What Intelligence Tests Miss Read online

  Given that IQ tests measure only a small set of the thinking abilities that people need, it is amazing that they have acquired the power that they have. IQ tests determine, to an important degree, the academic and professional careers of millions of people in the United States. University admissions offices depend on indicators that are nothing but proxies for IQ scores, even if the admissions office dare not label them as such. The vaunted SAT test has undergone many name changes (from Scholastic Achievement Test, to Scholastic Aptitude Test, to Scholastic Assessment Test, to simply the letters SAT) in order to disguise one basic fact that has remained constant throughout these changes—it is a stand-in for an IQ test.2 It is the same in law school, business school, and medical school—admission assessment devices are often simply disguised proxies for IQ. Young children in affluent neighborhoods are given IQ tests to determine which of them will be admitted to exclusive preschools. Older children are given IQ tests to determine whether they will be allowed to enter a gifted program. Corporations and the military as well are dependent on assessment and sorting devices that are little more than disguised intelligence tests. Even the National Football League in the United States gives prospective quarterbacks an IQ test.3

  Perhaps some of this attention to intelligence is necessary, but what is not warranted is the ignoring of capacities that are of at least equal importance—the capacities that sustain rational thought and action. It is ludicrous for society to be so fixated on assessing intelligence and to virtually ignore rationality when it is easy to show that the societal consequences of irrational thinking are profound. And yet, oddly enough, I have discovered that there is enormous resistance to the idea of giving full value to mental abilities other than intelligence. For instance, when I lecture on how I think society has overvalued mental traits like intelligence and undervalued other traits such as rationality, someone in the audience will invariably respond with a variant of the rhetorical question “Well, would you want someone with an IQ of 92 doing surgery?” My answer is that perhaps not—but that I also would not want someone with a rationality quotient (RQ) of 93 serving on the judicial bench, someone with an RQ of 91 heading a legislature, someone with an RQ of 76 investing my retirement funds, someone with an RQ of 94 marketing the home I am selling, or a guidance counselor with an RQ of 83 advising the children in my school district.

  Of course, currently, we do not have a rationality quotient, as we have an IQ, an intelligence quotient, which might explain, at least to some extent, why IQ has acquired such value in relation to other equally important cognitive skills. In our society, what gets measured gets valued. But what if we could turn things around? What if we could actually devise tests of rationality? In fact, as I will discuss in the book, there is now enough knowledge available so that we could, in theory, begin to assess rationality as systematically as we do IQ. There is no such thing as the Wechsler or Stanford Rationality Test published by The Psychological Corporation. There is no RQ test. But the point is that there could be, using the same criteria used to justify current IQ tests (psychometric criteria such as reliability of measurement and the ability to predict relevant behavior). If not for professional inertia and psychologists’ investment in the IQ concept, we could choose tomorrow to more formally assess rational thinking skills, focus more on teaching them, and redesign our environment so that irrational thinking is not so costly.

  Whereas just thirty years ago we knew vastly more about intelligence than we knew about rational thinking, this imbalance has been redressed in the last few decades because of some remarkable work in behavioral decision theory, cognitive science, and related areas of psychology. In the past two decades cognitive scientists have developed laboratory tasks and real-life performance indicators to measure rational thinking tendencies such as sensible goal prioritization, reflectivity, and the proper calibration of evidence. People have been found to differ from each other on these indicators. These processes have also been found to be separable from the kinds of cognitive operations tapped by intelligence tests. Interestingly, some people can have very high IQs but be remarkably weak when it comes to the ability to think rationally.

  What This Book Is Not About

  At this point the reader probably expects me to reveal that this book is about the importance of the emotions (so-called emotional intelligence), or about the importance of social skills (of so-called social intelligence), or about the importance of creativity or some other supracognitive characteristic. Further, many readers might well expect me to say that IQ tests do not measure anything important, or that there are many different kinds of intelligence, or that all people are intelligent in their own way.

  In fact, I will be saying none of these things—and in many instances I will be saying just the opposite. First, this is not a book about social or emotional skills. Because I questioned the comprehensiveness of standard IQ tests at the outset of this chapter, some may have thought that this was a signal that I was going to emphasize noncognitive domains. This is the strategy most commonly employed by critics of intelligence as it is conventionally measured with standard IQ tests. Critics of intelligence as it is conventionally defined often point out that IQ tests fail to assess many domains of psychological functioning that are essential. For example, many largely noncognitive domains such as socioemotional abilities, motivation, empathy, and interpersonal skills are almost entirely unassessed by tests of cognitive ability. However, these standard critiques of intelligence tests often contain the unstated assumption that although intelligence tests miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important cognitively. It is this unstated assumption that I am challenging. In fact, intelligence, as conventionally measured, leaves out many critical cognitive domains—domains of thinking itself. Some of the thinking domains that are missing are related to the ability to make optimal decisions at important choice points in life.

