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IQ tests are not culturally biased. This is a decades out of date canard. Some tests, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, don't even require the test giver and t
by slphil 9y ago
IQ tests are not culturally biased. This is a decades out of date canard. Some tests, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, don't even require the test giver and taker to share a language. IQ, as a statistic, washes out almost every other psychometric in predictive validity -- there are a staggering number of psychology papers which pointedly do not include IQ because whatever predictive power their metric purports to have is totally overridden by IQ. There are many subfields of intelligence and two major categories (fluid and crystal) so it's true that intelligence can't be defined as a single number, but this is a strawman since intelligence researchers have never said this.
- sharemywin 9y agoLet's assume resources are also important in success and you use IQ "tests" as a way to allocate resources to candidates. Then, your biasing your results.
- slphil 9y agoYes, this is a legitimate problem because there are both genetic and environmental contributions to intelligence. We must be wary of eugenic arguments. After all, the easiest way to raise the average IQ of a society would be to kill everyone who doesn't meet a specified minimum IQ. A more politically palatable way would be to allocate resources away from those groups. This isn't a matter of biasing results, though, because the metric validity of intelligence testing doesn't require that we play nice with making sure everyone has equal access. These are separate problems. Intelligence research is a scientific problem, and resource allocation is a political one. We already know that environmental contributions to IQ are important, and a reasonable and moral person who is literate on intelligence research thinks that resource allocation to lower-performing people is critically important.