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: A shortened computerized domain-general measure of working memory capacity is developed by representatively sampling items from three existing complex working memory span tasks: operation span, reading span, and symmetry span by developing and applying a principled strategy for developing the reduced measure, based on testing a series of confirmatory factor analysis models.
Abstract: Working memory capacity is one of the most fre- quentlymeasuredindividualdifferenceconstructsincognitive psychology and related fields. However, implementation of complex span and other working memory measures is gener- ally time-consuming for administrators and examinees alike. Because researchers often must manage the tension between limited testing time and measuring numerous constructs reli- ably, a short and effective measure of working memory ca- pacity would often be a major practical benefit in future research efforts. The current study developed a shortened computerized domain-general measure of working memory capacity by representatively sampling items from three existing complex working memory span tasks: operation span, reading span, and symmetryspan. Using a largearchival data set (Study 1, N = 4,845), we developed and applied a principled strategy for developing the reduced measure, based on testing a series of confirmatory factor analysis models. Adequate fit indices from these models lent support to this strategy. The resulting shortened measure was then ad- ministered to a second independent sample (Study 2, N = 172), demonstrating that the new measure saves roughly 15 min (30 %) of testing time on average, and even up to 25 min depending on the test-taker. On the basis of these initial promising findings, several directions for future research are discussed.
160 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...…highly with one another and demonstrate theoretically appropriate patterns of convergent and discriminant validity, and, in general, cognitive ability measures have long been known to predict a variety of important life outcomes in academic, employment, and personal domains (Gottfredson, 1997)....
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...Scores on a variety of established measures of WMC have long been known to correlate highly with one another and demonstrate theoretically appropriate patterns of convergent and discriminant validity, and, in general, cognitive ability measures have long been known to predict a variety of important life outcomes in academic, employment, and personal domains (Gottfredson, 1997)....
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TL;DR: Rostral prefrontal cortex (RPFC) supports self-generated, abstract thought processing in adolescence and becomes more specific to relational integration during development, which has implication for education.
159 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
..., 2010)), university and in cognitively demanding occupations (Gottfredson, 1997)....
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...Fluid intelligence in childhood predicts achievements at school (e.g. in maths during early adolescence (Primi et al., 2010)), university and in cognitively demanding occupations (Gottfredson, 1997)....
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TL;DR: The findings suggest that superforecasters are partly discovered and partly created—and that the high-performance incentives of tournaments highlight aspects of human judgment that would not come to light in laboratory paradigms focused on typical performance.
Abstract: Across a wide range of tasks, research has shown that people make poor probabilistic predictions of future events. Recently, the U.S. Intelligence Community sponsored a series of forecasting tournaments designed to explore the best strategies for generating accurate subjective probability estimates of geopolitical events. In this article, we describe the winning strategy: culling off top performers each year and assigning them into elite teams of superforecasters. Defying expectations of regression toward the mean 2 years in a row, superforecasters maintained high accuracy across hundreds of questions and a wide array of topics. We find support for four mutually reinforcing explanations of superforecaster performance: (a) cognitive abilities and styles, (b) task-specific skills, (c) motivation and commitment, and (d) enriched environments. These findings suggest that superforecasters are partly discovered and partly created—and that the high-performance incentives of tournaments highlight aspects of human...
158 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...In this view, the door to superforecaster status is not open to all (Gottfredson, 1997)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess potential differences in the predictive ability of self-assessed health for mortality between educational groups, and to find explanations for any of these educational differences.
Abstract: Background The purpose of this study was to assess potential differences in the predictive ability of self-assessed health for mortality between educational groups, and to find explanations for any of these educational differences. Methods We used data from the longitudinal GLOBE study, with a 13-year mortality follow-up. Analyses were performed for people aged between 25-74 years at baseline (n = 16 722). The associations of self-assessed health with mortality were estimated with Cox regression analyses, and the resulting hazard ratios were used as indicators of the 'predictive ability' of self-assessed health for mortality. Differences between educational levels were estimated by including an interaction term of education with self-assessed health in regression models with mortality as the outcome. The analyses were subsequently adjusted for: life threatening chronic conditions, non-life threatening conditions, stressors and health behaviour, to test the contribution of these factors to the predictive ability of self-assessed health. Results Results indicated that the predictive ability of self-assessed health for mortality was greater in men with tertiary education as compared with the lowest educated men. No differences were observed in women. None of the four health aspects accounted for the educational difference in men. Conclusions Because differences in the predictive ability for mortality were limited to the extreme educational groups in men, educational differences in self-assessed health that are reported in numerous studies should not be expected to seriously overestimate educational differences in 'objective' health status.
157 citations
TL;DR: This first autosomal genome‐wide association scan of g used a two‐stage quantitative trait locus (QTL) design with pooled DNA to screen more than 500 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on microarrays, selecting from a sample of 7000 7‐year‐old children.
Abstract: General cognitive ability (g), which refers to what cognitive abilities have in common, is an important target for molecular genetic research because multivariate quantitative genetic analyses have shown that the same set of genes affects diverse cognitive abilities as well as learning disabilities. In this first autosomal genome-wide association scan of g, we used a two-stage quantitative trait locus (QTL) design with pooled DNA to screen more than 500 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on microarrays, selecting from a sample of 7000 7-year-old children. In stage 1, we screened for allele frequency differences between groups pooled for low and high g. In stage 2, 47 SNPs nominated in stage 1 were tested by individually genotyping an independent sample of 3195 individuals, representative of the entire distribution of g scores in the full 7000 7-year-old children. Six SNPs yielded significant associations across the normal distribution of g, although only one SNP remained significant after a false discovery rate of 0.05 was imposed. However, none of these SNPs accounted for more than 0.4% of the variance of g, despite 95% power to detect associations of that size. It is likely that QTL effect sizes, even for highly heritable traits such as cognitive abilities and disabilities, are much smaller than previously assumed. Nonetheless, an aggregated ‘SNP set’ of the six SNPs correlated 0.11 (P < 0.00000003) with g. This shows that future SNP sets that will incorporate many more SNPs could be useful for predicting genetic risk and for investigating functional systems of effects from genes to brain to behavior.
156 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...g is one of the most reliable, valid and stable behavioral traits, and it predicts important social outcomes such as educational and occupational levels far better than any other trait (Deary et al. 1994; Gottfredson 1997; Neisser et al. 1996; Schmidt & Hunter 2004)....
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...…(Carroll 1993; Jensen 1998). g is one of the most reliable, valid and stable behavioral traits, and it predicts important social outcomes such as educational and occupational levels far better than any other trait (Deary et al. 1994; Gottfredson 1997; Neisser et al. 1996; Schmidt & Hunter 2004)....
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References
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