What was this study you did on intelligence?

Yeah, so some people say that IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle, and other people think it fully captures everything about your intelligence and says who you are as a person fundamentally.

And as you probably know, there was a big replication crisis in social science where many studies failed to replicate.

And so we thought, hey, we can do our part by trying to replicate a lot of claims about IQ

and intelligence. So we recruited over 3,000 people. We implemented 62 distinct intelligence

tasks, which includes everything from like memorization, puzzle solving, math problems, spelling,

reaction time, sort of everything you could possibly think about,

that you could do online automatically.

And then we tested about 40 different claims that are made about intelligence,

and we checked if they held up.

Right. Yeah, it is, intelligence is kind of like the barbell chalk and cheese. It's the,

how do you say, it's like the cognitive raw shock test. It's like how you see it kind of tells me

probably quite a lot about your priors coming into it. You're right, it's either the fundamental

underpinning that explains all of the outcomes

that you're going to get in life, or it is a Nazi-ish policy that never had any basis in science

and should be totally disbanded. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And so the question is, yeah,

what's really true about it? To what extent is academia right about it? To what extent of the late public right about it? And so we explored a bunch of those questions. Why do you think, even before we get into that, why do you think it's so contentious? Yeah, I think it's a few things. One, it does have a horrendous history. It was used, for example, like the idea of IQ or measuring intelligence was used for forced sterilization, so that's pretty horrible. I mean, the Nazis got into really some evil stuff around, you know, thinking about how intelligent people are and murdering people on that basis. So I think that's part of it. I think another thing is, you know, everyone kind of thinks it's like, yeah, it's good to be organized. But if someone says you're disorganized, it doesn't feel like it cuts to the bone, like of who you are as a human or it doesn't make you subhuman. But I think some people feel this about intelligence. If you're told you're unintelligent, that it's sort of like says you're bad and have a fundamental way or you're lesser. And I think that's, you know, and I think, so I think that it feels

different. That's interesting. Intelligence is very close to our sense of self in a way that the

cleanliness of our cupboards or like our obsessiveness or something isn't quite so much. Yeah. And

it's really interesting because having run many different studies on human psychology, we find there are some things people can report accurately about themselves, and there's some things they can't. Like, for example, if you ask people how organized they are, they're pretty accurate, actually. But if you ask people, are you intelligent? Not so accurate. Like, it's hard for people to self-assess

because sort of everyone has to believe

that they're intelligent, right?

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