"I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased"
I think a lot of newcomers from very poor countries may not be exposed to some things as often, they might not be thinking about shapes and geometry in the same way - more importantly, the notion of tests and test taking.
Solving little abstract problems in a test format as we understand them ... I think is something that's only normalized in certain countries.
I think there's enough potential variance in those things to make a difference.
It's not like people can't grasp what a 3D cube is ... but some cultures just may have that much more exposure to things, more familiarity. Enough to move the needle.
I went to a French immersion school as a kid, in an English city. I studied mostly in French for most of the day until high school. When they did some kinds of testing, there were 'word tests' which depended on some degree of vocabulary.
Though my peers were basically 'a cut above' in almost everything (French immersion was basically public school's version of private school) ... we did noticeably more poorly on that test, granted the lexical nature of it makes 'cultural bias' more obvious.
I think it's 'a thing' though maybe a small thing.
Word tests are used as part of good, high quality IQ tests (e.g. WAIS and Stanford-Binet, though obviously not Raven’s). They are in fact one of the most useful and predictive parts (I.e. they are most g-loaded). They are biased (i.e. not measurement invariant) if you compare subjects from different countries/cultures, but they are not biased if you compare subjects from the same country/culture. For example, the score on word analogies sections has exact same predictive validity for white Americans as it does for black Americans. See Arthur Jensen’s “Bias in mental testing” for a very comprehensive treatise on the issue.
> Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".
For "name the next number in the series" questions there literally are no wrong answers unless you place further restrictions.
IQ tests typically use shapes and not numbers, but that doesn't solve this specific question. Finding the answer is more about finding the same answer as the official solution, which is culture dependant
When given the task "What is the next number in this sequence: 3, 5, 7" my first thought would be 9, since we are counting odd numbers. But that's kind of dumb, nobody would ask something this simple. So maybe the answer is 11, since we might be counting prime numbers. That's probably good enough for an IQ test, but if this was an interview question at Google the better answer might be 13 (counting Mersenne exponents, integers so that 2^n - 1 is prime, a well known method to find large primes). On the other hand 23 is the next prime whose digits are also prime. 9 is also the next Columbian Number, but 13 is the next fortunate number.
Now a good question would give me only one of these as possible answer, but in practise having multiple viable answers happens and I have to judge how complicated the question was supposed to be, what the test's expectations are etc. If you ask a Japanese you might get a different answer than if you ask a French simply because of how different their academic cultures are.
What does a carefully chosen straw man IQ question (may never have appeared in an IQ test in history, afaik) have to do with the fact that no sub saharan african society had developed the wheel before colonialism?
>Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.
No, but whether that is a meaningful measure of intelligence is where the bias creeps in. In our times having high mathematical aptitude is considered to be a sign of intelligence and intelligence is associated with success, so the very same people who like mathy things design IQ tests and hand out credentials and make the most money, so the entire process is largely circular.
What constitutes intelligence is dependent on what environment you're in. If in 100 years all the technical things have been automated it's conceivable that people with high degrees of social intelligence or creativity who can leverage technology rather than implement it will get to define what intelligence means.
IQ predicts those as well, not just mathematical ability. The theory of "multiple intelligences" has serious weaknesses which have not been addressed by its proponents, chief among those is that the "different intelligences" are highly correlated.
That's not the point. Nobody denies that mathematics is involved in bridge-building. What is malleable is the perception whether bridge-building is a feat of intellect, and the position in the social hierarchy people with that ability occupy.
I had to take an IQ test as part of my adhd diagnosis. I was asked about sherlock holmes, I have never read sherlock holmes, I haven't seen the series, and I mentioned that when the test administrator asked me questions related to it.
Are you sure that question was related to IQ specifically? I suspect it wasn’t. Neuropsychological assessments usually administered to diagnose ADHD include a lot of things that aren’t related to IQ and many things that are just there to guide the person administering the test on the subjects capabilities in ways that don’t show up in results but to influence what further tests they’ll administer.
Different communities use different variants of the English language - different words, different grammar, and different meanings for the same words. The standard English on most English IQ tests is not going to be as accessible or understandable to somebody who speaks a different dialect and isn't as familiar with standard English.
It depends on what you use them for. If you want to compare the intelligence of people from different cultures, you need a culturally neutral test (whether such a thing exists is another question). For clinical diagnosis, when what you want to test is whether an individual is retarded or if there are suspicious patterns in their test results – like a large difference between their score at different subtests – I don't think it matters.
There are (or were) actually tests used by psychologists that include testing one's vocabulary. Which is knowledge, not intelligence.
From my experience of IQ tests administered in Germany the tests have multiple parts, among others one about reasoning about abstract shapes, one about spatial reasoning, and one about language (naming related words under time pressure and similar).
Because children who spend their time looking at screens will probably find it harder to understand spatial dimensions. Perhaps they gain something else, like heightened social awareness, but not physically actively playing with 3D objects will surely take its toll.
But, the trend of increased screen time in my opinion is a bad one and would probably lead to lowered IQ. There's no reason to get stuck on a problem or spend time being bored. As children playing with Lego, Mechano, K'nex, etc, we taught ourselves to solve problems with no shortcuts. We were bored, we found a problem, we got stuck, we troubleshooted and we overcame. It seems like the younger generations of today are losing this Scientific process.
Probably the most concerning issue is that the reward system doesn't require pushing your mental abilities. You can see interesting output without having to put the work in. Because many of the websites/apps measure success in engagement, they literally want you to do as little work as possible to see as much interesting content as possible. Contrast that to pre-screen time, where if you wanted to play with the Lego model on the box you had to build it. Mechano would even actively put mistakes into the instructions to allow kids to problem solve.
> Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.
Really? You can't think of any factors other than innate genetic intelligence that would influence your success in answering questions like this?
Let me give you the first example that springs to mind. I can come up with many more.
I used to know someone who had anxiety issues about their intellectual ability and would clam up when they felt they were being tested. Anything that seemed "test-like" to them would make them stressed and confused. I would bet any attempt to measure their IQ that triggered this behaviour would produce a lower score than if they didn't suffer from this.
Is that a measure of innate intelligence?
Like I said I can think of many similar scenarios although they would be more hypothetical.
Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".