10

Intelligence
How Can Intelligence Be Measured?
What Is Intelligence?
Where Does Intelligence Come From?
Who Is Most Intelligent?

WHEN ANNE MCGARRAH DIED at the age of 57, she had lived more years
than she could count. That’s because Anne couldn’t count at all. Like most
people with Williams syndrome, she couldn’t add 3 and 7, couldn’t make
change for a dollar, and couldn’t distinguish right from left. Her cognitive
ability was so impaired that she was unable to care for herself or hold a full-
time job. So what did she do with her time?

I love to read. Biographies, fiction, novels, different articles in

newspapers, articles in magazines, just about anything. I just read a
book about a young girl—she was born in Scotland—and her family
who lived on a farm…. I love listening to music. I like a little bit of
Beethoven, but I specifically like Mozart and Chopin and Bach. I like
the way they develop their music—it’s very light, it’s very airy, and
it’s very cheerful music. I find Beethoven depressing. (Finn, 1991, p.
54)

People with Williams syndrome are often unable to tie their own shoes or
make their own beds, but, as Anne’s words suggest, they often have an
unusual flair for language and music. Williams syndrome is caused by the
absence of just a few genes on a single chromosome, and no one knows
how this tiny genetic glitch can so profoundly impair people’s general
cognitive abilities and yet leave them with a few extraordinary talents. So
here’s the question: Was Anne McGarrah intelligent?
 People with Williams syndrome have diminished cognitive abilities, but often have unusual
gifts for music and language. Gabrielle Marion-Rivard is a singer and actress who has
Williams syndrome. She won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actress in 2014.

THAT’S A TOUGH ONE. IT SEEMS ODD TO SAY that someone is intelligent when they can’t do
simple addition, but it seems equally odd to say that someone is not intelligent when they know the
difference between baroque counterpoint and 19th-century romanticism. In a world of Albert Einsteins
and Homer Simpsons, we’d have no trouble distinguishing the geniuses from the dullards. But ours is a
world of people like Anne McGarrah and people like us: people who are sometimes brilliant, often
bright, usually competent, and occasionally dimmer than broccoli. So what is this thing called
intelligence?
More than 25 years ago, a large group of scientific experts came together to answer this question.
They concluded that intelligence involves …

the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas,
learn quickly, and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic
skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather it reflects a broader and deeper capability for
comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out”
what to do. (Gottfredson, 1997, p. 13)

In short, intelligence is the ability to use one’s mind to solve problems and learn from experience, and
for more than a century, psychologists have been asking four questions about this remarkable ability:
How can intelligence be measured? What exactly is intelligence? Where does intelligence come from?
Why are some people more intelligent than others? As you will see, we now have good answers to all
of these questions, but they did not come without controversy.
How Can Intelligence Be Measured?
Learning Outcomes
Define intelligence.
Explain how and why intelligence tests were developed.
Explain why intelligence matters.

Few things are more dangerous than a man with a mission. In the 1920s, the psychologist Henry Goddard
administered intelligence tests to arriving immigrants at Ellis Island and concluded that the overwhelming
majority of Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were “feebleminded.” Goddard also used his tests to identify
feebleminded American families (whom, he claimed, were largely responsible for the nation’s social problems)
and suggested that the government should segregate them in isolated colonies and “take away from these people
the power of procreation” (Goddard, 1913, p. 107). The United States subsequently passed laws restricting the
immigration of people from southern and eastern Europe, and the majority of U.S. states passed laws requiring
the sterilization of “mental defectives.”

During the early 20th century, laws required the involuntary sterilization of people with low intelligence. These laws were
widely supported, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their constitutionality. As Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
declared in 1927, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
From Goddard’s day to our own, intelligence tests have been used to rationalize prejudice and discrimination on
the basis of race, religion, and nationality. Although intelligence testing has achieved many notable successes, its
history is marred by more than its share of fraud and disgrace (Chorover, 1980; Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin,
1984). The fact that intelligence tests have sometimes been used for detestable purposes is especially ironic
because, as you are about to see, those tests were originally developed for the noblest of purposes: to help
underprivileged children succeed in school.

The Intelligence Quotient

Toward the end of the 19th century, France instituted a sweeping set of social reforms that for the first time
required all boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 13 to attend school. This was nice in theory but difficult in
practice because, as it turned out, not all children of the same age were equally prepared to learn. So the
government appointed a small group of experts to figure out how mandatory public education might actually
work. Some of the experts argued that psychiatrists should examine every French child and that the government
should build special schools for the “slow-witted” ones—or better yet, send them to asylums. But one of the
experts, a psychologist named Alfred Binet, disagreed. He believed that the government should rely not on the
subjective evaluations of parents, teachers, or psychiatrists, but rather, it should use an objective method to
determine the learning capabilities of each child. Those who needed extra help, he argued, should not be put in
asylums, but placed in special classrooms alongside their peers (Nicolas et al., 2013).

To make proper placement possible, Binet and Simon created a series of tasks that “bright” children could
perform well and that “slow” children could not. These tasks included solving logic problems, remembering
words, copying pictures, distinguishing edible and inedible foods, making rhymes, and answering questions such
as “Before deciding something important, what should you do?” Binet and Simon assembled 30 of these tasks
into a test that they suggested could measure a child’s “natural intelligence.” What did they mean by that phrase?

We here separate natural intelligence and instruction … by disregarding, insofar

as possible, the degree of instruction which the subject possesses…. We give him
nothing to read, nothing to write, and submit him to no test in which he might
succeed by means of rote learning. In fact, we do not even notice his inability to
read if a case occurs. It is simply the level of his natural intelligence that is taken
into account. (Binet, 1905).

In other words, Binet and Simon designed their test to measure a child’s aptitude for learning, independent of the
child’s prior educational achievement. Moreover, they designed it to allow psychologists to estimate a student’s
“mental level” simply by computing the average test score of many students in different age groups, and then
finding the age group whose average test score best matched the test score of the particular student. For example,
a 10-year-old child whose test score was about the same as the average test score of all 8-year-olds was said to
have the mental level of an 8-year-old and thus to need remedial education.

About a decade later, the German psychologist William Stern (1914) suggested that this mental level could
actually be thought of as the child’s mental age and that the best way to determine whether a child was
developing normally was simply to compute the ratio of the child’s mental age to the child’s physical age. Thus
was born the intelligence quotient, or what most of us just call IQ. Initially, psychologists computed ratio IQ,
which is a statistic obtained by dividing a person’s mental age by the person’s physical age and then multiplying
the quotient by 100. According to this formula, a 10-year-old child whose test score is about the same as the
average 10-year-old child’s test score has a ratio IQ of 100 because (10/10) × 100 = 100. But a 10-year-old child
whose test score is about the same as the average 8-year-old child’s test score has a ratio IQ of 80 because (8/10)
× 100 = 80.

This computation sounds simple, and it is. But there’s a problem with it. Intelligence increases dramatically in the
first decade or so of life and then levels off. As you probably know from your own experience, the intellectual
difference between a 10-year-old and a 5-year-old is quite dramatic, but the intellectual difference between a 40-
year-old and a 35-year-old is not. This makes ratio IQ scores problematic. For example, a 7-year-old who
performs on an intelligence test like a 14-year-old does will have a whopping ratio IQ score of 200—and that’s
okay, because any 7-year-old who can do algebra is probably pretty smart. But a 20-year-old who performs like a
40-year-old isn’t necessarily super smart, yet he will also have a ratio IQ of 200, which doesn’t make sense at all.

Psychologists quickly realized that comparing mental age to chronological age works fairly well for kids but not
for adults, because adults of different ages simply don’t have remarkably different intellectual capacities
(Ackerman, 2017). To solve this problem, psychologists began to measure intelligence by computing deviation
IQ, which is a statistic obtained by dividing an adult’s test score by the average adult’s test score and then
multiplying the quotient by 100. So, instead of comparing a person’s mental age to her physical age, the deviation
IQ score compares her performance to the performance of others. An adult who scores the same as the average
adult has a deviation IQ of 100. The nice thing about the deviation IQ is that a 20-year-old whose test
performance is similar to that of the average 40-year-old is no longer mistakenly labeled a genius. When you hear
people talk about IQ scores today, they are almost always talking about deviation IQ.

At 4 years old, Heidi Hankins became one of the youngest people ever admitted to Mensa, an organization for people
 with unusually high IQs. Heidi’s IQ is 159—about the same as Albert Einstein’s.

The Intelligence Test

Most modern intelligence tests have their roots in the test that Binet and Simon developed more than a century
ago. For instance, the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale is based on Binet and Simon’s original test and was
initially updated by Stanford University professor Lewis Terman (whom you will encounter again later in this
chapter). The most widely used modern intelligence tests are the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and
the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). The psychologist David Wechsler worked with the army
during World War I to develop tests to screen new recruits and later became the chief psychologist at Bellevue
Psychiatric Hospital. Like Binet and Simon’s original test, the WAIS and the WISC measure intelligence by
asking people to answer questions and solve problems. Test takers are required to see similarities and differences
between ideas and objects, to draw inferences from evidence, to work out and apply rules, to remember and
manipulate material, to construct shapes, to articulate the meaning of words, to recall general knowledge, to
explain practical actions in everyday life, to use numbers, to attend to details, and so forth. In the spirit of Binet
and Simon’s early test, none of the tests requires writing words. Some sample problems from the WAIS are
shown in TABLE 10.1.

TABLE 10.1 THE TESTS AND CORE SUBTESTS OF THE WECHSLER ADULT
INTELLIGENCE SCALE IV
WAIS-IV Test Core Questions and Tasks
Subtest

Verbal Vocabulary The test taker is asked to tell the examiner what certain words mean. For example: chair (easy),
comprehension hesitant (medium), and presumptuous (hard).
test
Similarities The test taker is asked what 19 pairs of words have in common. For example: In what way are an
apple and a pear alike? In what way are a painting and a symphony alike?
Information The test taker is asked several general knowledge questions. These cover people, places, and
events. For example: How many days are in a week? What is the capital of France? Name three
oceans. Who wrote The Inferno?

Perceptual Block The test taker is shown 2-D patterns made up of red and white squares and triangles and is asked
reasoning test design to reproduce these patterns using cubes with red and white faces.
Matrix
reasoning

The test taker is asked to add a missing element to a pattern so that it progresses logically. For
 example: Which of the four symbols at the bottom goes in the empty cell of the table?
Visual The test taker is asked to complete visual puzzles like this one: “Which three of these pictures go
puzzles together to make this puzzle?”

Working Digit span The test taker is asked to repeat a sequence of numbers. Sequences run from two to nine numbers
memory test in length. In the second part of this test, the sequences must be repeated in reversed order. An easy
example is to repeat 3-7-4. A harder one is 3-9-1-7-4-5-3-9.
Arithmetic The test taker is asked to solve arithmetic problems, progressing from easy to difficult ones.

