IQ is QI only

Dinner parties can be a terrifying or equally wonderful experience, it all comes down to who you happen to be seated next to. You can probably relate to the horror of being sat next to someone with a passion for collecting pre-World War II buttons or perhaps someone with the missionary zeal of a new convert (dessert seems a long way off when you are having to pretend interest in bakerlite buttons of 1930s England or face probing and leading questions about your beliefs). Perhaps worse than either of these options is finding yourself seated next to someone who believes that they have a high IQ. You will find yourself at once regaled with a disconnected variety of facts and regarded with a smug condescension. The good news is that next time you find yourself seated next to a self-anointed genius you have the ammunition to bring them down because their vaunted IQ is, not to put too fine a point on it,…bollocks.

To begin with terms “intelligence” is a person’s capacity to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and engage in abstract reasoning. So intelligence itself is a real thing but does “IQ” measure it? Although IQ is thrown around quite a bit in general discussion these days, in psychological circles the value of IQ as a measure has been doubted for a while now. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is the score you get on an intelligence test and originally, it was a literally a quotient (a ratio): IQ= MA/CA x 100 (MA is mental age, CA is chronological age). Today, scores are statistically calibrated against norms of actual population scores but, even so, a new study has confirmed what has been suspected for a while, which is that IQ does not really measure intelligence all that well.

The study involved more than 100,000 people from all around the world who were given tests that measured memory, attention, reasoning, and planning abilities. After analysing this enormous amount of data the researchers found that intelligence arises from three abilities: short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal skills. Brain scans also showed that these three abilities are generated from different areas of the brain, so any given person might be good at one of these things, or two of them, and not so good at the other one or two.

The researchers concluded that a generalised IQ test does not adequately measure intelligence, or cognitive ability, in people. As an interesting side-light they also found that brain training does not impact intelligence.

So the next time someone tries to impress you with their IQ your response can be that their IQ is QI (quite interesting) but not all that impressive or revealing.