[Crash Course] Psychology: XXIII XIV Intelligence & Bias
Intelligence: the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new experiences.
Intelligence test: a method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores.
Spearman and Thurstone: Spatial ability, verbal comprehension, word fluency, perceptual speed, numerical ability, inductive reasoning, memory.
Howard Gardner: Intelligence is multiple abilities that come in different forms. Musical, mathematical, linguistic, naturalist, interpersonal, intrapersonal spatial, kinethetic abilities.
Robert Sternberg: Analytical (problem-solving intelligence), creative (ability to adapt to new situations), practical intelligence (for everyday tasks).
Svant syndrome: a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing.
Creativity: expertise, imaginative thinking, venturesome personality, creative environment.
Emotional intelligence, defined in 1997 by psychologist Peter Salovey and John Mayer, is the ability to perceive, to understand, manage, and use emotions. [Plenty of smart people who have a hard time processing social information.] -Perceiving emotions: being able to recognise them in faces, and even in music, film, and stories. -Understanding emotions: being able to predict them and how they might change. -Manage emotions: knowing how to appropriately express yourself in various situations. Emotional intelligence also means using emotions to enable adaptive or creative thinking.
Francis Galton: [eugenics] The first attempts to measure intelligence in the western world began with English scientist Francis Galton in the eighteen hundreds. Taking the page from his famous brother Charles Darwin's theories on natural selection, Galton wondered how that premise might extend to human's natural ability when it came to intelligence. He suggested that our smarts have a lot to do with heredity, so if we encouraged smart people to breed with each other, we could essentially create a master race of geniuses. If that sounds a little sketchy, because, it was, like, really really sketchy!
Enter Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon: measure child's so-called mental age. The concept of a child's mental age is essentially the level of performance associated with a cerain chronological age. Binet believed that his tests could measure a child's current mental abilities, but that intelligence wasn't a fixed, inborn thing. He believed that a person's capabilities could be raised with proper attentions, self-discipline, and practice. He was hoping that his tests would improve children's education by identifying those who needed extra attention. But Binet also feared that these tests would, in the wrong hands, be used to do the opposite: labeling children as 'lost causes', limiting their opportunities. And wow was he on to something, because that is pretty much exactly what happened.
William Stern: Intelligence quotient (IQ): mental age/ chronolgical age * 100
Lewis Terman: Improved and promoted the IQ measurement to the entire America, using these numerical findings as a kind of label.
In the first half of 20th century, intelligence test scores were used to enforce the sterilisation of about 60,000 people. Poor African American, Native American, and Latina women being forcibly or covertly sterilised in largely numbers as recently as the 1970s. The Nazi: they seterilised or simply excuted hundreds of thousands of victims based on their answers to (pseudo-) IQ test questions.
=============== Today we think intelligence as determined by a series of factors related to genetics, environment, education, and perhaps even randomness itself.
The Wechsler adult intelligence scale or WAIS The Wechsler intelligence scale for children or WISC
Cognitive tests usually fall into one of two categories: -Achievement test: a test designed to assess what a person has learned. -Apptitude test: a test designed to predict a person's future performance, aptittde is the capacity to learn.
-Standardised, defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group. Bell-curve. -Reliable, the extent to which a test yields consistent results. -Valid, the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to.
The risk of bias may even fall to the test-takers' own expectations.
Stereotype threat: a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype.