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o subject in psychology has pro-voked more intense public controversythan the study of human intelligence.From its beginning, research on howand why people differ in overall mentalability has fallen prey to political andsocial agendas that obscure or distorteven the most well-established scientificfindings. Journalists, too, often present aview of intelligence research that isexactly the opposite of what most intel-ligence experts believe. For these andother reasons, public understanding of intelligence falls far short of public con-cern about it. The IQ experts discussingtheir work in the public arena can feelas though they have fallen down therabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland.The debate over intelligence andintelligence testing focuses on the ques-tion of whether it is useful or meaning-ful to evaluate people according to asingle major dimension of cognitivecompetence. Is there indeed a generalmental ability we commonly call “intel-ligence,” and is it important in the prac-tical affairsof life? The answer, based ondecades of intelligence research, is anunequivocal yes. No matter their formor content, tests of mental skills invari-ably point to the existence of a globalfactor that permeates all aspects of cog-nition. And this factor seems to haveconsiderable influence on a person’spractical quality of life. Intelligence asmeasured by IQ tests is the single mosteffective predictor known of individualperformance at school and on the job. Italso predicts many other aspects of well-being, includinga person’s chances of divorcing, droppingout of high school,being unemployed or having illegitimatechildren.By now the vast majority of intelli-gence researchers take these findings forgranted. Yet in the press and in publicdebate, the facts are typically dismissed,downplayed or ignored. This misrepresen-tation reflects a clash between a deeplyfelt ideal and a stubborn reality. The ideal,implicit in many popular critiques of intelligence research, is that all people areborn equally able and that social inequali-ty results only from the exercise of unjustprivilege. The reality is that MotherNature is no egalitarian. People are in factunequal in intellectual potential
—
andthey are born that way, just as they areborn with different potentials for height,physical attractiveness, artistic flair, ath-letic prowess and other traits. Althoughsubsequent experience shapes this poten-tial, no amount of social engineering canmake individuals with widely divergentmental aptitudes into intellectual equals.Of course, there are many kinds of talent, many kinds of mental ability andmanyother aspects of personality andcharacter that influence a person’schances of happiness and success. Thefunctional importance of general mentalability in everyday life, however, meansthat without onerous restrictions onindividual liberty, differences in mentalcompetence are likely to result in socialinequality. This gulf between equalopportunity and equal outcomes is per-haps what pains Americans most aboutthe subject of intelligence. The publicintuitively knows what is at stake: whenasked to rank personal qualities in orderof desirability, peopleput intelligencesecond only to good health. But with amore realistic approach to the intellectualdifferences between people, society couldbetter accommodate these differencesand minimize the inequalities they create.
E
xtracting
g 
Early in the century-old study of intelligence, researchers discovered thatall tests of mental ability ranked individ-uals in about the same way. Althoughmental tests are often designed to mea-sure specific domains of cognition—ver-bal fluency, say, or mathematical skill,spatial visualization or memory—peoplewho do well on one kind of test tend todo well on the others, and people whodo poorly generally do so across theboard. This overlap, or intercorrelation,suggests that all such tests measuresome global element of intellectual abil-ity as well as specific cognitive skills. Inrecent decades, psychologists havedevoted much effort to isolating thatgeneral factor, which is abbreviated
 g 
,from the other aspects of cognitive abili-ty gauged in mental tests.The statistical extraction of 
 g 
is per-formed by a technique called factoranalysis. Introduced at the turn of thecentury by British psychologist CharlesSpearman, factor analysis determines theminimum number of underlying dimen-sions necessary to explain a pattern of correlations among measurements. Ageneral factor suffusing all tests is not,as is sometimes argued, a necessary out-come of factor analysis. No general factorhas been found in the analysis of per-sonalitytests, for example; instead themethod usually yields at least five dimen-sions (neuroticism, extraversion, consci-entiousness, agreeableness and opennessto ideas), each relating to different sub-sets of tests. But, as Spearman observed,a general factor does emerge from analy-sis of mental ability tests, and leadingpsychologists, such as Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeleyand John B. Carroll of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have con-firmedhis findings in the decades since.Partly because of this research, most intel-ligenceexperts now use
 g 
as the workingdefinition of intelligence.The general factor explains mostdifferences among individuals in perfor-mance on diverse mental tests. This is
Human Intelligence
24
Scientific American Presents
The GeneralIntelligenceFactor
 Despite some popular assertions, a single factor for intelligence, called 
g,
can be measured with IQ tests and does predict success in life
by Linda S. Gottfredson
Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc.