  In short, there is no need to look outside of the cognitive domain for things that IQ tests miss. However, when I say that intelligence, as measured with standard IQ tests, leaves something out, I do not mean to “blow off” conventional views of intelligence as is common in many popular books. It is fashionable to say that intelligence has nothing to do with real life, or that the items on IQ tests are just parlor games related only “school smarts.” Decades of research in psychology contradicts this view. IQ tests measure something that is cognitively real and that does relate to real life.

  In fact, the way we use the term intelligence in day-to-day discourse reveals that we do not think that it is so trivial after all. People are termed “bright” and “quick” and “smart” in ways that clearly indicate that it is not social or emotional qualities that we are talking about. And these terms are used often and nearly universally with positive connotations. In fact, “bright” and “quick” and “sharp” are used in general discourse to pick out precisely a quality assessed on standard IQ tests (something termed “fluid g” in the psychological literature). It may not be politically correct to laud IQ at certain cocktail parties, but all the parents at those same cocktail parties do want that quality for their children. When their children have behavioral/cognitive difficulties, parents are much more accepting of diagnostic categories that do not have “low IQ” attached.4 In short, we seem very confused about intelligence. We value it in private, but would never say so in public.

  The Source of the Confusion about Bush’s Intelligence

  It is telling to note that President Bush’s supporters were as surprised by his pro-rated IQ results as were his detractors. Like his detractors, they did not expect him to do well on the tests. So both groups were confused about what the tests show and do not show. Bush’s detractors described him as taking disastrously irrational actions, and they seemed to believe that the type of poor thinking that led to those disastrous actions would be picked up by the standard tests of intelligence. Otherwise, they would not have been surprised when his scores were high rather than low. Thus, the B
ush detractors must have assumed that a mental quality (rational thinking tendencies) could be detected by the tests that in fact the tests do not detect at all.

  In contrast, Bush’s supporters like his actions but admit that he has “street smarts,” or common sense, rather than “school smarts.” Assuming his “school smarts” to be low, and further assuming that IQ tests pick up only “school smarts,” his supporters were likewise surprised by the high pro-rated IQ scores that were indicated. Thus, his supporters missed the fact that Bush would excel on something that was assessed by the tests. The supporters assumed the tests measured only “school smarts” in the trivial pursuit sense (“who wrote Hamlet?”) that is easily mocked and dismissed as having nothing to do with “real life.” That the tests would actually measure a quality that cast Bush in a favorable light was something his supporters never anticipated. For different reasons from those of the detractors, Bush’s supporters were quite confused about what such tests do and do not measure.

  There is more, however. It is not just that people are confused about what IQ tests assess and what they do not assess. People are also very confused about the concept of intelligence itself. The so-called folk language (everyday usage) of the term intelligence is an utterly inconsistent mess. It is a unique confluence of inconsistent terminology, politically infused usage, and failure to assimilate what science has found out about the nature of human cognitive abilities. A desire to help to clarify this situation was what led me to invent the term dysrationalia.

  It is important to point out, however, that Bush is not a typical case of dysrationalia, in the sense that he would not be the first example to come to mind. Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. People were surprised when informed of Bush’s measured intelligence. In more clear-cut cases of dysrationalia, people are in no doubt about the intelligence of the individual in question. It is the blatantly irrational acts committed by people of obvious intelligence that shock and surprise us and that call out for explanation. These are the most obvious cases of dysrationalia.

  In the next chapter I will discuss some of these more clear-cut cases and explain why we should not expect them to be rare. That we are surprised when we hear about such cases indicates that we have confused views about what intelligence is and what IQ tests measure—and that we undervalue human rationality because we tend to deify intelligence.

  TWO

  Dysrationalia: Separating Rationality and Intelligence

  Rationality gives us greater knowledge and greater control over our own actions and emotions and over the world. . . . It enables us to transform ourselves and hence transcend our status as mere animals, actually and also symbolically.

  —Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, 1993

  John Allen Paulos is a smart man. He is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of several popular books, including the best-selling Innumeracy. On any existing intelligence test, Professor Paulos would score extremely high. Nevertheless, Paulos did a very stupid thing—in fact, a whole sequence of stupid things. The sequence began with a single action that, itself, may or may not have been stupid: Professor Paulos bought the stock of WorldCom at $47 per share in early 2000.

  Whether or not that act was wise, the act of buying even more of the stock when it had fallen to $30 later in the year seems much less prudent. As Paulos tells us in his book A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, by that time, the problem of overcapacity in the long-distance phone industry was becoming clear. However, Paulos admits that he “searched for the good news, angles, and analyses about the stock while avoiding the less sanguine indications” and flatly confesses that “my purchases were not completely rational” (p. 13).

