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Journal ArticleDOI

Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life

01 Jan 1997-Intelligence (JAI)-Vol. 24, Iss: 1, pp 79-132
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)

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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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Radix Intelligence as mentioned in this paper is a new definition and integrative model of intelligence developed within the overarching system of psychobionomy, whose nature is collective, impersonal, and non-local.

4 citations


Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."

  • ...That is not to negate their predictive validity in relation to mundane criteria like formal scholastic achievement, getting and keeping a job, social conventionality, and perhaps living a little longer (e.g., Gottfredson, 1997)....

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  • ...…Brown, 2010; Friedman, 2019; Petrides, Vernon, Schermer, & Veselka, 2011; Pettersson et al., 2014), but less so in relation to IQ, which is usually portrayed as some kind of adaptational panacea (e.g., Gottfredson, 1997; although see Charlton, 2009; Gignac & Starbuck, 2019; Karpinski et al., 2018)....

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01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: Pehlivanova et al. as discussed by the authors found that higher cognitive ability, but not personality, was associated with stronger reliance on the normative factors that should govern learning, and that learning in older adults (age 60+) was less influenced by uncertainty, but also more influenced by reward, a non-normative factor that has substantial effects on learning across the lifespan.
Abstract: Human decisions are strongly influenced by past experience or by the subjective values attributed to available choice options. Although decision processes show some common trends across individuals, they also vary considerably between individuals. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on two domains of decision-making, related to learning and time preference, and examines factors that explain decision-making differences between individuals. First, we focus on a form of reinforcement learning in a dynamic environment. Across three experiments, we investigated whether individual differences in learning were associated with differences in cognitive abilities, personality, and age. Participants made sequential predictions about an on-screen location in a video game. Consistent with previous work, participants showed high variability in their ability to implement normative strategies related to surprise and uncertainty. We found that higher cognitive ability, but not personality, was associated with stronger reliance on the normative factors that should govern learning. Furthermore, learning in older adults (age 60+) was less influenced by uncertainty, but also less influenced by reward, a non-normative factor that has substantial effects on learning across the lifespan. Second, we focus on delay discounting, the tendency to prefer smaller rewards delivered soon over larger rewards delivered after a delay. Delay discounting has been used as a behavioral measure of impulsivity and is associated with many undesirable real-life outcomes. Specifically, we examined how neuroanatomy is associated with individual differences in delay discounting in a large adolescent sample. Using a novel multivariate method, we identified networks where cortical thickness varied consistently across individuals and brain regions. Cortical thickness in several of these networks, including regions such as ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and temporal pole, was negatively associated with delay discounting. Furthermore, this brain data predicted differences beyond those typically accounted for by other cognitive variables related to delay discounting. These results suggest that cortical thickness may be a useful brain phenotype of delay discounting and carry unique information about impulsivity. Collectively, this research furthers our understanding of how cognitive abilities, brain structure and healthy aging relate to individual differences in value-based decision-making. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Psychology First Advisor Joseph W. Kable Subject Categories Cognitive Psychology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2520 This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2520 INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN VALUE-BASED DECISION-MAKING: LEARNING AND TIME PREFERENCE Marieta Pehlivanova A DISSERTATION in Psychology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation _____________________ Joseph W. Kable, Ph.D., Baird Term Associate Professor, Psychology Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Sara R. Jaffee, Ph.D., Professor, Psychology Dissertation Committee Theodore D. Satterthwaite, M.D., M.A., Assistant Professor, Psychiatry Russell A. Epstein, Ph.D., Professor, Psychology Danielle S. Bassett, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Bioengineering INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN VALUE-BASED DECISION-MAKING: LEARNING AND TIME PREFERENCE COPYRIGHT 2017 Marieta Pehlivanova This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii For Maika, Tatko, and Ina

4 citations


Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."

  • ...Higher IQ is associated with higher educational achievement, successful job performance and functioning in modern life (Gottfredson, 1997) and decreased mortality (Batty, Deary, & Gottfredson, 2007), among other beneficial outcomes....

    [...]

  • ...Accurate inference could rely on cognitive abilities in a variety of different ways: it may reflect the ability to integrate abstract information from different sources (wind and helicopter movement; Gottfredson, 1997), or to actively maintain a representation of the environment, focusing attention on relevant information while ignoring the interference of noise (Kane & Engle, 2002)....

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  • ...…in a variety of different ways: it may reflect the ability to integrate abstract information from different sources (wind and helicopter movement; Gottfredson, 1997), or to actively maintain a representation of the environment, focusing attention on relevant information while ignoring the…...

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01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: This dissertation proposes a novel principle which it is hoped will allow not only for a greater understanding of the brain, but also serve as a principled basis for the design of future algorithms to solve a broad range of problems in artificial intelligence.
Abstract: There has been much research in recent decades aimed at discovering what the underlying principles are, if any, that drive the brain. As the cortex appears to be basically uniform, it seems that if there is an underlying principle, it is ubiquitous. However, the principles which have been proposed to explain the brain have largely been specialized principles, which each explain a particular aspect of the brain. Principles such as efficient coding, predictive coding, and temporal invariance have been proposed to explain sensory coding, and have succeeded to some measure in reproducing the receptive field properties of neurons in the visual cortex. Bayesian surprise has been offered as an explanation of attention, and has enjoyed some success in modeling human saccades, while reinforcement learning and intelligent adaptive curiosity have been aimed at explaining how actions are chosen. In this dissertation we propose a novel principle which we call predictive action. It is an information theoretic principle which unifies all of the above proposals. We show its relationship to each of the above proposals, and give several algorithms which approximate predictive action for specific environments. We hope that this principle will allow not only for a greater understanding of the brain, but also serve as a principled basis for the design of future algorithms to solve a broad range of problems in artificial intelligence.

