Besides, even the most radical and orthodox of IQ fanatics will accept that, while IQ is an important predictor of real-life outcomes, any model will increase in predictive accuracy if we also take into account other psychological (e.g., interests, personality, attitudes, emotional states, confidence, meta-cognition, motivation, beliefs, values, working memory capacity, etc.), and situational (e.g., pressure, incentives, familiarity, performance evaluation, bias, nepotism, etc.) variables. In contrast, measures of EQ, which are either unreliable, or pure reconfigurations of the Big Five personality traits (which, in combination, rival and even surpass IQ in predictive power, even when assessed via self-reports), rarely explain more than 5-10% of the variance in objective success outcomes. Indeed, IQ scores don’t just predict political orientation, they also predict a proclivity to be altruistic, empathetic, and emotionally intelligent. Moreover, although there is a common misconception that accepting this evidence (or even being a high IQ scorer) immediately makes one prejudiced, right wing, or narrow minded, the exact opposite is true: the higher your IQ score, the more tolerant, open-minded, liberal, and less prejudiced you are. Nonetheless, thousands of empirical studies published in top scholarly journals indicate that intelligence scores (including IQ tests) predict not just school and college performance, but also work performance, career success, leadership effectiveness, mental and physical wellbeing, happiness (which, across nations, co-varies with IQ), relationship success, and longevity. Critics and sceptics struggle to believe it, perhaps because intelligence tests often seem abstract, geeky, or because they were originally invented to identify school kids with learning difficulties. As a matter of fact, there is probably no claim - not just about intelligence, but about any variable or construct in the social sciences altogether - that has been more categorically refuted and frequently debunked by scientific evidence than this one (something that is in stark contrast with the looming replication crisis in psychology). That is, even if we regard IQ as an acceptable measure of someone’s reasoning or thinking potential, it is really just meaningless when it comes to explaining real-life success, or being clever in everyday situations. Sadly, IQ critics still make instant (prejudiced) inferences on other people’s intelligence, and all society’s prefer to allocate opportunities on the basis of nepotism and social class than actual intellectual ability, to their own peril.Ģ) IQ scores don’t predict anything useful: Another common misconception about intelligence (and especially IQ) scores, is that they are practically useless. Most notably, nothing stops people who habitually object to IQ tests from making their own, subjective, intuitive, and inaccurate evaluations of other people’s intellectual competence, which results in far more biased, unfair, and wrong decisions than relying on science-based intelligence tests does. Importantly, no other measure of intelligence, whether school or college grades, scores on either learning agility, emotional intelligence, or practical intelligence assessments, peer-estimates, and especially self-estimates (for an example of their inaccuracies, see this), are a better predictor of how fast and well people learn, reason, and amass knowledge. And yet, well-designed psychometric tests, which have been validated, used, and perfected for over 100 years, predict individual differences in a wide range of outcomes that are both logically and empirically connected with the definitions provided in (a). To be sure, we cannot accurately tell how smart people are simply by looking at it - though, admittedly, in some instances it is rather tempting to jump to conclusions.
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