  His purchases became even less rational later in October 2000, when the stock was at $20 and he continued to buy (“I bought more shares even though I knew better,” he says, p. 24) when mounting evidence indicated that he should have been selling rather than buying (“there was apparently a loose connection between my brain and the buy button on my Schwab online account,” p. 24). As things got steadily worse, Paulos concealed from his wife that he had been buying stock on margin (buying with borrowed money). After the stock price was halved yet again, Paulos began e-mailing the CEO of WorldCom in a desperate attempt to gain control of the situation (he offered to write copy for the company so that it could more effectively “state its case” to the investment world).

  By late 2001, Professor Paulos could not stand to be out of contact with the stock’s price for even an hour. As late as April 2002 he was still in thrall to the idea that he would keep buying as the stock went down and then recoup some of his losses when it bounced back up. He was still buying when the price was $5. However, on April 19 the stock rose to over $7, and Paulos did finally resolve to sell. However, it was Friday, and he did not get back from a lecture in northern New Jersey until after the market closed. By the next Monday, the stock had lost a third of its value, and he finally ended the ordeal, selling at a huge loss. WorldCom eventually collapsed to a worth of 9¢ after accounting fraud was revealed. In his fascinating book, Paulos meditates on the mental states that led him to violate every principle of sound investing (diversification, etc.). He has no trouble telling you that he was a smart man who acted foolishly (he says that “the thought of the stock even now sometimes momentarily unhinges me,” p. 150).

  David Denby’s story is, if anything, even stranger than that of Paulos. Denby is also a very intelligent man. He is a staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker who has written a very well received book on—and titled—Great Books. He lived in a valuable New York apartment and wanted to continue to own it after his divorce. That meant buying out his ex-wife. Except that the numbers didn’t add up. The apartment was worth $1.4 million, and there were a lot of other complications and, well, Denby decided that he would try to make $1 million in the stock market in the year 2000. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Exactly the sort of thing for any reasonable fellow to do, right?

  In his hilarious book American Sucker, Denby tells us how, in late 1999 and early 2000 he liquidated all of his conservative investment vehicles (index stock funds, bonds, insurance policies) and invested in technology funds and dot-com stocks. His entire 401(k) accumulation was rolled over into a fund that invested in nothing but volatile NASDAQ companies. All this took place in late 1999 and early 2000, remember (the NASDAQ peaked at over 5000 in March 2000—in May 2004 it was trading under 2000, and in May 2007 it was still under 3000). All this was done even though Denby admitted, “I was ignorant. I understood only the most rudimentary things about the stock market; I knew nothing of the new communications technologies. . . . I knew damn well that a large part of the current boom, at least in the Internet sector, was sheer desire. . . . But doubt was overwhelmed by hope,” pp. 18, 28). Throughout 2000 and 2001, he continued to buy companies with business “models” but without revenues, sales, or profits.

  At first Denby was successful, and he admitted that he heard, but ignored, very clear warnings even from market enthusiasts to “take some off the table” because the types of stocks he held were outrageously overvalued. He describes how he clearly processed, but willfully ignored, the warning of one investment specialist from the Wharton School of Business, who noted that the NASDAQ had doubled in five months without any change at all in earnings projections. But these early days of success were brief. Denby tells us that by October 2002, sitting on $900,000 worth of losses, he was asking himself the question “Was I insane in 2000?” (p. 320).

  Both David Denby and John Allen Paulos took actions over an extended period of time that were disastrous. Neither verbal cognitive ability (Denby) nor quantitative cognitive ability (Paulos) in large amounts seemed to have helped much here. Denby and Paulos provide vivid examples of smart people acting foolishly, and we are surprised at such cases. We are amazed when a physician loses all his pension funds in a speculative financial venture
. We are astounded that there are highly trained scientists who are creationists. We cannot figure out why an educated professional would ignore proven medical treatment and instead go to Mexico for a quack therapy. We are puzzled when we hear that some Holocaust deniers are university professors with degrees in history. When our neighbors, who are high school teachers, ask us to become involved in a pyramid sales scheme, we are flabbergasted. In short, we find it paradoxical when smart people believe preposterous things and take disastrous actions.

  In fact, we are wrong to be surprised by such cases. There is really nothing remarkable about smart people acting stupidly—once we understand what this colloquialism means in the language of modern cognitive science. Our tendency to see something remarkable in this phenomenon reflects flaws in our folk language of mental life—flaws that are fostered by the confusing ways that psychologists themselves speak about concepts such as intelligence.

  What to Call These Cases?

  There are a variety of folk phrases to describe cases like those with which I opened this chapter. For example, Robert Sternberg once edited a book titled Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, considered the logic of the volume’s title, and found it wanting! A typical dictionary definition of the adjectival form of the word smart is “characterized by sharp quick thought; bright” or “having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capacity.” Thus, being smart seems a lot like being intelligent, according to the dictionary. Sternberg points out that the same dictionaries tell us that a stupid person is “slow to learn or understand; lacking or marked by lack of intelligence.” Thus, if a smart person is intelligent, and stupid means a lack of intelligence and, by the law of contradiction, someone cannot be intelligent and not intelligent, the “smart people being stupid” phrase seems to make no sense.