Processing Symbol The test taker is asked to indicate whether one of a pair of abstract symbols is contained in a list of
speed test search abstract symbols. There are many of these lists, and the test taker does as many as he or she can
in 2 minutes.
Coding The test taker is asked to write down the number that corresponds to a code for a given symbol
(e.g., a cross, a circle, and an upside-down T) and does as many as he or she can in 90 seconds.

These sample problems may look to you like fun and games (perhaps without the fun part), but decades of
research show that a person’s performance on tests like the WAIS predict an astonishing number of important life
outcomes (Borghans et al., 2016; Deary, Batty, & Gale, 2008; Deary, Batty, Pattie, & Gale, 2008; Der, Batty, &
Deary, 2009; Leon et al., 2009; Richards et al., 2009; Rushton & Templer, 2009).

For example, intelligence test scores are excellent predictors of income. One study compared siblings who had
significantly different IQs and found that the less intelligent sibling earned roughly half of what the more
intelligent sibling earned over the course of their lifetimes (Murray, 2002; see FIGURE 10.1). One reason for
this is that intelligent people have a variety of traits that promote economic success. For instance, they are more
patient, they are better at calculating risk, and they are better at predicting how other people will act and how they
should respond (Burks et al., 2009). But the main reason that intelligent people earn much more money than their
less intelligent counterparts (or siblings!) is that they get more education (Deary et al., 2005; Nyborg & Jensen,
2001).

Figure 10.1

Income And Intelligence Among Siblings This graph shows the average annual salary of a person who has an IQ of 90–
109 (shown in pink) and of his or her siblings who have higher or lower IQs (shown in blue).

In fact, a person’s IQ is a better predictor of the amount of education he or she will receive than is that person’s
social class (Deary, 2012; Deary et al., 2005). Intelligent people not only spend more time in school but also
perform better when they’re there (Roth et al., 2015). The correlation between IQ and academic performance is
roughly r = .50 across a wide range of people and situations. The relationship between IQ and performance
continues after school ends. Intelligent people perform so much better at their jobs that one pair of researchers
concluded that “for hiring employees without previous experience in the job, the most valid measure of future
performance and learning is general mental ability” (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998, p. 262).

Intelligent people aren’t just wealthier, they are healthier as well. Researchers who have followed millions of
people over decades have found a strong correlation between intelligence and both health and longevity (Calvin
et al., 2011; Wraw et al., 2015). Intelligent people are less likely to smoke and drink alcohol and are more likely
to exercise and eat well (Batty et al., 2007; Ciarrochi, Heaven, & Skinner, 2012; Weiser et al., 2010). Not
surprisingly, they also live longer. In fact, every 15-point increase in a young person’s IQ is associated with a
24% decrease in his or her risk of death from a wide variety of causes, including cardiovascular disease, suicide,
homicide, and accidents (Calvin et al., 2011).

Health and wealth are related, of course, and some data suggest that intelligence promotes longevity by allowing
people to succeed in school, which allows them to get better jobs, which allows them to earn more money, which
allows them to avoid illnesses such as cardiovascular disease (Deary, Weiss, & Batty, 2011; Jokela et al., 2009).
However it happens, the bottom line is clear: Intelligence matters for almost everything people value (see A
World of Difference: Equality in Smartland).

Intelligence is a good predictor of success. Thomas Jefferson is considered the most intelligent of all U.S presidents, and
Calvin Coolidge is considered the least intelligent (Simonton, 2006). Jefferson gave us the Declaration of Independence
and Coolidge gave us the Great Depression.

A World of Difference
Equality in Smartland
Being smart and being happy are pretty nice things, so it doesn’t seem fair that the people who have a whole lot
of one should also have more than their fair share of the other. But (sigh) they do. Smart people have better
health, better jobs, and better relationships; so, predictably, they tend to be happier as well. What’s true at the
individual level is also true at the national level. Scientists have long known that a nation’s average IQ scores
and average happiness scores are positively correlated: Happy nations have smart citizens and smart nations
have happy citizens. Go, Denmark!

But recently, scientists have discovered that the relationship between national happiness and national
intelligence is more interesting than anyone had realized. Nikolaev and Salahodjaev (2016) gathered data on
the intelligence and happiness of the citizens of 81 countries. As expected, they found a positive correlation
between a nation’s average IQ and its average happiness. But in addition to calculating the mean of each
nation’s happiness scores, they also calculated the standard deviation, which (as you know from the Methods in
Psychology chapter) measures the dispersion of scores around a mean. Just as the mean of a set of happiness
scores provides a rough index of a nation’s happiness, the standard deviation provides a rough index of a
nation’s “happiness equality.” If most citizens are about equally happy, then the standard deviation is low and
happiness equality is high. But if many citizens are ecstatic and many are despondent, then the standard
deviation is high and happiness equality is low.

When the researchers computed the correlation between IQ and happiness equality, they discovered something
that no one had noticed before: Nations with smart citizens do not just have more happiness, they also have
more happiness equality (see the accompanying graph). In other words, if two nations have the same average
happiness, the smarter one tends to distribute that happiness more equally among its citizens. Correlations
must always be interpreted with caution, of course, but this one is intriguing and begs for explanation. One
explanation is that intelligent people spread happiness to others. Another explanation is that the social policies
that give rise to happiness equality also foster intelligence. Whether either, both, or neither of these
explanations turns out to be right, it seems clear that smart people are about as happy as their neighbors.

Each dot represents a nation. The positive correlation indicates that the smarter a nation is, the more “happiness equality” it has.

Build to the Outcomes

1. Why were intelligence tests originally developed?
2. What is an intelligence quotient (IQ)?
3. How do ratio IQ and deviation IQ differ?
4. What important life outcomes do intelligence test scores predict?
What Is Intelligence?
Learning Outcomes
Explain how the three-level hierarchy of intelligence confirms both Spearman and Thurstone’s
conclusions.
Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the data-based and theory-based approaches to measuring
abilities.
Describe how the concept of intelligence differs across cultures.

James Franco is a remarkably talented actor, which is why he won Golden Globe Awards for his performances in
the 2017 film The Disaster Artist and the 2001 film James Dean and was nominated for an Academy Award for
Best Actor for his performance in the riveting 2010 film 127 Hours (in which he played a trapped hiker who cuts
off his own arm with a pocket knife. Really. You have to see it). So when Franco released his first book of poetry
in 2014, he was probably surprised to learn from critics that his writing—well, there’s really no way to say this
nicely—sucks. The New York Times said his work was “aggressively lazy” and the Telegraph said it was “hard to
forgive.” The Boston Globe said that reading his book was “like being trapped on a date with a chronic
mansplainer whose deepest fear is silence.” Other critics were less kind.

Franco’s excellence on the screen and his mediocrity on the page are equally difficult to deny—and clearly show
that these two artistic endeavors require different abilities that are not necessarily possessed by the same
individual. But if acting and writing require different abilities, then what does it mean to say that someone has
artistic talent? Is “artistic talent” just an aggressively lazy phrase that actually means nothing or does it refer to
something measurable and real? The science of intelligence has grappled with a similar question for more than a
century. Intelligence test scores predict important outcomes, from academic success to longevity, but is that
because they measure a real ability called intelligence?

A Hierarchy of Abilities
If there really is an ability called intelligence that enables people to perform a variety of intelligent behaviors,
then those who have this ability should do well at just about everything, and those who lack it should do well at
just about nothing. In other words, if intelligence is a single, general ability, then there should be a very strong
positive correlation between people’s performances on many different kinds of tests. This is precisely the
hypothesis that the psychologist Charles Spearman (1904) set out to examine at the start of the 20th century. He
began by measuring how well school-age children could discriminate small differences in color, auditory pitch,
and weight, and he then computed the correlation between these scores and the children’s grades in different
academic subjects. He immediately noticed two things.

First, Spearman noticed that performances on these different tests were positively correlated, which is to say that
children who performed well on one test (e.g., distinguishing the musical notes C# and D) tended to perform well
on other tests (e.g., solving algebraic equations). Some psychologists have called this finding “the most replicated
result in all of psychology” (Deary, 2000, p. 6), and it may well be. Indeed, there is even a strong positive
correlation between performances on different kinds of cognitive tests in mice (Matzel et al., 2003) and in dogs
(Arden & Adams, 2016)! Second, Spearman noticed that although performances on different tests were positively
correlated, they were not perfectly correlated. In other words, the child who had the very highest score on one test
didn’t necessarily have the very highest score on every test. Spearman combined these two facts into his two-
factor theory of intelligence, which suggests that a person’s performance on a test is due to a combination of
general ability and skills that are specific to the test. Spearman referred to general ability as g and to specific
ability as s.

Social psychologist Jennifer Richeson received a so-called “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation for her
research on the dynamics of interracial interaction. Spearman’s notion of g suggests that because she’s really good at
psychology, she’s probably pretty good at most other things too.

As sensible as Spearman’s theory was, not everyone agreed with it. Louis Thurstone (1938) noticed that although
the correlations between performances on different tests were all positive, they were much stronger when the
tests had something in common. For example, performances on a verbal test were more strongly correlated with
scores on another verbal test than with scores on a perceptual test. Thurstone took this “clustering of correlations”
to mean that there was actually no such thing as general ability; rather, there were a few stable and independent
mental abilities—such as perceptual ability, verbal ability, and numerical ability. Thurstone called these the
primary mental abilities and argued that they were neither general like g (e.g., a person might have strong verbal
abilities and weak numerical abilities), nor specific like s (e.g., a person who had strong verbal abilities tended
both to speak and read well). In essence, Thurstone argued that just as we have games called baseball and
basketball but no game called athletics, so we have abilities such as verbal ability and perceptual ability but no
general ability called intelligence. TABLE 10.2 shows the primary mental abilities that Thurstone identified.

TABLE 10.2 THURSTONE’S PRIMARY MENTAL ABILITIES

Primary Mental Ability Description

Word fluency Ability to solve anagrams and to find rhymes, etc.

Verbal comprehension Ability to understand words and sentences

 Numerical ability Ability to make mental and other numerical computations

Spatial visualization Ability to visualize a complex shape in various orientations

Associative memory Ability to recall verbal material, learn pairs of unrelated words, etc.

Perceptual speed Ability to detect visual details quickly

Reasoning Ability to induce a general rule from a few instances

For more than half a century, psychologists debated the existence of g. Then, in the 1980s, a new mathematical
technique called confirmatory factor analysis brought the debate to a quiet close by revealing that Spearman and
Thurstone had both been right, but each in his own way. Specifically, this new technique showed that the
correlations between scores on different tests are best described by a three-level hierarchy (see FIGURE 10.2)
with a general factor (much like Spearman’s g) at the top, specific factors (much like Spearman’s s) at the
bottom, and a set of factors called group factors (much like Thurstone’s primary mental abilities) in the middle
(Gustafsson, 1984). A reanalysis of massive amounts of data collected over 60 years from more than 130,000
people has shown that almost every study done since the early 1900s can be described by a three-level hierarchy
of this kind (Carroll, 1993). This hierarchy suggests that people have a very general ability called intelligence,
which is made up of a small set of middle-level abilities, which are made up of a large set of specific abilities that
are unique to particular tasks. Although this resolution to a half century of debate is not particularly exciting, it
appears to have the compensatory benefit of being true.

