Ch. 7: Intelligence Intelligence is the ability to direct one’s thinking, adapt to one’s circumstances and learn from one’s experience   Goddard administered intelligence tests to immigrants on Ellis Island and concluded that the majority of Jews, Hungarians, Italians and Russians were feebleminded He also tested Americans and determined they were feebleminded and were responsible for the government’s social problems and suggested that these people be segregated and not be able to procreate. The United States subsequently passed laws restricting immigration of people from Southern and Eastern Europe and 27 states passed laws requiring the sterilization of mental defectives We begin with the assumption that there is a property called intelligence that leads people to experience a wide variety of consequences like getting good grades in school, becoming a great leader and earning a high income.

Today - the most widely used intelligence tests are the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler Adult intelligence Scale   The Wechsler has 13 subtests involving seeing similarities and differences, making inferences, working out and applying rules, remembering and manipulating material, constructing shapes, recalling general knowledge, explaining practical problems in daily life. The correlation between a person’s score on a standard intelligence test and his/her academic performance is roughly r=.5 (.7 and above is considered high) And test score is also the best predictor of the number of years of education a person will receive Intelligence test scores are also among the best predictors of how well employees perform in their jobs and job performance correlates more highly with intelligence. Psychologist Howard Gardner believes standard intelligence tests fail to measure some important human abilities. He believes there are eight distinct kinds of intelligence linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic

How different cultures describe intelligence:   The Confucist people emphasize the ability to behave properly and Taoist tradition emphasizes humility and self-knowledge Buddhists emphasize determination and mental effort. Westerners think intelligent people speak quickly and often, have large vocabularies. African and Asian societies see intelligence as including social responsibility and cooperativeness. Studies show that the intelligence test scores of identical twins are strongly correlated: r= .86 when the twins are raised in the same household and when raised in different households the correlation is r=.78 This means that people who share all their genes have similar intelligence scores regardless of whether they share their environments. Genes play an important role in determining intelligence.

Intelligence is generally stable over time so those who were most intelligent at age 11 are likely to be the most intelligent at age 80   The other kind of intelligence is called absolute intelligence which can change considerably over time; it tends to increase between adolescence and middle-age and decline thereafter. The sharpest decline occurs in old age and is due to slowing of the brain’s processing speed. Age related declines are more evident in some domains: On tests that measure vocabulary, general information and verbal reasoning people show small changes from ages 18-70 On tests that are timed: have abstract material, involve making new memories or require reasoning about spatial relationships, most people show marked declines in performance after middle age.

Economics:   One of the best predictors of a person's intelligence is the material wealth of the family that he or she was raised in; we call this SES: socio-economics status. Studies show that being raised in a high SES family rather than a low SES family is worth between 12 and 18 IQ points Low SES families children have poor nutrition, medical care, experience greater daily stress and they're more likely to be exposed to environmental toxins like air pollution and lead which impairs brain development. Low SES children are less likely to be breast-fed and breast-feeding is known to enhance IQ by about six points Children who grow up in more intellectually stimulating environments seem to be more intelligent Intellectual stimulation matters because in high SES families, parents are more likely to provide books and they read to their children.

Are Some Groups More Intelligent Than Others?   Stanford Prof. Lewis Terman administered IQ tests and he concluded that whites perform much better than nonwhites The question is when whites perform better than nonwhites are the inferior races really inferior or are they merely unfortunate in their lack of opportunities to learn Terman concluded that their dullness seems to be racial or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come and he said the children in this group should be segregated into separate classes because they cannot master abstractions He concluded that a person’s intelligence is a product of his or her genes despite how repugnant these conclusions may be Some studies conclude that some groups routinely outscore others on intelligence tests; whites routinely outscore Latinos who routinely outscore blacks

Group Differences in Intelligence Women routinely outscore men on tests that require rapid access to and use of semantic information production and comprehension of complex prose, fine motor skills and perceptual speed of verbal intelligence   Men routinely outscore women on tests that require transformations in visual or spatial memory, certain motor skills and fluid reasoning and abstract mathematical and scientific domains Group Differences in Intelligence Scientists agree that environment plays a major role in intelligence. African-American children may have lower birth weights, poor diets, higher rates of chronic illness poor medical care and attend poorer schools African-American children are three times more likely to live in single parent households Given the big difference socioeconomic status between European Americans and African-Americans it's not surprising that African-Americans score on average 10 points lower on IQ tests.