Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life
Summary (1 min read)
Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life
- This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essentially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing.
- Few claims in the social sciences are backed by such massive evidence but remain so hotly contested in public discourse.
- Besides demonstrating that g is important in practical affairs, I seek to demonstrate why intelligence has such surprisingly pervasive importance in the lives of individuals.
- I then use both the employment and literacy data to sketch a portrait of life’s challenges and opportunities at different levels of intelligence.
WHAT DOES “IMPORTANT” MEAN?
- The nature of the job and its context seem to determine whether g has any direct effect on task proficiency, net of job knowlege.
- As is well known in psychometrics (see also Gordon, 1997), the fact that an individual passes or fails any single test item says little about that person’s general intelligence level.
INFLUENCE OF INTELLIGENCE ON OVERALL LIFE OUTCOMES
- The effects of intelligence-like other psychological traits-are probabilistic, not deterministic.
- White adults in this range marry, work, and have children (Hermstein & Murray, 1994), but, as Table 10 shows, they are nonetheless at great risk of living in poverty (30%), bearing children out of wedlock (32%), and becoming chronic welfare dependents (31%).
- At this IQ level, fewer than half the high school graduates and none of the dropouts meet the military’s minimum AFQT enlistment standards.
- Most occupations are within reach cognitively, because these individuals learn complex material fairly easily and independently.
- Such as divorce, illness, and occasional unemployment, they rarely become trapped in poverty or social pathology.
THE FUTURE
- Complexity enriches social and cultural life, but it also risks leaving some individuals behind.
- Society has become more complex-and g loaded-as the authors have entered the information age and postindustrial economy.
- Accordingly, organizations are “flatter” (have fewer hierarchical levels), and increasing numbers of jobs require high-level cognitive and interpersonal skills (Camevale, 1991; Cascio, 1995; Hunt, 1995; Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991).
- There is evidence that increasing proportions of individuals with below-average IQs are having trouble adapting to their increasingly complex modern life (Granat & Granat, 1978) and that social inequality along IQ lines is increasing (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994).
- As the military experience also illustrates, however, what is good pedagogy for the low-aptitude learner may be inappropriate for the high-aptitude person.
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Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...academic performance and to a somewhat lesser extent of performance in the real world, including performance in the work place, particularly in situations that require complex operations (see reviews in Gordon, 1997; Gottfredson, 1997; Hunter, 1983, 1986; and Hunter & Hunter, 1984)....
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301 citations
300 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...It is probably cultivated from years of experience by repeated exposure to condition-action scripts; learning from such experience too may depend on individual differences such as the ability to learn (i.e., intelligence, Gottfredson, 1997, 2002; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998)....
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300 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...stems from the social implications of the existence of measurable individual differences in a personal characteristic that is highly predictive of a broad range of life outcomes (Gottfredson, 1997). The controversy takes place both at the level of social policies regarding measurement and intervention (e.g., Baumeister & Bacharach, 1996; Blair, 1999; Scarr, 1996; Sternberg, 2000; Williams, 2000) and at the level of theories of genetics, biochemistry, neurology, cognitive science, evolution, intelligence, and latent variable measurement (e.g., Elman et al., 1996; Eysenck, 1994; Haier, 1993; Horn, 1998; Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997). The questions related to measurement have focused on two fundamental issues: the accuracy and equity with respect to the individual of the measurement instruments that have been developed, and the relevance of our measurements to the structure and, ultimately, biology of human intellectual abilities. To the extent that there is a g factor, g factor measurements among individuals should be independent of the specific mental ability tests used to define the factor. That is, the nature of the general factor should be uniform from test battery to test battery. If the nature of the g factor changes with the composition of the test battery, the factor analytic approach to identifying structure is arbitrary, and so are the factors identified through its use (Horn, 1989). Put simply, the question is whether there is only one g. This question has been investigated from two perspectives. The first perspective concerns the degree to which the g-loading of a particular test is inherent in the nature of the test and thus stable as the test is inserted in different sets of other tests. For example, Thorndike (1987) created six different test batteries, each consisting of eight different tests developed to assess vocational aptitude among military recruits. He separately embedded each of 17 additional tests in each of the six batteries, and then correlated the factor loadings from the inserted tests across the six groups. The correlations ranged from .52 to .94 with a median of .83, which he interpreted as providing evidence that the g-loading of a test is relatively independent of the battery of tests in which it appears, and thus a characteristic of the test itself. Vernon (1989) obtained similar results using g factors from several intelligence tests and a battery of reaction time tests. Thorndike focused on the evaluative properties of the individual test, which can of course be important, especially in situations where practicalities dictate that only a single test will be used to evaluate individual differences in general cognitive ability and their associations with other variables. On the other hand, Vernon focused on demonstration of a consistent relationship between various psychometric measurements of g and a physiological property. The second perspective concerns the degree to which the g-loadings for tests depend on the particular method of factor analysis used to extract the g factor. For example, Ree and Earles (1991) extracted g factors using unrotated principal components, unrotated principal factors, and hierarchical analyses based on principal components and principal factors, extracting three to eight first-order factors for each. They then calculated scores on the g factors resulting from each extraction, and correlated them. The correlations ranged from .930 to .999, which they interpreted as evidence that the g loading of a test is independent of the method used to extract the g factor. Jensen and Weng (1994) obtained similar results using both simulated correlation matrices in which the true g was known, and empirical data from batteries of diverse mental tests. As Ree and Earles pointed out, however, these results do nothing more than provide instantiations of Wilks’ (1938) theorem, which states that the correlation of two linear composites of multiple variables will approach 1....