Figure 10.2

A Three-Level Hierarchy Most intelligence test data are best described by a three-level
hierarchy with general intelligence (g) at the top, specific abilities (s) at the bottom, and a
small number of middle-level abilities (m) (sometimes called group factors) in the middle.

The Middle-Level Abilities

James Franco’s acting is better than his writing, but the fact is that he does both of these things much better than
most people can do either one. His specific abilities have allowed him to be more successful at one of these
artistic endeavors than the other, but his general ability has allowed him to outperform 99% of the world’s
population on both. Franco clearly has many specific abilities (memorizing lines) and a general ability (artistic
talent), but it is not so easy to say precisely what his middle-level abilities were. Should we draw a distinction
between screen presence and dramatic timing or between creative insight and physical expressiveness? Should
we describe his talent as a function of three middle-level abilities, or 4 or 6 or 92.5?
Similar questions arise when we consider intelligence. Most psychologists agree that there are very specific
mental abilities, as well as a very general mental ability and that the really hard problem is to characterize
accurately the middle-level abilities that lie between them. Some psychologists have taken a data-based
approach to the problem by starting with people’s responses on intelligence tests and then looking to see what
kinds of independent clusters these responses form. Other psychologists have taken a theory-based approach to
this problem by starting with a broad survey of human abilities and then looking to see which of these abilities
intelligence tests measure—or fail to measure. These approaches have led to rather different suggestions about
the best way to characterize the middle-level abilities that constitute intelligence.

The Data-Based Approach

One way to determine the nature of the middle-level abilities is to start with the data and go where they lead us.
Just as Spearman and Thurstone did, we could compute the correlations between people’s performances on a
large number of tests and then see how those correlations cluster. For example, imagine that we tested how well a
large group of people could (1) balance teacups, (2) understand Shakespeare, (3) swat flies, and (4) sum the
whole numbers between 1 and 1,000. Now imagine that we computed the correlations between scores on each of
these tests and observed a pattern of correlations like the one shown in FIGURE 10.3a. What would this pattern
tell us?

Figure 10.3

Patterns of Correlation Can Reveal Middle-Level Abilities The pattern of correlations shown
in part (a) suggests that these four specific abilities can be thought of as instances of the
two middle-level abilities, physical coordination and academic skill, as shown in part (b).

This pattern suggests that a person who can swat flies well can also balance teacups well and that a person who
can understand Shakespeare well can also sum numbers well. But it also suggests that a person who can swat
flies well and balance teacups well may or may not be able to sum numbers or understand Shakespeare well.
From this pattern, we could conclude that there are two middle-level abilities (shown in Figure 10.3b), which we
might call physical coordination (the ability that allows people to swat flies and balance teacups) and academic
skill (the ability that allows people to understand Shakespeare and sum numbers). In other words, some people
are really good at the specific tasks of fly swatting and teacup balancing because they have a middle-level ability
called physical coordination, but this middle-level ability is unrelated to the other middle-level ability, academic
skill, which is why these people are not necessarily good at summing numbers or understanding Shakespeare. As
this example shows, simply by examining the pattern of correlations between different tests, we can discover the
nature and number of the middle-level abilities.

Of course, in the real world, there are far more than four specific skills measured by four specific tests. So what
kinds of patterns do we observe when we compute the correlations between all the many tests of mental ability
that psychologists have actually used? This is precisely what the psychologist John Carroll (1993) set out to
discover in his landmark analysis of intelligence test scores from nearly 500 studies conducted over a half
century. And what Carroll discovered was that there are not three middle-level abilities—nor 4 nor 6 nor 92.5.
Rather, there are eight, namely: memory and learning, visual perception, auditory perception, retrieval ability,
cognitive speediness, processing speed, crystallized intelligence, and fluid intelligence.

Although most of the abilities on this list are self-explanatory, the last two are not (Horn & Cattell, 1966).
Crystallized intelligence refers to the ability to apply knowledge that was acquired through experience, and it is
generally measured with tests of vocabulary and factual information. Fluid intelligence refers to the ability to
solve and reason about novel problems, and it is generally measured with tests that present people with abstract
problems in new domains that must be solved under time pressure (see FIGURE 10.4). Problems that require
crystallized or fluid intelligence appear to activate different networks in the brain (Barbey, 2018), which may
explain why impairment of one kind of intelligence does not always lead to impairment of the other. For
example, both autism and Alzheimer’s disease impair crystallized intelligence more than fluid intelligence,
whereas damage to the prefrontal cortex impairs fluid intelligence more than crystallized intelligence (Blair,
2006).

Figure 10.4

Measuring Fluid Intelligence Problems like this one from Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test (Raven, Raven, & Court,
2004) measure fluid intelligence rather than crystallized intelligence.
The Theory-Based Approach

Not everyone agrees that there are precisely eight middle-level abilities, though you will be pleased to know that
the reasons have nothing to do with math. The data-based approach discovers middle-level abilities by analyzing
the correlations between performances on intelligence tests. The good thing about this approach is that its
conclusions are based on hard evidence; the bad thing is that this approach is incapable of discovering any
middle-level ability that the hard evidence doesn’t happen to provide (Stanovich, 2009). For example, if an
intelligence test does not ask people to find three new uses for an origami fish or to answer the question “What is
the question you thought you’d be asked but weren’t?” then no analysis of those tests’ scores will ever reveal a
middle-level ability called imagination. Are there any middle-level abilities to which the data-based approach has
been blind?

The psychologist Robert Sternberg (1999, 2006) thinks so. He has argued that because standard intelligence tests
present clearly defined problems that have one right answer, and then supply all the information needed to solve
them, they can measure only analytic intelligence, which is the ability to identify and define problems and to find
strategies for solving them. But in everyday life, people find themselves in situations in which they must
formulate the problem, find the information needed to solve it, and then choose among multiple right answers.
These situations require creative intelligence, which is the ability to generate solutions that other people do not,
as well as practical intelligence, which is the ability to implement these solutions in everyday settings. In one
study, workers at milk-processing plants developed complex strategies for efficiently combining partially filled
cases of milk. Not only did they outperform highly educated white-collar workers, but their performance was
unrelated to their scores on intelligence tests, suggesting that practical and analytic intelligence are not the same
thing (Scribner, 1984). Sternberg has argued that tests of practical intelligence are actually better than tests of
analytic intelligence at predicting a person’s job performance (cf. Brody, 2003; Gottfredson, 2003).

Of course, not all of the problems that intelligence enables us to solve are analytical, practical, or creative. For
instance, how do you tell a friend that she talks too much without hurting her feelings? How do you cheer
yourself up after failing a test? How do you know whether you are feeling anxious or angry? The psychologists
John Mayer and Peter Salovey define emotional intelligence as the ability to reason about emotions and to use
emotions to enhance reasoning (Mayer, Roberts, & Barsade, 2008; Salovey & Grewal, 2005). Emotionally
intelligent people know what kinds of emotions a particular event will trigger; they can identify, describe, and
manage their emotions; they know how to use their emotions to improve their decisions; and they can identify
other people’s emotions from facial expressions and tones of voice. Furthermore, they do all this quite easily,
which is why emotionally intelligent people show less neural activity when solving emotional problems than
emotionally unintelligent people do (Jausovec & Jausovec, 2005; Jausovec, Jausovec, & Gerlic, 2001).

Emotional intelligence is also quite important for social relationships. Emotionally intelligent people have better
social skills and more friends (Eisenberg et al., 2000; Mestre et al., 2006; Schultz, Izard, & Bear, 2004), they are
judged to be more competent in their interactions (Brackett et al., 2006), and they have better romantic
relationships (Brackett, Warner, & Bosco, 2005) and workplace relationships (Elfenbein et al., 2007; Lopes et al.,
2006). Given all this, it isn’t surprising that emotionally intelligent people tend to be happier (Brackett & Mayer,
2003; Brackett et al., 2006), healthier (Mikolajczak et al., 2015), and more satisfied with their lives (Ciarrochi,
Chan, & Caputi, 2000; Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 1999). Accumulating evidence suggests that emotional
intelligence is indeed one of the middle-level abilities that the data-based approach has missed (MacCann et al.,
2014).

Two items from a test of emotional intelligence (Mayer et al, 2008). Item 1 measures the accuracy with which a person
can read emotional expressions (left). Item 2 measures the ability to predict emotional responses to events (right). The
correct answer on both items is a.

The data-based approach is also blind to middle-level abilities that are valued in cultures where intelligence tests
are not common. For instance, Westerners regard people as intelligent when they speak quickly and often, but
Africans regard people as intelligent when they are deliberate and quiet (Irvine, 1978). The Confucian tradition’s
conception of intelligence emphasizes flexibility in thinking and the ability to identify wisdom in others (Pang,
Esping, & Plucker, 2017), the Taoist tradition emphasizes humility and self-knowledge; and the Buddhist
tradition emphasizes determination and mental effort (Yang & Sternberg, 1997). Unlike Western societies, many
African and Asian societies conceive of intelligence as including social responsibility and cooperativeness
(Azuma & Kashiwagi, 1987; Serpell, 1974; White & Kirkpatrick, 1985). In Zimbabwe, the word for
“intelligence” is ngware, which means to be wise and cautious in social relationships (Sternberg & Grigorenko,
2004).

Some researchers take all this to mean that different cultures have radically different conceptualizations of
intelligence, but others are convinced that what appear to be differences in the conceptualization of intelligence
are really just differences in language. They argue that every culture values the ability to solve important
problems and that what really distinguishes cultures is the kinds of problems that are considered important.
 The Hungarian chess grandmaster Judit Polgar (left) and the Korean actress Ryu Si-Hyeon (right) both have genius-level
IQs. But their cultures construe intelligence differently. Westerners tend to think of intelligence as an individual’s ability to
engage in rational thinking, but Easterners tend to think of it as the ability to recognize contradictions and complexities.

Build to the Outcomes

1. What was the debate between Spearman and Thurstone and how was it resolved?
2. What approaches have been used to assess middle-level abilities?
3. How does fluid intelligence differ from crystallized intelligence?
4. What are some of the skills of emotionally intelligent people?
5. What are the common threads between conceptualizations of intelligence across cultures?
Where Does Intelligence Come From?
Learning Outcomes
Describe the influence of genes on intelligence.
Explain how environmental factors influence intelligence.

No one is born knowing calculus, and no one has to be taught how to blink. Some things are learned, others are
not. But almost all of the really interesting things about people are a joint product of the experiences they have
had and the characteristics with which they were born. Intelligence is one of those really interesting things, and it
is influenced both by nature and by nurture. Let’s examine these in turn.

