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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Citations
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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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....
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...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…...
[...]
4 citations
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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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…...
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...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…...
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