybe
I had a bad mathematics teacher that gave me a really bad experience early on
and I developed poor
mathematical self-efficacy and I didn't think I was very good at it so I created a
self-fulfilling prophecy. I just never engaged mathematics well enough to learn it.
So there's a lot of reasons my specific abilities might vary
but the idea that he's positing here is that you have a general
type of intelligence from which these sub factors will flow.
So reasoning is one of many sub factors. He thought it was the most important
factor because it enabled you to adapt to
all kinds of environments and all kinds of situations. You were able to use your
general intelligence,
higher or lower abilities, to engage the world in multiple ways,
depending on what the situations were. As I said, if you
did well on one sub-test, you tended to do well on others. If you did poorly on one, you tended
to do more poorly on others.So it must be that this
general factor is the more important one. Now look here,
I'm going past some stuff you don't need to study now for your test.
I appreciate you coming. There's a lot of theories of intelligence so I'm going to focus
in on the ones you need to know
for taking your test next week.
Cattel and Horn proposed two types of intelligence. What you see
with Spearman is two factors, a general factor
and then sub factors, hierarchical levels. Cattel and Horn proposing two types
of intelligence that are
are related but a little bit different in this sense.
Fluid intelligence would be
abstract reasoning ability, general
ability to use your working memory and thus speed of information processing.
Fluidity of information flow, if you will, in your own mind.
Versus crystallized intelligence which would be
the specifics in your mind; accumulated knowledge, accumulated vocabulary,
accumulated skills,
accumulated facts and trivia, right? There are just
certain things you know that are fixed,
right? You could now use those things to reason in different ways
but you have a set a fixed facts that are part of your
intelligence. The larger that is the more information you have at your
disposal at any given moment,
and then your ability to work with that in speed or flexibility or adaptivity
would be
your fluid intelligence. And my favorite example of this, and I don't know if it is
too dated to use here, is
Jeopardy. Most people know about the show Jeopardy
and Ken Jennings as the example. They took off the limit
where it was set before, you could only win so many times or
so much money. You know how memory is, I'm not sure about that.
But they took off the limit. Now you can win as many times as you can win.
Probably never figuring anybody would go more than 5, 10, 15.
And Ken Jennings came along, and he won 74.
74 shows. Now, his opponents
were not dull witted people. I've tried to do that online
Jeopardy test and I flunk.
I don't do that very well. Time, questions, and I'm going tip of the tongue, oh!
I think I've got... no, oh, times up. Right? And so it's interesting.
To get on Jeopardy you got to pass tests to even be considered
and then you got to go through additional selection before you're actually on.
So the people who get on Jeopardy, generally speaking, have a pretty high level of
crystallized intelligence. They've got a lot of trivia up there in their heads, right? They're
able to
look at all these questions and they would know more than the average person
would know
because they have an accumulation of facts that seems to be greater than most
people's.
So they didn't have a bigger basis of facts than Ken Jennings. What I noticed Ken
Jennings
did, was when the question got asked,
he was quicker to respond. Whether he was right or he was wrong,
he didn't delay. In other words,
he probably had the same amount roughly speaking as most people of
amounts of facts but he could get to it faster than most people.
Whether he knew the fact was correct or didn't know it was correct, he found out when he gave the
answer and it was either right or wrong.
But he could get to what he thought was the answer very quickly.
So his fluid intelligence was extremely high.
So if you watch the show, you'll notice that some people, myself included, if I was ever in
that situation, would be like,
uuhhhhh - he didn't uuhhhh very long - he'd go click.
This is what I think it is. He could access his own
sets of facts very rapidly which is what's required to do well in that
that test. I think he threw it. I think in the 75th episode he's like, you know,
I have a life,
and a family, and I have to go home. He had already amassed more than two million dollars
and became famous. But nobody else has matched it since and I would say in that sense it
shows that his
fluid intelligence was higher than most people's fluid intelligence. He had an ability.
Again, it doesn't make him a better human being, doesn't make anybody a better or
worse human being to have high or low levels
of intelligence.