The Problem with IQ

IQ, or “intelligence quotient” is a popular and well known concept frequently used as a shorthand in colloquial speech for a person’s overall intellectual capacity, as well as by legitimate scientists and researchers. A hypothesized method of measuring "general intelligence factor", IQ has come under fire in recent years due to fundamental and deep flaws in its application and the negative effect it has had on the opportunities and education of underserved and marginalized youth, among other criticisms. While its merits as a way to measure intelligence and whether intelligence can even be distilled down to a single number is up for debate, IQ’s history of being used to justify eugenics and racism cannot be ignored.

In their 1991 book “The IQ Mythology”, Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh level an in-depth take down and criticism of the concept of IQ as an institution, its history, and the ways in which it has misrepresented and harmed the people of whom it has claimed to be an objective measure. Mensh and Mensh discuss IQ’s numerous issues, such as its property of enforcing the expectations projected onto students; in one study they mention, teachers who were told certain students had been designated “intellectual bloomers” i.e. students with great academic and intellectual potential, by an IQ test; those students’ scores improved more than students who were not in this group when later retested. In reality, the students had been selected at random. (Mensh & Mensh xii) “The point to be drawn from this experiment,” Mensh and Mensh say, “is not…that with encouragement students can raise their IQ scores, but rather that the existence of the scores assures discouragement for students from certain racial and/or socioeconomic groups.” (xii) The study cited here shows that IQ is malleable, subject to encouragement (or discouragement) from educators, other authority figures, and potentially even peers. This research calls into question the usefulness of a person’s measured IQ as a true indicator of innate general intelligence. That is, if IQ can be trained and improved, does it tell us anything fundamental or useful about the brain of a person? This study also proves the IQ is susceptible to environmental factors not under the power of the individual. IQ disparities across demographics could be influenced or even fully explained by this fact. Additionally, to Mensh and Mensh’s point, as long as IQ is regarded as a useful and meaningful metric, individuals belonging to demographics that are known to do poorly on IQ tests will be underestimated and subsequently discouraged by educators and other authority figures, creating a kind of feedback loop where their apparent “intelligence” is lower due to a lack of positive nurture. As we will see later, other researchers (Allman; Dent) have shown that environmental factors have a huge impact on demographic based IQ (and other intelligence test score) trends, and the way IQ is upheld as a valuable and constructive metric and used to pre-judge individuals becomes yet another environmental factor holding back marginalized students.

For example, in his criticism of R.J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, a well known book using IQ to justify racist policies and attitudes (Herrnstein passim), Harold E. Dent discusses in detail the racist history of IQ and similar methods of measuring mental capacity. “From its very beginnings,” Dentsays, “the mental measurement movement in [the US] has been characterized by efforts to advance the theory of white intellectual superiority over non-whites.” (Dent 1) Throughout his response to The Bell Curve, Dent provides an overview of various figures in the field of psychology who advocated for or used IQ in their methodology, all of whom used it as a justification for their own racist beliefs. This has been true from the very early stages of the development of intelligence tests, such as psychologist Lewis Terman’s work on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence scale. Dent notes that “Terman’s views on racial differences are seldom emphasized in the literature,” despite his ties to the eugenics movement and firm belief that racial minorities are genetically inferior to whites. (Dent 3) Dent goes on to list many other psychologists who have used intelligence tests to “contribute…to the legacy of scientific racism,” including “Dr. Goddard [who was the] … Director of Research at the Vineland School for the Feeblemind …[who] was a strong advocate for the sterilization of the feebleminded and a staunch believer in the fledgling field of psychometrics.” (Dent 2) Terman and Goddard’s careers, as well as those of many other staunch believers in general intelligence tests, are troublingly rooted in eugenics and bigotry, a pattern continuing to manifest in the modern usage of IQ tests.

Dent furthers his argument by making the point that psychological testing is fundamentally biased against minority cultures, citing a history of pushback from activists as well as testimony from test industry leaders in federal court. (Dent 4) Dent makes it clear that the conception of IQ is fundamentally mired in racism and the oppression of marginalized people; biased against minority cultures; and overall fails to serve as a useful metric for measuring anything meaningful or inherent about the human psyche. Dent highlights the effects culture can have on intelligence evaluations in children, using an example of a Hawaiian child who does not have concepts of east and west, but rather is oriented by the mountains and the sea. When asked by a psychiatrist which direction the sun sets in, the child would state “the sea”, when in fact the answer in the manual, written from the perspective of dominant Western culture, would only allow for “West”. The child is correct in their cultural context, but within the framework of the dominant culture, they have answered the question incorrectly. (Dent 4) This is reflected in broader trends: “[C]ertain Research conducted by ETS staff indicates that the demand for speed [and] … the use of homographs and certain sentence structure confuses African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans and depresses their scores.” (Dent 5) Dent’s conclusions are clear: IQ (and other intelligence) tests do not provide any sort of neutral metric for measuring inherent intelligence, but are instead deeply mired in the majority culture, and in the base assumptions of knowledge that members of the majority culture assume are universal but are instead tied to their own socio-cultural context.

