The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  Unsurprisingly, given that they were developed precisely for this reason, these scores are best at predicting how well you do at school and university, but they are also modestly successful at predicting your career path after education. The capacity to juggle complex information will mean that you find complex mathematical or scientific concepts easier to understand and remember; that capacity to understand and remember difficult concepts might also help you to build a stronger argument in a history essay.

  Particularly if you want to enter fields such as law, medicine or computer programming that will demand advanced learning and abstract reasoning, greater general intelligence is undoubtedly an advantage. Perhaps because of the socioeconomic success that comes with a white-collar career, people who score higher on intelligence tests tend to enjoy better health and live longer as a result, too.

  Neuroscientists have also identified some of the anatomical differences that might account for greater general intelligence.28 The bark-like cerebral cortex is thicker and more wrinkled in more intelligent people, for example, and these also tend to have bigger brains overall.29 And the long-distance neural connections linking different brain regions (called ‘white matter’, since they are coated in a fatty sheath) appear to be wired differently too, forging more efficient networks for the transmission of signals.30 Together, these differences may contribute to faster processing and greater short-term and long-term memory capacity that should make it easier to see patterns and process complex information.

  It would be foolish to deny the value of these results and the undoubtedly important role that intelligence plays in our lives. The problems come when we place too much faith in those measures’ capacity to represent someone’s total intellectual potential31 without recognising the variation in behaviour and performance that cannot be accounted for by these scores.32

  If you consider surveys of lawyers, accountants or engineers, for instance, the average IQ may lie around 125 – showing that intelligence does give you an advantage. But the scores cover a considerable range, between around 95 (below average) and 157 (Termite territory).33 And when you compare the individuals’ success in those professions, those different scores can, at the very most, account for around 29 per cent of the variance in performance, as measured by managers’ ratings.34 That is certainly a very significant chunk, but even if you take into account factors such as motivation, it still leaves a vast range in performance that cannot be accounted for by their intelligence.35

  For any career, there are plenty of people of lower IQ who outperform those with much higher scores, and people with greater intelligence who don’t make the most of their brainpower, confirming that qualities such as creativity or wise professional judgement just can’t be accounted for by that one number alone. ‘It’s a bit like being tall and playing basketball,’ David Perkins of the Harvard Graduate School of Education told me. If you don’t meet a very basic threshold, you won’t get far, but beyond that point other factors take over, he says.

  Binet had warned us of this fact, and if you look closely at the data, this was apparent in the lives of the Termites. As a group, they were quite a bit more successful than the average American, but a vast number did not manage to fulfil their ambitions. The psychologist David Henry Feldman has examined the careers of the twenty-six brightest Termites, each of whom had a stratospheric IQ score of more than 180. Feldman was expecting to find each of these geniuses to have surpassed their peers, yet just four had reached a high level of professional distinction (becoming, for example, a judge or a highly honoured architect); as a group, they were only slightly more successful than those scoring 30?40 points fewer.36

  Consider Beatrice and Sara Ann – the two precocious young girls with IQs of 192 whom we met at the start of this chapter. Beatrice dreamed of being a sculptor and writer, but ended up dabbling in real estate with her husband’s money – a stark contrast to the career of Oppenheimer, who had scored at the lower end of the group.37 Sara Ann, meanwhile, earned a PhD, but apparently found it hard to concentrate on her career; by her fifties she was living a semi-nomadic life, moving from friend’s house to friend’s house, and briefly, in a commune. ‘I think I was made, as a child, to be far too self-conscious of my status as a “Termite” . . . and given far too little to actually do with this mental endowment’, she later wrote.38

  We can’t neglect the possibility that a few of the Termites may have made a conscious decision not to pursue a high-flying (and potentially stressful) career, but if general intelligence really were as important as Terman initially believed, you might have hoped for more of them to have reached great scientific, artistic or political success.39 ‘When we recall Terman’s early optimism about his subjects’ potential . . . there is the disappointing sense that they might have done more with their lives,’ Feldman concluded.

  The interpretation of general intelligence as an all-powerful problem-solving-and-learning ability also has to contend with the Flynn Effect – a mysterious rise in IQ over the last few decades.

  To find out more, I met Flynn at his son’s house in Oxford, during a flying visit from his home in New Zealand.40 Flynn is now a towering figure in intelligence research, but it was only meant to be a short distraction, he says: ‘I’m a moral philosopher who dabbles in psychology. And by dabbling I mean it’s taken over half my time for the past thirty years.’

  Flynn’s interest in IQ began when he came across troubling claims that certain racial groups are inherently less intelligent. He suspected that environmental effects would explain the differences in IQ scores: richer and more educated families will have a bigger vocabulary, for instance, meaning that their children perform better in the verbal parts of the test.

