Jane’s company would be full of people who were impossible to manage.
“Work ethic is far more important than IQ.”
You’re assuming that work ethic will differ overall between the two IQ groups, and/or that job recruiters can reliably identify ‘work ethic’.
If they average the same, its a non issue regarding which company will succeed.
Otara
No matter how many times I point to, provide quotes from, link to copies of articles, summarize or otherwise describe the fairly vast empirical literature on the subject of IQs, ignorance abounds.
It persists in spite of, indeed in the face of, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
People, at least posters on the Straight Dope, do not want to know about IQ. They want, for some reason that I cannot fathom, to feel that IQ does not describe much about a person’s capacity. Nevertheless, on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance, it surely has been the most frustrating phenomenon I have encountered.
Most of the people in this thread have demonstrated that they know nothing about IQ, but are nevertheless willing to make grand pronouncements about it. Please stop doing this, and educate yourselves. I’ve tried to help, but I am ready to give up.
Just some quick hits, and in most cases, I’m repeating myself.
- IQ is very, very stable over the life span.
- I don’t know of any evidence to suggest that you can really train people for these tests. I do know that repeated assessments with them (which should generate practice effects) do not reveal significant changes in scores.
- “Solving word problems” is not a primary feature of IQ tests. It is a small component of some tests, but you have to realize that the “IQ test” offered on Facebook is not a standard IQ test. Nor are the SAT or ACT IQ tests. Primary IQ tests are the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test or, a bit more old school, the Stanford Binet.
- IQ tests do not measure “a narrow slice” of anything. They measure performance in a relatively wide range of verbal and non-verbal performance areas.
- IQ is not just a predictor of academic performance, nor is it just a predictor of how well you will perform on an IQ test.
As to the OP, since IQ is a strong predictor of job performance, then all other things being equal, a group selected for high IQ will perform better than a group selected for average IQ. NB: “all things being equal” - Of course, individual differences exist, so some individuals will achieve high IQs and still have problems such as a crap work ethic, and some will achieve high IQs but lack the social capacities to function well in some types of jobs. However, among people of average IQ, some will have a crap work ethic, and some will lack the social capacities to function well in some types of jobs. [Edited to add: Please add “difficulty to manage” to this statement. Having a high IQ does not necessarily make one difficult to manage, any more so than having an average IQ makes you necessarily ready, willing and able to happily take direction.]
Please, on the subject of IQ, engage your intellect, educate yourself, and fight ignorance.
Do you have cites for the stability of IQ over the life span?
I admit I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard that IQ has not been found to be very stable in children. And I was tested 3 times as a child with a nearly 30-point difference between my highest and lowest score. I have never been tested as an adult.
Yes.
Where’s your evidence that inventiveness, in fact, any kind of creativity, is tied to IQ? Ditto person skills, any empathic job (like…sales or marketing).
Forgive me, but I have presented this information in about three different threads over the past three to six months. Please search my user name in combination with “stability” or “intelligence” or both.
The stability of IQ in childhood is a little bit lower than adolescence or adulthood, and the earlier you go in childhood, the more difficult it is to measure intelligence, but IQ is still very stable (still one of the most stable characteristics of a person over time) in childhood and from childhood to adulthood. I will also add that it is a bit more subject to change due to environmental effects during childhood than in the later life span, and may show increasing declines as the number of environmental risk factors during childhod mount.
Jesus wept. Hentor bashed his forehead into his monitor.
Its a lot more frustrating to do that these days, there just isnt the satisfaction with an LCD that you get with a CRT.
To be fair Hentor, theres enough actual psychologists I know who arent much better. People really really like to think they can judge things better than standardised tests.
Otara
Think how VARIABLE you were as a child when it comes to all things. One day you can act and think in a manner typical for a child many years your senior. The next day, behave more like someone years younger than your chronological age. That your test results could vary significantly doesnt surprise me in the least.
You state that as established fact yet that is exactly the question.
