Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide evidence that intelligence has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essentially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing, and the more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well.
About: This article is published in Intelligence.The article was published on 1997-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 1300 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Everyday life & Cognitive complexity.
Summary (1 min read)
Jump to: [Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life] – [WHAT DOES “IMPORTANT” MEAN?] – [INFLUENCE OF INTELLIGENCE ON OVERALL LIFE OUTCOMES] and [THE FUTURE]
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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TL;DR: The two experiments highlight the importance of intelligence for complex and challenging learning tasks that are supposed to stimulate deeper encoding and more cognitive processing and specifically learners with higher, or at least average, intelligence should be confronted with difficulties to increase long-term learning and test performance.
8 citations
TL;DR: An analysis of longitudinal data on state and national level placement rates reveals that a lengthy and steep 12-year decline in students receiving mental retardation services reversed shortly after the introduction of the WISC-III in 1991.
Abstract: Oppositely valenced forces may be at work to influence rates of placement of children into mental retardation programs. On one hand, educational policies regarding intellectual disability and concerns about overrepresentation of minorities in special education may contribute to lower placement rates; on the other hand, more difficult intelligence test norms may be a countervailing force, increasing placement rates. An analysis of longitudinal data on state and national level placement rates reveals that a lengthy and steep 12-year decline in students receiving mental retardation services reversed shortly after the introduction of the WISC-III in 1991. This phenomenon has relevance for death-penalty cases, because this historical pattern may affect the ability to establish whether an adult meets the developmental period onset criterion for mental retardation.
8 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...Such individuals have a great deal of difficulty finding and maintaining employment and often live in poverty (Gottfredson, 1997), and their inability to earn a subsistence living through ordinary means may contribute to their overrepresentation in the prison population....
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01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: The WAIS-IV, WMS-IV Flexible Approach, and Advanced Clinical Solutions for the WAIS -IV/WMS -IV (ACS) as discussed by the authors is a comprehensive set of tests for evaluating cognitive functioning of adolescents and adults.
Abstract: The WAIS–IV, WMS–IV WMS–IV Flexible Approach (WMS–IV Flex), and Advanced Clinical Solutions for the WAIS–IV/WMS–IV (ACS) are a comprehensive set of tests for evaluating cognitive functioning of adolescents and adults. The WAIS–IV measures multiple components of verbal, visual–perceptual, auditory working memory, and processing speed abilities. Theoretical and empirical support for the usefulness of measuring fluid reasoning with the WAIS–IV is discussed. The WMS–IV can be used to measure different aspects of declarative and episodic memory. Joint factor analysis of the WAIS–IV/WMS–IV supports a five- or seven-factor model for integrated interpretation of the batteries. New index scores based on the joint factor analysis and theoretical considerations are presented. The ACS provides clinicians with the ability to parse memory functioning into more refined analysis of errors and processes, evaluate social perception and executive functions, measure change in cognitive functioning from a premorbid level or across time, and evaluate the results for invalid performance. The co-development of the WAIS–IV/WMS–IV/ACS provides clinicians with a variety of clinical measures for evaluating the cognitive functioning of individuals with developmental, psychiatric, neurological, and medical disorders.
8 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of cognitive training on fluid intelligence were investigated with the participation of young schoolchildren, and it was shown that the effect of such training can generalize to fluid intelligence.
