Essay on Intelligence | Psychology

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Essay # 1. Intelligence- Contrasting Views of Its Nature:

Intelligence, like love, is one of those concepts that are easier to recognize than to define. We often refer to others’ intelligence, describing people as bright, sharp, or quick on the one hand, or as slow, dull, or even stupid on the other. And slurs on one’s intelligence are often fighting words where children and even adults are concerned.

But again, what, precisely, is intelligence? Psychologists don’t entirely agree, but as a working definition we can adopt the wording offered by a distinguished panel of experts. The term intelligence refers to individuals’ abilities to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by careful thought.

Why do we place so much importance on evaluating others’ (and our thought, own) intelligence? Partly because we believe that intelligence is related to many important outcomes; how quickly individuals can master new tasks and adapt to new situations, how successful they will be in school and in various kinds of jobs, and even how well they can get along with others.

To some extent, our commonsense ideas in this respect are correct. But although intelligence is related to important life outcomes, this relationship is far from perfect. Many other factors, too, play a role, so predictions based on intelligence alone can be wrong.

Intelligence: Unitary or Multifaceted?

Is intelligence a single characteristic, or does it involve several different components? In the past, psychologists who studied intelligence often disagreed sharply on this issue. In one camp were scientists who viewed intel­ligence as a single characteristic or dimension along which people vary. One early supporter of this view was Spearman (1927), who believed that performance on any cognitive task depended on a primary general factor (which he termed g) and one or more specific factors relating to particular tasks.

He found that although tests of intelligence often contain different kinds of items designed to measure different aspects of intelligence, scores on these items often correlate highly with one another. This fact suggested to him that no matter how intel­ligence was measured, it was related to a single, primary factor.

In contrast, other researchers believed that intelligence is composed of many separate abilities that operate more or less independently. According to this multifactor view, a given person can be high on some components of intelligence but low on others and vice versa.

One early supporter of this position was Thurstone (1938), who suggested that intelligence is composed of seven distinct primary mental abilities. Included in his list were verbal meaning understanding of ideas and word meanings; number speed and accuracy in dealing with numbers; and space the ability to visualize objects in three dimensions.

Most modern theories of intelligence recognize that intelligence may involve a general ability to handle a wide range of cognitive tasks and problems, as Spearman suggested, but also that intelligence is expressed in many different ways, and that persons can be high on some aspects of intelligence but low on others. As examples of this modern approach, let’s briefly consider three influential views of intelligence.

Culture and Intelligence:

A major characteristic of intelligence is that it helps individuals to adapt to their environment. The cultural environment provides a context for intelligence to develop. Vygotsky has argued that culture provides a social context in which people live, grow, and understand the world around them.

For example, in less technologically developed societies, social and emotional skills in relating to people are valued, while in technologically advanced societies, personal achievement founded on abilities of reasoning and judgment is considered to represent intelligence.

A person’s intelligence is likely to be tuned by these cultural parameters. Many theorists have regarded intelligence in terms of attributes specific to the person without regard to their cultural background. The unique features of culture now find some representation in theories of intelligence.

Vygotsky also believed that cultures, like individuals, have a life of their own; they grow and change, and in the process specify what will be the end-product of successful intellectual development. Thus, while ele­mentary mental functions (e.g., crying, attending to mother’s voice, sensi­tivity to smells, walking, and running) are universal, the manner in which higher mental functions such as problem solving and thinking operate are largely culture-produced.

Technologically advanced societies; adopt child rearing practices that foster skills of generalization and abstraction, speed, minimal moves, and mental manipulation among children. This is a type of intelligence, which can be called technological intelligence. In these societies, persons are well-versed in skills of attention, observation, analysis, performance, speed, and achievement orientation. Intelligence tests devel­oped in Western cultures look precisely for these skills in an individual.

Technological intelligence is not so valued in many Asian and African societies. The qualities and skills regarded as intelligent actions in non-western cultures are sharply different, though the boundaries are gradu­ally vanishing with the processes of acculturation and globalization.

In addition to cognitive competence that is very specific to the individual, the non-western cultures look for skills to relate to others in the society. Some non-western societies value self-reflection and collectivistic orientation as opposed to personal achievement and individualistic orientation.

Intelligence in the Indian Tradition:

Contrary to technological intelligence, intelligence in the Indian tradition can be termed as integral intelligence, which gives emphasis on connectivity with the social and world environment.

Indian thinkers view intelligence from a holistic perspective where equal attention is paid to cognitive and non-cognitive processes as well as their integration. Intelligence in the Indian thought systems is treated as a state, a process, and an entity, the realiza­tion of which depends upon one’s own effort, persistence, and motivation.

The Sanskrit word buddhi which is often used to represent intelligence is far more pervasive in scope than the western concept of intelligence. Buddhi, according to J. P. Das (1994), includes skills such as mental effort, determined action, feelings, and opinions along with cognitive competence such as knowledge, discrimination, and understanding.

Among other things, buddhi is the knowledge of one’s own self based on conscience, will, and desire. Thus, the notion of buddhi has affective and motivational components besides a strong cognitive component. Unlike the Western views, which primarily focus on cognitive functions, the following compe­tencies are identified as facets of intelligence in the Indian tradition.

i. Cognitive competence (sensitivity to context, understanding, discrimination, problem solving, and effective communication).

ii. Social competence (respect for social order, commitment to elders, the young and the needy, concern about others, recognizing others’ perspectives).

iii. Emotional competence (self-regulation and self-monitoring of emotions, honesty, politeness, good conduct, and self-evaluation).

iv. Entrepreneurial competence (commitment, persistence, patience, hard work, vigilance, and goal-directed behaviors).

The role of genetic and environmental factors in intellectual growth was also recognized in Indian thought. Intelligence is seen as the result of one’s own karma and inheritance. However, the expression of this genetic endowment is believed to depend upon the child’s own efforts and endeavor.

Baral and Das (2004) have reviewed the developments in intelligence in Indian context including contribu­tions of Sri Aurobindo and Krishnamurti. According to Sri Aurobindo, ultimate aim of intelligence is direct cognizance without the mediation of senses and hence without the distortions brought by the ego. Human intellectual pursuit occurs at two levels.

At the lower level, the obvious functions of the mind are reasoning and inference based on sense experience. But the higher function of intelligence is self-awareness, using the mind to know about oneself. Krishnamurti contends that intelligence is truth, beauty, completeness, and love itself. To understand the environment, whatever it maybe is intelligence.

Essay # 2. Human Intelligence- The Role of Heredity and the Role of Environment:

Human intelligence is clearly the result of the complex interplay between genetic factors and a wide range of environmental conditions. Here we’ll consider some of the evidence pointing to this conclusion.

i. Evidence for the Influence of Heredity:

Several lines of research offer support for the view that heredity plays an important role in human intelligence. First, consider findings with respect to family relationship and measured IQ. If intelligence is indeed deter­mined by heredity, we would expect that the more closely two persons are related, the more similar their IQs will be. This prediction has generally been confirmed. For example, the IQs of iden­tical twins raised together correlate almost +.90, those of brothers and sisters about +.50, and those of cousins about +.15.

Additional support for the impact of heredity on intelligence is provided by studies involving adopted children. If intelligence is strongly affected by genetic factors, the IQs of adopted children should resemble those of their biological parents more closely than those of their adoptive parents.

In short, the children should be more similar in IQ to the persons from whom they received their genes than to the persons who raised them. This prediction, too, has been confirmed. For example, consider a long-term study conducted by Plomin and his colleagues.

In this investigation (the Colorado Adoption Project), the researchers studied 245 children who were placed for adoption by their mothers shortly after birth (on average, when they were twenty-nine days old) until they were teenagers. Measures of the children’s intelligence were obtained when they were one, two, three, four, seven, twelve, and sixteen years old. In addition, measures were obtained of their biological mothers’ intelligence and of their adoptive parents’ intelligence.

