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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: In this article, the authors studied how intelligence and personality affect the outcomes of groups, focusing on repeated interactions that provide the opportunity for profitable cooperation, and found that intelligence has a large and positive long-run effect on cooperative behavior.
Abstract: We study how intelligence and personality affect the outcomes of groups, focusing on repeated interactions that provide the opportunity for profitable cooperation. Our experimental method creates two groups of subjects who have different levels of certain traits, such as higher or lower levels of Intelligence, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness, but who are very similar otherwise. Intelligence has a large and positive long-run effect on cooperative behavior. The effect is strong when at the equilibrium of the repeated game there is a trade-off between short-run gains and long-run losses. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness have a natural, significant but transitory effect on cooperation rates.

83 citations


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

  • ...This prediction is natural and is also supported by extensive research in psychology and economics (Neal and Johnson, 1996; Gottfredson, 1997; Bowles et al., 2001; Heckman et al., 2006; Jones and Schneider, 2010) The relationship between intelligence and outcomes is less clear when one instead considers the link between intelligence and strategic behavior, and when one seeks to explain how the outcomes of groups are influenced....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The incomplete current understanding of the biological foundations of aging-related cognitive declines and the continuous nature of many biomarkers commonly used in dementia diagnosis and classification together pose both opportunities and challenges in the current research landscape.
Abstract: This review summarizes empirical findings and theoretical concepts in cognitive aging and late-life dementia research, with emphases on (a) person-to-person heterogeneity in trajectories of cogniti...

83 citations


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

  • ...It has been suggested that the reason that cognitive abilities are robustly related to such a diverse array of real-world outcomes is that they measure the ability to deal with complexity, and that complexity is itself crucial for navigating society writ large (Gottfredson 1997)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: The cross-country growth literature (especially Sala-i-Martin 1997; Sala-i-Martin, Doppelhofer, and Miller 2004) has found that traditional education measures rarely have a robust relationship with growth and productivity--elementary education being a rare exception. By contrast, a new empirical growth literature (Jones and Schneider 2006; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002; Ram 2007; Weede 2004; Weede and Kampf 2002) has shown that a nation's average IQ has a remarkably robust relationship with its productivity (Figure 1). That a test designed by psychologists should have such a robust relationship with economic variables is a puzzle that demands explanation. For instance, Jones and Schneider showed that national average IQ was more robust than other human capital variables and was statistically significant at the 1% level in all 455 growth regressions that controlled for all 18 factors that passed Sala-i-Martin, Doppelhofer, and Miller's (2004) robustness tests. Of course, as with all the growth regression literature, a key difficulty is disentangling cause and effect. Thus, in this article, we run no growth regressions whatsoever. Instead, we perform a simple calibration of the IQ-productivity relationship based on widely agreed upon microeconomic parameters. That means we can directly estimate one causal channel running from cognitive ability to productivity. In the process, we learn the following: (1) If one knows the average IQ of a nation's citizens as estimated by Lynn and Vanhanen (2002, 2006), one can predict the average wages that immigrants from that country will earn upon their arrival in the United States--whether or not one controls for immigrant education and even if the test is completely visual rather than verbal. In other words, national average IQ predicts part of what Hendricks (2002) calls "unmeasured worker skill." (2) We find that a 1-point increase in national average IQ predicts 1% higher immigrant wages--precisely the value found repeatedly in microeconometric studies (note that by construction, 1 IQ point [approximately equal to] 1/15th of a standard deviation within any large national population). Together, Points 1 and 2 provide further evidence that cross-country IQ tests are valid predictors of worker productivity. (3) When IQ is added to the production function in the form implied by traditional, externality-free human capital theory, differences in national average IQ are quantitatively significant in explaining cross-country income differences. That said, our productivity accounting exercise does not resolve the puzzle of why high-IQ countries are 15 times richer than low-IQ countries. In a related vein, Hanushek and Kimko (2000) use national math and science test scores to verify that cognitive skills appear to matter more for groups than for individuals. Like us, they use immigrants to the United States as a way to test whether immigrants bring their home country productivity levels along with them when they immigrate to the United States. When they interpret their results within a Solow-type framework, they conclude that "the [cross-country] growth equation results are much larger than the corresponding results for individual earnings." In sum, our article rigorously explores the quantitative magnitude of the puzzle uncovered by Hanushek and Kimko (2000) and Hanushek and Woessman (2007). But by using IQ tests rather than other widely used math and science test scores, we can often double our sample size while simultaneously using the most widely analyzed, best understood form of cognitive test. We begin with an overview of the recent psychological literature on the validity of IQ tests and then proceed to our discussion of the link between IQ and immigrant wages. The discussion of IQ and immigrant wages yields a key parameter, [gamma], the IQ semi-elasticity of wages, which we use in our development accounting exercise. We then discuss the questions of reverse causality and trends in the IQ-productivity relationship over the past 40 yr and conclude by discussing how our results fit into the growth literature. …

80 citations


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

  • ...effectively with unfamiliar situations is at the core of most theorists’ definitions of intelligence ( Gottfredson, 1997 )....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper showed that the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) has the same construct validity in African university students as it does in non-African university students, and the hypothesis was tested that the APM had the same validity in students of African university.

80 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: The authors developed a heuristic, inspired by the field of evolutionary medicine, for identifying promising human enhancement interventions and provided criteria for the special cases where we have reason to believe that it is feasible for us to improve on nature.
Abstract: Human beings are a marvel of evolved complexity. Such systems can be difficult to enhance. When we manipulate complex evolved systems, which are poorly understood, our interventions often fail or backfire. It can appear as if there is a “wisdom of nature” which we ignore at our peril. Sometimes the belief in nature’s wisdom—and corresponding doubts about the prudence of tampering with nature, especially human nature—manifests as diffusely moral objections against enhancement. Such objections may be expressed as intuitions about the superiority of the natural or the troublesomeness of hubris or as an evaluative bias in favor of the status quo. This chapter explores the extent to which such prudence-derived anti-enhancement sentiments are justified. We develop a heuristic, inspired by the field of evolutionary medicine, for identifying promising human enhancement interventions. The heuristic incorporates the grains of truth contained in “nature knows best” attitudes while providing criteria for the special cases where we have reason to believe that it is feasible for us to improve on nature.

79 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...⁴⁴ Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard, Boykin, Brody, Ceci, Halpern, Loehlin, Perloff, Sternberg and Urbina 1996; Gottfredson 1997; Bersaglieri, Sabeti, Patterson, Vanderploeg, Schaffner, Drake, Rhodes, Reich and Hirschhorn 2004....

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  • ...⁴⁵ Gottfredson 1997; Gottfredson 2004....

    [...]

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.
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

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01 Jan 1983
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.

8,018 citations

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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.

7,809 citations

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TL;DR: Because of the extraordinary clarity and importance of the Commission's Report, the editors of the Communica t ions decided to reprint the Report's main section in its entirety and present it to you here.
Abstract: released a remarkab le report, A Nation at Risk. This Report has s t imulated in the media considerable discussion about the problems in our schools, speculation about the causes, and ass ignment of blame. Astonishingly, f e w of the media reports have focused on the specific f indings and recommendat ions of the Commission. A lmos t none of the med ia reports tells that the Commission i tsel f re frained f rom speculation on causes and f rom assignment of blame. Because of the extraordinary clarity and importance of the Commission's Report, the editors of the Communica t ions decided to reprint the Report's main section in its entirety. We are p leased to present it to you here.

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