Genetic Influences on Intelligence

The notion that intelligence is somehow “in the blood” has been with us for a very long time. As early as 380
BCE, the philosopher Plato suggested that people are born with innate aptitudes that make them good rulers,
good soldiers, or good tradesmen. But it wasn’t until late in the 19th century that this idea became the subject of
scientific inquiry. Sir Francis Galton was a half cousin of Charles Darwin, and his contributions to science ranged
from meteorology to fingerprinting. He was also the father of eugenics—the idea that humankind should be
improved by controlled breeding—which was seized upon by the Nazis as a rationale for exterminating millions
of people during World War II. Despite the horrors that his work inspired, Galton did careful genealogical studies
of eminent families, collected measurements from over 12,000 people, and concluded that intelligence was
largely inherited. Was he right?

These photos, taken from the “Genetic Portraits” series by artist Ulric Collette, were made by blending the face of a 32-
 year-old woman with the face of her mother (left) and the face of her father (right). Because physical appearance is highly
heritable, the resemblance between family members can often be quite striking. If intelligence is highly heritable, then it
too should be similar among family members. Is it?

Genetic Relatedness

Although intelligence does appear to “run in families,” that isn’t very good evidence of genetic influence because
family members share experiences as well as genes. Parents and children typically live in the same house and eat
the same foods; siblings often go to the same schools, watch the same TV shows and movies; and so on. Family
members may have similar levels of intelligence because they share genes, because they share environments, or
both. If we want to know how much influence each of these factors has on intelligence, we need to measure and
compare the intelligence scores of people who share one, both, or neither. For example, siblings who are raised
together share both genes and environments; siblings who are separated at birth and raised by different families
share genes but not environments; and adopted children who are raised together share environments but not
genes.

Furthermore, different kinds of siblings share different amounts of their genes. Siblings who were born at
different times share, on average, about 50% of their genes. And so do fraternal (or dizygotic) twins, who are
siblings who develop from two different eggs that were fertilized by two different sperm. On the other hand,
identical (or monozygotic) twins are siblings who develop from the splitting of a single egg that was fertilized by
a single sperm, and they share 100% of their genes. By comparing people who have different combinations of
shared genes and environments, and different degrees of genetic relatedness, psychologists have been able to
assess the influence of genes on intelligence.

That influence is extremely powerful. For example, the IQs of biologically unrelated children raised in the same
household are only modestly correlated (r = .32). In contrast, the IQs of identical twins are much more highly
correlated—and that's true even when those twins were raised in different households (Bouchard & McGue,
2003). Indeed, if you look at TABLE 10.3, you’ll see that identical twins who were raised apart have more
similar IQs (r = .78) than do fraternal twins who were raised together (r = .60). These patterns of correlation
suggest that genes play an important role in determining intelligence—and that shouldn’t surprise you. After all,
intelligence is influenced by the structure and function of the brain, and the structure and function of the brain are
influenced by the genes that provide the blueprint for it. Indeed, given that genes influence just about every other
human trait (Polderman et al., 2015), it would be rather remarkable if they didn’t influence intelligence.

TABLE 10.3 INTELLIGENCE TEST CORRELATIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE WITH

DIFFERENT RELATIONSHIPS
Relationship Shared Shared Genes Correlation Between Intelligence Test
Environment (%) Scores (r)

Twins
Identical twins (n = 4,672) yes 100 .86

Identical twins (n = 93) no 100 .78

Fraternal twins (n = 5,533) yes 50 .60

Parents and Children
Parent–biological child (n = 8,433) yes 50 .42
 Parent–biological child (n = 720) no 50 .24
Nonbiological parent–adopted child (n = yes 0 .19
1,491)

Siblings
Biological siblings (2 parents in common) (n = yes 50 .47
26,473)

Nonbiological siblings (no parents in common) yes 0 .32

(n = 714)

Biological siblings (2 parents in common) (n = no 50 .24

203)

Information from Plomin et al., 2001, p. 168.

Tamara Rabi and Adriana Scott were 20 years old when they met for the first time in a McDonald’s parking lot in New
York. “I’m just standing there looking at her,” Adriana recalled. “It was a shock. I saw me” (Gootman, 2003). It turned out
that the two women were identical twins who had been separated at birth and adopted by different families. By
coincidence, both families lived in the New York area and sent their daughters to colleges just a few miles apart.

The Heritability Coefficient: Measuring the Influence of Genes on IQ

Genes exert a powerful influence on intelligence—but exactly how powerful? The heritability coefficient
(commonly denoted as h2) is a statistic that describes the proportion of the difference between people’s IQ scores
that can be explained by differences in their genes. When the data from numerous studies of children and adults
are analyzed together, the heritability of intelligence is somewhere between .5 and .7, which is to say that roughly
50% to 70% of the difference between people’s intelligence test scores is due to genetic differences between
those people (Plomin & Spinath, 2004; Plomin et al., 2013; cf. Chabris et al., 2012).
 Small genetic differences
can make a big difference.
A single gene on
chromosome 15
determines whether a dog
will be too small for your
pocket or too large for
your garage.

Most people misunderstand the heritability coefficient, so let’s make sure you aren’t one of them. First, the
heritability coefficient h2 is not the same as the correlation coefficient r. Yes, both are quite efficient, but that’s
where the similarity ends. Second, many people who hear that “the heritability of intelligence is roughly .5” think
this means that roughly half of their intelligence is due to their genes and half is due to their experiences. That is
completely wrong, and to understand why, consider the rectangles in FIGURE 10.5. These rectangles have the
same heights but different widths, so they have different areas. (Remember high school geometry? A = H × W.)
So if you were asked how much of the difference in their areas was due to differences in their widths, you would
say that all of it was—100%—and if you were asked to say how much of the difference in their areas was due to
differences in their heights you would say that none of it was—0%.

Figure 10.5

Questions With And Without Answers These rectangles differ in area. The question “How much of the difference in their
areas is due to differences in their widths, and how much is due to differences in their heights?” has an answer. But the
question “How much of rectangle A’s area is due to width and how much is due to height?” does not.

Well done. Your answers about the differences between the rectangles are correct. Now try to answer a different
question: How much of rectangle A’s area is due to its height, and how much is due to its width? This question is
nonsense because an individual rectangle’s area is a product of both its height and its width, so it can’t be “due
to” one of these more or less than it is “due to” the other.

Now let’s apply this wisdom to the problem of intelligence. If you measured the intelligence of every person at a
basketball game and were then asked to say how much of the difference in their intelligence scores was due to
differences in their genes, the fact that h2 is between .5 and .7 would allow you to guess that the answer is
between 50% and 70%. But if someone pointed to the annoying guy in Row 17, Seat 4, and asked how much of
his intelligence was due to his genes, the right answer would be, “You didn’t read the textbook very carefully, did
you?” This question is nonsense because the intelligence of a particular person is a joint product of both genes
and experience—just as the area of a particular rectangle is a joint product of its height and width—thus, it
cannot be “due to” one of these things or the other.

The heritability coefficient tells us how big a role genes play in interpersonal differences in intelligence, so its
value changes depending on the particular persons we measure. For example, the heritability of intelligence
among high-income children in the United States is about .72 and among low-income children about .10
(Turkheimer et al., 2003; cf. Figlio et al., 2017). Why should that be? High-income children in America have
fairly similar environments—they all have pretty nice homes with lots of books, plenty of free time, ample
nutrition—so differences in their intelligence must be due to the one and only factor that distinguishes them from
each other: their genes.

Conversely, poor children in America have very different environments—some have books and free time and
ample nutrition, but others have little or none of these—so differences in their intelligence may be due to either
of the two factors that distinguish them from each other: their genes and their environments (Tucker-Drob et al.,
2010). This may be why intelligence is not equally heritable among high- and low-income children in America
but is equally heritable among high- and low-income children in Western Europe and Australia, where both high-
and low-income citizens have more equal amounts of nutrition and leisure, more equal access to books, and so on
(Bates et al., 2016; Tucker-Drob & Bates, 2016).

Some research suggests that IQ is more heritable among higher-income children, perhaps because their environments
 are so similar. If there are fewer differences in their environments, then differences in their IQs are more likely to be due
to differences in their genes.

The value of the heritability coefficient also changes depending on the age of the people being measured. For
example, the heritability of intelligence is higher among adults than among children (see FIGURE 10.6), and it is
higher among older children than younger children. Indeed, in infancy, genes account for less than 25% of the
interpersonal differences in intelligence, but by adolescence they account for about 70% (Haworth et al., 2010).
Why? One possibility is that the environments of older people are more similar than the environments of younger
people, and when environments don’t differ much across people, then differences in their intelligence scores must
be due to the one thing that does differ: their genes. It may seem paradoxical, but in a science-fictional world of
clones, in which all humans were genetically identical, the heritability of intelligence would be zero because
environments would be the only thing that distinguished one clone from another.

Figure 10.6

Age And Heritability Of Intelligence The heritability of intelligence generally increases with the age of the sample
measured.

Does that mean that in a science-fictional world in which humans were genetically different but lived in identical
houses and received identical meals, educations, parental care, and so on, the heritability coefficient would be
1.00? Not likely, and that’s because two people who live in the same household will share some of their
experiences but not all of their experiences. The shared environment refers to features of the environment that
are experienced by all relevant members of a household. For example, siblings raised in the same household
usually get about the same nutrition, have about the same access to books, and so on. The nonshared
environment refers to features of the environment that are not experienced by all relevant members of a
household. Siblings raised in the same household usually have different friends and different teachers, contract
different illnesses, and so on. This may explain why the correlation between the IQ scores of siblings is greater if
they are close to each other in age: Similar-aged siblings are more likely to have the same teacher, contract the
same illnesses at the same time, and so on (Sundet, Eriksen, & Tambs, 2008).

First-born children tend to be more intelligent than their later-born siblings. But when a first-born child dies in infancy and
the second-born child becomes the oldest child in the family, that second-born child ends up being just as intelligent as
the average first-born child (Kristensen & Bjerkedal, 2007). This suggests that first-borns are smarter than their siblings
not for biological reasons but because they experience a different family environment.