4 citations

01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: In this article, the evaluation procedures for screening a large number of applicants were investigated and the basis of this research was to investigate whether a person's performance can be improved by being evaluated more thoroughly.
Abstract: While personnel evaluation has been extensively covered in literature, little is known about evaluation procedures screening a large number of applicants. The basis of this research was to investig ...

4 citations


Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."

  • ...General mental ability, also known as general intelligence (Schmidt & Hunter, 2004) or the g factor (Gottfredson, 1997), is a construct that measures the ability to deal with complex information processing (Gottfredson, 1997)....

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  • ...It has shown to correlate and forecast a variety of life factors, such as crime rate and school dropout (Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997), and even everyday tasks such as banking and understanding transport schedules (Gottfredson, 1997)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
28 Feb 2021
TL;DR: In this article, it is shown that, in both the workplace and educational system, other qualities besides g are important but remain invisible, and that invisibility is produced by a network of interacting, but mutually supportive, processes which include the adoption of an inappropriate psychometric model and limited criteria of performance, but, most importantly, from what seems to be a sociological "need" for a single and unarguable criterion of merit to legitimise a social hierarchy which contributes enormously to the network of forces which result in most people spending most of their time contributing to activities which are
Abstract: Gottfredson (1997) assembled a huge amount of data supporting three main claims: Out of all the traits known to psychology, only g predicts much of the variance in occupational performance; g is the most important of all the variables assessable by psychologists determining the effectiveness of behaviour outside work; and occupational status depends mainly on g. In this article it is shown that, in both the workplace and educational system, other qualities besides g are important but remain invisible. This invisibility is produced by a network of interacting, but mutually supportive, processes which include the adoption of an inappropriate psychometric model and limited criteria of performance, but, most importantly, from what seems to be a sociological “need” for a single and unarguable criterion of merit to legitimise a social hierarchy which contributes enormously to the network of forces which result in most people spending most of their time contributing to activities which are, directly or indirectly, destructive of other people’s quality of life and the chances of our species and the planet surviving – that is, to activities which can only be regarded as highly unethical. Embracing the task of mapping these socio-cybernetic forces results in focussing on the external rather than the internal determinants of behaviour. Trying to map these forces has enabled us to outline arrangements which should make it possible to run the educational system–and other domains of human * An earlier version of this paper has for some time been available at WebPsychEmpiricist: http://www.wpe.onfo/papers_table.html Chapter 19: Engineered Invisibility 432 endeavour–more effectively. These developments depend quintessentially on organisational arrangements, job descriptions, and appraisal systems the development of which falls clearly within the domain of organisational psychology.

4 citations


Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."

  • ...In a wonderfully documented paper, Gottfredson (1997) not only argues that g is the major variable responsible for differential performance in all walks of life (or at least the only one whose contribution can be demonstrated with the assessment instruments currently available to us) but also the…...

    [...]

  • ...Gottfredson (1997) assembled a huge amount of data supporting three main claims: Out of all the traits known to psychology, only g predicts much of the variance in occupational performance; g is the most important of all the variables assessable by psychologists determining the effectiveness of…...

    [...]

References
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TL;DR: The ten-year edition of the 10th anniversary edition as mentioned in this paper is devoted to the theory of multiple intelligences and its application in the socialization of human intelligence through Symbols Implications And Applications.
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TL;DR: The Tenth Anniversary Edition of Intelligence explains the development of intelligence in the 21st Century through the applications of language, linguistics, mathematics, and more.
Abstract: * Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition Background * The Idea of Multiple Intelligences * Intelligence: Earlier Views * Biological Foundations of Intelligence * What Is an Intelligence? The Theory * Linguistic Intelligence * Musical Intelligence * Logical-Mathematical Intelligence * Spatial Intelligence * Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence * The Personal Intelligences * A Critique of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences * The Socialization of Human Intelligences through Symbols Implications And Applications * The Education of Intelligences * The Application of Intelligences

9,611 citations

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TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relation of the Big Five personality dimensions (extraversion, emotional stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) to three job performance criteria (job proficiency, training proficiency, and personnel data) for five occupational groups (professionals, police, managers, sales, and skilled/semi-skilled).
Abstract: This study investigated the relation of the “Big Five” personality dimensions (Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) to three job performance criteria (job proficiency, training proficiency, and personnel data) for five occupational groups (professionals, police, managers, sales, and skilled/semi-skilled). Results indicated that one dimension of personality, Conscientiousness, showed consistent relations with all job performance criteria for all occupational groups. For the remaining personality dimensions, the estimated true score correlations varied by occupational group and criterion type. Extraversion was a valid predictor for two occupations involving social interaction, managers and sales (across criterion types). Also, both Openness to Experience and Extraversion were valid predictors of the training proficiency criterion (across occupations). Other personality dimensions were also found to be valid predictors for some occupations and some criterion types, but the magnitude of the estimated true score correlations was small (ρ < .10). Overall, the results illustrate the benefits of using the 5-factor model of personality to accumulate and communicate empirical findings. The findings have numerous implications for research and practice in personnel psychology, especially in the subfields of personnel selection, training and development, and performance appraisal.

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TL;DR: An up-to-date handbook on conceptual and methodological issues relevant to the study of industrial and organizational behavior is presented in this paper, which covers substantive issues at both the individual and organizational level in both theoretical and practical terms.
Abstract: An up-to-date handbook on conceptual and methodological issues relevant to the study of industrial and organizational behavior. Chapters contributed by leading experts from the academic and business communities cover substantive issues at both the individual and organizational level, in both theoretical and practical terms.

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