If IQ tests are ‘culturally biased’, then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers. The highest scoring group does not share the same culture as the test writers (for instance, East Asians score higher than White Americans). This seems to be strong evidence that IQ tests are not ‘culturally biased’.
If IQ tests are ‘culturally biased’, then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers.
This assumes that if a test is culture biased, it must be biased in favor of the culture as a whole. A test can be culture biased by hyper-valuing a set of skills prominent in one culture, even if that skill set is stronger in some other culture. If IQ is biased, say, toward “academic culture,” even though this is a feature of “white U.S. culture” it may be even more a part of East Asian culture.
What I think your argument shows is that the tests aren’t intentionally biased in favor of one culture specifically. In fact, the studies of early IQ testing shows there was intentional bias (not so much today), but rather than being in favor of the dominant culture, it was against the cultures of particular immigrants. (I’m speaking of the Army Alpha tests.)
Richard Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence (2006) refers to a study with n = ~2000 for whites in US getting IQ 103 and a study with n = ~1000 (plus several with n = ~500) for Japanese in Japan getting IQ 105.
Ok. Interesting point, but did this group of Asians take English language courses at school? Do they have knowledge of American culture via entertainment channels? Perhaps the Africans who allegedly got low scores were people who grew up living in tribes in the wild, and only came into the city where they ended up getting tested recently. I met a person whose mother fell in love with an African tribesman and I read her memoir on the experience—it wasn’t long ago that she met him, a decade or two maybe. There may be a large proportion of people in Africa who literally grew up in a jungle.
In addition to straight up single-culture cultural differences, there are also variations from one culture to the next between which foreign cultures they’ve been exposed to (if any) and enjoy. Some cultures seek to limit their exposure to the outside (North Korea) while in others, the ideal is to embrace them (USA). For instance, here, there are many fans of Asian culture—think anime, Japanese video games and lovers of Thai food. Do they have a multicultural atmosphere like that in Africa? Sure there are American missionaries around who probably bring teacups and the like, but there’s a giant difference between occasionally seeing some white people with some cups they didn’t tell you anything about because they were too busy feeding starving children versus being taught their language in a class and spending time absorbing culture from their entertainment products.
Not only that, but differences between one IQ test and another could be gigantic when it comes to how many culture-dependent questions are in them. If you haven’t specifically controlled for that during test design, that would be completely random. Maybe the Asians just so happened to get the test that had fewer cultural questions on it, and the Africans got one that was thoroughly based on many obscure pieces of cultural knowledge.
What we really need to be asking here is this:
Has anyone done a culture fair test for multiple different countries, using the exact same test with each one, and controlled for factors like whether the people being tested were schooled as children, whether they ever experienced starvation (that can cause brain damage) and any other important things?
Only if all the factors are controlled for would we have relevant data.
If I’m not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:
My measured Ravens IQ jumped a good ten points after the experience of taking a few IQ tests, because I got a sense for the thought patterns of the test makers. This indicates that you can learn how to do better on these tests, which further suggests that cultural knowledge might help you learn it faster.
A westerner customarily reads from left to right, and then goes down one line. Note how the incomplete square is also the last square that the Westerner’s eye would consider...only after seeing all the relevant information would the Westerner consider the empty square.
A westerner also frequently uses the concept of clockwise and anticlockwise. The black square progresses in a neatly clockwise fashion for each shape as it is viewed by the western gaze. Thanks to the bottom third line breaking the top left/top right/bottom left pattern, one must use clockwise/anticlockwise notions to complete the pattern.
A westerner has also been taught about division using pie charts, and each of these shapes are divided neatly into fourths. Add to this a passing familiarity with grids, the idea that tests are important in the first place...you get the picture.
To get some sense of how difficult this task would be for, say, an illiterate hunter gatherer, try rotating the image 45 degrees counterclockwise and refrain from using your prior knowledge of the correct reading frame to complete the pattern. Suddenly, it is a lot harder, isn’t it?
If I’m not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. There is an environmental influence on even more fundamental visual perception and so could well be related differences here. Further, past exposure to tests in general and tests of the ‘complete the pattern’ variety is going to bring up a cache of typical things that a test designer is likely to include. It is more or less a habit for me when looking at such a problem to test if it is simple rotation (by either a constant amount or an amount that increases by a constant amount, depending on the level of the test).
