Debunking Science Influencers’ Claims on IQ

There’s so much misinformation out there about intelligence. So today we’re going to be debunking claims on YouTube about IQ and intelligence. We’re going to look at what’s really true. This video is from Sihow Psych, which is a Hank Green channel with 860,000 subscribers. They do a lot of content about psychology. People love to bring up how Einstein had a genius level IQ of 160. And to join Mensah, you need to have an IQ of at least 130.

Yeah, it’s funny. So many people think that Einstein had an IQ of 160. This idea is actually a little bit silly because as far as anyone knows, Einstein never took an IQ test and we can’t just say because he was a great genius who developed all these really fascinating and important ideas in physics that he necessarily had an IQ of 160. There are many different things that go into creative success. Einstein had these incredibly profound and important

Theories of physics and the fact that he was able to produce that does imply that he was probably incredibly intelligent. But intelligence is not the same as IQ and we actually don’t know his IQ score. IQ is a measure of intelligence. And we can’t just say because he graded these great theories, he necessarily had an extremely high IQ. But is IQ even a good way to measure intelligence? Well, that depends on how you define intelligence. IQ scores may be a useful shortorthhand

To talk about education strategies for big groups of people like when discussing public policy. But IQ can be affected by a lot of factors, even things as subjective as your motivation while taking the test. Yeah, it’s absolutely true that your motivation taking a test can affect your IQ scores. This is a source of variability where a test will always depend on how hard you try. If you don’t try at all, you’re probably not going to do very well. So,

This doesn’t make the idea of a Q invalid. It just means it’s a source of noise in IQ testing. IQ tests will be limited in their ability to measure people’s actual IQ scores based on whether people try during the test. But psychologists seem to agree that one thing that seems to help people with learning and academic achievement is thinking about intelligence as a thing that can change. What he’s talking about here is the idea of growth mindset,

Which is essentially the view that you can always improve your abilities at anything. So suppose you do badly on a test. If you have a growth mindset, you’ll think, well, next time I can work harder, I can learn the subject better, and therefore do better at the test. On the other hand, if you have a fixed mindset, you’ll just think, well, this test shows how good or bad I am at the subject. since I did bad, it means I’m

Bad at the subject and therefore I’m going to be doomed to do badly in the future as well. And there’s a lot of research that suggests it is a bit helpful to have a growth mindset. When you randomize people and teach them about growth mindset, they do tend to do a little bit better in certain ways. So, it’s a useful mindset to have. That being said, it’s important to distinguish between things we can improve at and things we can’t. No

Matter how much growth mindset you have, it’s not going to make you taller. However, you can improve your muscle growth. So, growth mindset about how strong you are, that makes a lot of sense. And so it’s important to distinguish there’s some things that we have control over and some things that we don’t. And having a growth mindset about the things we do have control over can be very valuable. This video is from the very popular YouTube channel

Veritasium. They have almost 20 million subscribers. >> Tomorrow I’m going to do an IQ test for real. Before I do that, I want to try to improve my score and so I’m going to try to do a whole bunch of practice tests. I think this test is trainable, but tomorrow we’re going to see whether that’s true or not. >> So are IQ tests trainable? It’s a really interesting question. If you take any specific type of question on an IQ test,

For example, vocabulary questions or puzzle solving questions, you’ll find that you can actually improve at them through practice. If you do a whole bunch of those questions, especially if you kind of break down the mistakes you made, you can get better at them. Does that mean that IQ is trainable, though? And the research is really interesting on this. It finds that while you can improve at any specific type of IQ question, what you don’t find is strong

Generalization to other types of IQ questions. So generally an IQ test will have a wide variety of types of intelligence tasks on them. And getting better at one type of task tends to not lead to improvements at other types of tasks. So it’s a tricky question. Yes, you can get better at IQ tests. If you practice whatever types of questions are on that test, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re raising your IQ because if you go to another IQ test

