Intelligence and Human Abilities

Structure, Origins and Applications

Colin Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317564409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Choice Recommended Read

Psychological research into human intelligence and abilities presents us with a number of difficult questions:

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• Are human abilities explained by a single core intelligence or by multiple intelligences?

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• How should abilities be assessed? With tests unlike the problems which people normally have to solve, or with practical problems closer to those encountered in life, school and work?

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• Do ability tests predict how a person will behave? If so, can they predict whether a person will succeed at school and at work?

Intelligence and Human Abilities critically evaluates research evidence from the past 100 years to consider these and other issues. It shows that, despite the apparent contradictions in this research, the evidence in fact supports one coherent model, a fact which has clear implications for researchers, educators and test-users.

This clear and engaging text provides an up-to-date evaluation of what the empirical evidence tells us about the number, nature and origins of human abilities. It will be essential reading for students and practitioners of psychology and education, and also for users of ability tests such as applied psychologists and personnel managers.

1
Introduction

The psychology of ability is a branch of psychology that examines how and why people differ from one another—as opposed to other areas of the discipline that regard such “individual differences” as nuisances, to be ignored (or controlled for statistically) in psychology experiments. For example, social psychologists study variables that influence prejudice in the population, and do not trouble to consider whether or why some individuals are more prejudiced against minority groups than others. Cognitive psychologists try to draw inferences about neural mechanisms by studying how various features of stimuli influence response time; they are rarely interested in whether or why some individuals perform more quickly or slowly than the norm in all experimental conditions. Thus Cronbach (1957) identified two distinct disciplines of psychology. One comprises areas such as social, developmental, cognitive, physiological and behavioural psychology—branches that try to understand the broad laws that govern how people in general behave under various conditions. The second branch is that of individual differences, clinical and (sometimes) occupational psychology, which focus on how and why people differ from one another. And whilst there have been moves to reconcile these two approaches through experimental designs that consider both types of experimental treatment and individual differences, such studies still remain the exception rather than the rule.

Individual Differences

The psychology of individual differences is traditionally divided into four main areas: first, the psychology of motivation, which tries to explain what drives people to behave in certain ways; second, mood/emotion, which considers feelings (one area where there is genuine integration between individual differences and cognitive psychology thanks to workers such as Bower, 1981); and third, personality psychology, which tries to explain both what people do and the way that they do it through ‘personal styles’, such as anxiety or sociability. Finally, there is the psychology of abilities, which examines how well individuals perform tasks that involve thinking or problem solving, attempts to understand how many “talents” are necessary to explain individual differences in problem-solving behaviour, and seeks to understand why and how individual differences in these abilities emerge in the first place. Underpinning these four areas is the science of psychometrics (literally “measurement of the soul”), which is a branch of statistics dealing with the measurement of motivation, mood, personality and abilities, and other issues (e.g., bias) arising from psychological testing.

The Meaning of ‘Ability’

It is first necessary to try to define the subject matter of this book: to set out what is meant by terms such as ‘mental ability’ and ‘intelligence’. There is no shortage of definitions in the literature, but many of these are unenlightening: the great and the good from the world of psychology were invited to define what they understood by intelligence at a symposium in 1921 (Thorndike, 1921) and, as usual when psychologists are gathered together, the range of definitions was enormous, running from the rather unhelpful behaviourist view that “intelligence is what is measured by intelligence tests” to “ability to learn”, or “capacity for abstract thinking”. Sternberg and Salter (1982) offer a thoughtful historical discussion of what is meant by terms such as ‘intelligence’, ‘mental ability’ and ‘aptitude’, but let us try to build our own definition.

Abilities, in the broad sense, are any behaviours that can sensibly be evaluated. They will include typing, knowledge of steam locomotives, sprinting (and other sporting activities), reading a map, swindling people, cooking, managing one’s finances, designing bridges, thinking up a plausible excuse to obtain an extension for a piece of coursework, growing onions, helping a depressed person, solving anagrams, diagnosing a fault in a piece of machinery or writing a creative essay. The key point is that it would be possible to assess the effectiveness of individual people who take part in these activities, either by

• monitoring behaviour (e.g., the number of words typed per minute, annual cost of rectifying design faults found in bridges, size/taste/yield of onions, time taken to run 400 metres, success at obtaining extensions), or by
• asking someone to evaluate their own or someone else’s behaviour, for example, by giving a student a mark for the creative essay, asking depressed individuals to rate the quality of their therapy, or asking the therapist to rate the degree of improvement that their course of therapy has brought about. Where these subjective ratings are used to assess performance, it is particularly important to ensure that they are accurate: that is, that the measures have high ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’.

