What makes you so bloomin’ smart, eh?
WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?
Some questions are so complex that they remain unanswered for centuries. Yet the search for a solution often yields information and wisdom even while the final answer remains out of reach.
For Scottish schoolchildren aged 10-11 on the 1st of June 1932, it was a special day. Instead of following their usual timetable, the first lesson involved a different and special challenge: an IQ test. For 45 minutes the students worked on the test, which included questions about words, sentences, numbers and figures. The test, which had been designed by a psychologist, Sir Godfrey Thomson from the University of Edinburgh, aimed to improve the teaching material of schools and find out how many students had mental handicaps, so that their education could be handled in a better way.
The study included 87,498 children, and was the first of its kind. Up until the 1960s, the extensive data that resulted was referenced in psychological text books. Since then it has been largely forgotten, the results collecting dust in the university’s attics and basements throughout Edinburgh – until another local psychologist, Ian Deary, brought them to light again in 1996. Deary knew exactly what he wanted to use them for. They were a perfect starting point for a study of what happens to our intelligence over a lifetime. Does it change, or do we become more or less intelligent as we grow older? Perhaps the old data could even be used to find out why some people are more intelligent than others.
Like all other intelligence researchers, Ian Deary is challenged by the fact that intelligence itself is a subject which is very hard to pin down. It is difficult even to form a definition on which scientists will agree. It has often been said that if you ask 25 intelligence researchers to define intelligence, you will get 25 different answers. So unsurprisingly there is also similar disagreement when it comes to the interpretation of results produced by intelligence studies. Not only that, the last century has shown that some facets of intelligence research can be socially and politically controversial.
Whether you live to collect your old-age pension depends in part on your IQ at age 11.
INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHER IAN DEARY on the relationship between IQ and life expectancy.
Defining intelligence
In 1994, American psychologist Linda Goddfredson set out to do the impossible, trying to make the world’s leading intelligence researchers agree. Gottfredson felt that there was a need for researchers to collaborate in telling the public what scientists had discovered concerning human intelligence. She drew up 25 short conclusions and asked 131 university professors to sign.
Less than half of them agreed – 52