Environmental Influences on Intelligence

Americans believe that every individual should have an equal chance to succeed in life, and one of the reasons
that some people get nervous when they hear about genetic influences on intelligence is that they mistakenly
believe that our genes are our destinies—that “genetic” is a synonym for “unchangeable” (Pinker, 2003). But that
isn’t true because traits that are strongly influenced by genes may also be strongly influenced by the environment.
For example, height is a highly heritable trait, which is why tall parents tend to have tall children. But that
doesn’t mean that height is unchangeable. In 1848, 25% of all Dutch men were rejected by the military because
they were less than 5′ 2″ tall, but because of changes in nutrition, the average Dutch man today is over 6′ tall
(Max, 2006). The average height of Korean boys has increased by more than 7′ in the last 50 years alone (Nisbett,
2009). Genes may explain why two people who have the same diet differ in height—that is, why Chang-sun is
taller than Kwan-ho and why Thijs is taller than Daan—but they do not dictate how tall any of these boys will
actually grow up to be. Is intelligence like height in this regard? Alfred Binet (1909) thought so:

A few modern philosophers … assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed

 quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal
pessimism…. With practice, training, and above all method, we manage to
increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more
intelligent than we were before. (p. 141)

Binet was right. As FIGURE 10.7 shows, intelligence clearly changes over time (Owens, 1966; Schaie, 1996,
2005; Schwartzman, Gold, & Andres, 1987). For most people, the direction of this change is upward between
adolescence and middle age and then downward thereafter (cf. Ackerman, 2014). The sharpest decline occurs in
old age (Kaufman, 2001; Salthouse, 1996a, 2000; Schaie, 2005) and may be due to a general decrease in the
brain’s processing speed (Salthouse, 1996b; Zimprich & Martin, 2002). These age-related declines are more
evident in some domains than in others. For example, on tests that measure vocabulary, general information, and
verbal reasoning, people show only small changes from age 18 to 70; but on tests that are timed, have abstract
material, involve making new memories, or require reasoning about spatial relationships, most people show
marked declines in performance after middle age (Avolio & Waldman, 1994; Lindenberger & Baltes, 1997;
Rabbitt et al., 2004; Salthouse, 2001).

Figure 10.7

Intelligence Changes Over Time Intelligence changes over the lifespan, rising early, peaking in middle age, and declining
thereafter.

Not only does intelligence change over the life span, but it also changes over
generations (see FIGURE 10.8). The Flynn effect refers to the fact that the average
How do Nature and
IQ score today is roughly 30 points higher than it was a century ago (Dickens &
Nurture Influence
Intelligence?
Flynn, 2001; Flynn, 2012; cf. Lynn, 2013). This is a striking number. It means that
the average person today is smarter than 95% of the people who were alive in
Go to
launchpadworks.com. 1900! Why is each generation outscoring the one before it? Some researchers give
the credit to improved nutrition, schooling, and parenting (Baker et al., 2015;
Lynn, 2009; Neisser, 1998), whereas others suggest that the least intelligent people
got left out of the mating game (Mingroni, 2007). But most scientists believe that the industrial and technological
revolutions have changed the nature of daily living such that people now spend more and more time solving
precisely the kinds of abstract problems that intelligence tests include—and as we all know, practice makes
perfect (Bordone, Scherbov, & Steiber, 2015; Bratsberg & Rogeberg, 2018; Flynn, 2012).

Figure 10.8

The Flynn Effect 105 year-old Khatijah (front row, second from right) sits with five
generations of her family. As the graph shows, human intelligence has been increasing
across generations for at least the last century, though some recent studies suggest that
this increase may recently have ended

(information from Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015).

This could explain why these generational increases are nearly twice as large for fluid intelligence as they are for
crystalized intelligence (Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015). Research on how well people can estimate other people’s
IQs shows that people tend to think their own children are smarter than their own grandparents—and the Flynn
effect suggests that they are right (Furnham, 2001)! It is worth noting that some very recent evidence suggests
that the increase in IQ across generations has recently come to a halt (Dutton, van der Linden, & Lynn, 2016).
Time will tell.

The fact that intelligence changes over the life span and across generations shows that it is by no means a “fixed
quantity that cannot be increased” (Binet, 1909, p. 141). Our genes may determine the range in which our IQ is
likely to fall, but our experiences determine the point in that range at which it actually does fall (Hunt, 2011; see
FIGURE 10.9). As you are about to see, two of the most powerful intelligence-altering experiences involve
economics and education.
 Figure 10.9

Genes and Environment Genes establish the range in which a person’s intelligence may fall, but environment
determines the point in that range at which the person’s intelligence will fall. Although Jason’s genes give him a better
chance to be smart than Josh’s genes do, differences in their diets could easily cause Josh to have a higher IQ than
Jason.

Economics: Poverty Is Intelligence’s Enemy

Maybe money can’t buy love, but it can buy intelligence. One of the best predictors of a person’s intelligence is
the material wealth of the family in which he or she was raised—what psychologists call socioeconomic status
(SES). Studies suggest that being raised in a high-SES family rather than a low-SES family is worth between 12
and 18 IQ points (Nisbett, 2009; van IJzendoorn, Juffer, & Klein Poelhuis, 2005). For instance, one study
compared pairs of siblings who were born to low-SES parents. In each case, one of the siblings was raised by his
or her low-SES parents, and the other was adopted and raised by a high-SES family. On average, the child who
had been raised by high-SES parents had an IQ that was 14 points higher than his or her sibling (Schiff et al.,
1978). Although these siblings had similar genes, they ended up with dramatically different IQs simply because
one was raised in a wealthier household. High-SES and low-SES children have different IQs at the age of 2, and
by the age of 16 the size of difference between them nearly triples (von Stumm & Plomin, 2015).

Exactly how does SES influence intelligence? One way is by influencing the brain itself. Low-SES children have
poorer nutrition and medical care, they experience greater daily stress, and they are more likely to be exposed to
environmental toxins such as air pollution and lead—all of which can impair brain development (Ash & Boyce,
2018; Chen, Cohen, & Miller, 2010; Evans, 2004; Hackman & Farah, 2008). The fact that low SES can impair a
child’s brain development may explain why children who experience poverty in early childhood are less
intelligent than those who experience poverty in middle or late childhood (Duncan et al., 1998).
SES affects the brain, and it also affects the environment in which that brain lives and learns. Intellectual
stimulation increases intelligence (Nelson et al., 2007), and research shows that high-SES parents are more likely
to provide it (Nisbett, 2009). For instance, high-SES parents are more likely to read to their children and to
connect what they are reading to the outside world (“Billy has a rubber ducky. Who do you know who has a
rubber ducky?”) (Heath, 1983; Lareau, 2003). When high-SES parents talk to their children, they tend to ask
stimulating questions such as “Do you think a ducky likes to eat grass?”, whereas low-SES parents tend to give
instructions such as “Please put your ducky away” (Hart & Risley, 1995). By the age of 3, the average high-SES
child has heard 30 million different words, whereas the average low-SES child has heard only 10 million
different words. As a result, the high-SES child knows 50% more words than his or her low-SES counterpart.
These differences in the intellectual richness of the home environment may explain why children from low-SES
families show a decrease in intelligence during the summer when school is not in session, whereas children from
the very highest SES families actually show an increase (Burkham et al., 2004; Cooper et al., 1996). Clearly,
poverty is the enemy of intelligence (Evans & Kim, 2012).

To encourage low-SES parents to talk more to their children, the city of Providence, Rhode Island, created a program
called “Providence Talks.” Once a month, a child wears a small recording device for the day, which allows a computer to
calculate how many words she spoke, how many were spoken by adults in her vicinity, and how many conversational
exchanges she experienced. A caseworker then visits her parent and provides a progress report.

Education: School Is Intelligence’s Friend

Alfred Binet believed that if poverty was intelligence’s enemy, then education was its friend. And he was right
about that, too. The correlation between the amount of formal education a person receives and his or her
intelligence is somewhere in the range of r = .55 to .90 (Ceci, 1991; Neisser et al., 1996). One reason this
correlation is so large is that smart people tend to stay in school, but the other reason is that school makes people
smarter (Ceci & Williams, 1997). When schooling is delayed because of war, political strife, or the simple lack of
qualified teachers, children show a measurable decline in intelligence (Nisbett, 2009). Indeed, children born in
the first 9 months of a calendar year typically start school an entire year earlier than those born in the last 3
months of the same year—and sure enough, people with late birthdays tend to have lower intelligence-test scores
than people with early birthdays (Baltes & Reinert, 1969). The best estimate to date suggests that each additional
year of education raises a person’s IQ by 1 to 5 points (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018).

Does this mean that anyone can become a lifelong genius just by showing up for class? Unfortunately not.
Although education does increase intelligence, its effects tend to vanish when education ends (Protzko, 2015,
2016). For example, prekindergarten programs for low-SES children tend to raise their IQs, but the effects fade
once these children leave their intellectually enriched environments and go to elementary school. On the other
hand, a few intensive education programs have produced longer-lasting gains. For instance, an experiment
conducted in the 1970s allowed low-SES children to enroll in a full-time preschool program that focused on
developing their cognitive, linguistic, and social skills in small classes of about six students total (Campbell et al.,
2002). Compared with a control group, those children showed IQ gains that were still measurable at the age of 21
(though it appears that girls benefited far more than boys) (Anderson, 2008).

Although education does not always produce long-lasting increases in intelligence, it does seem to produce long-
lasting increases in other important skills such as reasoning. In terms of just about every important outcome—
from health to wealth to happiness—the difference between an illiterate person with an IQ of 100 and a literate
person with an IQ of 101 is much larger than a single IQ point would suggest.

Gene–Environment Interactions
Genes and environments clearly influence intelligence. But how? Does each of them exert an independent effect,
or do they somehow work together? The answer is yes—they do both! Genes and environments do indeed have
direct and independent effects on the brain. For example, most embryos have 23 pairs of chromosomes—one
inherited from their mother and one inherited from their father. But about 1 in every 700 embryos has an extra
21st chromosome, and these embryos become children with “trisomy 21,” also known as Down syndrome. That
extra 21st chromosome holds about 250 genes, and one or more of those genes impairs the development of the
embryos’ brains and lowers intelligence. Similarly, the environment can directly impact brain development.
Environmental toxins such as mercury can kill brain cells and alter the cells’ ability to migrate and proliferate,
which can lead to lower intelligence (Lanphear, 2015). So yes, both genes and environments can directly and
independently influence intelligence.

But you knew that. What you may not have known is that genes and environments can interact in fascinating
ways. For instance, a person can have a gene, but the environment can determine whether that gene will or will
not play an active role in producing proteins. When a gene does play an active role, biologists say it is being
“expressed,” and the environment can determine whether expression takes place. As you read in Chapter 3,
epigenetics refers to environmentally induced changes to a gene that can alter its expression. You can think of a
gene as a little switch that the environment can turn to the on or off position. If the environment turns it on, then
the gene plays a role in the production of proteins that influence both the development and function of the brain;
if the environment turns it off, then the gene is silent and does nothing—as if it weren’t even there. Scientists
have discovered more than 50 genes that can influence intelligence (Sniekers et al., 2017), and whether a person
has these genes depends on his or her parents, but whether these genes are expressed may depend on the
experiences the person has.

In addition to epigenetics, there is another way in which genes and environments can interact to influence
intelligence: Genes can cause people to be drawn toward or away from particular environments (Dickens &
Flynn, 2001; Nisbett, 2009; Plomin et al., 2001; Tucker-Drob, Briley, & Harden, 2013). For example, personality
traits such as extraversion are heritable (Polderman et al., 2015). If a particular set of genes makes people more
outgoing and more sociable, then those genes may cause some people to enjoy the company of their peers more
than others, which may cause them to stay in school longer, which may cause them to become smarter. Those
genes would not be playing a direct role in promoting intelligence, but rather, they would be playing an indirect
role by “pushing” people into the environments that promote their intelligence and “pulling” them away from
environments that don’t.

