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Recommended Reading
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427322.400-a-rational-alternative-to-testing-iq.html
A. Test your thinking
When researchers put the following three problems to 3400 students in the US, only 17 per cent got all three right. Can you do any better?
1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
2) If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?
Source: Shane Frederick, 2005
Answers: 1) 5 cents, 2) 5 minutes, 3) 47 days
B. Discuss these questions:
1. How can intelligence be measured?
2. Why do companies and schools try to measure intelligence?
3. Do you think that the methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests are effective? Why?
4. What are the positive and negative effects in society of measuring intelligence?
C. In your dictionary look up these words: Cognitive, rational and intuitive.
D. In pairs discuss the meanings of: cognitive thinking, intuitive thinking and rational thinking.
E.Read through the article and take notes as you read. Try to make a note of the most important points in each paragraph.
Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart
02 November 2009 by Michael Bond
IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him incurious and "ill-informed". The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was "in a league by himself". Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical".
How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a "smart" person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind.
But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That's because they are unable to assess things such as a person's ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.
This is the kind of rational thinking we are compelled to do every day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest money, or how to deal with a difficult client at work. We need to be good at rational thinking to navigate our way around an increasingly complex world. And yet, says Stanovich, IQ tests - still the predominant measure of people's cognitive abilities - do not effectively measure rational thinking. "IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of measuring the full array of skills that would come under the definition of 'good thinking'."
"A high IQ is like height in a basketball player," says David Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal. There's a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there's a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ."
IQ tests are used by many businesses and colleges to help select the "best" candidates, and also play a role in schools and universities, in the form of SAT tests in the US and CATs in the UK. "IQ tests determine, to an important degree, the academic and professional careers of millions of people in the US," Stanovich says in his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss (Yale University Press, 2008). He challenges the "lavish attention" society bestows on such tests, which he claims measure only a limited part of cognitive functioning. "IQ tests are overvalued, and I think most psychologists would agree with that," says Jonathan Evans, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Plymouth, UK.
Indeed, IQ scores have long been criticised as poor indicators of an individual's all-round intelligence, as well as for their inability to predict how good a person will be in a particular profession. The palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould claimed in The Mismeasure of Man in 1981 that general intelligence was simply a mathematical artefact and that its use was unscientific and culturally and socially discriminatory. Howard Gardner at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been arguing - controversially - for more than 25 years that cognitive capacity is best understood in terms of multiple intelligences, covering mathematical, verbal, visual-spatial, physiological, naturalistic, self-reflective, social and musical aptitudes.
Yet unlike many critics of IQ testing, Stanovich and other researchers into rational thinking are not trying to redefine intelligence, which they are happy to characterise as those mental abilities that can be measured by IQ tests. Rather, they are trying to focus attention on cognitive faculties that go beyond intelligence - what they describe as the essential tools of rational thinking. These, they claim, are just as important as intelligence to judgement and decision-making. "IQ is only part of what it means to be smart," says Evans.
As an illustration of how rational-thinking ability differs from intelligence, consider this puzzle: if it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? Most people instinctively jump to the wrong answer that "feels" right - 100 - even if they later amend it. When Shane Frederick at the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut, put this and two similarly counter-intuitive questions to about 3400 students at various colleges and universities in the US - Harvard and Princeton among them - only 17 per cent got all three right. A third of the students failed to give any correct answers (Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 19, p 25).
We encounter problems like these in various guises every day. Without careful reasoning we often get them wrong, probably because our brains use two different systems to process information (see New Scientist, 30 August 2008, p 34). One is intuitive and spontaneous; the other is deliberative and reasoned. Intuitive processing can serve us well in some areas - choosing a potential partner, for example, or in situations where you've had a lot of experience. It can make us make a mistake in others, though, such as when we overvalue our own egocentric perspective. Deliberative processing, on the other hand, is key to conscious problem-solving and can help us override our intuitive tendencies if they look like leading us astray.
The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our use of them when the situation demands. This is a crucial distinction: as Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University puts it, intelligence is about brain power whereas rational thinking is about control. "Some people who are intellectually able do not bother to engage very much in analytical thinking and are inclined to rely on their intuitions," explains Evans. "Other people will check out their gut feeling and reason it through and make sure they have a justification for what they're doing." An IQ test cannot predict which of these paths someone will follow, hence the George W. Bush incongruity of people who are supposedly smart acting foolishly.
The idea that Bush is just one foolish smart person among many, and that intelligence is a poor predictor of "good thinking", comes from a series of recent experiments that compared the performances of people of a range of intellectual abilities on rational-thinking tasks. In a study published last year, Stanovich and Richard West of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, found there was no correlation between intelligence and a person's ability to avoid some common traps of intuitive-thinking (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 94, p 672).
On certain types of thinking tasks, such as those involving number ratios, probabilities, deductive reasoning and the use of hindsight, intelligent people do perform better, Stanovich and others have found. This is particularly true when any intuitive pitfalls are obvious, especially if a correct answer depends on logic or abstract reasoning - abilities that IQ tests measure well. But most researchers agree that, overall, the correlation between intelligence and successful decision-making is weak.
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The idea that IQ is a poor measure of rationality is not without its critics, though. Christopher Ferguson, who studies the genetic and environmental factors behind human behaviour at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, says that since those with high IQ tend to live longer and earn more, we should assume that intelligent people are more rational. "They tend to have more knowledge with which to make better decisions," he says.
Article is continued on http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html?full=true#bx273210B1
F. Answer the questions below in detail (The answers to each question are spread throughout the text)
1. What are the different criticisms of IQ tests?
2. How many scientists are mentioned? What is each scientist’s perspective on IQ tests? How are their opinions different from each other?
G. Write a report, summarising the benefits and drawbacks of using IQ tests to measure intelligence that are mentioned in the article. Try to discuss the scientists’ different views on this subject. 200- 300 words.
Optional H/W:
Watch this very interesting Channel 4 documentary about race and intelligence by the journalist Rageh Omar:
Part 1/7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9i7a_race-and-intelligence-17_school
Part 2/ 7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9icu_race-and-intelligence-27_school
Part 3/ 7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9ifj_race-and-intelligence-37_school
Part 4/7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9ihh_race-and-intelligence-47_school
Part 5/7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9iip_race-and-intelligence-57_school
Part 6/7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9iju_race-and-intelligence-67_school
Part 7/7: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9ing_race-and-intelligence-77_school
Write a summary of the issues that were discussed in the documentary and compare it to the issues discussed in the article about IQ that you read in class. 200-300 words