That’s a pet peeve of mine: that illusion belongs to class of illusions of the form, “If you saw this in real life, your perception would be right. But it’s a 2D picture, so you’re wrong.”
It’s exactly the same as taking this standard optical illusion, and instead of claiming the A/B squares are the same color, saying “This image has no squares. Verify it for yourself!” (i.e. in the plane of the image, nothing makes a square, but it’s understood to represent a perspective image of squares)
Nothing wrong with exploring these—they’re very informative about how our perceptual system works—but please understand what’s going on.
I can see, then, how a culture not expecting perspective images, can interpret them as flat and not fall prey to these illusions.
Another thing I thought about is that there weren’t that many straight lines and right angles in the ancestral environment, so i think it’s likely that the module in the brain for “getting” perspective doesn’t come from a blueprint in the DNA but rather it arises in response to stimuli in the early life. If this is right, there might be differences between people who spent their early childhood in rural vs urban environments.
An old psychology professor of mine once gave an anecdote of a tiger that was kept in a cylindrical room during its early phases of development. It grew up to have a warped sense of spatial awareness and was unable to function properly for the most part. I don’t know the details surrounding the story, so I can’t confirm it right now, but I’ll see if I can find the study (assuming it does exist).
We both underestimated how inaccurate cultural differences can make an IQ score, I think.
I have two rebuttals specific to your assertion that knowing English shouldn’t affect your ability to solve IQ test puzzles, but I also thought about this more and realized that even a culture fair test probably cannot compensate for the differences between the three groups of people we’re discussing, so I gave a couple examples for that, too.
First: How are you supposed to understand the question that goes with the puzzle if you don’t know how to read English well? Without that question “Which shape goes in the white box?” there is little hope of interpreting the puzzle correctly, let alone filling it out. This is an IQ test, and the questions are sometimes written in a way that makes them tricky to understand completely. IQ tests may demand a high reading level. If all you’ve got is broken English, reading and comprehending questions like these might feel like you’re doing something as hard as applying Bayesian probability to statistics.
IQ tests are also frequently written by people who don’t consider all possible ways of interpreting the question. If you were not constantly exposed to academic conventions, you are likely to interpret the questions in a different way without realizing it. Look up the difference between “divergent intelligence” and “convergent intelligence” if you don’t believe me. That’s a big problem for people with divergent minds—even ones who have been schooled—they see all these options that other people don’t (essentially, they’re creative) and they tend to get lower IQ scores for no reason other than that they did not interpret the questions and answers in a convention manner. A professional developmental psychologist may provide a creativity test to these people, and if they score significantly higher than average on the creativity test, they’ll actually adjust the person’s IQ score upward accordingly.
Now for our underestimation of cultural differences: I think you’re really underestimating the amount of difference it can make to the human mind to grow up in a completely uncivilized environment. These children (specifically the Masai tribe I read the book about) are literally growing up stealing cow’s blood from the adult’s tubs for their survival (it’s a staple food for some) and as a game, they dare each other to challenge wild animals. They’re not sitting there day after day, like you and I have been, looking at pieces of paper. Their lives are completely different, and this most likely makes a profound difference in what kinds of processing their brains develop.
For example, there’s a lot of controversy over whether ADD is a disease, or if children just aren’t meant to be sitting there in classrooms. Some theorize that ADD is extremely useful for your survival if you live in a jungle. You have to be aware of your entire environment the whole time. If the kids are growing up surrounded by boa constrictors and other dangerous animals, they have to REALLY develop their ability for paying attention to every little sound and movement. This is the opposite of what the schooling environment will do—force you to learn how to focus for long periods of time on little pieces of paper, doing thinking work, while blocking out any noise or thought you have that’s unrelated. Concentration is a skill, no?
That’s just one difference. There are others.
For instance, have you ever heard it’s important to teach math in school, not because everybody needs high level math itself, but because doing the type of intellectual rigors involved in mathematical calculating will boost reasoning in general?
If you were tossed a machine gun at the age of 6 and told to shoot or die, you’re totally not going to spend any time on math. And some of them were. (I learned that in a Ted talk video).
