Intelligence

Ever since Alfred Binet tried to identify children who might be expected to struggle in school going forward, with an "intelligence test," testing has replaced intuition and description and thought as a measure of intelligence.

Intelligence testing has been used, at least at its earlier incarnations, for the purpose of crowd control. It was meant to stream large numbers of individuals into different pens, so they could be managed. If you were going to have trouble learning to read, to do sums, then you got moved into one pen; if you were already there or likely to move quickly, you got shunted to another. 

During World War I, the army wanted to know who had the "right stuff," the intelligence to become officers, to lead soldiers out of the trenches, charge across a field under withering fire and reach the enemy and later to organize the feeding and care of soldiers in a company. So the army used "intelligence tests" which reflected what Robert Yerkes, a Harvard professor of psychology, thought qualified as intelligence. It doesn't take a high IQ to see the problem with the tests as soon as you look at the questions:

1. Seven up is played with: a. rackets b. cards c. pins d. dice

2. The Merino is a kind of: a. horse b. sheep c. goat d. cow

3. The most prominent industry of Minneapolis is: a. flour b. packing c. automobiles d. brewing

4. Garnets are usually: a. yellow b. blue c. green d. red

5. Soap is made by: a. B.T. Babbit b. Smith &Wesson c. W.L. Douglas d. Swift & Co.

6. A house is better than a tent because: a. It costs more b. It is more comfortable c. It is made of wood

7. If the grocer should give you too much money in making change, what is the right thing to do?: a. Buy some candy off him with it b. Give it to the first poor man you meet c. Tell him of his mistake

So, what Yerkes was looking for was people with his own virtues, people who knew the sorts of things a Harvard gentleman should know. He was disturbed to discover that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe getting off the boats at Ellis Island failed these tests miserably and were clearly the scum of the earth, or as Mr. Trump might say, "They are not sending us their best people."

When I was growing up in the 1950's, we took "intelligence tests" with number 2 pencils filling in the blanks on single sheets of papers which were scored by machines, not computers but which aligned up our marks with holes on grids. I cannot recall the questions, but I know the results were considered so important and determinative we were never told our own scores.  Kristie Hansen, a gorgeous blue eyed blonde, however, knew her score: 154, but she never told me how she was able to ascertain this. Maybe her parents found out. 

When I was entering my senior year in high school and struggling in some of my classes, my parents went to the guidance counselor and were relieved to discover my "verbal IQ" score was 160--"Almost genius!" my mother trilled--even though my math score was "much lower." The counselor remarked she had never seen  a wider gap between these two types of intelligence, but that made sense to me as I had no interest in arithmetic or math--although for some reason I loved geometry, and algebra, once I repeated the course, seemed to make a lot of sense. Never could learn calculus--never was interested enough. Trigonometry struck me as worse than useless.

I concluded from this that whatever tests I had attacked with my number 2 pencil knew something about me which was true--although not the "genius" part, which I knew, for sure, was not true.

Years later, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine which purported to show that fetuses incubating in women who were hypothyroid during pregnancy wound up with lower IQ scores if the mother failed to receive thyroid hormone during pregnancy. There followed other studies. But the first study was peculiar in that it was done by screening 25,000 frozen sera (blood samples) and finding 64 mothers who were hypothyroid sometime during their pregnancies. Their kids were tested at 7-9 years of age and scored about 4 points lower than 125 children in a control group. Fifteen percent of the "affected" kids had IQs lower than 85 compared to only 5% in the control group.

Later studies confirmed this in 3 year olds.

The reason they were looking at thyroid in pregnancy is it has long been held that cretinism (a form of mental retardation accompanying other physical findings) happens in hypothyroid children but when children got tested just after birth and treated with thyroid hormone, cretinism vanished from the American scene. You had 6 weeks to start treatment, and if you did the brains were fine--but kids who went a year or two got cretinism. Note, we are talking about the levels of thyroid hormone in mothers in one study and in children in the other. We also have to conclude that the timing of thyroid hormone in the brain is critical, as children treated within six weeks of birth are just fine. So there are obviously critical timing issues with respect to brain development.

I objected to the study of 3 year olds at a Boston conference, questioning whether you can even know about lifelong intelligence from a test in a 3 year old. What tests are used? Are these 3 year olds even capable of  using those number 2 pencils? 

A pediatrician caught up with me in the hallway afterward and insisted you can tell who is intelligent by testing at age 3. She was most indignant I had questioned the meaning of IQ at age 3, and even more angry about my dismissal of IQ testing techniques. 

I asked her if anyone had tested those 3 year olds when they were 18. Of course not.

So, IQ testing is freighted with a lot of baggage and emotionally held beliefs. 

I later wrote Alan Kaufman, a Yale psychologist who has written extensively, and is a sort of IQ guru, about all this and he laughed about a difference of 4 IQ points, which he said could not be meaningful with current tests, like trying to determine if one elephant weighs 4 ounces more than another. 

The SAT exam has been used as an IQ test--it was supposed to be the great leveler, so kids from rural Iowa could be discovered as diamonds in the rough, bright kids without the advantages of kids in New York or prep schools would have, but who had just as great "native intelligence." 

It is reasonably clear that, even as the SAT has changed its questions over time, it tests one band of intelligence, which is one reason the ACT was developed, to show another sort of intelligence.

But I would like to submit, if I were devising tests for college admission, another sort of test: The New Yorker cartoon caption test. Look at these two samples:

Here we have three submission for captions for this cartoon which are so far beyond my capacity it is profoundly humbling. 

The picture, of course, evokes Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall, about to fall, but each of these contestants has seen  new and different possibilities:

1. Rather than worrying about Humpty falling and splattering the woman below, looking up his rear end is offended by the exposure.

2. The topicality of the price of eggs, having played such a prominent role in the last election is on the mind of the second contestant.

3. My favorite: In this caption we see Humpty not as teetering on the wall, in danger from his own precarious position but a willful Humpty, desperately trying to heave himself over the wall to safety.

I would grant admission to any of these three contestants to my college. They each display a sort of intelligence unmeasurable using number two pencils on test sheets.

Or take this cartoon: 

Here we have someone who looked at this array and noticed one road cone reaching out to another comfortingly, and the circle of chairs resembling an alcohol anonymous group session and the remark is totally appropriate to a sympathetic, therapeutic effort but at the same time to what traffic cones are all about: you go around them.

Brilliant.

Our colleges do, somehow, manage to attract brilliant minds, although they do not always retain them--Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates quickly concluded Harvard had nothing to offer them. 

But, if you believe as I do that societies really do need to collect and nurture brilliant minds, you might agree we need better ways of identifying them.

England, with Oxford and Cambridge, has managed to punch above its weight for nearly a century. CT scans, MRI's, the critical, early work on nuclear fission all came from England, not America. 

But, even more clearly, wouldn't it be wonderful to have on campus people with the sorts of minds which can win a New Yorker cartoon contest?