Roundworms that have the NPR-1 gene get fewer infections than those that don’t. But this gene does not directly
influence the functioning of the immune system. Rather, it causes roundworms to “dislike” the kinds of environments
where bacteria hang out. Similarly, genes may influence intelligence not by directly influencing the functioning of the
brain, but by causing people to gravitate toward or away from particular environments.

The fact that genes and environments can interact challenges the way most of us think about them. For instance,
if a gene that lowers intelligence by impairing brain function is normally switched off, but in Arjun’s case it was
switched on by the stress of his impoverished environment, should we attribute Arjun’s low intelligence to his
“low intelligence gene” or to his “stressful environment”? If Anaya has a gene that causes her to be extraverted,
which causes her to join all the clubs at school, which causes her to read more books and attend more lectures,
should we attribute her high intelligence to her “extraversion gene” or to her extra education? These questions
highlight the fact that genes and environments work together in complex ways that scientists are just beginning to
understand, which is why the obvious distinction between nature and nurture is becoming less obvious every day
(see Hot Science: Brains Wide Open).

Hot Science
Brains Wide Open
One of the things that makes our species so smart is that our brains are designed to be programmed by our
environments. Turtles, lizards, and houseflies are all prewired by evolution to react in very specific ways to very
specific stimuli. But mammalian brains—and especially human brains—are built to be environmentally sensitive,
which means that humans are born with the minimal amount of hardwiring and are instead wired by their
experiences in the world in which they find themselves. This is one of the things that allows human beings to
function so effectively in a wide variety of physical and cultural environments.

But the brain’s remarkable openness to experience doesn’t last forever. By the age of 18 or so, the cerebral
cortex has thickened, and the brain is never again as environmentally sensitive as it was in childhood. If the
brain’s environmental sensitivity is one of the things that makes our species so smart, it stands to reason that
the smartest people among us might have brains that remain environmentally sensitive for longer than usual. Is
that true?

That’s what Brant and colleagues (2013) set out to discover. They examined data from nearly 11,000 sets of
monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins who had taken IQ tests sometime between infancy and adulthood.
Using sophisticated mathematical techniques, they computed the extent to which differences in IQ scores at
each age had been influenced by genes or by the environment. What they found was fascinating. Children’s
brains were relatively open to environmental influence, while adult’s brains were relatively closed—but the point
at which the closing happened was different for high-IQ people than for low-IQ people. Whereas the brains of
low-IQ people closed by early adolescence, the brains of high-IQ people remained open to influence well into
adolescence.

The accompanying graph shows the magnitude of both environmental and genetic influences at different ages.
As indicated, the brains of high-IQ adolescents remained as sensitive as the brains of children, but the brains of
low-IQ adolescents were as insensitive as the brains of adults. Whether you look at the effect of genes (in
orange) or the effect of environment (in purple), you’ll notice that the high- and low-IQ people start in the same
place and end in the same place, but they get there at different speeds—specifically, low-IQ people get there
faster.
No one knows why the brains of high-IQ people remain sensitive to the environment for longer, and no one
knows if this is a cause or a consequence of their intelligence. All we know is that the longer the brain retains its
childlike openness to experience, the more effectively it functions for the rest of its life.

Build to the Outcomes

1. What do twin studies teach us about the influence of genes and environments on intelligence?
2. What is the heritability coefficient?
3. Why is heritability of intelligence higher among wealthy people than poor people?
4. What are the most important environmental influences on intelligence?
5. How do genes and environments interact to influence intelligence?
Who Is Most Intelligent?
Learning Outcomes
Describe myths about the intellectually gifted and the intellectually disabled.
Explain what is and is not known about between-group differences in intelligence.
Identify ways in which intelligence can be enhanced.

Individual Differences in Intelligence

Intelligence is a prized trait, and some people have more or less of it than others. The average IQ is 100, and 68%
of us have IQs between 85 and 115 (see FIGURE 10.10). The people who score well above this large middle
range are said to be intellectually gifted, and the people who score well below it are said to be intellectually
disabled. Although these people live at opposite ends of the intelligence continuum, they do have one thing in
common: They are more likely to be male than female. Males and females have the same average IQ, but the
distribution of males’ IQ scores is wider and more variable than the distribution of females’ IQ scores, which
means that there are more males than females at both the very top and the very bottom of the IQ range (Hedges &
Nowell, 1995; Lakin, 2013; Wai, Putallaz, & Makel, 2012). Some of this difference is due to the different ways
in which boys and girls are socialized. Whether any of this difference is due to innate biological differences
between males and females remains a hotly debated issue in psychology (Ceci, Williams, & Barnett, 2009;
Nisbett et al., 2012; Spelke, 2005).

Figure 10.10

The Normal Curve of Intelligence Deviation IQ scores produce a normal curve. This graph shows the percentage of
people who score in each range of IQ.

Those of us who occupy the large middle of the intelligence distribution tend to
have a number of misconceptions about those who live at the extremes. For
example, movies often portray the “tortured genius” as a person (usually a male
person) who is brilliant, creative, misunderstood, despondent, and more than a little
bit weird. Although some psychologists believe there is a link between creative
genius and certain forms of psychopathology (Gale et al., 2012; Jamison, 1993; cf.
Schlesinger, 2012; Simonton, 2014), for the most part Hollywood has the
relationship between intelligence and mental illness backward: People with very
high intelligence are less susceptible to mental illness than are people with very
low intelligence (Dekker & Koot, 2003; Didden et al., 2012; Walker et al., 2002).
Indeed, a 15-point decrease in IQ at age 20 is associated with a 50% increase in
the risk of later hospitalization for schizophrenia, mood disorder, and alcohol- The artist Vincent van
Gogh was the iconic
related disorders (Gale et al., 2010), as well as for personality disorders (Moran et
“tortured genius.” But data
al., 2009). Just as intelligence seems to buffer people against physical illness, so it suggest that low
seems to buffer people against mental illness as well. intelligence, not high
intelligence, is most
strongly associated with
Gifted children are rarely gifted in all departments, but instead have gifts in
mental illness.
particular domains such as math, language, or music (Achter, Lubinski, &
Benbow, 1996; Makel et al., 2016). Because gifted children tend to be single-
gifted, they also tend to be single-minded, displaying a “rage to master” the domain in which they excel. As one
psychologist noted, “One cannot tear these children away from activities in their area of giftedness, whether they
involve an instrument, a computer, a sketch pad, or a math book. These children … can focus so intently on work
in this domain that they lose sense of the outside world” (Winner, 2000, p. 162). Some research suggests that
what most clearly distinguishes gifted children from their less gifted peers is the sheer amount of time they spend
engaged in their domain of excellence (Ericsson & Charness, 1999), which suggests that a part of nature’s gift
may simply be the capacity for passionate devotion to a single activity (cf. Hambrick et al., 2013; Mayer et al.,
1989). This passionate devotion may explain why gifted children are much more likely to become high-achieving
adults (Lubinski, 2016).

On the other end of the intelligence spectrum are people with intellectual disabilities, which can range from mild
(50 < IQ < 69) to moderate (35 < IQ < 49) to severe (20 < IQ < 34) to profound (IQ < 20). About 70% of people
with IQs in this range are male. Two of the most common causes of intellectual disability are Down syndrome
(caused by the presence of a third copy of chromosome 21) and fetal alcohol syndrome (caused by a mother’s
excessive alcohol use during pregnancy). The intellectual disabilities associated with these two causes tend to be
quite general, and people who have them typically show impaired performance on most or all cognitive tasks.
There are many myths about the intellectually disabled, but perhaps the most pervasive is that they are unhappy.
The fact is that nearly all people with Down syndrome are happy with their lives, like who they are, and like how
they look (Skotko, Levine, & Goldstein, 2011b). Their siblings are proud of them and feel that their relationships
have made them “better people,” and they do not wish that their sibling with Down syndrome were any different
(Skotko, Levine, & Goldstein, 2011a). People with intellectual disabilities face many challenges, but being
misunderstood by those who don’t know them is among the most difficult.
 Isabella Springmuhl Tejada is a fashion designer who has Down syndrome. Her work has been showcased during
London Fashion Week, and the BBC voted her one of the 100 most inspiring and innovative women of 2016.

Group Differences in Intelligence

Eugenics is the idea that the intelligence of humankind can and should be improved by controlled breeding.
George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Calvin Coolidge, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
were all early supporters of eugenics, which was “hugely popular in America and Europe among the ‘better sort’
before Hitler gave it a bad name” (Lemann, 1999).

The Stanford University professor Lewis Terman (whom you encountered earlier in this chapter) was also a
supporter of eugenics. In the early 1900s, he improved on Binet and Simon’s work and produced the intelligence
test that today is known as the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale. One of the things Terman discovered when he
gave people his intelligence test was that Whites performed better than non-Whites. Terman did not need
evidence to know why: “Are the inferior races really inferior, or are they merely unfortunate in their lack of
opportunity to learn?” he asked, and then answered unequivocally: “Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least
inherent in the family stocks from which they come” (Terman, 1916, pp. 91–92).

A century later, Terman’s words make most of us cringe. But which words are the cringe-worthy ones? Terman
claimed that (1) intelligence is influenced by genes, (2) members of some racial groups score better than others
on intelligence tests, and (3) members of some racial groups score better than others on intelligence tests because
of differences in their genes. Virtually all modern scientists who study intelligence consider Terman’s first two
claims to be well-established facts: Intelligence is influenced by genes, and some groups do perform better than
others on intelligence tests. But Terman’s third claim—that differences in genes are the reason why some groups
outperform others—is not an established fact. In fact, it is a controversial conjecture that has been the subject of
acrimonious debate. What does science have to tell us about it?

Before answering that question, let’s be clear about one thing: Group differences in intelligence are not inherently
problematic. No one is troubled by the possibility that this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics are on
average more intelligent than this year’s winners of the Super Bowl, or that people who graduate from college are
on average more intelligent than people who never attended school. On the other hand, most of us are troubled by
the possibility that people of one gender, race, or nationality may be more intelligent than people of another.
Intelligence is a valuable trait, and it doesn’t seem fair for some people to have more of it than others simply
because of an accident of birth or geography.

But fair or not, they do. Women routinely outscore men on tests that require rapid access to and use of semantic
information, production and comprehension of complex prose, fine motor skills, and perceptual speed of verbal
intelligence. Men routinely outscore women on tests that require transformations in visual or spatial memory,
certain motor skills, spatiotemporal responding, and fluid reasoning in abstract mathematical and scientific
domains (Halpern et al., 2007; Nisbett et al., 2012). Asians routinely outscore Whites who routinely outscore
Blacks on standard intelligence tests (Neisser et al., 1996; Nisbett et al., 2012). Indeed, group differences on
intelligence tests are “among the most thoroughly documented findings in psychology” (Suzuki & Valencia,
1997, p. 1104). Although the average difference between groups is considerably less than the average difference
within groups, there is no doubt that some groups outperform others—and the only interesting and important
question is why?

