Does your IQ reflect your intelligence?

Defining intelligence has always been a challenge for psychologists, for the simple reason that intelligence is just a concept. According to some specialists, intelligence allows us to make appropriate associations between events. For others, intelligence would allow us to adapt to new situations. As for Piaget, he said with derision that intelligence is not what we know, but what we do when we do not know…

Despite this lack of consensus on the definition of intelligence, psychologists have nevertheless tried to measure it, through the evaluation of our intelligence quotient (IQ). So is this famous IQ a good reflection of your intelligence? A brief history will help you to get an idea…

It was in 1905 that the first intelligence evaluation test was created. We owe it to the French Banet and Simon, respectively psychologist and doctor. At that time, school had just been made compulsory, and the French Ministry of Public Instruction was concerned with the education to be given to children in difficulty. He then called on Banet, who worked with Simon on a test to detect children with learning difficulties. For this, Banet and Simon first of all highlighted the typical developmental ages of the child (some exercises successful by “normal” children are not successful by younger children). They then had to compare the performance of the children tested with that of typical children of the same age: if a 4 year old child succeeded in exercises mainly solved by 6 year old children, this child was then said to have a “mental age” of 6 years or you can check the iq test on iq-global-test.com. This notion of “mental age” thus provided an indication of the “intellectual level” of the child. Conversely, mental retardation was characterized by a developmental age below the child’s reference age.

At the time, therefore, a pupil’s degree of intelligence was “arbitrarily” characterized by the difference between his “mental age” and his actual age.

The problem is that a delay does not have the same meaning depending on the actual age of the child. Thus, a 2-year delay is much more problematic in a 3-year-old than in a 12-year-old. To solve this problem, a German psychologist (Stern) had the idea, in 1912, to divide the “mental age” of the child by his actual age and multiply this result by 100. This is how was born the famous intelligence quotient or IQ. In my example, the 3-year-old child with a delay of 2 years therefore obtains an IQ of 33. As for the 12-year-old child, with the same number of years late, he obtains an IQ much higher by 83.

Subsequently, the notion of IQ evolved further. The psychologist Wechsler thus proposed to abandon the notion of mental age and quotient, by developing a test for adults. This time, Wechsler uses a statistical approach which makes it possible to compare performance between people, regardless of their age. For example, if you get an IQ of 100 (the standard score), that just means that 50% of the people in your comparison group scored better than you, and 50% scored worse:

The IQ has therefore become a ranking in which your result is located, relative to the result of others. The average IQ is conventionally fixed at 100. Mental retardation corresponds to an IQ of 70 or less, and the higher intellectual level is a level of 120 or more.

Today, therefore, the term IQ is used in an abusive manner, since it no longer corresponds at all to the intelligence quotient of the time.

One of the downsides of IQ is that it makes us think that intelligence comes down to a number. Let us recall first of all that there is no concrete definition of intelligence and that secondly, it has many facets. This means that it would take several measures to evaluate it (this is what recent tests propose, for example, distinguishing indices of verbal comprehension, memory or processing speed).

But what is perhaps the biggest flaw of IQ is that it makes us believe that intelligence is a characteristic in itself of the person, while IQ also varies according to his socio-economic background. . For the most critical, the QI would only be a means of legitimizing the perpetuation of social classes, of maintaining everyone in their rank. More objectively, the researchers found that performance on intelligence tests was indeed influenced by social class (studies have shown differences of around fifteen points between the average IQ of children of agricultural workers and that of the children of senior executives).

The IQ would therefore reflect intelligence less than behavior relating to a social class.

To conclude, here is the ironic definition of intelligence proposed by Banet, the inventor of tests: “Intelligence is what my test measures!” “. To meditate.