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What exactly is "intelligent people" again? It just sums up to an IQ score? It's naive to treat "intelligence" as a simple number. There are SO MANY skills rel

by talles 13y ago

What exactly is "intelligent people" again? It just sums up to an IQ score? It's naive to treat "intelligence" as a simple number. There are SO MANY skills related to 'human intelligence' and yet these studies fail to give a more closer look of what they mean with "intelligence" and how this affect the outcome. I hate when, in those studies, they promote a set people as "intelligent" and start to research how these special category performs in simple aspects of everyday life, things like "trust others", "live longer"[1] or "use more drugs"[2]. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/old-and-wise/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/old-and-wise/ [2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...

pessimizer 13y ago
It looks like intelligence was evaluated solely through two items: size of English vocabulary(?), and the subjective opinion of the interviewer. Pretty much garbage, really. "Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word [24]. Despite its brevity, the test has a correlation of 0.71 with the Army General Classification Test, an IQ exam developed by the U.S. Military [25]. In addition, there is abundant psychometric evidence that individuals with higher IQs have larger vocabularies [26], [27]. Prior to taking the vocabulary test, the respondent is told the following by the interviewer [24]: “We would like to know something about how people go about guessing words they do not know. On this card are listed some words–you may know some of them, and you may not know quite a few of them. On each line the first word is in capital letters–like BEAST. Then there are five other words. Tell me the number of the word that comes closest to the meaning of the word in capital letters. For example, if the word in capital letters is BEAST, you would say “4” since “animal” come closer to BEAST than any of the other words. If you wish, I will read the words to you. These words are difficult for almost everyone–just give me your best guess if you are not sure of the answer.” The respondent is assigned a score between 0 and 10, corresponding to the number of words she defined correctly. "Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. The interviewer notes down whether the respondent’s understanding of the survey questions was “good”, “fair” or “poor” [24]. We refer to our first measure as ‘verbal ability’ and our second measure as ‘question comprehension’. The Pearson correlation between these two variables is 0.37 (p<0.001), meaning that they are moderately positively correlated. The strength of their correlation is depicted in Table 1, a simple cross-tabulation. It indicates that 98% of those scoring 10 out of 10 in the vocabulary test have a good understanding of the survey questions, yet only 36% of those scoring 0 out of 10 have a good understanding of them."
- barry-cotter 13y ago
  WORDSUM has a 70% correlation with real, designed by psychometricians IQ tests. Garbage it is not. The correlation between adult IQ and WORDSUM = 0.71. The source for this number is a 1980 paper, The Enduring Effects of Education on Verbal Skills. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/#.UyczfstwaAg http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/#....

by talles 13y ago

pessimizer 13y ago

It looks like intelligence was evaluated solely through two items: size of English vocabulary(?), and the subjective opinion of the interviewer. Pretty much garbage, really. "Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word [24]. Despite its brevity, the test has a correlation of 0.71 with the Army General Classification Test, an IQ exam developed by the U.S. Military [25]. In addition, there is abundant psychometric evidence that individuals with higher IQs have larger vocabularies [26], [27]. Prior to taking the vocabulary test, the respondent is told the following by the interviewer [24]: “We would like to know something about how people go about guessing words they do not know. On this card are listed some words–you may know some of them, and you may not know quite a few of them. On each line the first word is in capital letters–like BEAST. Then there are five other words. Tell me the number of the word that comes closest to the meaning of the word in capital letters. For example, if the word in capital letters is BEAST, you would say “4” since “animal” come closer to BEAST than any of the other words. If you wish, I will read the words to you. These words are difficult for almost everyone–just give me your best guess if you are not sure of the answer.” The respondent is assigned a score between 0 and 10, corresponding to the number of words she defined correctly. "Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. The interviewer notes down whether the respondent’s understanding of the survey questions was “good”, “fair” or “poor” [24]. We refer to our first measure as ‘verbal ability’ and our second measure as ‘question comprehension’. The Pearson correlation between these two variables is 0.37 (p<0.001), meaning that they are moderately positively correlated. The strength of their correlation is depicted in Table 1, a simple cross-tabulation. It indicates that 98% of those scoring 10 out of 10 in the vocabulary test have a good understanding of the survey questions, yet only 36% of those scoring 0 out of 10 have a good understanding of them."

barry-cotter 13y ago
WORDSUM has a 70% correlation with real, designed by psychometricians IQ tests. Garbage it is not. The correlation between adult IQ and WORDSUM = 0.71. The source for this number is a 1980 paper, The Enduring Effects of Education on Verbal Skills. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/#.UyczfstwaAg http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/#....