As Hentor states
All other things are never equal. And many jobs do not require a superior IQ so much as being to work well with others, to maintain your own self-confidence while accepting and working with other’s ideas, to know when to fight and when to go with the flow, etc. And of course innate skills in other areas relevant to a particular task that only correlates loosely to IQ if at all. And that includes many jobs that are thought of as “cognitive work”, jobs in which an above average IQ is required, but above that, higher IQ doesn’t mean much.
Let’s use one example I know well - medicine. Sure, you won’t get into medical school or through it if you do not have an IQ above the national mean and you won’t be a very good doctor if you are not a bit smart. But once you have a doctor above that bar, is a higher IQ predictive of a better physician? Now admittedly I only have my guesses at my fellow physicians’ IQs but my distinct impression is that some of the smartest have very little in the way of people skills and that some of the best clinicians are just smart, not brilliant, but good at listening and caring without being sucked in as if it happening to them. Some of the best surgeons I know are not people I would peg as geniuses. Far from it. Smart enough, good enough at listening to hear what needs to be heard and to say what needs to be said, but great skills with their hands.
Even for that job, often thought of as a higher IQ profession, the issue is having an IQ above some minimal threshold, but higher than that is not much more of a plus. That’s why a running gag in med school always was that you want a doctor who was in the middle of his medical school class - not the bottom, but just as much so, not the very top scorer either.
Indeed it is not always easy to quantify those other features: the light is better under the IQ lamppost; but that is still not where the keys are for many tasks.
Figure that games like Minesweeper, or other small puzzle games, are essentially the same as an IQ test question. A person who has never seen Minesweeper might take 10 minutes to solve the starting, easy puzzle, simply because he is figuring out the rules and the tricks for solving the puzzle at the same time as trying to solve the puzzle itself. For the first few times he plays (if done in relatively quick succession), the speed and accuracy at which he plays will drop rapidly. If you test him at Minesweeper years later, he’ll probably still remember it well enough to play at a similar level as where he was when he last played.
Again, that’s just as true of any puzzle as it is with Minesweeper. Continued exposure and practice, in a large enough quantity, can allow someone to become faster and more accurate at that type of puzzle. Someone who has been exposed to and trained at a significant number of different types of puzzle, when encountering a new type of puzzle, will probably find it easier than someone who doesn’t play lots of puzzles, because there’s a decent likelihood that there’s a related type of puzzle that he knows well.
Unless you can argue that IQ test questions aren’t a form of puzzle, then it’s fairly well shown that people can become better at puzzles, and subsequently it should apply to IQ tests.
Though, if I only play Minesweeper 4 times in my life, with a 15 year gap between tests, it’s unlikely that much will change. You’ll get a stable reading on my ability to solve Minesweeper. This is how most people take the IQ test, with no particular knowledge of the questions asked within and no practice taking them.
All of this really boils down to rank supposition. How do you know that in general the performance of physicians with an IQ of 120 is equal to the performance of physicians with an IQ of 140? Or, to put it slightly differently, how do you know that there is not an incremental improvement in performance with each incremental improvement in IQ? As you say, you don’t even know the IQs of your colleagues, but you nevertheless feel comfortable about drawing conclusions that there are no differences above some particular undefined cut-point.
On a second point, what is your evidence that “people skills” are inversely correlated with IQ? Sure, I can think of smart people who are dicks. I can also think of smart people who are very kind and empathic. More to the point, what I can think about is as irrelevant as what you can think about. That’s the point of actually relying on empirical evidence than gut feelings or anecdotes about who we know.
And if “people skills” are not correlated with IQ, then we are back to a position in which we are questioning whether or not we can expect different levels of performance between two people who are equal on “people skills” but are different on IQ. I would wager every time on the performance being better when given a higher IQ, and I would win more money than I would lose.
I said that IQ tests on Facebook are not IQ tests. Minesweeper is certainly not an IQ test, and the same will be true for any game you choose to select. But rather than continue to beat my head against rank ignorance, I’ll simply ask you to provide some evidence for “training to improve IQ scores.” That will be moer useful to illustrating your point than thought experiments about Windows games and IQ.
