IQ DOESN’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY

We needn’t belabor the “IQ debate” much further, considering that the multiple intelligence concept is already rather widely accepted, for better or worse. For our purposes, it’s only necessary to put the dimension of abstract intelligence—the IQ kind into perspective with the other intelligences. Having a high IQ is proof of the ability to get a high score on an IQ test, and possibly a few other things, although it’s uncertain exactly what those are. IQ test scores do tend to predict success in life, but only to a small extent and within a relatively small range of scores. The Possible Human 27 A person with a very low IQ test score, say 85 or less, is very likely to have difficulty coping with the kinds of tasks presented by life in a modern society. A person with a mid-range IQ score, say 95 through 120, will very likely cope with life more successfully than people with very low scores. However, scores above 125 or so are only loosely correlated with life success. And even within the “normal” range of 95 to 125, the effects of the differences tend to get washed out by a host of other factors. In other words, it would not be reasonable to expect that a difference of five or ten IQ points would make a direct and measurable difference between two people in terms of income, net worth, or even subjective measures of success. The effect of the IQ differences is too weak, and there are many other factors that contribute to success in life. In highly controlled educational settings, performance differences on written tests may be more noticeable, but in “real life” the other factors come into play in unpredictable ways. Many leading thinkers in the field of developmental psychology have advocated eliminating intelligence testing completely from public schools, but with limited success. Even eminent intelligence psychologist Arthur Jensen has said, “Achievement itself is the school’s main concern. I see no need to measure anything other than achievement itself.” IQ testing suffers from another, perhaps more important limitation—one not necessarily of interest to researchers but one certainly of concern to parents, for example, who are trying to raise kids who can use their gray matter successfully in life.That limitation, or flaw if you prefer, is built right into the method of IQ testing that is almost universally used. Standardized IQ tests typically present questions or problems in a written format—with pen and paper—and with multiple-choice answers.This practice probably came about because of the need to test large numbers of people at low cost, so it became necessary to eliminate any kind of experiential or contextual challenge and get the whole testing process into the multiple-choice format. The unfortunate limitation of the pen-and-paper test design is that the test can only present questions or problems that have one “right” answer. Such a design makes it easy to test what psychologists call convergent thinking skills—narrowing down many possibilities to find the one correct choice. It makes it virtually impossible to test the complementary mental skill of divergent thinking, which is critical for creativity, innovation, imagination, and invention. For example, if you give a coin to a child and ask,“How many things can you think of to do with this coin?” the youngster will probably come up with quite a few possibilities: use it as a guide to draw a circle; use it to turn a screw or pry something open; use it to measure something; flip it to make a decision; give it to someone as a gift; and, of course, use it to buy something.With this divergent thinking proess, the number of possible options is unbounded, and can’t be reduced to a fixed set of “right” answers. Show a picture to a child and ask him or her to tell you a story about the picture. You’ll get lots of different stories from different kids, all of which are “correct,” in that they’re all natural products of the child’s “intelligence.” Yet conventional IQ testing leaves out the entire range of divergent, generative, projective, and inventive thinking processes. Many educators believe that the unconsciously held idea that intelligence is confined to a process of convergent thinking has led to educational approaches based on “right” answers. Many of them—and I agree with them—believe that the skills of “far-out” thinking get systematically eradicated as children go through the educational experience to adulthood.