A comparison group of children who were living with their biological parents was tested in the same manner. The results showed a clear pattern; the correlation between the adopted children’s intelligence and that of their biological parents increased over time, as did the correlation between the intelligence of the control group (children living with their biological parents) and that of their parents.

In contrast, the correlation between the intelligence of the adopted children and that of their adoptive parents decreased over time. Similar patterns were found for specific components of intelligence, as well as for general cognitive. These findings suggest that genetic factors play an important role in intelligence and may indeed outweigh environmental factors in this respect.

However, the authors are also quick to add that the children studied were placed in homes above average in socioeconomic status; thus, they were not ex­posed to environmental extremes of poverty, disadvantage, or malnutrition. Such extreme conditions can strongly affect children’s intelligence. In addition, somewhat different measures of intelligence were employed at different ages, especially for the youngest children; this too may have played some role in the pattern of findings obtained.

Additional evidence for the role of genetic factors in intelligence is provided by recent studies focused on the task of identifying the specific genes that influence intelligence. These studies have adopted as a working hypothesis the view that many genes, each exerting relatively small effects, probably play a role in general intelligence—that is, in what many aspects of mental abilities (e.g., verbal, spa­tial, speed-of-processing, and memory abilities) have in common.

In other words, such research has not attempted to identify the gene that influences intelligence, but rather has sought quantitative trait loci (QTLs): genes that have relatively small effects and that influence the likelihood of some characteristic in a population. Chorney and his colleagues (1998) compared individuals with IQ scores greater than 160 and a control group of persons average in intelligence (with mean IQ scores of about 100).

They found that persons in the very high-IQ group were more likely to possess a specific gene (actually, a particular form of this gene) than were persons in the average, however, that the effects of this gene were small; the researchers estimated that it accounted for only 2 percent of the variance in general intelligence.

Finally, evidence for the role of genetic factors in intelligence has been provided by research on identical twins separated as infants (usually, within the first few weeks of life) who were then raised in different homes. Because such persons have identical genetic inheritance but have been exposed to different environmental conditions in some cases, sharply contrasting conditions studying their IQs provides a powerful means for comparing the roles of genetic and environmental factors in human intel­ligence.

The results of such research are clear; the IQs of identical twins reared apart (often from the time they were only a few days old) correlate almost as highly as those of identical twins reared together. Moreover, such individuals are also amazingly simi­lar in many other characteristics, such as physical appearance, preferences in dress, mannerisms, and even personality. Clearly, these findings point to an important role for heredity in intelligence and in many other aspects of psychological functioning.

On the basis of these and other findings, some researchers have estimated that the heritability of intelligence, the proportion of the variance in intelligence within a given population that is attributable to genetic factors ranges from about 35 percent in childhood to as much as 75 percent in adulthood, and may be about 50 percent overall.

Why does the contribution of genetic factors to intelligence increase with age? Perhaps because as individuals grow older, their interactions with their environment are shaped less and less by restraints imposed on them by their families or by their social origins and are shaped more and more by the characteristics they bring with them to these environments. In other words, as they grow older, individuals are increasingly able to choose or change their environments so that these permit expression of their genetically determined tendencies and preferences.

ii. Evidence for the Influence of Environmental Factors:

Genetic factors are definitely not the entire picture where human intelligence is concerned, however. Other findings point to the conclusion that environmental variables, too, are important. One such finding is that performance on IQ tests has risen substantially around the world at all age levels in recent decades. This phe­nomenon is known as the Flynn effect after the psychologist who first reported it.

Such increases have averaged about 3 IQ points per decade worldwide; but in some countries they have been even larger. As a result of these gains in performance, it has been necessary to re-standardize widely used tests so that they con­tinue to yield an average IQ of 100; what is termed “average” today is actually a higher level of performance than was true in the past.