Another contemporary response to The Bell Curve, “Why IQ Isn’t Destiny” by William Allman, takes a different but similarly negative approach to critiquing Hernstein’s text. Allman discusses the lack of evidence supporting the idea that IQ leads to success or productivity in life and the workplace, as well as how there are a variety of types of intelligence that determine success in life, with IQ only measuring a narrow subset of these. “There are other kinds of ‘intelligence’ that are crucial to determining a person’s performance in life, this research shows. They include common sense, experience, intuition, creativity, and, perhaps most important, social intelligence. Some of the most path-breaking researchers argue that it is these talents, not the skills measured by IQ tests, that the brain was designed by evolutionary forces to perform.” (Allman 73) Allman speaks to the failings of a disproportionate focus on IQ, calling into question the idea of one measurable  “g factor” that contributes to all areas of intelligence. Among the many types of intelligence that IQ likely does not measure, experience in particular is as a type of intelligence that is inherently external and impossible to measure any innate inclination towards. Allman also tackles The Bell Curve’s assumption that racial differences in IQ are tied to genes; rather, there is good reason to believe that these gaps are due to factors such as poverty, racism, and nutrition, which due to “the historic legacy of racism” are factors far more likely to have an impact on black children during crucial developmental periods. (Allman) In short, uses of IQ to justify theories of racial superiority are unfounded and racist. Because measured IQ is largely dependent on early childhood development, Allman agrees with Mensch and Mensh that it is not an inherent factor set in stone, but rather a reflection of the individual's environment and privilege (or lack thereof).

Of course, despite these glaring issues baked into the foundation of IQ, many people in the field of psychology continue to ardently defend it. In her article for Scientific American simply titled “The General Intelligence Factor,” author Linda Gottfredson outlines evidence for the idea of a universal general intelligence factor which contributes to all areas of a person’s intelligence. Gottfredson cites Charles Spearman, a turn of the century psychologist, as well as several of his subsequents, who found that a g factor was present that could be used to predict trends with regards to individuals' skill across various types of intelligence tests, a finding that was not present on other types of neural evaluations, such as personality tests. (Gottfredson) Gottfredson also dismisses out of hand the idea that there exist other unmeasurable intelligences, saying that g still holds an effect over the rate of knowledge acquisition even when it comes to gaining experience, and has an impact of social intelligence. (Gottfredson) While there certainly can be multiple perspectives offered on the validity of IQ, even if Gottfredson is correct in her assertion that a g factor does exist, intelligence tests as they exist are certainly not objective measures of it. As they are currently used, the evidence is simply too strong that IQ tests as they currently exist are biased and mired in Western-centric and racist practices, beliefs, and legacies. Even if a g factor does exist, is it truly worth the harm sorting people into groups based around their mental capacity (a nearly impossible thing to measure neutrally) causes, or the eugenicist ideas this practice both stems from and feeds into? In this author’s opinion, the answer is no.

The IQ test and similar intelligence tests purporting to measure a test-taker’s inherent, genetic, or otherwise fundamentally ingrained generalized mental capacity are riddled with problems and reasons to reject their usage and elevated status. Their usage has served to reify and provide justification for racism, colonialism, and belief in the validity of eugenics. Regardless of any scientific basis a “g factor” may have, attempts to find and measure it will only serve to harm vulnerable people and will fail to be in any way objective. Rather than attempting to quantify the infinitely complex and always developing human brain into a single, dimensionless number, it’s important to take each individual mind on a case by case basis, from education to the workforce. The intelligence quotient is not a valuable metric, and it’s time to let it go.

Works Cited

Allman, William F. “Why IQ Isn’t Destiny.” U.S News & World Report, 24 October 1994.

Dent, Harold E. “Everything You Thought Was True About IQ Testing, but Isn’t: A Reaction to “The Bell Curve.”” 12 August 1995.

Gottfredson, Linda S. “The General Intelligence Factor.” Scientific American,  Winter 1998, pp. 24-29.

Herrnstein, Richard J. The Bell Curve. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Mensh, Elaine, and Harry Mensh. The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality. Southern Illinois University, 1991.