The Chinese people that were tested, to contrast, may have spent a lot of time as children working in sweatshops making small items or doing fine motor skill work like making toys and sewing. They’ve probably spent a lot of time developing their ability to concentrate—way more than would be demanded of the average American kid (they’re working 16 hour days...) and furthermore, constructing these products takes a bit of reasoning.
Don’t underestimate the difference that culture can make to an IQ score. Now that I’ve thought about this, I’m not even sure a culture fair test can compensate for these differences. It probably only works if you compare people with a similar upbringing. Comparing jungle survivors vs. sweatshop laborers vs. schooled Americans is probably going to yield different results no matter how you design an IQ test.
Ugh, visual shape processing. You grow up with that sorts of shapes (and patterns, and consecutive patterns that are regular, and so on), Africans don’t. You grow up with everything in left to right order or right to left order, they don’t.
What do you think goes on formally (mathematically) with the correct answer, anyway?
The correct answer is the one where the whole thing with the square filled in can be least complexly represented with most culturally common operations (mirrorings, rotations, superpositions, etc) done on orderings of the squares. You have a penalty for each operation (more for less common operations), you add those scores for the whole set of relations, you pick the smallest. That’s roughly what a programming contest solution for that sort of thing would look like (leaving aside the question of hardcoding or inferring the patterns and their penalties themselves).
Yes, the operations are in some sense fundamental, but you haven’t reinvented them, you learned them, from when you were categorizing visual input as a child.
As an IQ test, it has two parts: the visual input you are exposed to as a child, and the matrices themselves. Since we’re all acquiring a sufficient training dataset, it works just fine as an IQ test for us.
edit: Also, try replacing the square to fill in with a circle, and see how many people will get that wrong. Empty box to fill in is a cultural concept. A child unused to this will think they need to use that box as part of the answer.
The best explanation for this I’ve heard is that there is a certain mindset (the writer refereed to it as a “modern mindset”) that is uncorrelated with intelligence, but that allows you to do better on intelligence tests. As evidence for this, he used the fact that right here in America, test scores have gone up over the past several decades. This clearly isn’t caused by some genetic change, so the most likely explanation is cultural change.
When people say that the IQ tests are culturally biased, that doesn’t necessarily mean that “white Americans” have the biggest advantage, it just means that IQ tests are measuring at least two separate qualities; one which is “intelligence”, and the other being some facet of the culture.
There are cultural factors that might give someone in China and advantage over someone in America on an IQ test. One of the simplest explanations I’ve heard is that the Chinese numbering system is easier to learn and more intuitive to do simple addition and subtraction with. While most number in English have a regular pattern that makes them easy to understand and to work with, (twenty-one, fourty-three are said in “tens then ones” form), the numbers right after ten don’t follow this pattern in English (eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen). This makes them more difficult for a child who is first learning his numbers to do so, and makes them slightly more difficult to work with on a cognitive level (it’s intuitive to add fourty-one and twenty-two and get sixty-three, since those numbers are in tens-then-ones form; it’s less intuitive to learn do that with eleven or thirteen).
Anyway, that’s just a simple example of the kind of cultural difference you won’t even notice but might give one culture a small cognitive or learning advantage over another that has nothing to do with genetics.
As evidence for this, he used the fact that right here in America, test scores have gone up over the past several decades. This clearly isn’t caused by some genetic change, so the most likely explanation is cultural change.
Is that actually more likely than environmental change?
Environmental change is certainly possible. For example, the amount of lead the average person gets from the environment has been slowly falling for several decades now. Better pre-natal care, and better education about the effects of consuming even small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy, might also be factors.
I think that cultural change is probably the biggest single cause of the Flynn effect, though. Computer use, increased practice taking standardized tests in childhood, ect. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re smarter, just that they’d better at taking IQ tests.
It might be caused by a genetic change. Populations are becoming less inbred. This would be expected to raise IQs, though I don’t know what the expected magnitude of change is.
It’s been claimed (“Resolving the IQ paradox: Heterosis as a cause of the Flynn effect and other trends”) that hybrid vigor/heterosis may help the Flynn effect, but this is not a popular explanation since it doesn’t explain the pattern of gains on IQ tests or the apparent size of the Flynn effect. I mean, inbreeding depression alone costs much less than Flynn, so it’s hard to imagine that outbreeding could be so valuable.
it doesn’t explain the pattern of gains on IQ tests or the apparent size of the Flynn effect. I mean, inbreeding depression alone costs much less than Flynn
Interesting. Can you elaborate? What are the patterns exactly, and how do we know what inbreeding depression costs? From recent studies of inbred individuals?
I’d be very surprised if it was the only cause of the gain in IQs, but as your reference says, it represents a pretty decent hypothesis for at least some of the effect.
how do we know what inbreeding depression costs? From recent studies of inbred individuals?
Yes, that’s how one would do it. The usual reference is to a study of Japanese cousin-marriages back in the ’50s or so where IIRC the estimate was <5 IQ points, but there’s been research since then, of course; a google for ‘inbreeding depression intelligence’ should bring some research to light.
so it’s hard to imagine that outbreeding could be so valuable
I suspect that my characteristics are partly due to hybrid vigor, as are my sister’s. It’s not so much “neg (inbreeding depression)” but more of a “when pooling both the strengths and weaknesses of two respective gene pools, the strengths of having access to more ‘highly beneficial’ genes tend to outweigh the weaknesses of being struck with ‘detrimental genes’ from a different region”. So hybrid vigor isn’t necessarily antisymmetrical (I doubt it is) to inbreeding depression. Beneficial/detrimental being relative to the current stage of human civilization in general, and your culture in particular, of course. Example: propensity for thalassemia, good once, bad now.
If IQ tests are ‘culturally biased’, then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers. The highest scoring group does not share the same culture as the test writers (for instance, East Asians score higher than White Americans). This seems to be strong evidence that IQ tests are not ‘culturally biased’.
This assumes that if a test is culture biased, it must be biased in favor of the culture as a whole. A test can be culture biased by hyper-valuing a set of skills prominent in one culture, even if that skill set is stronger in some other culture. If IQ is biased, say, toward “academic culture,” even though this is a feature of “white U.S. culture” it may be even more a part of East Asian culture.
What I think your argument shows is that the tests aren’t intentionally biased in favor of one culture specifically. In fact, the studies of early IQ testing shows there was intentional bias (not so much today), but rather than being in favor of the dominant culture, it was against the cultures of particular immigrants. (I’m speaking of the Army Alpha tests.)
East Asians in America or East Asians in East Asia?
Average IQ
East Asians in US: 106
Whites in US: 103
Japanese in Japan: 105
Koreans in South Korea: 106
Uh, two to three points is noise. Edit: er, possibly. What was the sample size?
Richard Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence (2006) refers to a study with n = ~2000 for whites in US getting IQ 103 and a study with n = ~1000 (plus several with n = ~500) for Japanese in Japan getting IQ 105.
In any case, it is clear evidence against the ‘cultural bias’ hypothesis.
The former, IIRC.
Both, actually.
Ok. Interesting point, but did this group of Asians take English language courses at school? Do they have knowledge of American culture via entertainment channels? Perhaps the Africans who allegedly got low scores were people who grew up living in tribes in the wild, and only came into the city where they ended up getting tested recently. I met a person whose mother fell in love with an African tribesman and I read her memoir on the experience—it wasn’t long ago that she met him, a decade or two maybe. There may be a large proportion of people in Africa who literally grew up in a jungle.
In addition to straight up single-culture cultural differences, there are also variations from one culture to the next between which foreign cultures they’ve been exposed to (if any) and enjoy. Some cultures seek to limit their exposure to the outside (North Korea) while in others, the ideal is to embrace them (USA). For instance, here, there are many fans of Asian culture—think anime, Japanese video games and lovers of Thai food. Do they have a multicultural atmosphere like that in Africa? Sure there are American missionaries around who probably bring teacups and the like, but there’s a giant difference between occasionally seeing some white people with some cups they didn’t tell you anything about because they were too busy feeding starving children versus being taught their language in a class and spending time absorbing culture from their entertainment products.