That just happens to use different types of questions, it won’t generally make you better at it. There’s actually a really interesting example of this from the academic literature. A researcher, Anders Ericson, was studying working memory and he had people try to remember digits. And he had one study participant in particular who started with an ability to remember about seven digits at a time, which is very normal, very typical. But over 2 years, he had this person do hundreds of sessions where

They had to try to remember digits. Well, by the end, this person was able to remember something like 80 digits at a time, which is way beyond what normal people are able to do. And it wasn’t because this person had an incredible IQ. It was because they practiced and practiced and their brain invented strategies for getting better and better at remembering digits. And I think this is a really important thing to understand about intelligence. You

Can get better at any aspect of intelligence that you want that you want to practice. Go pick that particular task, practice it, break down your mistakes, and you’ll get better and better. But that’s different than saying you’re improving your IQ. They’re simply improving their ability at that type of task. This is a YouTube short about IQ that has almost 10 million views. The person with the highest IQ of all time could at 18 months read through newspapers and at 5

Years old calculate the day of any date in the past 10 years. He got into Harvard University at 11 years old and could speak 25 languages. His name is William James Situs and he is estimated to have had an IQ of 275. >> So notice I use the word estimated. So Situs never took an IQ test as far as anyone’s aware. I don’t even know that IQ test existed at the time. And in fact, he was born just before 1900 and

IQ testing was very early and there’s no way he took a valid IQ test that could measure his IQ at that level. In fact, if today someone claims they took an IQ test with their IQ greater than 160, you should be very skeptical because most IQ tests don’t even measure IQ’s above 160 reliably. The reason for this is that if you have extremely high IQ, you will tend to get all or almost all questions right on a standard IQ test, which means

That you can’t tell how good people are because if they max out all the answers, well, you can’t tell the difference between someone with very high IQ and an extremely extremely high IQ. You have to actually develop special tests to even measure IQ’s that high. Most tests are not equipped to do this. And what’s so ridiculous about this claim is that funnily enough, if IQ were normally distributed if it follows a bell curve, as many people believe, then an IQ this

High should actually essentially never happen in the history of the world. Not even close. Situs, I’m sure, was a very smart person. He was a child prodigy, but he doesn’t have an IQ this high. And in fact, if we think about the highest IQ person in the world, there’s a very high likelihood that that person never got an IQ test and that nobody knows who they are. It’s probably some random person who went about and lived their

Life. They may not have ever discovered the theory of relativity or anything like that. Maybe they were really good at their job. Maybe they did really interesting things, but chances are they never had an IQ test and nobody’s ever heard of them. This video is from the Jubilee channel. They have 10 million subscribers and they like to do a lot of social experiments. In this case, they have people rank their own and other people’s intelligence. >> Why don’t you guys rank each other from

1 to six, including yourself, and give reasons why you want to do what you’re doing? >> Got to go one. >> No. >> Oh, yeah. Two. Three. four, five, six. >> So, one thing that’s happening here is that they’re ranking each other based on intelligence. Intelligence is a broad concept and different people are going to use that phrase in different ways. For example, some people might emphasize social skills more in their definition of intelligence. Other people might

Think, well, social skills are not about intelligence. Intelligence is about abstract reasoning or logic or something like that. So, there’s an inherent ambiguity in these rankings. >> 1 2 3 4 5 6. So, one thing that’s interesting here is they’re actually having to rate their own intelligence. And we actually did some research on this and we found some really fascinating findings. So, this is our site personality map where we make available over a million correlations about humans. And you can

Actually go sign up and you can search it. You can find all the different kinds of things about how human traits are related to other human traits. We actually collected data on people’s overestimation of their own IQ. We had them estimate what IQ percentile they are and then we actually measure their IQ percentile and we look at the difference between those. And it’s really interesting to look at what predicts people overestimating their IQ. We first have a bunch of variables

Related to just performance. And that makes a lot of sense because of what’s known as the Dunning Krueger effect. It’s well known that people with higher IQs tend to underestimate their IQ and people with lower IQs tend to overestimate it. And so that’s kind of the first factor we find here. But it’s funny because we also find another factor here. We also find this other interesting factor which is narcissism. The more narcissistic people are, the more they tend to overestimate their IQ.