It seems reasonable to suppose that two things affect how well a person can perform on any task that they are given: their level of ability, and the difficulty of the task. If we give people exactly the same tasks to perform, this controls for the effects of task difficulty. Therefore the only reason that one person performs better than another on a particular task measuring memory for faces (for example) has to be because they have a better memory for faces: they are more able at that task. We can at least rank-order people in terms of their performance on a particular task, and use this as an estimate of their ability.

In practice, we know that people may produce slightly different scores if they are given a second version of the task on a different occasion, and a branch of statistics known as psychometrics has grown up to address this and similar measurement issues. Without going into the details, it can be shown that given well-designed, appropriately lengthy tasks to perform, it is possible to assess a person’s level of ability fairly accurately—and that abilities are fairly stable over time. For example, Ian Deary at Edinburgh compared the scores of 11-year-olds who completed a reasoning test with the scores that were obtained when the same people took the same test again 66 years later. The correlation between performance at age 11 and performance at age 77 was approximately 0.73, indicating that the scores are extremely stable over time (Deary, Whalley, Lemmon, Crawford & Starr, 2000). Children who reason well end up as adults who reason well: children who are weak at reasoning generally turn into adults who are weak at reasoning.

Characteristics such as this—behaviours that are fairly stable over time—are known as traits. Traits are usually divided into two categories. Personality traits describe a person’s style of behaviour: for example, some people are anxious, whilst others are calm and relaxed; some people are sociable, whereas others prefer their own company and do not hanker after outside stimulation. Ability traits, on the other hand, reflect how well a person can do things—and this book considers how and why some people perform better than others at tasks that involve thinking. For example, it considers how well people can reason, remember things, visualise things, and so on.

From this, it may seem that all one needs to do in order to study abilities is devise a few tasks, measure how well people perform on them, and report the results. There are several reasons why this simple-minded approach will not suffice. The remainder of this chapter explores why this is so, and it gives a flavour of some of the types of tasks that psychologists typically study.

It is implicit in this definition that not everyone has the same level of a particular ability. All humans do some things—such as regulating our body temperature—pretty much equally effectively, or else we would die. Almost all of us are capable of performing activities such as manoeuvring our way through a busy crowd without jostling other people without even appreciating how complicated this feat is. Almost all of us may be able to infer a person’s emotional state by combining a number of quite subtle cues without always noticing how and why we do so: slow, quiet speech delivered in a monotone coupled with a lack of emotion and little eye contact might lead us to infer sadness or depression, whilst rapid speech and much body movement may suggest that a person is anxious, for example. Indeed, psychologists and computer scientists often only appreciate how complex activities are when it is found that computers find them difficult or impossible to perform.

Mental and Other Abilities

Readers may feel some unease at this point since the list of abilities given above seems to be far more extensive than one might expect in a psychology text. Surely this book is not going to turn into a treatise on onion growing? And indeed it is conventional (though not, I believe, necessarily a good thing) to narrow down the field of abilities.

Each of the abilities in the above list can be regarded as reflecting a different mixture of at least four things:

• (a) Task-specific knowledge or training. By definition, this will not generalise to other things: if I spend years becoming proficient at playing the bagpipes, the skills I acquire will not mean that I can pick up a violin for the first time and play it expertly.
• (b) Physical prowess. All tasks require some sort of physical response, even if it is just clicking a mouse or saying a word. However some tasks rely on coordination, strength or agility (for example) for their successful completion.
• (c) Emotional skills. Excessive anxiety can affect performance at many tasks: managing this might be important. Emotional skills will also be important when dealing with other people—e.g., leadership at work, or counselling.
• (d) Thought processes. Unlike (a), these might generalise from task to task. For example, someone with an excellent long-term memory is likely to perform well at many subjects at school (where the emphasis is often on rote learning), or be a wonderful lawyer (learning case law) or accountant (tax and accounting regulations).