Not only that, but differences between one IQ test and another could be gigantic when it comes to how many culture-dependent questions are in them. If you haven’t specifically controlled for that during test design, that would be completely random. Maybe the Asians just so happened to get the test that had fewer cultural questions on it, and the Africans got one that was thoroughly based on many obscure pieces of cultural knowledge.
What we really need to be asking here is this:
Has anyone done a culture fair test for multiple different countries, using the exact same test with each one, and controlled for factors like whether the people being tested were schooled as children, whether they ever experienced starvation (that can cause brain damage) and any other important things?
Only if all the factors are controlled for would we have relevant data.
If I’m not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:
My measured Ravens IQ jumped a good ten points after the experience of taking a few IQ tests, because I got a sense for the thought patterns of the test makers. This indicates that you can learn how to do better on these tests, which further suggests that cultural knowledge might help you learn it faster.
A westerner customarily reads from left to right, and then goes down one line. Note how the incomplete square is also the last square that the Westerner’s eye would consider...only after seeing all the relevant information would the Westerner consider the empty square.
A westerner also frequently uses the concept of clockwise and anticlockwise. The black square progresses in a neatly clockwise fashion for each shape as it is viewed by the western gaze. Thanks to the bottom third line breaking the top left/top right/bottom left pattern, one must use clockwise/anticlockwise notions to complete the pattern.
A westerner has also been taught about division using pie charts, and each of these shapes are divided neatly into fourths. Add to this a passing familiarity with grids, the idea that tests are important in the first place...you get the picture.
To get some sense of how difficult this task would be for, say, an illiterate hunter gatherer, try rotating the image 45 degrees counterclockwise and refrain from using your prior knowledge of the correct reading frame to complete the pattern. Suddenly, it is a lot harder, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. There is an environmental influence on even more fundamental visual perception and so could well be related differences here. Further, past exposure to tests in general and tests of the ‘complete the pattern’ variety is going to bring up a cache of typical things that a test designer is likely to include. It is more or less a habit for me when looking at such a problem to test if it is simple rotation (by either a constant amount or an amount that increases by a constant amount, depending on the level of the test).
I seem to recall that the Ponzo illusion doesn’t work among cultures not accustomed to visual art using perspective.
(Edited to replace ASCII art with a link to Wikipedia.)
That’s a pet peeve of mine: that illusion belongs to class of illusions of the form, “If you saw this in real life, your perception would be right. But it’s a 2D picture, so you’re wrong.”
It’s exactly the same as taking this standard optical illusion, and instead of claiming the A/B squares are the same color, saying “This image has no squares. Verify it for yourself!” (i.e. in the plane of the image, nothing makes a square, but it’s understood to represent a perspective image of squares)
Nothing wrong with exploring these—they’re very informative about how our perceptual system works—but please understand what’s going on.
I can see, then, how a culture not expecting perspective images, can interpret them as flat and not fall prey to these illusions.
Another thing I thought about is that there weren’t that many straight lines and right angles in the ancestral environment, so i think it’s likely that the module in the brain for “getting” perspective doesn’t come from a blueprint in the DNA but rather it arises in response to stimuli in the early life. If this is right, there might be differences between people who spent their early childhood in rural vs urban environments.
An old psychology professor of mine once gave an anecdote of a tiger that was kept in a cylindrical room during its early phases of development. It grew up to have a warped sense of spatial awareness and was unable to function properly for the most part. I don’t know the details surrounding the story, so I can’t confirm it right now, but I’ll see if I can find the study (assuming it does exist).
I think it might be wiser to link to an image. Wikipedia’s article on the Ponzo illusion appears to be talking about the same thing.
Thank you. I had no idea what the name of that illusion was.
(This was in the wrong place, sorry.)
We both underestimated how inaccurate cultural differences can make an IQ score, I think.
I have two rebuttals specific to your assertion that knowing English shouldn’t affect your ability to solve IQ test puzzles, but I also thought about this more and realized that even a culture fair test probably cannot compensate for the differences between the three groups of people we’re discussing, so I gave a couple examples for that, too.