Abstract: Attention is at the core of cognition (Posner & Petersen, 1990; Petersen & Posner, 2012) and fluid intelligence is the most fundamental cognitive ability (Gottfredson, 1997; Jensen, 1998). Therefore, it is tempting to check whether both attention and intelligence can be improved through planned interventions. Being its cognitive substrate, some aspects of attention are believed to underlie general mental ability (Schweizer, Moosbrugger, & Goldhammer, 2005; Stankov, 1988). If so, the effects of attention training should generalize to fluid intelligence. Here we attempt to verify this hypothesis with the participation of young schoolchildren.Fluid intelligence is understood to involve general reasoning ability, problem solving skills, and abstract thinking in novel situations (Cattell, 1971). The distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence has been proposed by Raymond Cattell (1957, 1971) and later developed by John Horn (1968). According to Cattell, fluid intelligence (Gf) is a biologically determined "pure" ability to reason in the inductive or deductive way, whereas crystallized intelligence (Gc) is a culturally determined ability to acquire and use knowledge. John Horn (1968; Horn & Stankov, 1982) developed the Cattell's distinction, adding several lower-level abilities, such as visual processing (Gv), short-term memory skills (Gsm), long-term memory skills (Glr), or speed of processing (Gs). As we can see, all acronyms contain the letter G, meaning that these abilities are relatively general in nature, that is, they manifest themselves in numerous and diverse tasks and situations rather than in some specific settings. John Carroll (1993, 1997) developed the Cattell-Horn theory into the form of a three-stratum theory of intelligence. According to his approach, human abilities are organized in three strata, depending on the number and variety of tasks and situations in which they can be observed. The most general ability is Spearman's (1927) general factor g, representing the highest stratum III. The second level (stratum II) includes so-called "broad abilities", whose number was originally eight but today it ranges from eight to sixteen, depending on the version of the model. The most important broad abilities are Gf and Gc, already proposed by Cattell and Horn. Other II stratum abilities are, for instance, processing speed or retrieval ability. The lowest level (stratum I) includes abilities that manifest themselves in very specific, narrowly defined tasks. They may also depend on specific cognitive abilities adopted by a person. Carroll's conceptualization of Cattell and Horn's ideas is now recognized as the CHC (Cattell-Horn-Carroll) theory of intelligence. It is regarded to be the most comprehensive model of the structure of human abilities, supported by confirmatory factor-analytical studies (e.g., Flanagan & Dixon, 2014; Gustaffson & Undheim, 1996).Ideally, it would be suitable to investigate training effects in reference to all the abilities described by the CHC theory but such an agenda is hard to implement in a single study. Besides, we do not have appropriate, theorybased tools for the measurement of potential training effects. For these reasons, we decided to focus on an ability that is general enough and predicts significant life achievements, namely, the general fluid intelligence (Gf). It has been demonstrated that Gf is an important predictor of academic achievement (Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fernandes, 2007), career outcomes and professional achievement (Ree & Earles, 1992), as well as health and mortality (Deary, 2008; Gottfredson, 1997, 2004). Not surprisingly, many planned interventions that include cognitive training have sought to improve it. However, it is not clear whether fluid intelligence is susceptible to such interventions. Many studies have found that intelligence training yields only limited effects (Barnett & Ceci, 2002). According to Sternberg (2008), the training tasks used in many studies that claim to improve fluid intelligence were very similar to the final tests that measured training effects (e. …
8 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...Attention is at the core of cognition (Posner & Petersen, 1990; Petersen & Posner, 2012) and fluid intelligence is the most fundamental cognitive ability (Gottfredson, 1997; Jensen, 1998). Therefore, it is tempting to check whether both attention and intelligence can be improved through planned interventions. Being its cognitive substrate, some aspects of attention are believed to underlie general mental ability (Schweizer, Moosbrugger, & Goldhammer, 2005; Stankov, 1988). If so, the effects of attention training should generalize to fluid intelligence. Here we attempt to verify this hypothesis with the participation of young schoolchildren. Fluid intelligence is understood to involve general reasoning ability, problem solving skills, and abstract thinking in novel situations (Cattell, 1971). The distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence has been proposed by Raymond Cattell (1957, 1971) and later developed by John Horn (1968). According to Cattell, fluid intelligence (Gf) is a biologically determined “pure” ability to reason in the inductive or deductive way, whereas crystallized intelligence (Gc) is a culturally determined ability to acquire and use knowledge....
[...]
...Attention is at the core of cognition (Posner & Petersen, 1990; Petersen & Posner, 2012) and fluid intelligence is the most fundamental cognitive ability (Gottfredson, 1997; Jensen, 1998)....
[...]
...…and Brain Sciences, Leipzig Jagiellonian University in Krakow The University of Social Sciences and Humanities Attention is at the core of cognition (Posner & Petersen, 1990; Petersen & Posner, 2012) and fluid intelligence is the most fundamental cognitive ability (Gottfredson, 1997; Jensen, 1998)....
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...It has been demonstrated that Gf is an important predictor of academic achievement (Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fernandes, 2007), career outcomes and professional achievement (Ree & Earles, 1992), as well as health and mortality (Deary, 2008; Gottfredson, 1997, 2004)....
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TL;DR: It is concluded that the VENs might contribute to individual differences in g by rapidly inducing the coherence of neuronal oscillations within a functionally invariant parieto-frontal network underlying higher-order cognition, thereby facilitating mental efficiency.
8 citations
References
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