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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30 Oct 2020
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present results of different investigations about emotional intelligence and its relationship with health and job performance in samples such as health (fitness center workers, surgeons, and podiatrists) and propose some key aspects to improve the EI aiming at reducing stress, enhancing social and mental health, and increasing human resilience to different stressor agents.
Abstract: Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to how people perceive, value, and show emotions, as well as those personal, cognitive, and/or social skills which define the efficacy of the people to understanding and confronting the daily problems. Up until a few decades ago, there wasn’t much knowledge about EI. Nonetheless, there has recently been increasing attention from the research community for identifying the relationship between EI and health. In this review, results of different investigations about EI and its relationships with health and job performance in samples such as health (fitness center workers, surgeons, and podiatrists) are presented. Besides, some key aspects are proposed to improve the EI aiming at reducing stress, enhancing social and mental health, and increasing human resilience to different stressor agents (workload, disease or death of a relative, etc.).
4 citations
Additional excerpts
...Más bien refleja una capacidad más amplia y profunda para comprender nuestro entorno: “comprender”, “dar sentido” a las cosas o “averiguar qué hacer” (Gottfredson 1997, p. 13)....
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12 Mar 2013
4 citations
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In this paper, a guide for interpreting WISC-V scores as a measure of g or overall ability, as well as a set of measures of specific abilities is provided. But, the interpretation of WISCV scores is typically done in the context of making recommendations for educational interventions for children and adolescents.
Abstract: Interpretation of the WISC-V scores is typically done in the context of making recommendations for educational interventions for children and adolescents. This chapter provides a guide for interpretation of the WISC-V as a measure of g or overall ability, as well as a set of measures of specific abilities. To aid practitioners with developing intervention strategies, the chapter continues by linking interventions to the specific cognitive abilities that WISC-V measures.
In this chapter, we first discuss common challenges to interpreting WISC-V scores for students where there is broad variance among the scores. Next, we present an analogy designed to promote a more intuitive understanding of the abilities measured by each index. Finally, we consider some fundamental suggestions for teachers and parents who have children with weaknesses in one of the primary cognitive abilities.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the authors examined the possibility that the larger brains of endotherms support a different organization of information processing, rather than specific differences in cognitive processes, and found that individual performance across domain-general cognitive tasks is positively correlated, resulting in the psychometric factor g.
Abstract: The average mammal or bird has a roughly ten times larger brain relative to body size than the average ectotherm vertebrate. It has been surprisingly challenging to determine how this translates into increased cognitive performance. In particular, it is unclear whether the brain size differences translate into qualitative differences in specific cognitive abilities. Here, we provide a first exploratory study to examine the possibility that the larger brains of endotherms support a different organisation of information processing, rather than specific differences in cognitive processes. In mammals, individual performance across domain-general cognitive tasks is positively correlated, resulting in the psychometric factor g. The value of g is positively correlated with brain size. We tested wild-caught female cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus, known for its highly sophisticated social behaviour, in four ecologically nonrelevant cognitive tasks that have been used to varying degrees to assess g in mammals. Cleaner fish solved three of these four tasks, flexibility (reversal learning), self-control (detour around an obstacle) and numerical competence (simultaneous two-choice task), while also providing enough interindividual variation to test for g. They did not perform above chance levels in the fourth task, which tested for object permanence. For the three retained tasks, individual performance did not load positively on one principal component. Furthermore, all pairwise correlation coefficients were close to zero. These negative results contradict a frequent criticism of g studies, which proposes that g is a default result of how brains are designed. Rather, the results provide a first indication that endotherm and ectotherm vertebrates may process cognitive tasks in fundamentally different ways due to differences in brain organisation. Our relatively low number of experiments compared to mammalian studies enhances this hypothesis, as the probability of finding a g factor by chance would have been higher.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the relationship between intelligence and debt repayment of high-consequences debt (HCD), such as mortgage debt, and Low Consequences Debt (LCD) such as credit card debt was studied.
4 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...…“system 2” processes (Epstein, 1994; Sloman, 1996; Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002), mental operations requiring effort, motivation, concentration, and the execution of learned rules – processes that are heavily dependent on cognitive ability (Gottfredson, 1997; Jensen, 1998)....
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References
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