First: How are you supposed to understand the question that goes with the puzzle if you don’t know how to read English well? Without that question “Which shape goes in the white box?” there is little hope of interpreting the puzzle correctly, let alone filling it out. This is an IQ test, and the questions are sometimes written in a way that makes them tricky to understand completely. IQ tests may demand a high reading level. If all you’ve got is broken English, reading and comprehending questions like these might feel like you’re doing something as hard as applying Bayesian probability to statistics.
IQ tests are also frequently written by people who don’t consider all possible ways of interpreting the question. If you were not constantly exposed to academic conventions, you are likely to interpret the questions in a different way without realizing it. Look up the difference between “divergent intelligence” and “convergent intelligence” if you don’t believe me. That’s a big problem for people with divergent minds—even ones who have been schooled—they see all these options that other people don’t (essentially, they’re creative) and they tend to get lower IQ scores for no reason other than that they did not interpret the questions and answers in a convention manner. A professional developmental psychologist may provide a creativity test to these people, and if they score significantly higher than average on the creativity test, they’ll actually adjust the person’s IQ score upward accordingly.
Now for our underestimation of cultural differences: I think you’re really underestimating the amount of difference it can make to the human mind to grow up in a completely uncivilized environment. These children (specifically the Masai tribe I read the book about) are literally growing up stealing cow’s blood from the adult’s tubs for their survival (it’s a staple food for some) and as a game, they dare each other to challenge wild animals. They’re not sitting there day after day, like you and I have been, looking at pieces of paper. Their lives are completely different, and this most likely makes a profound difference in what kinds of processing their brains develop.
For example, there’s a lot of controversy over whether ADD is a disease, or if children just aren’t meant to be sitting there in classrooms. Some theorize that ADD is extremely useful for your survival if you live in a jungle. You have to be aware of your entire environment the whole time. If the kids are growing up surrounded by boa constrictors and other dangerous animals, they have to REALLY develop their ability for paying attention to every little sound and movement. This is the opposite of what the schooling environment will do—force you to learn how to focus for long periods of time on little pieces of paper, doing thinking work, while blocking out any noise or thought you have that’s unrelated. Concentration is a skill, no?
That’s just one difference. There are others.
For instance, have you ever heard it’s important to teach math in school, not because everybody needs high level math itself, but because doing the type of intellectual rigors involved in mathematical calculating will boost reasoning in general?
If you were tossed a machine gun at the age of 6 and told to shoot or die, you’re totally not going to spend any time on math. And some of them were. (I learned that in a Ted talk video).
The Chinese people that were tested, to contrast, may have spent a lot of time as children working in sweatshops making small items or doing fine motor skill work like making toys and sewing. They’ve probably spent a lot of time developing their ability to concentrate—way more than would be demanded of the average American kid (they’re working 16 hour days...) and furthermore, constructing these products takes a bit of reasoning.
Don’t underestimate the difference that culture can make to an IQ score. Now that I’ve thought about this, I’m not even sure a culture fair test can compensate for these differences. It probably only works if you compare people with a similar upbringing. Comparing jungle survivors vs. sweatshop laborers vs. schooled Americans is probably going to yield different results no matter how you design an IQ test.
Ugh, visual shape processing. You grow up with that sorts of shapes (and patterns, and consecutive patterns that are regular, and so on), Africans don’t. You grow up with everything in left to right order or right to left order, they don’t.
What do you think goes on formally (mathematically) with the correct answer, anyway?
The correct answer is the one where the whole thing with the square filled in can be least complexly represented with most culturally common operations (mirrorings, rotations, superpositions, etc) done on orderings of the squares. You have a penalty for each operation (more for less common operations), you add those scores for the whole set of relations, you pick the smallest. That’s roughly what a programming contest solution for that sort of thing would look like (leaving aside the question of hardcoding or inferring the patterns and their penalties themselves).
Yes, the operations are in some sense fundamental, but you haven’t reinvented them, you learned them, from when you were categorizing visual input as a child.
As an IQ test, it has two parts: the visual input you are exposed to as a child, and the matrices themselves. Since we’re all acquiring a sufficient training dataset, it works just fine as an IQ test for us.
edit: Also, try replacing the square to fill in with a circle, and see how many people will get that wrong. Empty box to fill in is a cultural concept. A child unused to this will think they need to use that box as part of the answer.
If the first two shapes on the bottom are diamonds, why is the third shape a square?
