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
108 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...Second, although the correlation of - .25 is weak for predicting individual outcomes, that is not the only purpose of correlations (Gottfredson, 1997)....
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...…and hence the capacity to acquire knowledge, the ability to deal with complexity, judgment, and, finally, the estimation of probabilities and the judicious weighting of conflicting priorities (Edgerton, 1993, p. 222; Gottfredson, 1997; Jensen, 1993b; Snyderman & Rothman, 1988, Table 2.3)....
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107 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...However, the promise has not yet been fulfilled: ‘g’ is still a better predictor of performance than any learning styles profile or label (Gottfredson 1997)....
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105 citations
104 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...(Gottfredson, 1997a, p. 13) This definition was provided by a panel of fifty-two experts in the field and first appeared on the Wall Street Journal in 1994 in response to media and sociological criticisms of the psychological notion of intellectual ability after the publication of The Bell Curve....
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...…by repetitive, systematic, monotonous and physical rather than intellectual tasks; they are also more highly supervised and demand less responsibility from the employee (see Gottfredson, 1997a, pp. 100–5) (see also Figure 6.5, taken from Chamorro-Premuzic, 2007, and based on Gottfredson, 2004)....
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...Indeed, it has been noted that occupational prestige is a direct function of both job complexity and GMA (Gottfredson, 1997b)....
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104 citations
Cites background from "Why g matters: The complexity of ev..."
...Empirical studies have revealed that performance on measures of intelligence is one of the best predictors of ease of learning in school and in other evolutionarily-novel contexts (Gottfredson, 1997; Lubinski, 2000; Walberg, 1983)....
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...The implication is that gF should predict learning in evolutionarily novel contexts, such as school and the modern workplace, and this is the case (Carroll, 1993; Gottfredson, 1997; Walberg, 1984)....
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