The Rough Guide to Psychology An Introduction to Human Behaviour and the Mind by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Intelligence

The subject of human intelligence and how to measure it has a dark history and remains one of the most controversial areas in psychology.

Despite this, intelligence tests are still used in many countries to inform sensitive decisions – from whether a child is provided with extra help at school to whether a job candidate should be hired or not.

What is intelligence?

In everyday life, intelligence is a familiar but incredibly vague concept.

We might all agree that a professor of astrophysics is in some sense highly intelligent. But imagine if the same professor made a habit of getting lost, offending colleagues or losing money on risky investments.

In these cases we might just as readily say that they were rather stupid, socially inept or unwise. Conversely, a gangster with no qualifications to their name might not be considered intelligent in an academic sense, but we might refer to their street smarts – their understanding of who to trust and how to avoid trouble. Common sense, creativity, tactical nous, mathematical genius, people skills, literary talent – in common parlance, all these abilities are at times seen as forms of intelligence.

The mainstream scientific view of intelligence is that it reflects the

“fitness” or efficiency of the brain and nervous system. The idea that intelligence is more than just an abstract or subjective concept has been supported by findings showing that someone who displays evidence of cleverness in one domain, say maths, also tends to excel in other domains too, such as language and spatial processing – an observation that has come to be known as g or general intelligence. Moreover, people’s performance on written or computerized tests of their mental skills and knowledge also correlate with extremely basic tests of their reaction time (their speed of mental processing), providing further support for the idea that intelligence is the manifestation of an efficient nervous system.

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