I think that’s meant as a field where you’d draw in the shape, diamond and all.
And what makes you sure of that? It even looks like the outline for the three boxes along the top.
Our cultural assumptions are perhaps more subtle than the average person thinks.
One big cultural difference might be how seriously tests are viewed, and how much practice people get at taking them.
The best explanation for this I’ve heard is that there is a certain mindset (the writer refereed to it as a “modern mindset”) that is uncorrelated with intelligence, but that allows you to do better on intelligence tests. As evidence for this, he used the fact that right here in America, test scores have gone up over the past several decades. This clearly isn’t caused by some genetic change, so the most likely explanation is cultural change.
When people say that the IQ tests are culturally biased, that doesn’t necessarily mean that “white Americans” have the biggest advantage, it just means that IQ tests are measuring at least two separate qualities; one which is “intelligence”, and the other being some facet of the culture.
There are cultural factors that might give someone in China and advantage over someone in America on an IQ test. One of the simplest explanations I’ve heard is that the Chinese numbering system is easier to learn and more intuitive to do simple addition and subtraction with. While most number in English have a regular pattern that makes them easy to understand and to work with, (twenty-one, fourty-three are said in “tens then ones” form), the numbers right after ten don’t follow this pattern in English (eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen). This makes them more difficult for a child who is first learning his numbers to do so, and makes them slightly more difficult to work with on a cognitive level (it’s intuitive to add fourty-one and twenty-two and get sixty-three, since those numbers are in tens-then-ones form; it’s less intuitive to learn do that with eleven or thirteen).
Anyway, that’s just a simple example of the kind of cultural difference you won’t even notice but might give one culture a small cognitive or learning advantage over another that has nothing to do with genetics.
Is that actually more likely than environmental change?
Environmental change is certainly possible. For example, the amount of lead the average person gets from the environment has been slowly falling for several decades now. Better pre-natal care, and better education about the effects of consuming even small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy, might also be factors.
I think that cultural change is probably the biggest single cause of the Flynn effect, though. Computer use, increased practice taking standardized tests in childhood, ect. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re smarter, just that they’d better at taking IQ tests.
It might be caused by a genetic change. Populations are becoming less inbred. This would be expected to raise IQs, though I don’t know what the expected magnitude of change is.
It’s been claimed (“Resolving the IQ paradox: Heterosis as a cause of the Flynn effect and other trends”) that hybrid vigor/heterosis may help the Flynn effect, but this is not a popular explanation since it doesn’t explain the pattern of gains on IQ tests or the apparent size of the Flynn effect. I mean, inbreeding depression alone costs much less than Flynn, so it’s hard to imagine that outbreeding could be so valuable.
Interesting. Can you elaborate? What are the patterns exactly, and how do we know what inbreeding depression costs? From recent studies of inbred individuals? I’d be very surprised if it was the only cause of the gain in IQs, but as your reference says, it represents a pretty decent hypothesis for at least some of the effect.
Being confined to the subscales that look like pattern-matching and analogies, IIRC; I’m not sure which paper I get this from, but it seems Jensen does at least make this claim in http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/2010%20Editorial%20for%20Intelligence.pdf and in some citations in http://menghusblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/explanation-behind-the-non-g-gains-in-the-flynn-effect-introducing-the-measurement-invariance-model/ so there’s some starting points at least.
Yes, that’s how one would do it. The usual reference is to a study of Japanese cousin-marriages back in the ’50s or so where IIRC the estimate was <5 IQ points, but there’s been research since then, of course; a google for ‘inbreeding depression intelligence’ should bring some research to light.
I suspect that my characteristics are partly due to hybrid vigor, as are my sister’s. It’s not so much “neg (inbreeding depression)” but more of a “when pooling both the strengths and weaknesses of two respective gene pools, the strengths of having access to more ‘highly beneficial’ genes tend to outweigh the weaknesses of being struck with ‘detrimental genes’ from a different region”. So hybrid vigor isn’t necessarily antisymmetrical (I doubt it is) to inbreeding depression. Beneficial/detrimental being relative to the current stage of human civilization in general, and your culture in particular, of course. Example: propensity for thalassemia, good once, bad now.