The tests administered by physiologists are not really IQ tests. More like they are brain capability tests. They are there not to tell anyone how clever someone is, but to measure capability, and more importantly degraded capability. There can be a good mapping from how well a patient does in one area of a battery of tests to individual areas of brain function. So tests look for various signs of different forms of dementia or other pathologies. Doing them over a period of time and looking for trends is a big part of this.
Tests may include memory, memory processing, language processing, problem solving and the like. They light up different areas of the brain and indicate where there may be problems. This is going to require skill in interpreting the results. Interpretation that is going to include factors outside of the tests themselves.
If you send me a $100 Visa gift card I will email you back your IQ.
If I send you $200 do I get a higher or a lower IQ?
I bid $250 but I’d better get a damn good IQ for that
If you send me $1,000 I will send you my patented I.Q. Tester and certificate of authenticity.
At the risk of fighting the question, I think it’s worth asking yourself why you want to know.
It might feel good getting a high score, and validate that you’re one of “the smart ones”, but all that really matters is what you can do.
Yes that was pretty much my experience too. I was in my twenties, and there were a few other younglings, but then a massive gap. Perhaps people in their mid-thirties to early fifties are more focused on kids and careers.
Personality-wise, it was a pretty normal slice of the population, but I did find a few of the older Mensans at the bigger events insufferable. We’re talking peak Dunning-Kruger.
I was a Mensa member for years. As was/is both my wives. I’ve even been a local chapter president for a few years.
As one of our members put it memorably:
Mensa is a support group for people who score on the extreme fringe of a particular psych eval.
Their official standard is “top 2% IQ”. But their membership is a teeny teeny fraction of 2% of the general public. Said anther way, the real filter to membership isn’t passing the 2% IQ bar, it’s wanting / needing the “support group” aspect.
IME through 4 local chapters over 4 decades, most (not all) Mensans are semi-failures socially & career-wise. Who salve their wounds by hanging out with other similar folks with whom they can wail at the injustice of it all while smugly asserting their own innate coolitude. Been there, done that myself.
There’s plenty of relative “normies” in the crowd too. But the misfits who’ve found a home with their fellow misfits is the bulk.
No, but I’ve met a few Mensa members that frame and hang their membership certificate on the wall of their office and then refer to it when you meet them for the first time. In both cases, my opinion was that they were both on the spectrum in some way.
I don’t know if my population exposure is broad enough to make such a claim, but this is consistent with my limited sample size.
ETA: @ the post 2 posts up.
Yeah. Whole lotta ASD goin’ on in a Mensa chapter. Far short of universal, but it’s noticeably enriched ore versus the general populace.
What is ASD?
Autism Spectrum Disorder. The current official term for what used to be Asperger’s Syndrome plus what’s always been called “autism”.
Which is why “on the spectrum” has now become a term of both pop-psych and legit psychological practice as a way of referring to folks exhibiting ASD-like socially awkward behaviors.
Thanks. I just momentarily blanked on that. I actually have a close friend who has a son “on the spectrum” who is currently in a graduate program in Engineering who is definitely Mensa material. I can’t see the poor guy ever working productively with human colleagues.
I’m incredibly intelligent. I remember things in a way that few other humans can. Like, you could read off a list of five words and I’d remember those five words a minute later. Watch this…
man… woman… person… camera… tv…
Me too. Although in my case my friend is Grandma, not Mom or Dad.
He’s an odd, odd kid, but scary smart. If he can find a niche somebody will hire him and throw pizza down into his basement where he’ll be happily and solitarily productive for decades.
Wow, that’s impressive! Have you considered running dor office?
Hey that’s cool. You know right of the bat they are tools.
Psychologists will often administer general intelligence tests. In a research setting that can be done for any number of purposes, but a big one being a short form of a general intelligence test can capture a lot of information with a small amount of effort, and the information can be useful for answering a variety of research questions.
A clinical setting is exactly where…
…interpretation is required. Anybody can look at the score from a test and say “this person is below average in intelligence,” but somebody trained to interpret the tests may look and see that verbal comprehension is low, but the other areas are all normal, and then diagnose a reading disability, for a simplistic example.
Tune in any of the three Dick Wolf “FBI” shows. If you think they’re the damn dumbest claptrap on TV within the first two minutes, you are the genius of the world.
I heard a comedian joke ‘you can go from feeling like a genius to a moron in the space of 30 minutes while watching tv. Wheel of Fortune is at 7:00 and Jeopardy! starts at 7:30’
Intelligence tests are regarded as being useful for getting a relative measure of an individual’s ability to perform reasoning skills, but one of the frequent criticisms is that it doesn’t measure or recognize other types of intelligence, such as emotional, creative, musical, etc.