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

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.