Kinda like crossword puzzles. First you’re struggling with everything… then you get better at it, you start to recognize the familiar words… and eventually you start to work from a sort of meta-solving base, where you recognize which of the usual suspects is responsible for creating today’s crossword and you start filling it out without looking at the hints because you know what words the guy (or girl) likes to use. You see that double s in the middle of a word and you know they have a propensity for using “demission”.
…which is why I stopped doing the crossword on my morning papers, it’s just no fun anymore.
Or Sudoku… at first you’re logicing your way through it one square at a time… but eventually you start recognizing the patterns faster than you can write them down. It becomes boring. …yea, I also stopped doing Sudoku.
Same thing with IQ tests, you learn to recognize patterns.
Well, of course Jane will hire a better staff, on average, than Bob IF all other variables are exactly equal and that isn’t likely to happen. Clearly Jane’s group are better at something, whatever an IQ test measures. I would be willing to bet that if Bob hires the best dressed and groomed applicants and Jane hires the worst dressed and groomed, then Bob’s company will easily beat Jane’s. So I am claiming that the way a person dresses for an interview is a better indicator of business success that any IQ test.
You would think that those who feel that IQ tests are such a good indicator of, well something, could come up with some tests or something that would substantiate their claims. Whatever they are. Claims that IQ tests are good measures IQ is kind of circular.
I searched on Google Scholar, and there weren’t any papers about the topic one way or the other (though I did find this). So again, unless you can say why an IQ test question isn’t a type of puzzle, what happens with puzzles should be applicable.
You’d think that, wouldn’t you? You might think that they would devise some sort of experiment, and then conduct that experiment, and then publish it in journals dedicated to the sciences with interest in human performance, cognition, occupational psychology and so on and so forth. Then you might expect that others would look at whole bunches of such articles, and write papers summarizing the overall findings. You might expect that someone would try to provide that information to groups of laypeople.
You might not expect that people would completely ignore that information and continue to spitball bullshit about how there’s no substantiation for any claims about the relationship between IQ and other outcomes. You’d be surprised.
Nonsense, I can take IQ tests repeatedly and produce widely varying scores. You will say that I would be deliberately skewing the results to prove a point. But that proves my point. You have no idea what factors other than intelligence contribute to a person’s score. This is like trying to measure average driving speeds by posting a police officer with a radar gun at roadside. The average will be considerably lower than actuallity because people slow down when they see the police officer.
In a related point, I don’t have the facts here, but motivation would be a factor, and it seems that IQ testing avoids using motivational factors. If there are studies that show motivation does not affect IQ scores, please let me know.
I don’t have the details, but I’ve seen several references to memory training being used to increase IQ scores. Feel free to refute this.
This is interesting, because solving word problems seems to be a major factor in the academic performance that IQ proponents claim to measure. If you could show an actual decoupling of IQ tests and ‘word problems’ you might have some evidence of IQ as an independent measurement of intelligence.
Narrow and wide are relative terms. Out of the possible ways that intelligence may be measured, IQ tests measure within a narrow range. Weighing 1 million grains of sand may sound like a large sample, but the number of grains of sand on the makes 1 million an insignificant number.
I’ve never seen IQ tests strongly correlated to anything except academic performance and income. And income is strongly tied to academic performance. In addition, correlation does necessitate a cause and effect.
This is contrary to all the other evidence that shows job performance is related to motivation, reward, group dynamics, and numerous factors which have no bearing on intelligence or IQ scores. I think you are making this one up entirely, or relying on fallacious evidence. The vast majority of jobs in the world have few requirements for intellectual capacity at all, and as stated in previous posts, intelligence can hinder job performance.
Physician, heal thyself.
Hmmm… I don’t think so.
I’ve done tons of research in this area of IQ test performance improvement. There is absolutely no training program or test taking technique I know of that will teach people with average IQ (100) to attain scores of 150 or 200.
I’m not going so far to say it’s impossible but such a methodology doesn’t exist today. I’m not totally doom and gloom because I’m holding out hope that one of my multimedia products can boost IQ scores and the insights can be fed back into neuroscientists work but I have to be realistic that it may fail.
Bash away. Doesn’t change the evidence that the IQ-creativity “correlation” doesn’t persist past 120. Skewed Pear and all that…