Meta

IQ and Motivation

So one of the most interesting items I came across while looking into the concept of intelligence was this blog post by intelligence scholar Earl Hunt. Says Hunt:

The statistics are pretty clear. Tests of general cognitive ability are by far the best tests for predicting performance in both academia and the workplace. If a job is cognitively demanding, the correlation between test performance and job performance will be somewhere in the .40-.55 range. This is about twice as high as any tests of personality or motivation…

…BUT it’s also pretty clear that people do not believe this. Over and over, I read and hear statements like “Personality is much more important than intelligence” or “Motivation is the important thing.” or ”
I knew someone who had real good (bad) test scores and they did as real bad (good) job.”…

…

When people reason about things, their personal experiences have much more weight than abstract statistics. AND, second point, we live in a cognitively segregated society. (The reason is at least partly because we live in an educationally segregated society.) To see what I mean, ask yourself how many of your friends…people you deal with at least once a week, and in a setting that is not restricted to formal exchanges, like a passenger-bus driver exchange, have markedly different educational backgrounds than you do?. I would bet that not very many do. (This is not quite so much the case if you are in the military, but that’s a special situation.)

Put these two tendencies together, and you see that most people do not get to observe the problem solving behaviors of people whose intelligence differs very much from their own. This is certainly true of professionals, college professors, executives, etc….The people who do the talking. Because the typical person sees only a small bit of the range of intelligence that is actually out there, the importance of intelligence…in the big picture, in the whole population just isn’t appreciated.

So IQ matters more than we realize, and more than motivation and personality in the grand scheme of things, at least according to Hunt.

On IQ tests, a single standard deviation equals 15 points. So if this research is right, giving people actual incentives to do well on IQ tests (money, for example) has the following effect:

Those with low IQs scored 14 points higher.

Those with high IQs scored 4 points higher.

In other words, giving people an incentive to do well collapsed the gap between high and low by ten points — and bigger incentives created even bigger effects. These results are based on a meta-analysis of previous studies, not on new research, and metastudies are notoriously tricky to do properly. So take this with the usual grain of salt until these results get replicated elsewhere.

So IQ may be a better predictor than motivation, but the latter informs the former. I wonder what Hunt’s response would be…