The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen
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that intelligence may vary according to the environment. If you live in a hunting and gathering society, your intelligence will have nothing to do with your ability to read abstract philosophy texts and much more to do with your ability to interpret your natural surroundings. In fact, someone who scores very highly on the WAIS would probably perform very poorly if he or she had been dropped into the Australian bush in the middle of the nineteenth century. Likewise, an aboriginal Australian from the nineteenth century with no formal education would perform extremely poorly on the WAIS, but would have an enormous store of knowledge and skills about surviving in the bush. Because the nature of intelligence is inherently dependent on an individual’s environment, there are chronic problems with cultural bias in intelligence tests. It is arguably impossible to design an intelligence test completely free from cultural bias.
What are the best ways to reduce cultural bias in IQ tests?
While it is probably impossible to remove all cultural bias from IQ tests, there are ways to ensure that the test is relevant to as broad a sample of people as possible. This is especially important in highly diverse societies such as the United States. The WAIS-IV includes non-verbal tests such as Block Design and Matrix Reasoning that are not dependent on language and not too dependent on education. Further, the use of abstract, geometric shapes avoids culturally meaningful images. It is also important to exclude items that depend on knowledge that is relevant to only a small percentage of the population. For example, early intelligence tests included items on the make and model of specific cars, which would only be relevant to people who care about and who drive cars. Another important way to reduce cultural bias is to provide norms for different segments of the population. The WAIS-IV includes norms for different age groups and many other cognitive tests provide separate norms for people with different levels of education. Finally, translation of tests into several languages is also very important.
Are IQ tests useful?
The IQ, as measured by the WAIS, does a good job of measuring the kinds of cognitive skills that are useful for functioning in a complex, industrialized, modern society. These include abstract and verbal problem-solving skills and complex attention skills. The IQ gives a good general sense of the person’s overall intellectual performance. But when the data is interpreted, close attention must be paid to the subtests because an individual’s performance may vary widely, with very high scores on some tests and low scores on others. The IQ is also vulnerable to many cultural biases. However, the subtests and the functional indices are very useful for providing a profile of an individual’s cognitive skills. This profile can be helpful in diagnosing various neurological or psychiatric conditions, such as intellectual disability, depression, or attention deficit disorder. Thus, regardless of the person’s IQ score, the profile of subtests can be enormously helpful for clinical purposes.
Are there other kinds of intelligence that the WAIS doesn’t measure?
If we define intelligence as information processing that allows us to adapt to our environment, then the WAIS only taps a narrow range of such skills. American developmental psychologist Howard Gardiner (1943–) has argued against the idea of a single, unitary intelligence, proposing instead the existence of multiple intelligences, including forms based in the body, and social and emotional forms of intelligence. Similarly, psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman (1946–) has written extensively about emotional intelligence, the ability to process emotional and interpersonal information effectively. Folk psychology speaks about street smarts, political acumen, business smarts, mechanical aptitude, and even common sense. None of these are directly measured on the WAIS, although we would assume the visual-spatial tests to have some relationship to mechanical aptitude. We do know, however, that people with very low intellectual skills—as measured by tests such as the WAIS—have significantly reduced interpersonal and self-care skills. On the other hand, we probably all know people with very high IQs who are sorely lacking in emotional and interpersonal skills and even common sense. Therefore we can conclude that the WAIS measures some aspects of intelligence that are related, but not identical, to other aspects of intelligence.
What were the Alpha and Beta Tests developed by the U.S. Army?
In 1917, immediately after the United States entered World War I (WWI), the American Psychological Association (APA) convened a committee to consider how best to contribute to the war effort. The committee concluded that the development of an intelligence test that could be administered to large groups would be most useful. Potential soldiers falling below a cut-off point would be excluded from the military, while high scorers could be selected for elite positions.
Under the guidance of Robert Yerkes (1876–1956), a Harvard psychologist and army major, the Army Alpha, a written test, and the Army Beta, a pictorial version for the 40 percent of soldiers unable to read the written test, were developed. These tests had broad impact on the discharge and promotion of soldiers. The use of such tests in WWI spawned an explosion of intelligence and aptitude tests after the war to be used in schools, the military, and other institutions.
Criticism of cultural bias soon followed, with complaints that the content of the Army tests favored affluent, native-born Americans over less privileged immigrants, who could not be expected to know, for example, the engines of different luxury cars or the layout of a tennis court. Further, many questions were moralistic, as if disagreement with Anglo-American values reflected lower intelligence. Despite these very legitimate complaints, it must be kept in mind that these intelligence tests aimed for a merit-based approach to job placement. In this way, the army at least tried to be more democratic than the explicitly prejudiced, family and class-based approaches to employment that were typically used before. Today’s intelligence and aptitude tests aim for much greater cultural sensitivity. Nonetheless, it is arguably impossible to develop a test that is completely culture-neutral.
Who devised the first intelligence test?
Frances Galton (1822–1911), the father of Eugenics, was one of the first scientists to study individual differences in intelligence. He presumed such differences were inherited, what we would now call genetic, and he aimed to separate the most intelligent individuals from the least in the interest of selective breeding. In keeping with Wilhelm Wundt’s studies of sensation and perception, Galton’s initial intelligence tests comprised various measures of hand grip, reaction time to sensory stimuli, and other sensory-motor skills. James Cattell (1860–1944) carried this work forward and developed an intelligence test based on Galton’s work. In his position as professor of psychology at Columbia University, he administered his test to hundreds of college freshmen. (Perhaps this was the beginning of the long tradition of using college freshmen in psychological research.)
By 1901, Cattell had sufficient data to correlate students’ grades with their intelligence test results. To his great disappointment, there was no relationship at all between the two variables. We might attribute these negative findings to two factors: a lack of construct validity, such that psychophysical measures have no relationship at all to academic performance, and restriction of range. College freshmen at an elite university will not vary that much in intelligence, so some correlations with intelligence may be masked by this fact.
What was the Binet-Simon test?
Influenced by a mandate from the French government addressing the needs of mentally retarded children, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) and his colleague Théodore Simon (1872–1961) decided to develop a test capable of distinguishing mentally retarded children from those of normal intelligence. They did this through multiple administrations and refinements of their measure, giving the test both to children of normal intelligence and those identified as mentally retarded. The first version of their test was published in 1905, with several revisions following in quick succession. By providing the expected scores for each age in the 1908 edition, Binet and Simon created the first empirically validated, standardized test. Within a few years, the Binet-Simon test was being used by countries on five continents.
What is the Stanford-Binet intelligence test?
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