What accounts for these increases? It seems unlikely that massive shifts in human heredity occur from one generation to the next. A more reasonable explanation, therefore, focuses on changes in environmental factors. What factors have changed in recent decades? The following variables have been suggested as possible contribu­tors to the continuing rise in IQ: better nutrition, increased urbanization, the advent of television, more and better education, more cognitively demanding jobs, and even exposure to computer games!

Many of these changes are real and seem plausible as explanations for the rise in IQ; but, as noted recently by Flynn (1999), there is as yet not sufficient evidence to conclude that any or all of these factors have played a role. In any case, whatever the specific causes involved the steady rise in performance on IQ tests points to the importance of environmental factors in human intelligence.

Additional evidence provided by the findings of studies of environmental deprivation and environmental enrichment. With respect to deprivation, some findings suggest that intelligence can be reduced by the absence of key forms of environmental stimulation early in life. In terms of enrichment, removing children from sterile, restricted environments and placing them in more favorable settings seems to enhance their intellectual growth.

For example, in one of the first demonstrations of the beneficial impact on IQ of an enriched environment, Skeels (1938, 1966) removed thirteen children, all about two years old, from an orphan­age in which they received virtually no intellectual stimulation and virtually no contact with adults and placed them in the care of a group of retarded women living in an institution.

After a few years, Skeels noted that the children’s IQs had risen dramatically 29 points on average. Interestingly, Skeels also obtained IQ measures of children who had remained in the orphanage and found that these had actually dropped by 26 points on average presumably as a result of continued exposure to the impoverished environment at the orphanage.

Twenty-five years later, the thirteen children who had experienced the enriched environment were all doing well; most had gradu­ated from high school, found a job, and married. In contrast, those in the original control group either remained institutionalized or were functioning poorly in society.

In the Indian context the studies do indicate negative effects of poverty and deprivation on measures of intellective performance. These effects become pronounced with advancing age indicating cumulative deficit.

While more recent—and more carefully controlled—efforts to increase intelligence through environmental interventions have not yielded gains as dramatic as those reported by Skeels (1966), some of these programs have produced beneficial results.

However, as noted by Ramey and Ramey (1998), such changes are most likely to occur when the following conditions are met:

(1) The interventions begin early and continue for a long time;

(2) The programs are intense, involving home visits several times per week;

(3) The children receive new learning experiences delivered directly to them by experts rather than indirectly though their parents;

(4) The interventions are broad in scope, using many different procedures to enhance children’s development;

(5) The interventions are matched to the needs of individual children; and

(6) Environmental supports (e.g., excellent schools) are put in place to support and maintain the positive attitudes toward learning the children gain. Needless to say, programs that meet these criteria tend to be expensive.

Additional support for the role of environmental factors in intelligence is provided by the finding that many biological factors that children encounter while growing up can affect their intelligence. Prolonged malnutri­tion can adversely affect IQ, as can exposure to lead either in the air or in lead-based paint, which young children often eat because it tastes sweet.

Exposure to such factors as alcohol and drugs; indicate that these factors can also adversely affect intelligence. In sum, therefore, many forms of evidence support the view that intelligence is determined, at least in part, by environmental factors. Especially when these are extreme, they may slow or accelerate children’s intellectual growth; and this effect, in turn, can have important implications for the societies in which those children will become adults.

Essay # 3. Group Differences in Intelligence Test Scores- Why They Occur:

There are sizable differences among the average IQ scores of various ethnic groups. The members of some minority groups score lower, on average, than members of the majority group. Why do such differences occur? This has been a topic of considerable controversy in psychology for many years, and currently there is still no final, universally accepted conclusion.

However, it seems fair to say that at present, most psychologists attribute such group differences in performance on standard intelligence tests largely to environmental variables. 

Group Differences in IQ Scores: Evidence for the Role of Environmental Factors:

Group differences in performance on intelligence tests stem primarily from environmental factors: the fact that the tests themselves may be biased against test takers from some minority groups. Why? In part because the tests were standardized largely on middle-class white persons; thus, interpreting the test scores of persons from minority groups in terms of these norms is not appropriate.