Though I have absolutely no data to back this up, I suspect that the extent to which each of these variables affects performance might be as shown in Table 1.1: the more stars, the larger the influence.

Table 1.1 Possible influences of specific knowledge/training, physical prowess, emotion and mental abilities on various tasks

Task	Specific Knowledge/Training	Physical Prowess	Emotion	Mental Abilities
Typing	****	**	*	*experienced typists
				****beginners
Performance on a history test	****	*	*	****memory
				*reasoning
Football	****	***	****elite athletes	**
			*casual players
Success in getting a coursework extension	***	*	****	***
Solving a reasoning unlike anything previously encountered	*	*	**	****

For example, if we assess typing performance by measuring speed and accuracy, experience at typing will have a huge influence. For experienced typists, individual differences in mental abilities probably have little effect on performance, as the activity is “overlearned” or “automatised” and requires little or no conscious thought. The novice typist will however need to scan the keyboard looking for letters, and the speed with which they can do this will greatly influence their performance. Emotional skills are not really needed, and most people in the general population will have the physical ability to use a keyboard. So this is an example of an ability that largely reflects training and practice (in expert typists) plus some mental abilities (speed of scanning, for novices only).

Many of the assessments made at school reflect specific knowledge or training: a test of ‘history attainment’ is more likely to measure how well you can remember the content of a particular book or lecture notes rather than physical ability, or emotional skills. Mental abilities are probably not enormously important, although strategies for memorising material (perhaps using mnemonics or visualisation techniques) might well be useful, and some ability to understand language will also clearly be important. But the key point is that just because a person has a wonderful knowledge of 19th century history, we cannot tell whether that person knows anything at all about Ancient Rome—he or she may never have been taught it. This is the crucial difference between specific knowledge or training and mental abilities. Mental abilities are thinking skills that can generalise to a wide range of different tasks.

Much of the variation in sporting skills between people in the general population will be related to physical ability and practice/training/coaching, although for elite athletes, emotional skills become extremely important (Kremer, 2012) and cognitive strategies—for example, for analysing weaknesses in an opponent’s game—will also matter. Talking to the depressed individual will require some emotional sensitivity (the effective therapist will positively ooze warmth, congruence and unconditional positive regard: Rogers, 1959), as might asking for a coursework extension, for which some creativity might be useful if the excuse is not 100% genuine. However, writing a creative essay (rather than one that is fact based), solving anagrams and reading a map are abilities that would seem to largely reflect thought processes, rather than any of the other three types of ability mentioned above, provided that we can assume that anyone who has been through the education system will be able to read and write.

I have laboured these issues a little because the distinction between task-specific training and cognitive skills is both important and frequently misunderstood. There seems to be little doubt in the public mind (and even in the minds of some psychologists who should know better) that the sorts of problems that psychologists study are closely linked to what people know, rather than how people think. Journalists interviewing me about the Test the Nation television programmes that administered a proper intelligence test to anyone who wanted to take it kept on talking about “the quiz” as if it was nothing more than a test of general knowledge.

There are very good reasons why the sorts of problems studied by psychologists should not be closely related to specific knowledge and training. If a person’s performance on a task is influenced by both specific knowledge/skills and mental abilities (as with the history test example in Table 1.1), a person who has not had the opportunity to acquire the knowledge or skill-set will perform poorly. If we are interested in measuring individual differences in mental abilities, then we need to devise tasks where the influence of prior knowledge and training (and indeed physical and emotional skills) are minimal, so that a person’s background or previous training does not influence their performance. This is why we use tasks that are quite different from those that people have ever encountered before, so that we can be fairly confident that the tasks measure thinking skills rather than specific knowledge or training. I give some examples of these tasks in Chapter 2. The downside of this is that critics sometimes argue that because the tasks do not closely resemble the sorts of problems that people encounter in real life, the sorts of abilities measured by psychologists are obviou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What Are Abilities?
• 3 The Structure of Mental Abilities
• 4 Alternative Views of the Structure of Abilities
• 5 Social and Biological Origins of Abilities
• 6 Ability Processes
• 7 Applications
• 8 Reflections and Conclusions
• References
• Index