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...stems from the social implications of the existence of measurable individual differences in a personal characteristic that is highly predictive of a broad range of life outcomes (Gottfredson, 1997). The controversy takes place both at the level of social policies regarding measurement and intervention (e.g., Baumeister & Bacharach, 1996; Blair, 1999; Scarr, 1996; Sternberg, 2000; Williams, 2000) and at the level of theories of genetics, biochemistry, neurology, cognitive science, evolution, intelligence, and latent variable measurement (e.g., Elman et al., 1996; Eysenck, 1994; Haier, 1993; Horn, 1998; Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997). The questions related to measurement have focused on two fundamental issues: the accuracy and equity with respect to the individual of the measurement instruments that have been developed, and the relevance of our measurements to the structure and, ultimately, biology of human intellectual abilities. To the extent that there is a g factor, g factor measurements among individuals should be independent of the specific mental ability tests used to define the factor. That is, the nature of the general factor should be uniform from test battery to test battery. If the nature of the g factor changes with the composition of the test battery, the factor analytic approach to identifying structure is arbitrary, and so are the factors identified through its use (Horn, 1989). Put simply, the question is whether there is only one g. This question has been investigated from two perspectives. The first perspective concerns the degree to which the g-loading of a particular test is inherent in the nature of the test and thus stable as the test is inserted in different sets of other tests. For example, Thorndike (1987) created six different test batteries, each consisting of eight different tests developed to assess vocational aptitude among military recruits. He separately embedded each of 17 additional tests in each of the six batteries, and then correlated the factor loadings from the inserted tests across the six groups. The correlations ranged from .52 to .94 with a median of .83, which he interpreted as providing evidence that the g-loading of a test is relatively independent of the battery of tests in which it appears, and thus a characteristic of the test itself. Vernon (1989) obtained similar results using g factors from several intelligence tests and a battery of reaction time tests. Thorndike focused on the evaluative properties of the individual test, which can of course be important, especially in situations where practicalities dictate that only a single test will be used to evaluate individual differences in general cognitive ability and their associations with other variables. On the other hand, Vernon focused on demonstration of a consistent relationship between various psychometric measurements of g and a physiological property. The second perspective concerns the degree to which the g-loadings for tests depend on the particular method of factor analysis used to extract the g factor. For example, Ree and Earles (1991) extracted g factors using unrotated principal components, unrotated principal factors, and hierarchical analyses based on principal components and principal factors, extracting three to eight first-order factors for each. They then calculated scores on the g factors resulting from each extraction, and correlated them. The correlations ranged from .930 to .999, which they interpreted as evidence that the g loading of a test is independent of the method used to extract the g factor. Jensen and Weng (1994) obtained similar results using both simulated correlation matrices in which the true g was known, and empirical data from batteries of diverse mental tests....
[...]
...stems from the social implications of the existence of measurable individual differences in a personal characteristic that is highly predictive of a broad range of life outcomes (Gottfredson, 1997). The controversy takes place both at the level of social policies regarding measurement and intervention (e.g., Baumeister & Bacharach, 1996; Blair, 1999; Scarr, 1996; Sternberg, 2000; Williams, 2000) and at the level of theories of genetics, biochemistry, neurology, cognitive science, evolution, intelligence, and latent variable measurement (e.g., Elman et al., 1996; Eysenck, 1994; Haier, 1993; Horn, 1998; Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997). The questions related to measurement have focused on two fundamental issues: the accuracy and equity with respect to the individual of the measurement instruments that have been developed, and the relevance of our measurements to the structure and, ultimately, biology of human intellectual abilities. To the extent that there is a g factor, g factor measurements among individuals should be independent of the specific mental ability tests used to define the factor. That is, the nature of the general factor should be uniform from test battery to test battery. If the nature of the g factor changes with the composition of the test battery, the factor analytic approach to identifying structure is arbitrary, and so are the factors identified through its use (Horn, 1989). Put simply, the question is whether there is only one g. This question has been investigated from two perspectives. The first perspective concerns the degree to which the g-loading of a particular test is inherent in the nature of the test and thus stable as the test is inserted in different sets of other tests. For example, Thorndike (1987) created six different test batteries, each consisting of eight different tests developed to assess vocational aptitude among military recruits. He separately embedded each of 17 additional tests in each of the six batteries, and then correlated the factor loadings from the inserted tests across the six groups. The correlations ranged from .52 to .94 with a median of .83, which he interpreted as providing evidence that the g-loading of a test is relatively independent of the battery of tests in which it appears, and thus a characteristic of the test itself. Vernon (1989) obtained similar results using g factors from several intelligence tests and a battery of reaction time tests....
[...]
...stems from the social implications of the existence of measurable individual differences in a personal characteristic that is highly predictive of a broad range of life outcomes (Gottfredson, 1997)....
[...]
...E-mail address: john4350@tc.umn.edu (W. Johnson). stems from the social implications of the existence of measurable individual differences in a personal characteristic that is highly predictive of a broad range of life outcomes (Gottfredson, 1997)....
[...]
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