Even worse, some critics have suggested that the tests themselves suffer from cultural bias: Items on the tests are ones that are familiar to middle-class white children and so give them an important edge in terms of test performance. Are such concerns valid? Careful examination of the items used on intelligence tests suggests that they may indeed be culturally biased, at least to a degree. Some items do seem to be ones that are less familiar and therefore more difficult to answer for minority test takers. To the extent that such cultural bias exists, it is indeed a serious flaw in IQ tests.

On the other hand, though, its important to note that the tests are gen­erally about as successful in predicting future school performance by children from all groups. So while the tests may be biased in terms of content, this in itself does not make them useless from the point of view of predicting future performance.

However, as noted by Steele and Aronson (1996), because minority children find at least some of the items on these tests unfamiliar, they may feel threatened by the tests; and this, in turn, may reduce their scores.

In an effort to eliminate cultural bias, psychologists have attempted to design culture-fair tests. Such tests attempt to include only items to which all groups, regardless of ethnic or racial background, have been exposed. Because many minority children are exposed to languages other than standard English, these tests tend to be nonverbal in nature. One of these, the Raven Progressive Matrices.

This test consists of sixty matrices of varying difficulty, each containing a logical pattern or design with a missing part. Individuals select the item that completes the pattern from several different choices.

Because the Raven test and ones like it focus primarily on fluid intelligence our basic abilities to form concepts, reason, and identify similarities these tests seem less likely to be subject to cultural bias than other kinds of intelligence tests. However, it is not clear that these tests, or any others, totally eliminate the problem of subtle built-in bias.

Additional evidence for the role of environmental factors in group differences in test performance has been divided by Flynn (1999), one expert on this issue, into two categories- indirect and direct. Indirect evidence is evidence from research in which efforts are made to equate environmental factors for all test takers, for instance, by eliminating the effects of socioeconomic status through statistical techniques.

The results of such studies are mixed; some suggest that the gap between minority groups and whites is reduced by such procedures, but other studies indicate that between-group differences still remain. These findings suggest that while socioeconomic factors contribute to group differences in IQ scores, other factors, as yet unknown, may also play some role.

Direct evidence for environmental factors, in contrast, involves actual life changes that take many minor­ity persons out of the disadvantaged environment they often face and provide them with an environment equivalent to that of other groups. According to Flynn (1999), one compelling piece of direct evidence for the role of environmental factors in group differences does exist.

During World War II, African American soldiers fathered thousands of children in Germany (much of which was occupied by U.S. troops after the war). These children have been raised by white mothers in what is essentially a white environment. The result? Their IQs are virtually identical to those of white children matched to them in socioeconomic status.

Given that the fathers of these children scored very similarly to other African American soldiers, these findings suggest that environmental factors are in fact the key to group differences in IQ: When such factors are largely eliminated, differences between the groups, too, disappear.

Group Differences in IQ Scores: Is There Any Evidence for the Role of Genetic Factors?

Now for the other side of the story the suggestion that group differences in intelligence stem largely from genetic factors. In 1994 this issue was brought into sharp focus by the publication of a highly controversial book entitled The Bell Curve.

Herrnstein and Murray (1994) voiced strong support for the genetic hypothesis. They noted, for instance, that there are several converging sources of evidence for “a genetic factor in cognitive ethnic differences” between African, American and other ethnic groups in the United States. They suggested that intelligence may not be readily modi­fiable through changes in environmental conditions. They proposed, therefore, that special programs aimed at raising the IQ scores of disadvantaged minorities were probably a waste of effort.

As you can imagine, these suggestions were challenged vigorously by many psychologists. These critics argued that much of the reasoning in The Bell Curve was flawed and that the book over­looked many important findings. Perhaps the harshest criticism of the book centered on its contention that because individual differences in intelligence are strongly influenced by genetic factors, group differences are, too. Several researchers took strong exception to this logic.

