The Great IQ Myth
How a faulty test from the 1900s wormed its way to the center of intellectual debate
IQ is everywhere. From school entrance tests to military exams and obnoxious pop-up ads, IQ appears to be a magical number we all turn to, to show us our place in both academic and non-academic society. IQ seems to be the ever-favourite topic of debate for the online communities most fedora-wearing, B-O sharing participants. If I had one pound for every time I saw a Twitter debate devolve into IQ boasting, I would be able to have almost as much lip filler as Khloe Kardashian.
Back when it was first invented by Alfred Binet, IQ was used to screen army soldiers in the US before being drafted into World War 1. IQ tests consist of sections on short term memory, reasoning, maths, and verbal proficiency. Apparently, this was to get a sense for what kind of position each person should be given within the military, although not surprisingly most high-ranking roles were still reserved for the wealthy.
Even up until recently, IQ has been used extensively in the police force although, ironically, to quite the opposite effect. In September 1996, a US citizen was denied a job in his local force after getting an IQ score of 125. This score was deemed too high to be working as a police officer. Looking at the current situation in America, this is hardly surprising. The man in question took the city to court, complaining of discrimination but lost his appeal.
So, is IQ everything it’s cracked up to be? Surely if the police are using it to make sure their officers aren’t too intelligent, there must be something behind it? Well surprisingly there’s still some hot debate amongst scientists and psychologists as to whether it’s actually useful or not, but there do seem to be two main camps of thought:
1- The IQ test is a useless metric to determine someone’s intelligence. There are multiple different types of intelligence and therefore to have one number to describe someone’s total cognitive ability is disingenuous.
2- There is no better current alternative to IQ; IQ is close enough to telling us what we want to know about certain individuals, so there’s no real problem.
Despite the fact that the latter statement is largely correct, there really is no current alternative test to better measure general intelligence, my assessment of IQ still falls very much into camp 1 and here’s why:
What is and what is not considered intelligence is largely subjective. That seems like a stupid statement, but it makes sense when we consider the ways cultures differ. Knowledge of medicinal herbs, for example, is a huge mark of intelligence in central African countries, yet largely obsolete and archaic in a world of modern western medicine.
‘What is and what is not considered intelligence is largely subjective’
To take this example further, imagine we discover an isolated tribe of humans in the Amazon. It is clear these people have developed their own language and a pictographic method of writing. If members of this tribe were to take a western IQ test, there would be a high chance they would have an IQ that fell into the ‘intellectual disability’ category of below 70. Yet these same people would have knowledge of herbal medicine, cultural thinking and societal building that the rest of the world would desperately want.
Many researchers also maintain that intelligence is a concept specific to culture. Unfortunately, this same cultural divide has caused the use of IQ to have a particularly dark past. Advocators for IQ tests in the 1900s used them to outline who was intelligent and who was ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘idiotic’. In 1927, the Supreme Court legalised forced sterilisation of people who were considered to have a low IQ. Due to cultural differences, ethnic minorities were disproportionally affected by this law, as well as mildly retarded young women. 65,000 US citizens were forcibly sterilised due to the results of a test whose merits are still in question even today. IQ was used extensively by eugenicists to continuously demean and undermine the voices of ethnic minorities in a time where racial injustice was in the forefront of public minds.
Even though we don’t have a better alternative, IQ is still best left as a measurement of curiosity rather than absolute fact. To use IQ as the be-all and end-all measurement for human intelligence is as dangerous as it is stupid. After all, we don’t bother trying to systematically measure other abstract concepts such as ‘health’ or ‘pain’ with single tests, so why bother doing the same for intelligence?