PNB 3HP3 Lecture 3: Intelligence Testing
18 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Darwin's work on evolutionary theory shapes a lot of modern psychology.
There were other people who seriously pushed the idea of heritability in terms
of mental traits.
Galton
Galton invented general methods for normal distributions, etc.
We should be aware that we are very susceptible to evolutionary pressures.
If we got all of the smart people, the people doing better than everyone else - those
are the phenotypically better people - these people should be the ones to reproduce.
Scientific Eugenics - people who had favourable traits should be the ones to be
encouraged to reproduce.
Suffragettes at the time - according to Galton - were taking out all of these
smart, intelligent women from the home and moving them into the workforce.
He thought this was a crime against society for these women to not pass
their genes on.
He was considered anti-feminist.
Spencer
Social Darwinism
Late 19th century Americanism was a good example - let's go out and become social
capitalists and outcompete.
Thought that this was the best thing to do for society because it made
evolutionary sense to him.
Didn't care about what it did to the lower classes; this was just a product of
what we see in society.
Catell
Studied with Wundt
Learned about what Galton was doing - became interested in individual differences.
He did a lot of research in this area, but what he ended up doing was not very
intelligence test-y
Seriously jumpstarted he individual differences idea in North America - many of his
students went on to make great advances in this field.
Binet
Same time as Catell in France.
Stanford-Binet test was born when Binet's ideas were sent out to.
Intelligence Testing
We have this sense that there's a thing we notice that we are trying to measure.
Problem is - if we go to do an IQ or aptitude test on someone and say, "here is your
score, it's a measure of your mental abilities" THIS IS NOT WHAT WE'RE MEASURING.
What you're measuring with IQ tests, is the sum of experience, genetics, etc.
Should call them aptitude - because not inherent.
Big difference in racial group performance in North America.
Issue of cultural bias in the early tests.
But if you look at performance for Caucasians vs African Americans, there's a big
difference in those performances, but we don't have an explanation.
A lot of people look at that and argue that these difference can't be true
because we don't want to think that these people are inherently different.
They would then argue that we shouldn’t even do IQ tests, but we can
and probably should.
What it really says is that there might be huge differences in environment,
access to resources, education, etc.
Question: what's the cause of these differences? Is there something about
intelligence tests that there's something heritable? Yes. Is that heritability the
explanation for racial differences? Not necessarily, no. Is it an indicator of
environmental or accessibility differences? Yes, we have tons of evidence for this.
What are we measuring when we measure IQ?
We are measuring a bunch of difference things, but we get a g (general
intelligence).
G is not a biological construct, it's not something in your head, it's literally a
mathematical concept to describe and predict performance on different things.
It's likely that if you're good at one thing, you're good at other related things.
Idea, if everyone gets rich early upbringing in terms of education/environment,
you would expect to see a shift in IQ differences and you might see that the
genetic heritability accounts for more of the variability.
Intelligence Testing
Thursday, February 8, 2018
9:31 AM
Document Summary
Darwin"s work on evolutionary theory shapes a lot of modern psychology. There were other people who seriously pushed the idea of heritability in terms of mental traits. Galton invented general methods for normal distributions, etc. We should be aware that we are very susceptible to evolutionary pressures. If we got all of the smart people, the people doing better than everyone else - those are the phenotypically better people - these people should be the ones to reproduce. Scientific eugenics - people who had favourable traits should be the ones to be encouraged to reproduce. Suffragettes at the time - according to galton - were taking out all of these smart, intelligent women from the home and moving them into the workforce. He thought this was a crime against society for these women to not pass their genes on. Late 19th century americanism was a good example - let"s go out and become social capitalists and outcompete.