They contended that this reasoning would be accurate only if the environments of the various groups being compared were identical. Under those conditions, it could be argued that differences between the groups stemmed, at least in part, from genetic factors. In reality, however, the environments in which the members of various ethnic groups exist are not identical.

As a result, it is false to assume that group differences with respect to IQ scores stem from genetic factors, even if we know that individual differences in such scores are strongly influenced by these factors. (When environmental differences are removed or minimized, group differences in intelligence, too, disappear.) Perhaps this point is best illustrated by a simple analogy.

Imagine that a farmer plants a batch of seeds that are known to be genetically identical. The farmer plants the seeds in two different fields; one is known to contain all the nutrients needed for good plant growth, but the other lacks these nutrients. Several months later, there are large differences between the plants growing in the two fields, despite the fact that their genetic makeup is identical.

Why? Probably because of the contrasting soil fertility. So differ­ences between the two fields are due to this environmental factor, whereas within each field, any differences among the plants are due to genetic factors. In a similar manner, it is entirely possible that differences in the IQ scores of various groups occur because of contrasting life environment and that genetic factors play little if any role in such differences.

In fact, the worldwide gains in IQ are directly analogous to this example. Here we have a case in which variation in intelligence within each generation is strongly influenced by genetic factors we know that this is so. Yet differences between the generations must be due to environmental factors- no one would argue that one generation is genetically different from the next.

Such reasoning argues powerfully against a genetic basis for group differences in performance on tests of intelligence. While some researchers continue to insist that sufficient evidence exists to conclude that genetic factors play a role, most take strong exception to this view and contend that the evidence for this view is relatively weak.

Gender Differences in Intelligence:

Do males and females differ in intelligence? Overall, they score virtually identically on standard tests of this characteristic. However, a few subtle differences do seem to exist with respect to certain components of intelligence. First, females tend to score higher than males with respect to verbal abilities such tasks as naming synonyms (words with the same meaning) and verbal fluency (e.g., naming words that start with a given letter).

Females also score higher than males on college achievement tests in literature, spelling, and writing. Such differences are relatively small and seem to be decreasing, but they do appear, even in very careful meta-analyses performed on the results of many different studies.

In contrast, males tend to score somewhat higher than females on visual-spatial tasks such as mental rota­tion or tracking a moving object through space. Ask several male and female friends to try their hand at the task it involves. You may discover that the males find this slightly easier (and perhaps more enjoyable) than the females. However, gender differences in performing visual-spatial tasks, like almost all gender differences, are far smaller than gender stereotypes suggest; so if you do observe any differ­ence, it is likely to be a small one.

Additional findings suggest that other subtle differences may exist between males and females with respect to various aspects of intelligence. For instance, consider the following study by Silverman and Eals (1992). These researchers asked female and male participants to perform several tasks in a small office.

In one condition participants were told to try to remember the location of various objects in the room; in another no mention was made of this task. When later asked to name the objects and indicate their locations, women outperformed men in both conditions. However, the difference was larger in the condition in which participants were not told to remember the information.

Other studies, in contrast, indicate that men are better at finding their way back to some physical location after taking a complex route away from it. What accounts for these observations? Silverman and Eals suggest that such gender differences may reflect different kinds of tasks performed by females and males during the evolution of our species. Before the development of civilization, humans lived by hunting and gathering.

Men hunted and women foraged for edible plants. Silverman and Eals suggest that these tasks required different spa­tial abilities. Gatherers (primarily females) needed to be able to notice edible plants and to pinpoint their loca­tion so that they could find them again in the future. In contrast, hunters (mainly males) needed to be able to find their way back home after crossing large distances.

The result, the two psychologists suggest, is that men are better at tasks such as rotating objects in their minds, while women are better at noticing and remembering spe­cific objects and their locations.

We can’t do experiments on the evolution of our species, however, so we can’t know for certain. In any case, it is clear that a few differences do exist between males and females where certain components of intelligence are concerned, but that these differences are small in size and subtle in nature.