 
true regardless of what specific ability atest is meant to assess, regardless of thetest’s manifest content (whether words,numbers or figures) and regardless of theway the test is administered (in writtenor oral form, to an individual or to agroup). Tests of specific mental abilitiesdo measure those abilities, but they allreflect
 g 
to varying degrees as well. Hence,the
 g 
factor can be extracted from scoreson any diverse battery of tests.Conversely, because every mentaltest is “contaminated” by the effects of specific mental skills, no single test mea-suresonly
 g 
. Even the scores from IQ tests
—
which usually combine about adozen subtests of specific cognitiveskills
—
contain some “impurities” thatreflect those narrower skills. For mostpurposes, these impurities make no prac-ticaldifference, and
 g 
and IQ can be usedinterchangeably. But if they need to,intelligence researchers can statisticallyseparate the
 g 
component of IQ. The abil-ityto isolate
 g 
has revolutionized researchon general intelligence, because it hasallowed investigators to show that thepredictive value of mental tests derivesalmost entirely from this global factorrather than from the more specific apti-tudes measured by intelligence tests.In addition to quantifying individualdifferences, tests of mental abilities havealso offered insight into the meaning of intelligence in everyday life. Some testsand test items are known to correlate bet-terwith
 g 
than others do.In these itemsthe “active ingredient” that demands theexercise of 
 g 
seems to be complexity.More complex tasks require more mentalmanipulation, and this manipulation of information
—
discerning similarities andinconsistencies, drawing inferences,grasping new concepts and so on
—
con-stitutes intelligence in action. Indeed,intelligence can best be described as theability to deal with cognitive complexity.This description coincides well withlay perceptions of intelligence. The
 g 
fac-toris especially important in just thekind of behaviors that people usuallyassociate with “smarts”: reasoning, prob-lemsolving, abstract thinking, quicklearning.And whereas
 g 
itself describesmental aptitude rather than accumulatedknowledge, a person’s store of knowledgetends to correspond with his or her
 g 
level, probably because that accumulationrepresents a previous adeptness in learn-ing and in understanding new informa-tion. The
 g 
factor is also the one attribute
Exploring Intelligence
25
The General Intelligence Factor
 HIERARCHICAL MODEL of intelligenceis akin to a pyramid, with
g
at the apex;other aptitudes are arrayed at successively lower levels according to their specificity.
    B    R    I    D    G    E    M    A    N    A    R    T    L    I    B    R    A    R    Y
Ad Parnassum,
by Paul Klee
Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc.
 
that best distinguishesamong personsconsidered gifted, average or retarded.Several decades of factor-analyticresearch on mental tests have confirmed ahierarchical model of mental abilities.The evidence, summarized most effec-tively in Carroll’s 1993 book,
 HumanCognitive Abilities,
puts
 g 
at the apex inthis model, with more specific aptitudesarrayed at successively lower levels: theso-called group factors, such as verbalability, mathematical reasoning, spatialvisualization and memory, are just below
 g 
, and below these are skills that aremore dependent on knowledge or experi-ence,such as the principles and practicesof a particular job or profession.Some researchers use the term “mul-tipleintelligences” to label these sets of narrow capabilities and achievements.Psychologist Howard Gardner of HarvardUniversity, for example, has postulatedthat eight relatively autonomous “intelli-gences”are exhibited in differentdomains of achievement. He does notdispute the existence of 
 g 
but treats it asa specific factor relevant chiefly to acade-micachievement and to situations thatresemble those of school. Gardner doesnot believe that tests can fruitfully mea-sure his proposed intelligences; withouttests, no one can at present determinewhether the intelligencesare indeed inde-pendentof 
 g 
(or each other). Further-more, it is not clear to what extentGardner’s intelligences tap personalitytraits or motor skills rather than mentalaptitudes.Other forms of intelligence havebeen proposed; among them, emotionalintelligence and practical intelligence areperhaps the best known. They are proba-blyamalgams either of intellect and per-sonality or of intellect and informal expe-riencein specific job or life settings,respectively. Practical intelligence like“street smarts,” for example, seems toconsist of the localized knowledge andknow-how developed with untutoredexperience in particular everyday settingsand activities
—
the so-called school of hard knocks. In contrast, general intelli-gence is not a form of achievement,whether local or renowned. Instead the
 g 
factorregulates the rate of learning: itgreatly affects the rate of return in knowl-edge to instruction and experience butcannot substitute for either.
T
he Biology of
g 
Some critics of intelligence researchmaintain that the notion of generalintelligence is illusory: that no suchglobal mental capacity exists and thatapparent “intelligence” is really just aby-product of one’s opportunities tolearn skills and information valued in aparticular cultural context. True, theconcept of intelligence and the way inwhich individuals are ranked accordingto this criterion could be social artifacts.But the fact that
 g 
is not specific to anyparticular domain of knowledge or men-tal skill suggests that
 g 
is independent of cultural content, including beliefs aboutwhat intelligence is. And tests of differ-ent social groups reveal the same con-tinuum of general intelligence. Thisobservation suggests either that culturesdo not construct
 g 
or that they constructthe same
 g 
. Both conclusions undercutthe social artifact theory of intelligence.Moreover, research on the physiolo-gy and genetics of 
 g 
has uncovered bio-logical correlates of this psychologicalphenomenon. In the past decade, stud-ies by teams ofresearchers in NorthAmerica and Europe have linked severalattributes of the brain to general intelli-gence. After taking into account genderand physical stature, brain size as deter-mined by magnetic resonance imagingis moderately correlated with IQ (about0.4 on a scale of 0 to 1). So is the speedof nerve conduction.The brains of bright people also use less energy duringproblem solving than do those of theirless able peers. And various qualities of 
Human Intelligence
26
Scientific American Presents
   A  n  s   w  e  r  s :  1 .   A ;  2 .   D ;  3 .  1  0 ,  1  2 ;  4 .  3 ,  6 ;  5 .  3 ,   7 ;  6 .  5 ,  2  5 ;   7 .   B ;  8 .   D
SAMPLE IQ ITEMS resembling those on current tests requirethe test taker to fill in the empty spaces based on the patternin the images, numbers or words. Because they can vary incomplexity, such tasks are useful in assessing 
g
level.
A B C D E
Number Series
2,4,6,8,_,_3,6,3,6,_,_1,5,4,2,6,5,_,_2,4,3,9,4,16,_,_
Analogies
brother:sister father:
A.
child
B.
mother
C.
cousin
D.
friend joke:humor law:
A.
lawyer
B.
mercy
C.
courts
D.
 justice
3.4.5.6.7.8.
A B C D E
Matrix Reasoning1.2.
    L    I    N    D    A    S .    G    O    T    T    F    R    E    D    S    O    N
Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc.
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