  As he analysed the various studies, however, he came across something even more puzzling: intelligence – for all races – appeared to have been rising over the decades. Psychologists had been slowly accounting for this by raising the bar of the exam – you had to answer more questions correctly to be given the same IQ score. But if you compare the raw data, the jump is remarkable, the equivalent of around thirty points over the last eighty years. ‘I thought, “Why aren’t psychologists dancing in the street over this? What the hell is going on?” ’ he told me.

  Psychologists who believed that intelligence was largely inherited were dumbfounded. By comparing the IQ scores of siblings and strangers, they had estimated that genetics could explain around 70 per cent of the variation between different people. But genetic evolution is slow: our genes could not possibly have changed quickly enough to produce the great gains in IQ score that Flynn was observing.

  Flynn instead argues that we need to consider the large changes in society. Even though we are not schooled in IQ tests explicitly, we have been taught to see patterns and think in symbols and categories from a young age. Just think of the elementary school lessons that lead us to consider the different branches of the tree of life, the different elements and the forces of nature. The more children are exposed to these ‘scientific spectacles’, the easier they find it to think in abstract terms more generally, Flynn suggests, leading to a steady rise in IQ over time. Our minds have been forged in Terman’s image.41

  Other psychologists were sceptical at first. But the Flynn Effect has been documented across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America (see below) – anywhere undergoing industrialisation and Western-style educational reforms. The results suggest that general intelligence depends on the way our genes interact with the culture around us. Crucially – and in line with Flynn’s theory of ‘scientific spectacles’ – the scores in the different strands of the IQ test had not all risen equally. Non-verbal reasoning has improved much more than vocabulary or numerical reasoning, for instance – and other abilities that are not measured by IQ, like navigation, have actually deteriorated. We have simply refined a few specific skills that help us to think more abstractly. ‘Society makes highly different demands on us over time, and people have to respond.’ In this w
ay, the Flynn Effect shows that we can’t just train one type of reasoning and assume that all the useful problem-solving abilities that we have come to associate with greater intelligence will follow suit, as some theories would have predicted.42

  This should be obvious from everyday life. If the rise of IQ really reflected a profound improvement in overall thinking, then even the smartest eighty-year-old (such as Flynn) would seem like a dunce compared to the average millennial. Nor do we see a rise in patents, for example, which you would expect if the skills measured by general intelligence tests were critical for the kind of technological innovation that Jess Oppenheimer had specialised in;43 nor do we witness a preponderance of wise and rational political leaders, which you might expect if general intelligence alone was critical for truly insightful decision making. We do not live in the utopian future that Terman might have imagined, had he survived to see the Flynn Effect.44

  Clearly, the skills measured by general intelligence tests are one important component of our mental machinery, governing how quickly we process and learn complex abstract information. But if we are to understand the full range of abilities in human decision making and problem solving, we need to expand our view to include many other elements – skills and styles of thinking that do not necessarily correlate strongly with IQ.

  Attempts to define alternative forms of intelligence have often ended in disappointment, however. One popular buzzword has been ‘emotional intelligence’, for instance.* It certainly makes sense that social skills determine many of our life outcomes, though critics have argued that some of the popular tests of ‘EQ’ are flawed and fail to predict success better than IQ or measures of standard personality traits such as conscientiousness.45

  * Despite these criticisms, updated theories of emotional intelligence do prove to be critical for our understanding of intuitive reasoning, and collective intelligence, as we will find out in Chapters 5 and 9.

  In the 1980s, meanwhile, the psychologist Howard Gardner formulated a theory of ‘multiple intelligences’ that featured eight traits, including interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence, bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence that makes you good at sport, and even ‘naturalistic intelligence’ – whether you are good at discerning different plants in the garden or even whether you can tell the brand of car from the sound of its engine. But many researchers consider that Gardner’s theory is too broad, without offering precise definitions and tests or any reliable evidence to support his conjectures, beyond the common-sense notion that some people do gravitate to some skills more than others.46 After all, we’ve always known that some people are better at sport and others excel at music, but does that make them separate intelligences? ‘Why not also talk about stuffing-beans-up-your-nose intelligence?’ Flynn said.

  Robert Sternberg at Cornell University offers a middle ground with his Triarchic Theory of Successful Intelligence, which examines three particular types of intelligence – practical, analytical and creative – that can together influence decision making in a diverse range of cultures and situations.47

  When I called him one afternoon, he apologised for the sound of his young children playing in the garden outside. But he soon forgot the noise as he described his frustration with education today and the outdated tools we use to calculate mental worth.

  He compares the lack of progress in intelligence testing to the enormous leaps made in other fields, like medicine: it is as if doctors were still using outdated nineteenth-century drugs to treat life-threatening disease. ‘We’re at the level of using mercury to treat syphilis,’ he told me. ‘The SAT determines who gets into a good university, and then who gets into a good job – but all you get are good technicians with no common sense.’

  Like Terman before him, Sternberg’s interest took root in childhood. Today, there is no questioning his brainpower: the American Psychological Association considered Sternberg the sixtieth most eminent psychologist in the twentieth century (twelve places above Terman).48 But as a second-grade child facing his first IQ test, his mind froze. When the results came in, it seemed clear to everyone – his teachers, his parents and Sternberg himself – that he was a dunce. That low score soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and Sternberg is certain he would have continued on this downward spiral, had it not been for his teacher in the fourth grade.49 ‘She thought there was more to a kid than an IQ score,’ he said. ‘My academic performance shot up just because she believed in me.’ It was only under her encouragement that his young mind began to flourish and blossom. Slippery concepts that had once slid from his grasp began to stick; he eventually became a first-class student.

  As a freshman at Yale, he decided to take an introductory class in psychology to understand why he had been considered ‘so stupid’ as a child ? an interest that carried him to post-graduate research at Stanford, where he began to study developmental psychology. If IQ tests were so uninformative, he wondered, how could we better measure the skills that help people to succeed?

  As luck would have it, observations of his own students started to provide the inspiration he needed. He remembers one girl, Alice, who had come to work in his lab. ‘Her test scores were terrific, she was a model student, but when she came in, she just didn’t have any creative ideas,’ he said. She was the complete opposite of another girl, Barbara, whose scores had been good but not ‘spectacular’, but who had been bursting with ideas to test in his lab.50 Another, Celia, had neither the amazing grades of Alice, nor the brilliant ideas of Barbara, but she was incredibly pragmatic – she thought of exceptional ways to plan and execute experiments, to build an efficient team and to get her papers published.

  Inspired by Alice, Barbara and Celia, Sternberg began to formulate a theory of human intelligence, which he defined as ‘the ability to achieve success in life, according to one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context’. Avoiding the (perhaps overly) broad definitions of Gardner’s multiple intelligences, he confined his theory to those three abilities – analytical, creative and practical – and considered how they might be defined, tested and nurtured.

  Analytical intelligence is essentially the kind of thinking that Terman was studying; it includes the abilities that allowed Alice to perform so well on her SATs. Creative intelligence, in contrast, examines our abilities ‘to invent, imagine and suppose’, as Sternberg puts it. While schools and universities already encourage this kind of thinking in creative writing classes, Sternberg points out that subjects such as history, science and foreign languages can also incorporate exercises designed to measure and train creativity. A student looking at European history, for instance, might be asked, ‘Would the First World War have occurred, had Franz Ferdinand never been shot?’ or, ‘What would the world look like today, if Germany had won the Second World War?’ In a science lesson on animal vision, it might involve imagining a scene from the eyes of a bee. ‘Describe what a bee can see, that you cannot.’51

  Responding to these questions, students would still have a chance to show off their factual knowledge, but they are also being forced to exercise counter-factual thinking, to imagine events that have never happened – skills that are clearly useful in many creative professions. Jess Oppenheimer exercised this kind of thinking in his scriptwriting and also his technical direction.

  Practical intelligence, meanwhile, concerns a different kind of innovation: the ability to plan and execute an idea, and to overcome life’s messy, ill-defined problems in the most pragmatic way possible. It includes traits like ‘metacognition’ – whether you can judge your strengths and your weaknesses and work out the best ways to overcome them, and the unspoken, tacit knowledge that comes from experience and allows you to solve problems on the fly. It also includes some of the skills that others have called emotional or social intelligence – the ability to read motives and to persuade others to do what you want. Among the Termites, Shelley Smith Mydans’ quick thinking as a war reporter, and her ability to navigate her escape from a Japanese prison camp
, may best personify this kind of intelligence.

  Of the three styles of thinking, practical intelligence may be the hardest to test or teach explicitly, but Sternberg suggests there are ways to cultivate it at school and university. In a business studies course, this may involve rating different strategies to deal with a personnel shortage;52 in a history lesson on slavery, you might ask a student to consider the challenges of implementing the underground railroad for escaped slaves.53 Whatever the subject, the core idea is to demand that students think of pragmatic solutions to an issue they may not have encountered before.

  Crucially, Sternberg has since managed to test his theories in many diverse situations. At Yale University, for example, he helped set up a psychology summer programme aimed at gifted high-school students. The children were tested according to his different measures of intelligence, and then divided randomly into groups and taught according to the principles of a particular kind of intelligence. After a morning studying the psychology of depression, for instance, some were asked to formulate their own theories based on what they had learnt – a task to train creative intelligence; others were asked how they might apply that knowledge to help a friend who was suffering from mental illness – a task to encourage practical thinking. ‘The idea was that some kids will be capitalising on their strengths, and others will be correcting their weaknesses,’ Sternberg told me.

  The results were encouraging. They showed that teaching the children according to their particular type of intelligence improved their overall scores in a final exam – suggesting that education in general should help cater for people with a more creative or practical style of thinking. Moreover, Sternberg found that the practical and creative intelligence tests had managed to identify a far greater range of students from different ethnic and economic backgrounds – a refreshing diversity that was apparent as soon as they arrived for the course, Sternberg said.