This video is a clip from the show Adam Ruins Everything by Adam Conover. >> We think IQ tests are objective evaluations of our mental abilities, but in reality they are deeply biased and controversial tools that might not predict intelligence at all. >> You know, it’s interesting might not predict intelligence at all. I mean that statement might is doing a lot of work there. But I think almost any way you measure intelligence, you’ll find that IQ is at least correlated with it. That

Being said, people can define intelligence differently. Okay. So, not everyone’s going to agree on what is intelligence exactly. And the correlation between IQ and intelligence will depend on how you choose to define intelligence. >> Nope. The only thing IQ tests tell you is how good you are at IQ test. >> That’s definitely not true. I mean, people have studied what IQ tests predict and they predict a wide range of different things. They to some extent predict income. They predict education,

Grades in school. So, yeah, IQ tests definitely don’t just measure what’s on an IQ test. That’s the whole point. If they just did that, they would be useless. If you look at any research, you’ll find immediately that they do predict a wide range of things. And in fact, the whole idea of an IQ test is that it’s designed to be one number that predicts performance across a wide range of tasks. That is literally how you measure IQ. You give people a range of

Intelligence tasks that are different from each other and you look for the single number that predicts across them as well as possible. >> Early tests focus almost entirely on concepts that only rich white folks would know. >> That can’t be true. Well, I’m not rich and I can answer these questions. Describe everything required by a riata. >> Well, there absolutely are ways of measuring IQ that are extremely biased. Right? If you ask for factual knowledge that tends to be cultural, then you’re

Going to find that some people will perform better because of their cultural background. There have been attempts to try to make tests that are less culturally based. For example, the Ravens Progressive Matrices test. What it does is it shows you nine boxes and eight of them are filled in with symbols and you have to try to guess what the next symbol is, what the ninth symbol is, essentially looking for the pattern. And the idea here is well that doesn’t

Depend on knowledge about the world. That might be cultural. However, it could still be a bit problematic because if you grew up in a culture where you tend to do tasks of that type, even if it’s not exactly the same, you’ll have more practice where if you come from a culture where you’ve never seen anything like that before, then you’ll have more of a disadvantage of doing that kind of task. This video is from Brainy Dose.

They have 2.4 million subscribers. >> Have you ever encountered someone who really wanted everyone to think they were smart? And whether they were using big words or just flaunting their nerdy hobby, it was quite obvious that they weren’t as bright as they tried to appear. While smart individuals are more likely to believe that they aren’t particularly smart. >> So that’s actually false. people who are well at least if we think of IQ as a measure of intelligence. People with

Higher IQs do tend to believe they have high IQs. So there is a link between having a high IQ and believing you have a high IQ. I think a lot of times people get confused about this because they think about things like the Dunning Krueger effect which is that people with higher IQs tend to underestimate their IQ which is true. So higher IQ people do tend to think they have higher IQs but they also tend to underestimate their

IQ. Both of those things are true simultaneously. So as we can see in this chart for example the blue line here the trend line does go up. People with higher measured IQ do assess their IQ as being higher. Not by a lot, but they do assess it as higher. So higher IQ people do think they have higher IQs on average, but they also tend to underestimate their IQs. I hope you found today’s discussion informative. If you’re interested in understanding your

Intelligence better, we have a cognitive assessment we make. You can find it on our website clearthinking.org. It measures seven different aspects of your intelligence and gives you a full report to help you understand yourself better. You might enjoy our video where we ran a giant study in intelligence and we tested many different claims about it. If you found this video interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you’d subscribe to our channel.