Tests and Test Takers

One possibility is that there is something wrong with the tests. In fact, the earliest intelligence tests did ask
questions whose answers were more likely to be known by members of one group (usually White Europeans)
than by members of another. For example, one of Binet and Simon’s questions was this: “When anyone has
offended you and asks you to excuse him, what ought you to do?” Binet and Simon were looking for answers
such as “accept the apology like a gentleman or explain why it is insufficient.” Answers such as “challenge him
to a fight” or “demand three goats” would have been counted as wrong despite the fact that in some cultures
those answers would have been right. Early intelligence tests were clearly culturally biased, but those tests have
come a long way in a century, and one would have to look hard to find such blatantly biased questions on a
modern intelligence test (Suzuki & Valencia, 1997). Moreover, group differences emerge even on those portions
of intelligence tests that measure nonverbal skills, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test (see Figure 10.4).

Of course, even when test questions are unbiased, testing situations may not be. For example, studies show that
African American students (but not European American students) perform more poorly on tests if they are asked
to report their race at the top of the answer sheet, presumably because doing so leads them to feel anxious about
confirming racial stereotypes (Steele & Aronson, 1995), and anxiety naturally interferes with test performance
(Reeve, Heggestad, & Lievens, 2009). Stereotype threat is the fear of confirming the negative beliefs that others
may hold (Aronson & Steele, 2004; Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008; Walton & Spencer, 2009), and it can
influence people’s test performances. When Asian American women are reminded of their gender, they perform
poorly on tests of mathematical skill if they are aware of stereotypes suggesting that women can’t do math; but
when the same women are instead reminded of their ethnicity, they perform well on such tests if they are aware
of stereotypes suggesting that Asians are especially good at math (Gibson, Losee, & Vitiello, 2014; Shih,
Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999). Indeed, when women read an essay suggesting that mathematical ability is strongly
influenced by genes, they perform more poorly on subsequent math tests (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2006). Findings
such as these remind us that the situations in which intelligence tests are administered can affect members of
different groups differently and may cause group differences in performance that do not reflect group differences
in actual intelligence. (See The Real World: Racism and Intelligence Testing).

These high school juniors in South Carolina are taking the SAT. When people are asked about their race before taking a
test, their performance can be affected.

The Real World

Racism and Intelligence Testing
In the 19th century, Alfred Binet and his colleague Théodore Simon developed the first intelligence test to help
 place schoolchildren in the appropriate classrooms. They argued that children would be much better served if
schools used an objective test to measure students’ intelligence rather than allowing teachers, who might
harbor a variety of preconceptions and prejudices, to make subjective evaluations of the children. In the early
20th century, however, intelligence tests acquired a bad reputation because they were used to justify some of
the most heinous forms of discrimination, including the forced sterilization of poor and uneducated people who
tended not to score well. Today, many people still consider IQ testing and racism to be synonymous.

But history is irony. For decades, the state of Florida eschewed intelligence tests and instead used the
subjective evaluations of teachers and parents to decide which children would be admitted to the “gifted and
talented” programs in public schools. Minority children were severely underrepresented in these programs, so,
in 2005, Florida decided to try something new—or, more correctly, something old: It began to require that all
second-graders take a screening test and that those who scored well take an actual intelligence test. The
schools then used the results of the intelligence tests (rather than subjective evaluations) to determine which
children would be placed in gifted and talented programs. What happened? The intelligence test did precisely
what Binet and Simon had designed it to do: It eliminated the all-too-human prejudices that naturally bedevil
subjective evaluations. In just a few years, the number of Black students admitted to gifted and talented
programs had increased by a remarkable 74%, and the number of Hispanic students admitted had increased by
an even more remarkable 118% (Card & Giuliano, 2016).

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. In 2010, the state of Florida instituted a series of budget
cuts that forced schools to discontinue the use of intelligence tests and to rely once again on subjective
evaluations. As you might expect, the number of minority children admitted to gifted and talented programs
plummeted. Intelligence tests, it seems, are neither good nor bad. They are tools—and like all tools, they can be
used to make the real world a worse place or a better one.

Environments and Genes

Biases in the testing situation may explain some of the between-group differences in intelligence test scores, but
probably not all. If we assume that some of these differences reflect real differences in the abilities that
intelligence tests are meant to measure, then what accounts for these ability differences?

There is broad agreement among scientists that environment plays a major role. For example, African American
children have lower birth weights, poorer diets, higher rates of chronic illness, and poorer medical care; attend
worse schools; and are three times more likely than European American children to live in single-parent
households (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2007; National Center for Health Statistics, 2016a). African American
households have lower incomes, and studies show that children in families earning more than $100,000 per year
are nearly 50% more likely to be in excellent health than are children in families earning less than $35,000 per
year (National Center for Health Statistics, 2016b). Given the vast differences between the SES of European
Americans and African Americans, it isn’t very surprising that African Americans score, on average, 10 points
lower on IQ tests than do European Americans.

Which brings us to the question that has caused so much controversy over the last century: Do genes play any
role in group differences like this one? There are uninformed people on every side of this issue and most of them
seem to have Twitter accounts. But so far, scientists have not found any facts about group differences that require
a genetic explanation. They have, however, found several facts that make such an explanation unlikely. For
example, the average African American has about 20% European genes; and yet, those who have more of these
genes are no smarter than those who have fewer, which is not what we’d expect if European genes made people
smart (Loehlin, 1973; Nisbett et al., 2012; Scarr et al., 1977). Similarly, African American children and mixed-
race children have different amounts of European genes; and yet, when they are adopted into middle-class
families, their IQs don’t differ (Moore, 1986), which is once again not what we’d expect if European genes made
people smart. These facts do not prove that there is no genetic basis of the between-group differences in
intelligence, but they do make that possibility less plausible.

What would it take to prove that intelligence differences—or any other psychological differences—between
groups have a genetic origin? It would take the kind of evidence that scientists often find when they study the
physical differences between groups. For instance, people who have hepatitis C are often given a prescription for
antiviral drugs, and European Americans typically benefit more from this treatment than African Americans do.
Physicians once thought this was because European Americans were more likely to take the medicine they were
given, but then scientists discovered a gene that makes people unresponsive to these antiviral drugs—and guess
what? African Americans are more likely than European Americans to have that gene for unresponsiveness (Ge
et al., 2009). This kind of evidence of genetic differences between groups is exactly what’s lacking in the debate
on group differences in intelligence. The best research suggests that intelligence is not strongly influenced by a
single gene but is instead weakly influenced by a very large number of genes (Davies et al., 2011). Unless
researchers can isolate those genes and then show that they are more prevalent in one group than another, most
scientists are unlikely to embrace a genetic explanation of between-group differences in intelligence.

Improving Intelligence
Intelligence can be improved—by money, for example, and by education. But most people can’t just snap their
fingers and become wealthier, and education takes time. Is there anything that average parents can do to raise
their child’s IQ? Researchers recently analyzed the data from all the high-quality scientific studies on this
question that have been performed over the last few decades (Protzko, Aronson, & Blair, 2013); and they found
four things that seem to reliably raise a child’s intelligence. First, supplementing the diets of pregnant women and
neonates with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (substances found in breast milk) appears to raise children’s
IQ by up to 4 points (Boutwell, Young, & Meldrum, 2018). Second, enrolling low-SES infants in so-called early
educational interventions tends to raise their IQ by about 6 points. Third, reading to children in an interactive
manner raises their IQ by about 6 points. Fourth, sending children to preschool raises their IQ by about 6 points.
In short, there do seem to be some things parents can do to make their kids smarter.

Parents are constantly looking for things they can do to make their kids smarter. Some studies suggest that learning to
play a musical instrument can increase a child’s intelligence (Protzko, 2017), while others suggest that musical training
and intelligence are not causally related (Sala & Gobet, 2018).

And there are things parents can do to make themselves smarter as well. For instance, research suggests that
various “mental exercises” may increase intelligence. The n-back task involves showing people letters one at a
time and then asking them whether the letter they are currently seeing is the same as the letter they saw n letters
ago. The 1-back version (comparing the letter to one you just saw) is fairly easy, but the 3-back version
(comparing the letter to the one you saw three letters ago) is quite challenging. Some research suggests that
people who train for long periods of time with complex high-n versions of this task show gains in fluid
intelligence (Jaeggi et al., 2008; cf. Redick et al., 2013). A variety of other memory-training and attention-
training tasks that are similarly long and joyless appear to enhance fluid intelligence in both children and adults
(e.g., Mackey et al., 2011; Tranter & Koutstaal, 2007), and may even slow cognitive decline among the elderly
(Salthouse, 2015). The jury is still out on whether these techniques produce significant and lasting increases in
intelligence (Katz, Shah, & Meyer, 2018), at least some of them appear promising.

Of course, improving intelligence does not have to take so much work. Cognitive enhancers are drugs that
improve the psychological processes that underlie intelligent performance. Stimulants such as Ritalin and
Adderall can enhance cognitive performance (Elliott et al., 1997; Halliday et al., 1994; McKetin et al., 1999),
which is why there has been an alarming increase in their use by healthy students over the past few years. About
8% of U.S. college students have used prescription stimulants for cognitive enhancement in the last few years
(Schulenberg et al., 2016), and on some campuses the number may be as high as 35% (DeSantis, Webb, & Noar,
2008). These drugs temporarily improve people’s ability to focus attention, manipulate information in working
memory, and flexibly control their responses (Sahakian & Morein-Zamir, 2007). Cognitive performance can also
be enhanced by a drug such as Modafinal (Ingvar et al., 1997), which has been shown to improve short-term
memory and planning abilities (Turner et al., 2003). All these drugs enhance cognitive performance, but they can
also have damaging side effects and lead to abuse.

In the near future, cognitive enhancement may be achieved not with chemicals that alter the brain’s function, but
with techniques that alter its actual structure. By manipulating the genes that guide hippocampal development, for
instance, scientists have created a strain of “smart mice” that have extraordinary memory and learning abilities,
(Tang et al., 1999, p. 64), and new “gene-editing” techniques may allow these animals to pass their genetic
modifications on to their young. Although no one has yet developed a safe and powerful “smart pill” or a gene-
editing technique that enhances intelligence in mammals, many experts believe that both of these things will
happen in the very near future (Farah et al., 2004; Rose, 2002; Turner & Sahakian, 2006).

There is no bright line between technological enhancements and the more traditional kinds. As one group of
scientists concluded, “Drugs may seem distinctive among enhancements in that they bring about their effects by
altering brain function, but in reality so does any intervention that enhances cognition. If Adderall and the n-back
task both enhance cognition by altering brain function, then what’s the difference between them? Some think the
answer is more ethical than biological: Both drugs and memory-training enhance fluid intelligence, but one
requires hard work and commitment, while the other just requires a prescription. Do we want to live in a world in
which a highly prized human attribute such as intelligence can be purchased, rather than being earned or
endowed by nature? That’s a question we will all soon be asking, and we will need a whole lot of intelligence to
answer it.

