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Value & implications of IQ

1. Social privilege theory

   • intelligence is only an arbitrary, socially constructed category without any existence apart from that which people give it.
   • The privileged classes simply label behaviors that they like or perform well as intelligent and then get society to reward these behaviors as forms of merit.
   • They do this to justify their own undeserved advantages.
   • There are no real differences in mental competence, but they appear to exist because people act as if they do
   • The way to eradicate differences in intelligence and their impact on individuals’ lives is therefore, to stop believing they exist, abolish ability tests, and treat everyone as equally intelligent.
   • family advantage
     • Differences in intelligence are created by differences in social class privilege.
     • Unlike the labeling version, this one admits that IQ differences reflect real differences in capability, but it argues that higher capability consists only of having learned more – it does not reflect any underlying ability or aptness in learning.
     • Children from more advantaged families are said to have more opportunities to accumulate intelligence in childhood, which they can then use in adulthood to get better jobs. n  Thus just one more way of transmitting social advantage and disadvantage across generations.
       • links between parent and child outcomes (and IQs) could be broken by equalizing educational opportunity

2. Functional tool theory

   • IQ is useful because it reflects a highly stable, highly general capacity for acquiring, processing, and applying knowledge of virtually any type.
   • brighter individuals learn, reason, and plan better, they will tend to extract more benefit than less able individuals from identical opportunities, including school instruction.
   • IQ tests that brings forth high-level thinking skills (that is, g) is something to do with the complexity of the information processing they require. n  Test items that require processing more complex information put a bigger premium on having a higher g level.
   • Tasks increase in information processing complexity when the information to be processed is multifaceted, abstract, ambiguous, uncertain, novel, changing, or embedded in irrelevant information, and when the task requires drawing more inferences, applying old knowledge to new situations, planning, and discerning similarities and differences.
   • These task conditions require the higher-order thinking skills that people associate with intelligence: n  reasoning, abstract thinking, problem solving, and learning quickly and efficiently.
   • The theory therefore predicts that high g constitutes a bigger advantage, not just on complex IQ items, but also on complex life tasks.