Other Voices
Not By Intelligence Alone
Intelligence matters. But is it all that matters? Professor Barry Schwartz thinks
not. He believes that intelligence alone cannot make us happy, productive, and
successful citizens unless it is combined with a list of “intellectual virtues” that
enable us to use our intelligence properly. In his view, colleges and universities
should focus less on teaching students what to think and focus more on teaching
students how to think by demonstrating and instilling nine key intellectual virtues.
What are they?

Knowing how to think demands a set of cognitive skills—quantitative ability, conceptual flexibility,
analytical acumen, expressive clarity. But beyond those skills, learning how to think requires the
development of a set of intellectual virtues that make good students, good professionals, and good
citizens …

Love of truth. Students need to love the truth to be good students … It has become intellectually
fashionable to attack the very notion of truth. You have your truth, and I have mine. You have one
truth today, but you may have a different one tomorrow. Everything is relative, a matter of
perspective. People who claim to know the “truth,” it is argued, are in reality just using their
positions of power and privilege to shove their truth down other people’s throats.

This turn to relativism is in part a reflection of something good and important that has happened to
intellectual inquiry. People have caught on to the fact that much of what the intellectual elite thought
 was the truth was distorted by limitations of perspective. Slowly the voices of the excluded have
been welcomed into the conversation. And their perspectives have enriched our understanding. But
the reason they have enriched our understanding is that they have given the rest of us an important
piece of the truth that was previously invisible to us. Not their truth, but the truth. It is troubling to
see how quickly an appreciation that each of us can attain only a partial grasp of the truth degrades
into a view that there really isn’t any truth out there to be grasped …

Honesty. Honesty enables students to face the limits of what they themselves know; it encourages
them to own up to their mistakes. And it allows them to acknowledge uncongenial truths about the
world …

Fair-mindedness. Students need to be fair-minded in evaluating the arguments of others …

Humility. Humility allows students to face up to their own limitations and mistakes and to seek help
from others …

Perseverance. Students need perseverance, since little that is worth knowing or doing comes
easily …

Courage. Students need intellectual courage to stand up for what they believe is true, sometimes in
the face of disagreement from others, including people in authority, like their professors. And they
need courage to take risks, to pursue intellectual paths that might not pan out.

Good listening. Students can’t learn from others, or from their professors, without listening. It takes
courage to be a good listener, because good listeners know that their own views of the world, along
with their plans for how to live in it, may be at stake whenever they have a serious conversation.

Perspective-taking and empathy. It may seem odd to list perspective-taking and empathy as
intellectual virtues, but it takes a great deal of intellectual sophistication to get perspective-taking
right. Young children “feel” for a peer who is upset but are clueless about how to comfort her. They
try to make a crying child feel better by doing what would make them feel better. And teachers, at all
levels, must overcome “the curse of knowledge.” If they can’t remind themselves of what they were
like before they understood something well, they will be at a loss to explain it to their students.
Everything is obvious once you know it …

Wisdom. Finally, students need what Aristotle called practical wisdom. Any of the intellectual
virtues I’ve mentioned can be carried to an extreme. Wisdom is what enables us to find the balance
(Aristotle called it the “mean”) between timidity and recklessness, carelessness and obsessiveness,
flightiness and stubbornness, speaking up and listening up, trust and skepticism, empathy and
detachment. Wisdom is also what enables us to make difficult decisions when intellectual virtues
conflict. Being empathetic, fair, and open-minded often rubs up against fidelity to the truth. Practical
wisdom is the master virtue …

Cultivation of intellectual virtues is not in conflict with training in specific occupations. On the
contrary, intellectual virtues will help to create a work force that is flexible, able to admit to and learn
from mistakes, and open to change. People with intellectual virtues will be persistent, ask for help
when they need it, provide help when others need it, and not settle for expedient but inaccurate
solutions to tough problems … Workplaces need people who have intellectual virtues, but
workplaces are not in a good position to instill them. Colleges and universities should be doing this
training for them.

Schwartz believes that without a love of truth, honesty, fair-mindedness, and the rest, intelligence itself just can’t
get us very far. Is he right? And if so, can these virtues be taught? How? Is his list complete, and if not, what’s
missing? These are difficult but important questions which, if you believe Schwartz, will never be answered by
intelligence alone.

Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of
numerous books including The Paradox of Choice (2004) and Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (2010).

Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education Copyright© 2019. All rights reserved.

Build to the Outcomes

1. What are the most common misconceptions about the intellectually gifted and the intellectually disabled?
2. What one thing most clearly distinguishes gifted children from other children?
3. How can the testing situation affect a person’s performance on an IQ test?
4. What evidence suggests that genes are unlikely to be the cause of between-group differences in
intelligence?
5. In what physical and chemical ways can intelligence be enhanced? What ethical questions are raised?
 Chapter Review

How Can Intelligence Be Measured?

Intelligence is the ability to use one’s mind to solve problems and learn from experience. Binet and
Simon developed a test that was meant to measure a child’s natural aptitude for learning,
independent of previous experience.
Intelligence tests produce a score known as an intelligence quotient, or IQ. Ratio IQ is the ratio of a
person’s mental to physical age. Deviation IQ is the deviation of an adult’s test score from the
average adult’s test score. Deviation IQ is the more common method for estimating intelligence.
Intelligence test scores predict many important life outcomes, such as scholastic performance, job
performance, health, and wealth.

What Is Intelligence?
People who score well on one test of mental ability tend to score well on others, which suggests that
each person has a particular level of general intelligence (g). Yet the person who scores highest on
one test doesn’t necessarily score highest on every other test, which suggests that different people
have different specific abilities (s).
Most intelligence test data can be described by a three-level hierarchy, revealing several middle-level
abilities between g and s.
The data-based approach suggests that there are eight middle-level abilities.
The theory-based approach suggests that there may be middle-level abilities that standard
intelligence tests don’t measure, such as practical, creative, and emotional intelligence.
While all cultures value the intellectual ability to solve problems, non-Western cultures sometimes
include social responsibility and cooperation in their definitions of intelligence.

Where Does Intelligence Come From?

The IQs of MZ twins (who share 100% of their genes) are more highly correlated than are the IQs of
DZ twins (who share 50% of their genes), suggesting that genes have a powerful influence on
intelligence.
The heritability coefficient (h2) tells us how much of the difference between the IQ scores of
different people is due to differences in their genes, but it does not tell us anything about individuals.
Environments can influence intelligence. SES and education can both be powerful influences on IQ,
though the effects of education are sometimes short-lived.
Whether or not a person has a specific gene depends on that person’s parents, but environmental
 factors can determine whether that gene is expressed.

Who Is Most Intelligent?

Intelligence is correlated with mental health, and gifted children are as well-adjusted as their peers.
Despite the myth, people with intellectual disabilities are typically happy with themselves and their
lives.
Some groups outscore others on intelligence tests. This may happen in part because testing situations
can impair the performance of some groups more than others, and in part because low-SES
environments have an adverse impact on intelligence. There is no compelling evidence to suggest
that this is due to the genetic differences between the groups.
Human intelligence can be increased by a variety of means, from preschool to mental exercise to
pharmaceuticals. Some of these methods carry greater risks, and raise more difficult ethical
questions, than others.

Key Concept Quiz

1. Intelligence tests were originally developed
a. to help place children in the most appropriate classroom.
b. to measure educational achievement rather than aptitude.
c. by governments that wanted to halt immigration.
d. in Russia.

2. Intelligence tests have been shown to be predictors of

a. academic performance.
b. mental health.
c. physical health.
d. all of the above.

3. People who score well on one test of mental ability usually score well on others, suggesting that
a. tests of mental ability are perfectly correlated.
b. intelligence cannot be measured meaningfully.
c. there is a general ability called intelligence.
d. intelligence is genetic.

4. Most scientists now believe that intelligence is best described

a. as a set of group factors.
b. by a two-factor framework.
c. as a single, general ability.
d. by a three-level hierarchy.
 5. Standard intelligence tests typically measure
a. analytic intelligence.
b. practical intelligence.
c. creative intelligence.
d. all of the above.

6. Intelligence is influenced by
a. genes alone.
b. genes and environment.
c. environment alone.
d. neither genes nor environment.

7. The heritability coefficient is a statistic that describes how much of the difference between different
people’s intelligence scores can be explained by
a. the nature of the specific test.
b. differences in their environment.
c. differences in their genes.
d. their age at the time of testing.

8. Intelligence changes
a. over the life span and across generations.
b. over the life span but not across generations.
c. across generations but not over the life span.
d. neither across generations nor over the life span.

9. A person’s socioeconomic status has a(n) effect on intelligence.

a. powerful
b. negligible
c. unsubstantiated
d. unknown

10. About which of these statements is there a broad agreement among scientists?
a. Differences in the intelligence test scores of different ethnic groups are clearly due to genetic
differences between those groups.
b. Differences in the intelligence test scores of different ethnic groups are caused in part by factors
such as low birth weight and poor diet, which are more prevalent in some groups than in others.
c. Differences in the intelligence test scores of different ethnic groups always reflect real differences
in intelligence.
d. Genes that are strongly associated with intelligence have been found to be more prevalent in some
ethnic groups than in others.

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Key Terms
intelligence
ratio IQ
deviation IQ
two-factor theory of intelligence
crystallized intelligence
fluid intelligence
emotional intelligence
fraternal (dizygotic) twins
identical (monozygotic) twins
heritability coefficient
shared environment
nonshared environment
stereotype threat
cognitive enhancers

Changing Minds
1. In biology class, the topic turns to genetics. The professor describes how scientists used gene editing
to make a smarter mouse. Your classmate turns to you. “I knew it,” she said. “There’s a ‘smart gene’
after all. Some people have it, and some people don’t, and that’s why some people are intelligent,
and some people aren’t.” What would you tell her about the role genetics plays in intelligence and
about the way in which genes affect it?
2. One of your friends tells you about his sister. “We’re very competitive,” he says. “But she’s smarter.
We both took IQ tests when we were kids, and she scored 104, but I only scored 102.” What would
you tell your friend about the relationship between IQ scores and intelligence?
3. A new survey shows that in mathematics departments all over the country, tenured male professors
outnumber tenured female professors by about 9 to 1. One of your friends says, “But it’s a fact—
girls just don’t do as well as boys at math, so it’s not surprising that fewer girls choose math-related
careers.” Considering what you’ve read in this chapter about group differences in intelligence, how
might you explain this fact to your friend?
4. One of your cousins has a young son, and she’s very proud of the boy’s accomplishments. “He’s
very smart,” she says. “I know this because he has a great memory: He gets 100% on all his
vocabulary tests.” What kind of intelligence do vocabulary tests measure? Although these skills are
 important for intelligence, what other abilities contribute to an individual’s overall intelligence?

Answers to Key Concept Quiz

1. a

2. d

3. c

4. d

5. a

6. b

7. c

8. a

9. a

10. b

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